144. [BONUS] Inside the Mehta Era… And What Comes Next?

But basically, lots of time to work out. I love reading.

So a lot of reading. And I definitely welcome it. If we’re watching any book suggestions, particularly long ones, I’m thinking Infinite Jest.

If you’ve read Infinite Jest or not, that’s David Foster Wallach’s classic that’s impossible to get through. Any book that you can’t get through, I want to read. I’ll probably take some classes on stuff that’s totally unrelated to work.

Oh, wait. What stuff are you going to take classes on? I’m big into philosophy and science.

And so luckily, we live in Palo Alto, it’s right by Stanford. And then I will do yoga, meditation, I don’t know. And then the one thing I can’t get away from is I’m obsessed with AI.

So I’ll probably be programming and tinkering and stuff like that just for fun. And then obviously being around for my family, because they’ve gone through a lot. So that’s my plan.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
So you can catch Nick vibe coding at the nearest Starbucks.

[Nick Mehta]
It’s most likely. Yeah. Yeah.

If you see somebody writing really bad code that was like clearly taught in the 1990s, that’s me.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
How about at Gainsight? You’re still involved. You’re a Gainsight board member now.

I’m a board member. Exactly. The easy job.

The easy job.

[Nick Mehta]
Well, okay. What is the job? I mean, a board member is a job.

I’m very fortunate to be on a couple other boards as well, a couple of public companies. And you know, the board member’s job is to be, I mean, there’s of course, a corporate governance job, which is just, you know, make sure the company is doing all the right things. But the real thing is then supporting the team and the CEO and the rest of the board.

So, but you know, Chuck’s got it. He’s great. And so he’s going to do awesome.

But of course, anytime they need anything, they’ve got my number and just be available.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
Do you have any inklings of where you might want to lean in or are you just going to kind of sit back and listen?

[Nick Mehta]
No, no. I’m actually a big believer that when you’re a CEO and then you pass it on to some other CEO, it’s their job now. So no, I’m not.

Chuck is awesome. He’s going to do great. So it’s more or less just anytime you need something.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
The next question is me on behalf of the entire community, because I’m a gainster right now, a proud gainster. You’re lucky to have me. Well, lucky to be here.

And that’s recent. And so I’ve been looking at you, you know, following you from the outside for several years now. And for somebody who’s, you know, has that founder entrepreneurial DNA, like myself, like you, like Chuck, I want to be you.

I want to aspire to grow to those heights. And I don’t know the exact question to ask, but like, how do I do that? How do others do that?

How do we maybe to break that down? Let’s start out with this. Where do you get all that energy from?

[Nick Mehta]
Well, first of all, you can’t go to my heights. You’re taller than me. So I want to go to your heights, just to be clear.

You’re 6’1″? Yes, yes. You’re right up there.

I’d like to be up there. On the energy side, though, I don’t know. I wish I could give you like a formula and there’s not one.

I think part of it is when you’re really fortunate in your life to be in a job or whatever you’re doing that you love, energy in some ways just naturally comes out. So one interesting question is like for people that don’t have feel that energy, it might be also that you’re not doing the thing that maybe brings you the most energy and joy, you know? And I’ve just been really lucky the last, you know, actually my whole career, but the last, especially 13 years with Gainsight, it’s just been incredible.

And so like the energy comes from this community and forums like this and people like Chuck and others. So I kind of like, I guess I’m an energy vampire. I take the energy from everyone else.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
I don’t think you’re an energy vampire. I think you’re like pretty hardcore. Yeah.

Yeah. I don’t know. Speaking of vampires.

Jeez. What was that?

[Nick Mehta]
Oh, God. We have a special guest on the podcast. Energy vampire.

Energy vampire. Was that all of this? It’s all a prank.

Was that all a video now? Energy vampire. That’s the energy vampire.

Get her.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
But call yourself back to this program folks. For the folks that are just listening, they can, they can imagine what that interlude was. Yeah.

I don’t, you’re not an energy vampire, Nick. I mean, you bring the energy every single place that you go and you light everybody up.

[Nick Mehta]
Fire. It is. It is true, by the way.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
It’s true. The energy that we see, that’s like, you know, you, you go to, to, to recharge and you’re not feeling that energy.

[Nick Mehta]
Yeah. I think it’s kind of interesting because if you saw me at home, then part of it was like very familiar, which is like, I’m equally manic energy with my kids and my dogs, by the way, particularly I’m just like talking to them and about customer success or whatever nonstop. And but then, yeah, like, I mean that night, you know what, I was just thinking everyone else.

I have a beer. I turn on my TV show.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
Do you sleep?

