November 27, 2024 • 47 mins
Projectworks founder Matthew Hayter and new CEO and Silicon Valley veteran Mark Orttung dive into the details on what’s happening with the $100 million company's international push.
Plus, Ben and Peter discuss Bluesky’s sudden rise in popularity as people leave Elon Musk’s X by the millions.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This week on the Business of Tech powered by two Degrees,
the Wellington tech startup that's just raised eight point six
million dollars, giving it a one hundred million dollar valuation.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Project Works as gaining traction around the world with software
that helps consulting firms get the best out of their
teams and keep projects on track.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
It's also doing very well tapping into the ecosystem of
another successful Wellington Bourne tech company, Zero. I'm Peter Griffin.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
And I'm Ben Moore, and soon we'll be hearing from
Project Works co founder Matthew Hater and the company's new CEO,
Silicon Valley veteran Mark Ortungue.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I have a lot of conversations now with people about
New Zealand and they all start off with New Zealand
is amazing, and say, oh, have you been.
Speaker 4 (00:47):
The same now?
Speaker 5 (00:49):
You know?
Speaker 3 (00:49):
So there's this funny thing like they all know it's
amazing and they all love it that they've never been.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
More from the Project Works crew soon, But first, Blue Sky,
the decentralized social network originally started by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.
Well it's getting a surge of new signups at the moment,
including Ben and Me, Casey Newton, author of the Excellent
Platform and newsletter, goes inside that phenomenal growth to look
(01:15):
at some of the growing pains now hitting blue Sky,
particularly when it comes to content moderation. Newton writes that
the user base of blue Sky has gone up over
fifty percent since the company raised fifteen million dollars in
funding last month. That was from Blockchain Capital. The real growth, though,
has come in the wake of the US elections. The growth,
(01:36):
says Newton, has strained the limits of what its twenty
person core team and twenty five contract moderators are able
to do. So, Ben, we've both sort of bailed on
X some time ago. We congregate on LinkedIn, that's where
we get most traction, and talking to others like Chris
(01:57):
kill Tech reporter, a lot of journalists in New Zealand
who have done very well building a big presence on
X over the years, a lot of them are now
bailing out. What do you think is really driving this
other than just sort of anti Trump sentiment.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
I think it's the actual platform itself. I've X has
just become kind of pointless to be there. There's just
I don't know, I go on there, I don't really
see anything in particular.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
That excites me.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
A lot of the stuff that used to crop up
that I thought was interesting, you know, links to news
for example, that's being buried now by the algorithm. I
tried out Threads for a while, but I found that
Threads was becoming like a story sharing service and it
was a bit more like a like a reddit. So
I kind of just fell off and I wasn't really
(02:50):
using a text based social media for a while. I
had signed up to Masteron and I had signed up
to blue Sky many moons ago, and so when I
start to hear that people were actually going on to the
Blue Sky and using it, I thought I'd check it
out again. And yeah, I've been really excited by what
I've seen. Actually, I think it's managing to recapture some
of that magic of the heyday of Twitter, and I
(03:14):
feel like I can trust it, to be honest.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yeah, it definitely does feel like sort of Twitter circus,
sort of twenty thirteen or something like that a long
time ago, very sort of stripped down, not very feature rich.
But in some ways that's a good thing. But I
think the key thing which you pointed to is just
the you know, the lack of engagement with quality sources
(03:38):
you get now and even trying to use it to
promote your work, which used to be a great place
for us to post our articles and that sort of thing.
Damian Christie, a friend of mine, a science communicator. He
wrote on LinkedIn this week that the change and engagement
on X has been huge. He's got around ten thousand
followers on X, which you know, not insubstantial these days,
(04:02):
he says, a post there will attract nothing but tumble weeds.
I don't know if they're not being seen because of
the algorithm or because none of the followers are really
there anymore. What I do know is that LinkedIn is
a great place for work industry chats, so he's getting
more traction there and that's I think the key thing
for me is you put something out there and the
(04:25):
engagement you used to get where a lot of people
would pile in and sometimes be critical, but there would
be a good, healthy debate. I'm seeing that going on
on X, but it's about highly polarized issues and real
sort of tropes like the Ukraine War, identity politics. It's
like the algorithm is really pushing everyone to these hot
(04:47):
button topics and that I think is people have Finally.
This has been going on for some time. It accelerated
with Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter and a lot of
people now going enough is enough and following the electioner
looking for something else. So maybe blue Sky is it.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Yeah, And you know, there's this video made by a
YouTuber called cgp Gray and he's an excellent content creator
on YouTube, and he made this video a long time
ago about basically what drives engagement, and it used to
be called this video will Make You Angry. I don't
know if that's still the title of it, but he
talks about how, you know, people laughter or emotional connection
(05:29):
and all these kinds of things promote engagement, but that
anger is one of the greatest promoters of engagement.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
And I think it.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Feels to me like X has really leaned into that
a lot. And it's something that I actively think about
when I'm online. If something is making me angry, I
intentionally try to push against that and not engage with it.
If I'm doing it in an intellectual way, that's okay,
But if I'm getting angry, I really try not to
because it's just creating this kind of shitty Internet that
(05:57):
I don't want to be a part of Yes.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Speaking of that, you know Corey doctor O, the Internet
advocate novelists. He famously labeled this the in shitification of
online platforms. Actually, here's Corey explaining it in a brilliant
essay topic he did on YouTube.
