Hello everyone. I am Jeetu Patel.
I'm the senior vice president and general manager
of the security and collaboration business unit at Cisco.
And welcome to another episode of designing the future of work,
where we share with you all the innovations that we're doing
to imagine the future of work.
Today's a very special day, because we announced today
the acquisition and the close of the acquisition of Slido,
where Webex and Slido are going to be a part of the same family.
And I have with me, to talk about Slido,
the CEO and co-founder of Slido, Peter Komornik,
who's a good friend of mine, but before we talk to Peter,
I wanted to show you a video that we've put together for Slido.
Are you a speaker, a trainer,
or a manager who runs meetings?
Then you have to use Slido.
Slido is the ultimate Q&A and live polling platform,
that creates a conversation between you and your audience.
Polls are a great way to get your crowd involved.
Whether you want to find out how they feel, collect feedback,
or simply break the ice. With Slido quizzes, you make learning fun,
and you can find out how much your audience has learned.
With Slido questions, they, too, have a voice,
and you can even see which questions are the most important using upvotes.
You know, I love that video. Peter, welcome, my friend, how are you?
Hey Jeetu, I'm good, thanks for having me.
Thank you for being here.
We're so excited to have you be welcome to the part of the Cisco family.
Can you start by just telling our audience in one sentence or less,
what does Slido do exactly?
Sure. So in its essence,
Slido is a simple audience interaction platform
that makes it really easy for presenters and meeting hosts
to crowdsource the best questions from the participants
and engage them with live polls and quizzes.
And so, you've spent a pretty large percentage of your professional career
on solving this problem. What is the specific problem you're trying to solve?
Why is this so important?
And what do you think is going to fundamentally change if you solve this problem?
Sure. So when you think about it, the problem we're trying to solve
is the incredible waste of human potential, productivity and time
that is being lost during meetings almost every day, right?
It's crazy when you think about it, we're going to be flying to Mars soon,
but people just somehow learn to accept that most meetings are just a waste of time.
And the bigger meeting, the more people at the meeting,
actually, the worse it gets, right?
So we actually ran a recent study,
where we asked people about the quality of their meetings,
and almost 50% of respondents said that their meetings are just completely unengaging.
And we at Slido, like from the beginning,
one of the things we very strongly believed in is that
the root cause behind most bad meetings is actually the lack of dialogue.
And making it very difficult for the presenter to actually know what the participants want,
and making it very difficult to have a conversation.
And as soon as a meeting gets more than 10 people,
this conversation becomes basically impossible.
And that's really what we are trying to solve with Slido.
Yeah. It becomes more of a lecture rather than a dialogue that goes back and forth,
I totally get it.
And so exactly how does this work? What's the...
what's different in a meeting that's powered with Slido
versus a meeting that's not powered with Slido?
So when you think about it, really, that big difference is the dialogue.
So with Slido, meeting leaders or meeting organizers
can actually have a conversation with their participants at scale.
If you are leading a meeting with Slido, you can extract ideas, opinions,
or feedback from your participants in just a couple of seconds.
And also one really important thing that Slido makes is,
it makes meetings more democratic by allowing everyone to have a say,
and actively contribute whether they feel like speaking up in a larger group or not.
So just to give you like one or two examples, for example,
when you're running an all hands meeting,
you can already start collecting questions in advance,
and allow your people to upvote the most important questions.
So then during the meeting, you can actually dedicate the time
to discuss the most relevant topics.
And what we have seen is that some companies that adopted Slido
have seen the number of questions increase 10 to 20 times compared to before.
Or just to give one more example, on the other hand, with some smaller meetings,
Slido can easily save 10 or even 15 minutes from the discussion
and speed up the decision-making process.
So if the discussion is just dragging on, just throw the topic to a Slido vote,
and in a few seconds, you can see exactly where the room stands,
what people are thinking,
allowing you to make it much more conversational,
much more effective going forward.
You know, Peter, I don't know if you know this actually, but
when we do our own all hands meetings, when I do my all hands meetings,
with 12-14,000 people on the team,
the first thing I do is I start with a Slido poll.
And usually the question I ask is, how are you feeling?
And it's just a one-word word cloud that comes up
and it's so interesting, you just get the mood and the pulse of how
10,000 people are feeling before you get going.
especially in these kind of times where right now, for example, there's
this craziness going on in India, where COVID rates have increased.
And so when you ask those questions,
you get some pretty authentic answers,
and it just immediately changes the energy of the meeting right away.
This is one of the things that I found really cool about what Slido does,
which is this whole notion of –
you folks think pretty deeply about the human interaction element,
and the meetings and how people engage with each other
in a conversation and a dialogue rather than just a feature in a product.
And you recently did a study, it was really interesting,
a trend report, that you folks call it,
tell us a little bit more about that and what you learned from that
as you went through that exercise
and did some data gathering from your customers and other people in your market research.
Sure, definitely.
So we actually conducted the research among 1,500 random US office workers,
and one of the really interesting insights we found out was that
four out of five people actually attended more meetings last year
las year when they were fully remote
than when they were in the office before.
But surprisingly though, like with all the bad press that online meetings have been getting lately,
what we have found is that
actually over 60% of respondents believe that online meetings can be
more engaging and more productive than face-to-face meetings,
which, at least for me personally, was a pretty big surprise. more engaging and more productive than face-to-face meetings,
which, at least for me personally, was a pretty big surprise.
And one other fascinating insight that we also learned is that
47% of people still find meetings unengaging
and 42% actually have left a meeting without saying what was on their minds.
And I think in this day and age with the interaction technology,
it's incredibly unfortunate and it just doesn't need to happen anymore, right?
With the right tools, we can just make sure that all the voices get heard
and nobody's left out from the conversation.
I'm so excited about the fact that, I don't think most of the audience knows this,
this, but you were – I joined Cisco nine months ago,
and you were one of the first calls I made.
The reason I made the call to you is,
you and I used to interact with each other when I was at my previous job,
And I was so impressed with the body of work that you were doing,
I just wanted to make sure that
these two things of Webex for meetings and what Slido is doing,
need to be fused together, to further take out the friction for the people.
And so we've closed this acquisition at this point in time.
Can our audience and users and customers expect that
in the next six to nine months,
you're going to have these two products fully integrated, Peter?
Or you're going to not deliver that to our customers?
Well, Jeetu, six to nine months is way too long.
So we're actually hoping to have the integration available
for the first customers already in the next four to six weeks.
So very excited to be in Cisco,
very excited to bring this magic and this experience to the Cisco customers.
So, thank you for everything and very excited to be here.
By the way, that was a TM. I knew that that was the answer,
but I wanted to make sure that you said it,
but this is amazing, from the time that the acquisition closes,
in four to six weeks,
you're going to have the Slido experience fully integrated into a Webex meeting,
so that when you're in a Webex meeting,
you can initiate a poll, or a question or something, immediately,
while you're in the meeting, without having to worry about anything,
the friction for the user is completely taken away.
So, Peter, I'm so excited to welcome you and the team to the Cisco family.
And I think we're going to do some great things together,
and our customers and users are just going to love the fact that
they're not going to dread going into meetings,
but they're going to love that these meetings are going to be so productive
as a result of Slido being fused into the Webex experience.
So thank you again and welcome to Cisco.
Thank you, Jeetu.