[Nick Mehta]
I actually sleep. I sleep well. Yeah, I try to sleep seven hours.

For me, all of us are different. I worked for the CEO a long time ago, and he was thriving with three hours of sleep. I’m not like that at all.

I need seven. I don’t need nine, but I need seven or so. Yeah.

No, I mean, literally at night, I like being on my own. It’s kind of interesting because the thing that is surprising for people is I actually don’t love, on a social level, being in big groups. I really like one-on-one time or zero-on-one time, meaning just me.

Besides my family and my kids.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
Do you enjoy the stage?

[Nick Mehta]
I love the stage. I think that’s kind of interesting because it’s more like a game. I’ve thought a lot about that.

Why do I like the stage, but outside of work, I like one-on-one? It’s because it is a game. It’s kind of like fun.

It’s something that you do more and more, and you get good at it. Much like if you follow professional sports, sometimes you’ll see these people that are playing in a stadium with 80,000 people live and 100 million people watching. Once they’re out of there, they want to put their headphones on and just be on their own.

I’m actually closer to that than most people would realize.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
Yeah.

[Nick Mehta]
You hear that a lot of folks, comedians as well, right?

[Josh Schachter – Host]
Yeah.

[Nick Mehta]
I feel that a lot. When I actually hear a lot of stories like artists and comedians and stuff, I feel something, even though they’re way more talented than I am. I feel that commonality that way.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
On the energy note, you write all your LinkedIn posts yourself. That’s surprising for people too. It’s very surprising because you’re a very prolific writer.

You’ve built an amazing audience and great content. In that content, you’re not just sounding off about random stuff. It shows that you are really deep into the latest and greatest and reading all the articles and the blogs and the podcasts.

I guess you’re just saying this is your passion and that’s how you find time for all those things.

[Nick Mehta]
Yeah. One of the things that I think we all learn is the things that scratch or itch. In another life, I definitely would be a very mediocre creative person.

I love writing. I love coming up with ideas. I love all this podcast filming videos.

I genuinely enjoy it. I don’t do it because it’s my job. I do it because I enjoy it.

Writing on LinkedIn, yes, it is me every single day. By the way, anytime somebody wonders, hey, is that really you writing? I’m like, dude, is anyone else weird enough to write that for me?

I had a post the other day that was how Taylor Swift is connected to AI marketing. The day before was about how the NFL is connected to be a tech company. It’s just my mind and what ends up happening is I just make a list.

I’m like, oh, yeah, this would be interesting to write about. I hear an interesting podcast. I think about something, whatever, and I write about it.

Some of them are people like and some are just okay, but I have found myself enjoying writing basically every day. Outside of work, I write poetry. I love writing.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
Really? Yeah. I didn’t know you wrote poetry.

Well, a lot, actually. Amazing. Amazing.

Let’s go down memory lane, a little bit of a rapid fire segment here about your time at Gainsight. A couple of questions. Your most memorable customer site visit.

[Nick Mehta]
Oh, my God. There’s so many and customer site visits are really fun because, first of all, customers are so amazing, like all the people in this community and all that, but there was one that comes to mind when you say that. Very early in Gainsight, 2014.

I was actually just looking at the email history on this one. We were funded by Bessemer, one of our investors. We had several, Battery, Bessemer, Bain, Insight, Lightspeed, and Bessemer, this guy named Byron Dieter, who’s the head of Bessemer, who’s a good friend.

He was one of the first SaaS investors. He invested in a company that not everyone knows, but it’s called Cornerstone, Cornerstone On Demand. They were one of the first SaaS companies right alongside Salesforce in that same era.

They went public and Byron was on the board of this company. There’s a guy named Adam Miller, who’s the founder of that company. He’s a legendary entrepreneur.

Incredible.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
LA entrepreneur.

[Nick Mehta]
LA entrepreneur. Yeah. Byron introduced me to Adam because we had just gotten Gainsight started and we’re trying to get customers and all that.

I get on a call. It’s like it was yesterday. I’m in our Mountain View office, this little office above a bar, this crappy little office.

I’ve got my cell phone out. I’m talking to Adam Miller. I’m starstruck because he was a well-known internet entrepreneur.

The intro was through Byron. I’m talking to Adam. It’s literally a random Tuesday or something.

I’m telling him what we do. He’s like, oh my God, we need that right now. Can you come to LA?

I’m like, yeah, sure. Yes. I have no plans because we have nothing.

We don’t have any customers. Literally nothing to do. Whatever time, I will be in LA.

I fly basically the next day with Dan Steinman, who was our original chief customer officer, wrote the first book on customer success, True Godfathers, this whole field. Dan and I fly to LA. We go to this meeting.