Speaker 6 (06:19):
There's a kind of common pathology. So what platforms do
when they start out is they use their investor's capital
to allocate surpluses to users, making life good for those users,
luring them in, and then locking them in. Once those
users are locked in, all of that surplus is clawed
back and it's allocated to business customers, advertisers, publishers, platform sellers,
(06:41):
gig workers, creators or performers until all of those people
are locked in too. And then finally, once both sides
of this two sided market are locked in, the platform
scoops up all the surplus for itself. And I have
a somewhat notorious name for this that I coined. I
call it in shitification, and it's the reason that things
really are worse these days.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
I guess the question now is how rivals like Blue
Sky and mastered On as well. Massed On is a
Feta verse. It's a collection of social networks. Blue Sky
is on an open protocol as well, so you can
take your social media content in theory and take it
to somewhere else. I don't think that in practice is
(07:22):
possible at the moment, but I really like the idea
of that, the fact that you don't have this really
aggressive algorithm manipulating everything. There's no advertising on it. But
it is a very small organization, only twenty people, twenty
five contract moderators. So how does this tiny organization, sure
it's had an influx of funding recently, avoid all the
(07:45):
pitfalls that we've seen with X.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Well, they have just announced that they're going to quadruple
that content moderation team to one hundred people now, specifically
to especially combat what they call sea SAM or child
sexual abuse content. And so that is a good news,
I think because being on the more protectionist side of
(08:10):
the inhabitants of this digital space is more of a
pleasant experience. And I think that if you are imagining
that X doesn't have strong moderation, then you're probably fooling
yourself actually, and I think that the moderation is just
in a different direction. Yeah, that this is just my
personal feelings, and you can call me a soft snowflake,
(08:32):
whatever you like. But honestly, you know, I've got a
whole life to live, and so when I go online,
I don't want to just be getting angry all the time,
or seeing negative staff or seeing arguments like sometimes it's
nice just to have a cool link to a science
story or pictures of space or whatever it is else
that you're into.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
You know, yeah, I'm probably a little sort of looser
on the content moderation. I'll tolerate a bit more, but
it's just become intolerable on it when it becomes unusable
in terms of it used to be where I got
my news. And because of the deprioritization of news of
mainstream news outlets anyway, you know, they seem to be
(09:11):
promoting podcasters and influencers, particularly conservative leaning one. So I'm
just greeted by them every time I go on X. So,
you know, the Guardian has just bailed out. All these
credible news outlets are not there, and I think that's
the weakness and Blue Sky and all of these alternatives.
(09:32):
At the moment is news is really important, but some
of these networks deprioritize news. For instance, threads. You know,
news is not very prominent on there. They are larry
about politics in the meta world as well. They've been
burned over that before, so you don't see a huge
(09:52):
amount of political discussion. Now, that's why blue Sky is great.
You know, we're interested in politics and news and current affairs,
and they seem to be more willing to facilitate that.
So I guess the question. Now it's getting traction. Blue
Sky twenty million odd users, grown fifty percent. Masterdon has
about nine million users. But will it just become a
(10:14):
sort of liberal leaning, sort of filter bubble and echo chamber.
This is what Ali Brellen, writing in the Atlantic this week,
sort of fears. She says, as the left flees and
X loses broader relevance, it becomes a more overtly right
wing site. But the right needs liberals on X. You
(10:34):
really do need a platform where people of all political
bents and ideologies come together to argue and to discuss
and share ideas. That's the digital town square that Eli
Musk supposedly is trying to foster. But we seem to
be going into these sort of echo chambers of liberal
(10:57):
or right leaning discourse. That's really not what social media
is about.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
No, you're right, but at the same time, this is
what we've had for the last ten years of social
media anyway. But you know, if we think that one
social media platform is going to come along and be
the solution to everyone's problem, then I think you're probably dreaming.
You know, there is the left leaning stuff on blue Sky,
(11:23):
but also just the more neutral stuff absolutely that was
being lost on X just links to cool science stuff,
like I said before, just fun, neutral stuff that had
that just was dying or had died on X.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Actually the science feed on Blue Sky's great, you know,
so finally refreshingly just a bunch of credible news sources
giving you news.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
So look for us on blue Sky. You can find
our handles in the show notes at business desk dot
co dot nz and I will post them on LinkedIn
as well.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Blue Sky is obviously doing very well the moment, but
let's face it, making a new social media platform of
financial success is going to be challenging to say the least,
which is why most of our tech companies going global
focus on B to B products and use cases, solving
a particular need for businesses that will pay a subscription
(12:18):
each month if you can make their lives easier or
win them new business.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Certainly the case with Wellington based project Works, which has
been around in its current form for five years and
solves a very specific problem for small to medium sized
consulting firms.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Which is cutting through the time consuming double handling and
expensive admin overheads that often plague those firms. You're dealing
primarily with charging for people's time billable hours, so you've
got to be super efficient in your admin maximizing the
productivity of the team, keeping projects on track.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Project Works is now helping over five hundred firms do that,
integrating with major platforms like HubSpot and Zero and making
aim at the US market under the guidance of its
new Silicon Valley based CEO, Mark Ortung.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Yeah. Mark knows a fair bit about the consulting game
and how to run fast growing tech companies. He was
a founder of Necient, the US cloud service company acquired
by NTT in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
He was also the co founder and COO of bill
dot Com, a now very successful NASDAK listed company, and
he did nearly a decade at Accenture, one of the
world's largest consulting firms.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
So I caught up with Mark and Matthew Hater, the
Project Works president and chief product officer, in Wellington recently
to find out more about the platform they've built and
the expansion that injection of investor cash now enables them
to pursue.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
So he is Peter's interview with Mark Ortung and Matthew
Hater of Project.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Works and Mike, Welcome to the business of tech. Thanks
so much for coming on project Where. It's probably not
a company that the average ki we has heard of
in the same breath as even vand and zero, But
(14:14):
you've been chipping away for quite a long time now
twenty nineteen the company was founded, but Matt take us back.
The origins of project Works actually lies a lot earlier,
back as far as what two thousand and.
Speaker 7 (14:27):
One, Yeah, two thousand and one. You could definitely stretch
it back that far.
Speaker 5 (14:31):
So in two thousand and eight I joined a consulting firm,
a Wellington based consulting firm called Provoke and where or
the team there had started to build up some internal
ip to run that consultancy. It was called Project Control
at the time. Fast forward to around twenty sixteen, I'd
been working there for a while, was ready to go and.
Speaker 7 (14:53):
Sort of start a startup.
Speaker 5 (14:54):
Got talking to the guys who ran Provoke and also Julian,
one of my now co founders, and we decided, hey,
we've got some pretty cool ip here, seems to be
a potential market for it. People were coming and going
from Provoke at the time saying, hey, you should go
and take this product to my previous employer, like they
need that desperately.
Speaker 7 (15:15):
So we did a bit of work with NZTA, but a.