This meeting literally is surreal. Again, it’s in Santa Monica. Beautiful.

Everything in Santa Monica is beautiful. We go into this office. We’re in this conference room.

Adam’s in there. I’m assuming he’s just going to introduce us to people and leave. He’s the CEO of a public company at the time.

He’s in the meeting. Then he brings in his chief customer officer, Kirsten Helvey, who actually eventually joined our board. Then eight other people, like sales ops and IT and all these people in this meeting.

We’re doing this demo. By the way, our product barely does anything at this point, but somehow it was impressive to them. They liked the UI or whatever.

We’re demoing this thing, Dan’s demoing and Adam is sitting there in the meeting for three hours. Then literally this person walks down the hallway outside the room. Adam says, hey, come in here.

Adam brings this person in. The person turns out to be one of their lawyers at Cornerstone. Adam says, hey, this is a company Gainside.

This is Nick. He’s a CEO. We’re going to be buying their software.

I was like, what? Then we leave. You were trying to sell the software, right?

This is the first meeting we’ve ever had. We didn’t have any customers. We barely had a product.

He’s like, we’re going to buy their software. Literally, we leave the conference room. We go back to the airport and get on Southwest Airlines, whatever.

It’s not even the A-list, the bottom back of the plane. Dan and I send an email to the company. I say, Dan, I just had the best sales meeting I’ve ever had in my life.

Cornerstone wants to buy. Fast forward, three years later, they purchase Gainside software. Okay.

That was my most memorable thing, because it teaches you, yes, sometimes you can get too excited. Then I subsequently told that story to other people. They’re like, dude, that happens all the time in software.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
That’s just reality. Pulse. I think you’ve told me before Pulse started in 2013 in the small banquet hall of Sheridan or something like that, right?

Four seasons.

[Nick Mehta]
We started pretty well. Yeah, exactly. Started with some of that best of our money.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
Anthony, Anthony, our CFO, he and I. Okay. All right.

It wasn’t so much rags to riches, but it got to the riches nonetheless this past year in Vegas and now international. Truly, it’s become an icon for the industry. This is going to be an impossible question to ask, but I’m going to ask it.

What’s been your favorite Pulse moment?

[Nick Mehta]
It’s not even hard. There’s lots, right? Of course, if I gave my two backups, one of them was definitely this past Pulse in Vegas because I’m a huge Wicked fan.

Being able to somehow have a Wicked themed musical thing and also tied to AI, that was number three. Number two would be when we had a Pulse in 2017, or 2016 in Oakland. It was Thursday morning at 9 AM in the Oakland Convention Center, which is also the Marriott Hotel.

I went up on there and I said, hey, everyone, next up is Byron Dieter from Bessemer Venture Partners to talk about the state of VC something, something. On walks, none other than Vanilla Ice, who performs Ice Ice Baby to 900 of our dearest friends in a little ballroom. Number one, unquestionably for me, given who I am, is in Pulse in 2015 when I took my very mediocre writing skills and rewrote Blank Space by Taylor Swift to be about the community.

Then we hired a Taylor Swift impersonator to perform it on stage. My song I wrote to perform in front of whatever, a thousand people or something. Everyone’s in the audience.

I was like, this is the best thing. The most exciting thing about that was the tweets that day where people were like, oh my God, Gaineside got Taylor Swift for their event. They were like, you don’t understand how little money we have, how much she would cost.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
But that story shows you’ve been writing these songs, these Taylor Swift parodies before AI, literally I just cannot stop writing things.

[Nick Mehta]
Not all of them have been written by me, by the way. We have some other amazing creative people at Gaineside, but I’ve enjoyed writing a lot. It sounds cathartic.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
Favorite Pulse outfit. I’m going to assume then based on what you said, that’s part of the Wicked outfits of this past Pulse.

[Nick Mehta]
I think Wicked was definitely, wearing the wizard outfit was pretty awesome, but I think probably one of the more iconic ones was simply the previous Pulse, which was in St. Louis and it was 80s themed and kind of high school themed. And so the jean jackets were just fire. So that was probably, I still have that one in my closet.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
Given what we learned about Chuck in the last segment, we should have had Chuck there at the- I mean, he would be the heartthrob, right?

[Nick Mehta]
Yeah, exactly.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
Like I had said, you are a mentor to so many. So who through the years, either within Gaineside, your peers and colleagues or outside, who have been your biggest mentors?

[Nick Mehta]
So, you know, it’s interesting. I think everyone has a different approach to mentorship. Some people want one mentor.