Speaker 5 (15:18):
Market validation work and decided to start shipping away, rebuilding
the product as a SaaS platform, and then in twenty nineteen,
when Provoked basically sold outright to private equity firm Bridge West,
Bridgewess kind of acquired Provoked stake and our company that
we'd founded, and then further sort of capitalized us, and
(15:40):
that's when we kind of really sort of started as
a real business. Transferred from us sort of a nights
and weekend's hobby to a company. Got Provoked on as
our first customer, so we properly separated the companies and
kind of did all of that and then kind of
got to work hiring, so we had some capital, started
really trying to achieve product market fit a little bit
(16:03):
more seriously, and.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
What was the core of that product that you were
working on at the time when you came out of
Provoke That really obviously Bridge were saw a lot of
potential in.
Speaker 5 (16:13):
So it started really as a time sheeting product you
alluded to back in two thousand and one. I think
that's where the first sort of line of code was
written when Provokes started an internal time shooting tool, and
then that expanded into kind of invoicing, resource planning, revenue forecasting,
really all the tools that you need to run a
consulting firm, and a lot of it sort of orientated
(16:36):
around sort of improving your margin and utilization. So Provoker
this great asset and kind of an edge for running
their consulting firm because they had such a great view
on the utilization of the team like pigs and troughs
for upcoming bench and margin, which ultimately drives any consulting firm.
Speaker 7 (16:55):
So that's what we had.
Speaker 5 (16:57):
Masoud who's the founder of Bridge West, he came in,
we talked to him. He had a background in services.
He kind of had that same kind of you know, yep,
I wish I had this back when I was running
consulting firms. Saw the potential, obviously liked us enough as
well to invest, and away we went.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Make When did you come on to seeing you joined
as CEO just this year in March, but have been
associated with the company before then.
Speaker 4 (17:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
So I first I came into Provoke because one of
the folks who worked for me at my prior company, Nextcient,
which was a software outsourcing company, became CEO of Provoke.
This was probably three or four years ago now, and
he asked me to join the board of Provoke. So
(17:46):
that's how I got involved with Provoke, and I met
Masud and then Masud and Bridgewest run a conference every
summer in northern California.
Speaker 4 (17:57):
And so two or three maybe three years.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
Ago now, I met and Doug, one of the co founders,
Doug along with Matt, and I really liked them.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
I liked the product.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
And when I was at an Excient running I was
a services company. When I joined, we were about thirty
five million US and we grew up about one hundred
and thirty million over a seven year period. And during
that time we had done the same thing. We needed
a product like this. We actually we tried a bunch
of stuff in the market. Our whole business was around
making software for other people with a great user experience,
(18:30):
which we had boiled down to this tagline, life's too
short for crappy software and all the stuff we tried.
We tried about three of the products in the market
at the time. They were all really crappy like they
were expensive, hard to use, and clunky. So we, like provoked,
started building our own and the team actually asked at
one point, can we turn it into multi tenant?
Speaker 4 (18:52):
Can we take it out? So there was a little bit.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Of that idea and had I had done a bunch
of SaaS companies previously, and I knew how they needed
to be capitalized, and we were a consulting firm turning
a profit, so we never went down that path. But
I felt the pain of as effectively as a customer
looking for a platform like this. So when I met
Matt and Doug at the conference and I saw their
(19:16):
product and saw what they were doing, I could tell
very quickly that it was a good fit and that
there's just and we've now done a lot of market researchers,
literally tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of consulting
firms they.
Speaker 4 (19:29):
Need this product. So yeah, I was excited to get involved.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
I actually went and approached Matt and Doug and asked
to be on the board, and we spent a little
bit of time kind of getting to know each other,
and so that was roughly two years ago that I
joined the board.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Yeah, you'd think you consulting firms. The US is the
heart of those sorts of businesses. You think, you know,
a Silicon Valley starter would have this covered. But yet again,
like with zero and cloud based accounting software vanned with
invoicing and receipts and all that sort of thing, a
gap in the market there that wasn't being served well
out of North America.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
Yeah, I think there are Silicon Valley startups that went
after this, and like most Silicon Valley startups, they got
pulled into going up market and they did sort of
the prior version of startups, which was build features to
sell the product, not to make a great user experience,
not to make something that's a joy to use. So
(20:26):
there are products out there that are you know, a
lot of them will not call you back unless you
have five hundred employees in your firm or more, and
most of them are not a joy to use. So, yeah,
so there is this gap I believe in the market
for us, which is really for small and mid market
consultancies who need something simple, something powerful and easy to use.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
And take us through. You are working with all the
big sort of platforms that consulting firms or any business
might be using, the likes of hubspotob Zero and many more.
So how do you integrate into all of these sort
of platforms that are likely to sit at the height
of a consulting business or other type of business.
Speaker 5 (21:09):
Yeah, so, I mean, we have a lot of discussions
around where the demarcation points for our product should be,
and today anyway and for the foreseeable future, we've decided
that we should sit with accounting on one side, CRM
on the other side, and task management also kind of
in the middle because those problems are largely solved. There
are household names and all of those categories already, so
(21:32):
there's no point in us trying to go and take
on you know, zero and QuickBooks or hubs and Salesforce
head on like those are pretty good, solid products, but
there's this massive white space in the middle. So, you know,
we've worked really hard on our relationship with starting in
New Zealand with the likes of Zero. A good chunk
of our customer base are also zero customers, ensuring that
we have the best integration there. So Project Works does
(21:55):
a lot of things, like a lot of our current
or our prospective customer base coming and they use multiple
point solutions or spreadsheets to kind of make this up.
So we're trying to take that kind of middle area
that is made up of these kind of cobble together
solutions and then integrate with the problems that are already solved,
like the CRM and the accounting side, and then largely
(22:17):
some of the task management side, like jerror in particular
is quite dominant too, So trying to create an experience
that's really seamless between all those systems. You know, we've
just brought on some of Mark's old team up in
the Valley who have a huge amount of experience building
integrations at a really high level, so they've come in
and sort of started to build out some of that.
(22:38):
So it's a very sort of seamless experience. You can
just operate in side project Works and your information is
just kind of flowing sort of seamlessly between the systems.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
That's great. So it's using APIs as something to transfer
all of that data into project works.
Speaker 7 (22:53):
That's right.
Speaker 5 (22:53):
Yeah, So most of the integrations are sort of API based,
and then we have kind of taskers that are sort
of auto edically sinking and calling out to external APIs
and bringing data in or sending data out.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yeah, that white space in the middle you talk about,
it is clearly an area where's a lot of demand
for you know, this year, you've raised five million dollars
US at a valuation of one hundred million dollars New Zealand.
I read somewhere that your revenue has grown something like
one hundred and seventy percent in the last year.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
There was one number out there, so we were in
the ink five thousand, number five five seven, and that's
a three year measurement. That was seven ninety eight, So
just under eight hundred percent over three years last year.
I don't know the exact number, it's roughly eighty percent.
Speaker 7 (23:37):
Yeah wow.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Yeah. So and and if this is not you were
talking about, you know, the some of those startups been
a bit too high end. You know, it was an
expensive product. I didn't want to talk to you unless
you had five hundred employees. I mean, this is not
a super expensive product or something like forty bucks a
month per user. So and there's no real sort of
limitation on the low end as to how many users
(23:59):
you can have in a consulting business that can take
advantage of this very much like democratizing it in the
way that Rogerie did with accounting software.
Speaker 5 (24:07):
Yeah, so we've found, like with a lot of the
features and project whereas, you don't really need a product
like ours until you're around ten around ten users, So
we typically work over that ten. Like you know, if
you're a new kind of consulting firm and you've got
kind of rapid growth ambitions and absolutely, you know, we
take those those customers on as well. But it's really
(24:28):
sort of once you get to that ten fifteen where
you have challenges with resource planning as the founder, you
no longer just know what everybody's doing. That's when Project
Works really starts to shine, I think. But we haven't
really found like a top end of user kind of
limitation yet. We've got customers with a few hundred users
and they're working really well too.
Speaker 4 (24:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
One of the things I'm most proud of is that
if you look across we're over five hundred consulting firms
using the product. Now, if you look across that base,
they're growing on average about twenty percent a year, which
is not typical for like I come from Naxian and
a lot of people that I worked with went off
into other consulting firms and that has been rough in
(25:09):
consulting for the last one to two years. And there
are not a lot of firms growing at that twenty
plus percent. So having the whole five hundred of them average,
that is pretty amazing. We've got a great group of customers.
They're thriving. Hopefully we're helping them do more of that.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
And are you seeing interest at the sort of the
top end of town the deloittes into PWCs and the
extenture is do they typically build their own bespoke systems
to do this sort of collaboration and project work or
are they on your radar as well?
Speaker 7 (25:39):
They are.
Speaker 5 (25:40):
Yeah, so we've got a fantastic sort of partner channel
and we do a lot of work just generally with
partners who maybe ranging from just referring us leads through
to doing full implementations. And yeah, we have various conversations
going on kind of across all spectrum of size consultancies.
Speaker 7 (25:58):
I would say, yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
Yeah, you've come on board as CEO. You knew the
company quite well and the founding team. What's it like
representing a New Zealand founded company in the US. Obviously,
they customers don't really care. They just want to use
to deliver a great product. But are there any nuances
about having a team here as well as sort of
(26:21):
the sales and marketing and all of that in the US.
Speaker 4 (26:25):
Yeah, it's been for me, it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
I'm really enjoying putting the two cultures together. Some of
the you know, the language, you get nuances where there
will be moments where I think I know every word
that was put together in a sentence, but I have
no idea what the sentence means. So even though we're
both speaking English, there's a lot of colloquial that I
don't necessarily get. I'm learning it quickly, so that for
(26:48):
me is fun. But in the US people are quite
open to hearing that we have this product with five
hundred plus customers that's well proven, but they haven't heard
of it because we've been in primarily Australia, New Zealand
in terms of our customer base, and then we tell them,
you know, we're about thirty thirty five US customers today,
(27:11):
so it's not that there's no one there, and we've
proven that the way consulting firms work is pretty much
the same. And we're really in five countries, so in
addition to those three, we're in Canada and the UK,
and we get pulled into the UK just because zero
is so strong there, so we just you know, we're
not actually on the ground with salespeople in the UK,
but we're getting demand anyway.
Speaker 4 (27:33):
Which is also fun.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
So one of the other things is not necessarily key
we but being a company of our size, we're about
forty some people, we're effectively a multinational selling in five countries,
and we're now set up as a US company. Matt
and I both spend a little more time than we'd
care too with sort of the lawyers and accountants working
out how you deal with being a global company that
(27:56):
I think most companies don't get to that until way,
way long later in the gross cycle. So that's been
interesting as well, but I think that'll be a real
strength for us. There's also kind of just some funny
things about Americans with New Zealand. So I have a
lot of conversations now with people about New Zealand and
they all start off with New Zealand is amazing, And
I'll say, oh, have you been? They say no, Like
(28:20):
you know, so there's this funny thing like they all
know it's amazing and they all love it, but they've
never been. It's I'm not sure why those two go together,
but it's it is.
Speaker 5 (28:30):
I think maybe the amount of Lord of the Rings
kind of references I've had speaking with your customers and prospects.
Speaker 7 (28:37):
It's like, oh yeah, beautiful Lord.
Speaker 5 (28:40):
Of the Rings.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Yeah, what's it like for you?
Speaker 4 (28:49):
Met?
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Because you know, the sort of the mancha really for
New Zealand startups is go to North America as soon
as possible, particularly for a product like this, that's where
the biggest market is. Get in there early. But then
if you're in the zero ecosystem, it makes sense really
leverage that huge customer base we have in New Zealand
(29:10):
and Australia where you can sort of test the market,
test the water. How did you sort of approach that
knowing that ultimately this is a product that you'll want
to take on the US with but trying to find
your feet here with the project works first, I think
you have.
Speaker 5 (29:25):
To have a rarely large vision, but you need to
start acting kind of a little bit more tactical there. Right,
So the US market for US is great, it's English
speaking culturally, Like, there are differences, but they're not that
big from a product perspective as well. You know, we
don't deal with things like tax or payroll, which are
(29:47):
traditionally quite different in country to countries.
Speaker 7 (29:51):
You know, like if you look at something.