I haven’t had like a mentor from like a CEO that’s like, oh, I just go to that person for everything. It’s more like I’ve learned from so many different people. Some of them working for them, like a guy named Jeremy Burton, I worked for eons ago, 25 years ago, he was like phenomenal communications.

I learned so much from him as an example. I learned so much from reading and just watching great CEOs, like everyone, like there’s so much to learn. I learned from like being first time CEOs from all them.

But the person I probably learned the most from actually is not, I wouldn’t call mentor, but my coach, a woman named Kaylee Warner. And Kaylee has worked with me forever, like literally pre-Gaineside, like 15 years. And she knows me better than any human in the world and has learned how to take all the weirdness inside me and somehow use it for good.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
So. It is a privilege, but you know, I’ve worked with coaches in the past and it does make such a difference.

[Nick Mehta]
So good.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
Yeah. You’ve got this cult of personality. We’ve talked about the energy goes hand in hand with that.

Is that a, a nurture or a nature? Is this something that you feel like you were born with or have you worked with that, work with your coach along the way?

[Nick Mehta]
I think it’s definitely not born with in that, like I was, and I’ve talked to this before, extremely shy kid, like, like not like no friends, like literally ain’t alone every day, kindergarten through 12th grade had no, no social ability whatsoever. And so I think it’s something of more just like repetition and then finding like, what is the thing that feels authentic to me? So I think that’s, you know, everyone’s different.

Right. But a big thing that doesn’t work is trying to do it the way somebody else does. Cause you saw them do it, but it doesn’t work for you.

And so I think going back to my coach Kaylee, like all the personal development of like, okay, like, yeah, I’m this weird dude. Who’s into like quantum physics and Taylor Swift and fashion and all these things. Like, and yes, that’s just who I am.

And by the way, most people are kind of weird. They just feel like they’re not allowed to share it in the work world. Right.

And so I kind of figured out, okay, well, it’s kind of endearing when people are just themselves, you know? And, and that turned out to like into the whole gain side, human first thing, all that stuff came out of that. But yeah, it came out of a lot of the personal work.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
Going back to Pulse to close us off on this. You like sports and, you know, reminds me with your legendary status of athletes, football players, basketball players, walking off the court for the last time after a hall of fame run. As you were walking off the stage at Pulse in Vegas a couple of months ago, what were some of the feelings and emotions that were going through your mind?

[Nick Mehta]
Oh my God. There were a lot of feelings. I mean, literally, I remember that morning.

Cause you know, the final, they’re like two keynotes at Pulse. It was like a day one and a day two. So the day two keynote, I wake up, I’m staying, we’re staying in a, you know, one of the hotels, like on the strip in Vegas.

Right. And I, you know, wake up and I’m like, this is the final day. And nobody, nobody knows.

Like, I mean, I think at that point, I guess, you know, maybe a few executives knew, but like basically nobody knew. So I like, I like walk out of the room and I like go down the escalator and like, I’m not a big Vegas guy. So I like pass the people with the frozen margaritas or I don’t know what the hell they’re doing at 9am.

Like, but like I’m walking down the strip and then all these Pulse attendees are there and I’m talking to them like, wow, soak it in. This is it. And then you walk across the strip and then you walk into this little, the convention center area where we were and you walk into the security and you go backstage and you get your makeup on for the last time.

I had like the, I do all the, I’m good with all the makeup, the eyeliner, all that stuff. I’ve got all that on. I think I glitter that time too.

I got my outfit on and I’m like, this is it. And then you kind of go on stage and the lights are on and you sit down and you do it. And we had a great conversation with the CEO, founder of Zoom Info and a bunch of other things as well.

And then I leave and like the, and it’s over. And I’m like, wow, like that’s it. What like 13 years.

And I got to experience it and soak it in. And then I got a few photos with some dear friends of gangsters, et cetera, on stage. And then I wrote a poem about it to like process it.

And, and I was like, in the poem, I talked about how like, you know, it’s like that feeling we all have, which is like, you’re like, wow, like, I know this is a big moment. And I’m like, wow, I really wish I could just stop this moment right now and stop time. But I can’t, because you can’t stop time and then still experience it.

And so you’re like, I can’t, all I can do is savor it. And so that’s what I did.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
But it’s good that you acknowledged it in the moment.

[Nick Mehta]
I did.

[Josh Schachter – Host]
Yeah, I did. It felt really good, actually. Well, Nick, thank you.

Thank you from somebody observing you in the community, following you in the community for, you know, one of many people who have, you’ve been an inspiration for, appreciate your setting that role model for all of us. And congratulations on such an illustrious career. Take your break, take your family time, your time, you know, helping gain insight on the side.

And we’re very much looking forward to following your footsteps and seeing what’s next. Thanks so much.