Speaker 5 (29:52):
Like zero, their products has to be very different in
the US market to deal with tax. Everything we do
is the same Australia, New Zealand, US with some subtle differences,
you know, Z's versus ESSES is kind of kind of
being a little bit facetious, but it's kind of the
extent of the difference. So you need to have a
(30:12):
vision and an addressable market for where you want to
get to, but you need to start.
Speaker 7 (30:16):
Sort of operating tactically. So that's kind of what we did.
Speaker 5 (30:19):
We went all in on kind of zero Australia and
now more recently we're starting to work more into the US.
But we knew from the start, like we weren't doing
anything locally that was going to box us in and
prevent us from getting into the US market.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Yeah, even sort of legal stuff. I mean that's not
dealt with in Project works. Better is that that will
be dealt with on one of those other platforms that
you integrate with.
Speaker 4 (30:41):
That's right.
Speaker 5 (30:42):
They dealt with all the hard problems and we're just
right on their coattails.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
So you should have designed it for immediate and sort
of easy uptake in other markets.
Speaker 4 (30:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (30:52):
I mean it's multi currency. It's not multi lingual yet,
but that will come in time. But just having the
multi currency and not dealing with X payroll integrating really
well with those systems obviously, but we don't have to
solve those headaches. It means we're very well suited for
global global mark Mike.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
You know, this year really has been the year of
real uptake of generative AI based products, the year of
co pilot from Microsoft. I just came back from Silicon Valley,
the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft as well, and now
talking about the era of AI agents moving beyond just
a chatbot to something that you can set tasks to do,
(31:31):
will automate things on your behalf interesting your perspective on
how project works fits into this your strategy around AI.
Are we going to get to a point where project
works agent is going to be talking to an M
YOB or a zero agent.
Speaker 7 (31:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (31:48):
Fascinating stuff, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
I think for US, AI presents a huge opportunity because
there's if you look across sort of the workflows the
consultancies go through every know, all the way from the
beginning of looking to get new clients, signing them up,
getting their projects specified, delivering the projects, and then getting
paid All throughout there, there's all sorts of tasks that
are document heavy and mostly sort of a ministrivia that
(32:15):
people don't want to do. So we see AI tools
within project works really making those easier and lowering.
Speaker 4 (32:24):
The amount of labor required.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
In the near term, I think you'll still want a
human touch, so but you know, take a look at
something before it goes to the client. Maybe in the
longer run, agents will just completely interact on your behalf.
But I think because most of our clients are consultancies
or engineers or architecture firms, they have a sort of
a high production value and a high touch with their clients.
(32:48):
I think they're just going to want to check it.
They're going to want to look at it. So it'll
be creating a lot of things for them, which makes
their lives easier. But I don't know if at least
not into twenty five. I don't think they'll just be saying, yeah,
just send it without me even looking at it.
Speaker 4 (33:05):
We'll see.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
So what's your strategy map in terms of development and
around integrating AI. Have you been experimenting with large language
models and generative AI?
Speaker 7 (33:17):
Yes?
Speaker 5 (33:17):
So, I think a big part of what we'll win
I think with products like ours with AI is the data.
You know, we're not building our own LM or anything
like that, but we do have a lot of data.
So we're running we're kind of running proof of concepts
and to like more sort of point parts at the
moment to test you know what sort of quality we
(33:40):
can get out and where we think the opportunities are.
So some examples would be spinning up a new resourcing
team and knowing like the right resource you should have, right,
so a statement of work comes in. You've got to
spin up a team. What availability do I have, what
skills do I need? What kind of mix of team? Members,
like they need a junior.
Speaker 7 (34:01):
What personalities work well together, all of.
Speaker 5 (34:04):
These kind of factors, and ideally having a some sort
of AI agent that can spin up that team. So
that's one example of a concept that we're working on.
Also analysis of your current workforce, how satisfied or what
sort of churn risk they are, Right, you can use
all these like minor heuristics, like somebody might have been
(34:26):
really good in time they're doing their timesheets and now
they've kind of started to slack off a bit, or
someone takes like a lot of leave, or someone's working
with other people.
Speaker 4 (34:33):
That have left.
Speaker 7 (34:34):
But there's all this the otter that.
Speaker 5 (34:36):
You can use AI to sort of suggest like, hey,
maybe you should check in with this person. They could
potentially be.
Speaker 7 (34:41):
Unhappy or at risk or whatever. So there's kind of a.
Speaker 5 (34:44):
Few sort of point bits we're doing well at the
same time where we're doing a lot in the integration
space as well as like you've kind of alluded to,
and we want to be able to be kind of
an insights engine for your consultancy.
Speaker 7 (34:58):
So you've got to get data and be able to
say like, hey, we.
Speaker 5 (35:02):
Think you are charging your margins are not quite high
enough on this project, you should up your rates for
this particular resource because we think that's actually probably more
fair and you're not going to lose customers because of it,
and so being able to be like a project management
co pilot. So we're kind of, you know, testing away
(35:22):
like various things, and it's probably been all the proof
of concept stage at the moment. Yeah, I know if
you'd add anything to that mark any of the others.
There's a lot of little bits and a lot of
ideas being kind of played with.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
I think, yeah, quite a few ideas. I think.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
Also the other thing that we can do when I
go out and talk to customers about it, they're often
experimenting with some of the models that are out there
in public and playing with us. We can select the
best model for each given task and really make sure
we're tuning it and getting the prompts really well executed.
And so that will in a funny way, that alone
(35:58):
takes away some labor around the consultancies who today might
be going to an open AI and trying to engineer
their own prompt to get it to do something, and
then we'll just bring it in as part of our
product to generate a given document and then once it's
generated and accepted, we have all the metadata and just
goes right into our system, right, so we can help
(36:21):
them tune it and we can help them sort of
integrate it right into our flow. And that's ultimately where
a lot of our value is is that we have
that backbone of data and everything flows into there, and
then whenever they get to the next task and the
next one, we have it all in a structured way.
Speaker 4 (36:37):
It's great.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
How do you do that sort of comparative to give
a consulting firm an idea of how their rights are
comparing to others out there in the market. Do you
do you somehow and put that data from market sources.
Speaker 5 (36:52):
So yeah, there's a lot of work for us to do,
especially on the kind of security and legality side here.
So any of this is really just perfect accept at
the moment. I think the way that it will shack
down is it will need to be an opt in
system for our customers. Obviously, they own their data and
that's you know, the data we have is incredibly important
(37:13):
to their business, right, So I think the technology stream
is kind of running is one part, but we're also
running unfortunately, like a more time of lawyers. But you know,
it's just as important of a piece to this puzzle
ensuring that the data is protected. And if we do
start using production data on third party language models and things,
(37:35):
you know we're doing that in a in a safe
and secure way.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Yeah, that's really important. But yeah, I guess if you
use it in an anonymized way, it's going to provide
really good insights to Project works customers as well. They
know that they're getting real world, accurate comparisons for their rates.
Speaker 7 (37:53):
That's right.
Speaker 5 (37:54):
Yeah, So there's kind of two like for this kind
of comparison data, there's kind of alluded to two key
ways you can go. You can sort of stack rank
and test against competitors if you wanted to, and there's
pretty good guidance, Like there's a company called SPI that
puts out the SPI Consulting Report, So couple one hundred
page document on just kind of the general consulting industry
(38:15):
trends and where margins should be and how you sort
of stack rank. So that data's readily available out there.
So there's a way that we can kind of build
all of that in I say, customers wanted to get
an idea of how they ranked against sort of a standard,
but didn't necessarily want to have their data shared in
a comparison with other companies.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
So Matte, you've transitioned to a role of what president
and chief product officer. That's right, Mike, you're in the
hot seat as CEO. You've just raised five million bucks.
That's great. What does that now allow you to do
and what's your sort of vision for the sort of
the next twelve months for the company.
Speaker 4 (38:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
So one of the big things we've done is we've
opened up a development and product team in the Bay Area.
So as Matt mentioned, we've hired several people I've worked
with before in a company called bill dot com, which
was a fintech offering for small mid market businesses. So
they have a really good idea architecturally what we need
(39:13):
to do, and they also understand this integration play. So
one of the things I think they'll help us do
is just speed up our ability to move and add
to the product and keep making more valuable for our customers.
Speaker 4 (39:27):
So I'm excited about that.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
We've also grown our sales team in the US and
we've begun doing a lot of work in the US market,
so getting a lot of feedback, a lot of conversations,
and we've begun adding US customers at a faster clip
as well. So those are probably the two big things
we're doing. And then just broadly speaking here in Wellington,
(39:49):
we've grown the team pretty significantly, both on the go
to market side and on the product and engineering side.
So those also help us go faster on the pre
and I think it'll help us go faster in the APEC, Australia,
New Zealand markets, so broad them, you know, more product
stuff faster, and then getting out too the market faster
(40:12):
as well.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Watch you sort of outlook for business. I mean, we've
come through in New Zealand it's a sort of a
tough recession, but still not out of it yet. The
US market, it seems to be a bit more buoyant
for consulting. Is that a business that when times are tough,
are looking for these sorts of solutions to get more
efficiency into their business.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
Definitely, And I think one thing that I've seen throughout
my career when times are tough, there are a lot
of smaller companies getting started. People get laid off from
the big companies and then they just you know, out
of necessity, we'll go out and create new firms. And
so you'll see a lot of these ten twenty person
consultancies getting into the market and they don't necessarily have
(40:54):
the background in it, so they love to have a
platform like ours. In addition to the software, we're doing
a lot of work on just kind of giving back
to the community we have. I think we did the
math and it's like one hundred and forty five years
of experience in consulting in our group, and so we've
been writing a lot about that on our website and
our blogs, and we've launched the Project Works Academy, which
(41:16):
is a set of free courses you can take on
how to differentiate your firm, how to scale your firm.
So as a lot of people are jumping into consulting
for the first time, we're trying to help them just
you know, with the models of how do you run
a small consultancy, not even necessarily our software, just how
do you run a consultancy? And it kind of goes
with our overall approach, which is we want to help
(41:39):
these firms grow. We want to be the place they
go to learn how to grow and then to give
them the tools that they need over time.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
So this is not what those in the industry would
call a sexy product. You know, sometimes we can get
a little repped up in these cool exciting stuff like
you know, Open Stars, Fusion Energy.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Production, but or Halter or Hold Yeah exactly, which which actually,
you know, just amazing. The businesses coverage this week of
how much revenue Halter is doing for fantastic hanging collars
around Cow's nix.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
And creation and number one on the Deloitte Fast fifty
this year fifteen hundred percent year on year increase in revenue,
which is just astounding. But something like this which is
kind of you know, not overly exciting, but just if
you can do it right and you can get it
in the you know, the most user interface friendly way,
(42:37):
and you can get that adoption and that excitement for
those people who it's for, these consultants, then you can
just have a really massively runaway successful business like we
saw with zero.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
Yeah and fast growing as well. They're also on the
Fast fifty, not not up there with with Halter, but
definitely making it onto that list, so growing revenue quickly,
which is great too. I think really interesting things about
them one is that again tapping into that ecosystem approach,
and Zero is at the heart of it. So as
Mike pointed out, there they've got customers in the UK.
(43:10):
They don't really have any staff there, but they've got
a lot of customers, so that is going to be
important to service. And it's off the back of Zero
being so strong in the UK market. So people in
consulting firms are using that for their accounting and they're
going but I need to do project management and I
need to keep an eye on the productivity of my
team of consultants. This can plug into zero as well
(43:33):
as other platforms as well, and I think that's been
so successful for you know, obviously for Zero building at
Eco system and all the New Zealand startups that have
tapped into that. So that's hugely valuable. And the other
thing is just where we're at in the economic cycle.
As Mike pointed out, he's been in the consulting game
for a long time and in tough times you see
(43:54):
people go out on their own, sometimes they get laid
off and they set up consultancies. You know, three or
four really smart people who get together and build a
consulting firm and and do quite well. But as that
starts to grow, all the complexity they had in their
own business starts to creep in and they need to
deal with that admin because ultimately, the thing about consulting
(44:16):
is you've got a limited number of hours per week
times the number of people that you've got in that business,
and if you chew up two or three hours even
a week, that's you know, thousands of dollars potentially you're
not you know, billing to customers. So this is actually
it's not particularly sexy, but this is solving a real
problem for quite a lucrative part of the you know,
(44:37):
the tech market, or even other types of consulting. It
might be legal, it might be business consulting. This is
this is really important to get right.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
Yeah, definitely. And you know, if you can do it
really well at that small to medium size level and
then you can start to scale that out on a
massive level, there's no shortage of market and there's going
to be the the case where when you get that reputation,
the moment a new player comes on or like you say,
one of these people goes off and does it themselves,
(45:07):
it's going to be the first thing they think of
is to go to Project Works and use them for
that side of the business.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
Yeah, so they got forty staff. At the moment, Mark
will be based it is based in Silicon Valley building
out a team there. He's getting people on board that
he trusts from his previous track record at bill dot
com and the likes thirty five customers in the US.
So you can see the potential growth opportunity they have there.
(45:34):
That's why Bridge West has led this round, invested this money,
and they see a lot of upside here. So I
think this is going to be a fascinating one to watch.
To see this company, it's five years old, it's really
established itself as a quality software maker in this part
of the world. Now we're going to see, hopefully in
the next couple of years, how this key we startup
(45:58):
is going to really ten x what they do in
particularly in the North American market.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
So that's it for another episode of the Business of Tech.
Thanks very much to Mark Ortungu and Matthew Hater from
Project Works. We'll keep a close eye on their progress.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
Yeah, and let us know what you think of Blue
Sky and how you're dealing with the in sertification of
online platforms like x and Facebook forever.
Speaker 1 (46:24):
Now, yeah, there's got to be somewhere other than LinkedIn
worth hanging out. Show notes for the Business of Tech
are in the podcast section at www dot Businessdesk, dot
co dot nz, where you can stream the podcast in
full every week. It's also available from iHeartRadio with your
podcast platform of choice.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
Get in touch with your feedback and we'd love to
hear your suggestions for upcoming guests. Email me on Ben
at Business Desk dot Co, dot and z and add
me on Blue Sky because I am actively looking for
people to follow and engage with, so please do follow
that link.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
That's it for this week. Another episode coming your way
next Thursday.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Until then, have a great week.
Speaker 4 (47:08):
Yahm
This week on the Business of Tech powered by two Degrees,
the Wellington tech startup that's just raised eight point six
million dollars, giving it a one hundred million dollar valuation.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Project Works as gaining traction around the world with software
that helps consulting firms get the best out of their
teams and keep projects on track.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
It's also doing very well tapping into the ecosystem of
another successful Wellington Bourne tech company, Zero. I'm Peter Griffin.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
And I'm Ben Moore, and soon we'll be hearing from
Project Works co founder Matthew Hater and the company's new CEO,
Silicon Valley veteran Mark Ortungue.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I have a lot of conversations now with people about
New Zealand and they all start off with New Zealand
is amazing, and say, oh, have you been.
Speaker 4 (00:47):
The same now?
Speaker 5 (00:49):
You know?
Speaker 3 (00:49):
So there's this funny thing like they all know it's
amazing and they all love it that they've never been.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
More from the Project Works crew soon, But first, Blue Sky,
the decentralized social network originally started by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.
Well it's getting a surge of new signups at the moment,
including Ben and Me, Casey Newton, author of the Excellent
Platform and newsletter, goes inside that phenomenal growth to look
(01:15):
at some of the growing pains now hitting blue Sky,
particularly when it comes to content moderation. Newton writes that
the user base of blue Sky has gone up over
fifty percent since the company raised fifteen million dollars in
funding last month. That was from Blockchain Capital. The real growth, though,
has come in the wake of the US elections. The growth,
(01:36):
says Newton, has strained the limits of what its twenty
person core team and twenty five contract moderators are able
to do. So, Ben, we've both sort of bailed on
X some time ago. We congregate on LinkedIn, that's where
we get most traction, and talking to others like Chris
(01:57):
kill Tech reporter, a lot of journalists in New Zealand
who have done very well building a big presence on
X over the years, a lot of them are now
bailing out. What do you think is really driving this
other than just sort of anti Trump sentiment.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
I think it's the actual platform itself. I've X has
just become kind of pointless to be there. There's just
I don't know, I go on there, I don't really
see anything in particular.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
That excites me.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
A lot of the stuff that used to crop up
that I thought was interesting, you know, links to news
for example, that's being buried now by the algorithm. I
tried out Threads for a while, but I found that
Threads was becoming like a story sharing service and it
was a bit more like a like a reddit. So
I kind of just fell off and I wasn't really
(02:50):
using a text based social media for a while. I
had signed up to Masteron and I had signed up
to blue Sky many moons ago, and so when I
start to hear that people were actually going on to the
Blue Sky and using it, I thought I'd check it
out again. And yeah, I've been really excited by what
I've seen. Actually, I think it's managing to recapture some
of that magic of the heyday of Twitter, and I
(03:14):
feel like I can trust it, to be honest.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yeah, it definitely does feel like sort of Twitter circus,
sort of twenty thirteen or something like that a long
time ago, very sort of stripped down, not very feature rich.
But in some ways that's a good thing. But I
think the key thing which you pointed to is just
the you know, the lack of engagement with quality sources
(03:38):
you get now and even trying to use it to
promote your work, which used to be a great place
for us to post our articles and that sort of thing.
Damian Christie, a friend of mine, a science communicator. He
wrote on LinkedIn this week that the change and engagement
on X has been huge. He's got around ten thousand
followers on X, which you know, not insubstantial these days,
(04:02):
he says, a post there will attract nothing but tumble weeds.
I don't know if they're not being seen because of
the algorithm or because none of the followers are really
there anymore. What I do know is that LinkedIn is
a great place for work industry chats, so he's getting
more traction there and that's I think the key thing
for me is you put something out there and the
(04:25):
engagement you used to get where a lot of people
would pile in and sometimes be critical, but there would
be a good, healthy debate. I'm seeing that going on
on X, but it's about highly polarized issues and real
sort of tropes like the Ukraine War, identity politics. It's
like the algorithm is really pushing everyone to these hot
(04:47):
button topics and that I think is people have Finally.
This has been going on for some time. It accelerated
with Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter and a lot of
people now going enough is enough and following the electioner
looking for something else. So maybe blue Sky is it.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Yeah, And you know, there's this video made by a
YouTuber called cgp Gray and he's an excellent content creator
on YouTube, and he made this video a long time
ago about basically what drives engagement, and it used to
be called this video will Make You Angry. I don't
know if that's still the title of it, but he
talks about how, you know, people laughter or emotional connection
(05:29):
and all these kinds of things promote engagement, but that
anger is one of the greatest promoters of engagement.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
And I think it.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Feels to me like X has really leaned into that
a lot. And it's something that I actively think about
when I'm online. If something is making me angry, I
intentionally try to push against that and not engage with it.
If I'm doing it in an intellectual way, that's okay,
But if I'm getting angry, I really try not to
because it's just creating this kind of shitty Internet that
(05:57):
I don't want to be a part of Yes.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Speaking of that, you know Corey doctor O, the Internet
advocate novelists. He famously labeled this the in shitification of
online platforms. Actually, here's Corey explaining it in a brilliant
essay topic he did on YouTube.
Speaker 6 (06:19):
There's a kind of common pathology. So what platforms do
when they start out is they use their investor's capital
to allocate surpluses to users, making life good for those users,
luring them in, and then locking them in. Once those
users are locked in, all of that surplus is clawed
back and it's allocated to business customers, advertisers, publishers, platform sellers,
(06:41):
gig workers, creators or performers until all of those people
are locked in too. And then finally, once both sides
of this two sided market are locked in, the platform
scoops up all the surplus for itself. And I have
a somewhat notorious name for this that I coined. I
call it in shitification, and it's the reason that things
really are worse these days.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
I guess the question now is how rivals like Blue
Sky and mastered On as well. Massed On is a
Feta verse. It's a collection of social networks. Blue Sky
is on an open protocol as well, so you can
take your social media content in theory and take it
to somewhere else. I don't think that in practice is
(07:22):
possible at the moment, but I really like the idea
of that, the fact that you don't have this really
aggressive algorithm manipulating everything. There's no advertising on it. But
it is a very small organization, only twenty people, twenty
five contract moderators. So how does this tiny organization, sure
it's had an influx of funding recently, avoid all the
(07:45):
pitfalls that we've seen with X.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Well, they have just announced that they're going to quadruple
that content moderation team to one hundred people now, specifically
to especially combat what they call sea SAM or child
sexual abuse content. And so that is a good news,
I think because being on the more protectionist side of
(08:10):
the inhabitants of this digital space is more of a
pleasant experience. And I think that if you are imagining
that X doesn't have strong moderation, then you're probably fooling
yourself actually, and I think that the moderation is just
in a different direction. Yeah, that this is just my
personal feelings, and you can call me a soft snowflake,
(08:32):
whatever you like. But honestly, you know, I've got a
whole life to live, and so when I go online,
I don't want to just be getting angry all the time,
or seeing negative staff or seeing arguments like sometimes it's
nice just to have a cool link to a science
story or pictures of space or whatever it is else
that you're into.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
You know, yeah, I'm probably a little sort of looser
on the content moderation. I'll tolerate a bit more, but
it's just become intolerable on it when it becomes unusable
in terms of it used to be where I got
my news. And because of the deprioritization of news of
mainstream news outlets anyway, you know, they seem to be
(09:11):
promoting podcasters and influencers, particularly conservative leaning one. So I'm
just greeted by them every time I go on X. So,
you know, the Guardian has just bailed out. All these
credible news outlets are not there, and I think that's
the weakness and Blue Sky and all of these alternatives.
(09:32):
At the moment is news is really important, but some
of these networks deprioritize news. For instance, threads. You know,
news is not very prominent on there. They are larry
about politics in the meta world as well. They've been
burned over that before, so you don't see a huge
(09:52):
amount of political discussion. Now, that's why blue Sky is great.
You know, we're interested in politics and news and current affairs,
and they seem to be more willing to facilitate that.
So I guess the question. Now it's getting traction. Blue
Sky twenty million odd users, grown fifty percent. Masterdon has
about nine million users. But will it just become a
(10:14):
sort of liberal leaning, sort of filter bubble and echo chamber.
This is what Ali Brellen, writing in the Atlantic this week,
sort of fears. She says, as the left flees and
X loses broader relevance, it becomes a more overtly right
wing site. But the right needs liberals on X. You
(10:34):
really do need a platform where people of all political
bents and ideologies come together to argue and to discuss
and share ideas. That's the digital town square that Eli
Musk supposedly is trying to foster. But we seem to
be going into these sort of echo chambers of liberal
(10:57):
or right leaning discourse. That's really not what social media
is about.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
No, you're right, but at the same time, this is
what we've had for the last ten years of social
media anyway. But you know, if we think that one
social media platform is going to come along and be
the solution to everyone's problem, then I think you're probably dreaming.
You know, there is the left leaning stuff on blue Sky,
(11:23):
but also just the more neutral stuff absolutely that was
being lost on X just links to cool science stuff,
like I said before, just fun, neutral stuff that had
that just was dying or had died on X.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Actually the science feed on Blue Sky's great, you know,
so finally refreshingly just a bunch of credible news sources
giving you news.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
So look for us on blue Sky. You can find
our handles in the show notes at business desk dot
co dot nz and I will post them on LinkedIn
as well.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Blue Sky is obviously doing very well the moment, but
let's face it, making a new social media platform of
financial success is going to be challenging to say the least,
which is why most of our tech companies going global
focus on B to B products and use cases, solving
a particular need for businesses that will pay a subscription
(12:18):
each month if you can make their lives easier or
win them new business.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Certainly the case with Wellington based project Works, which has
been around in its current form for five years and
solves a very specific problem for small to medium sized
consulting firms.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Which is cutting through the time consuming double handling and
expensive admin overheads that often plague those firms. You're dealing
primarily with charging for people's time billable hours, so you've
got to be super efficient in your admin maximizing the
productivity of the team, keeping projects on track.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Project Works is now helping over five hundred firms do that,
integrating with major platforms like HubSpot and Zero and making
aim at the US market under the guidance of its
new Silicon Valley based CEO, Mark Ortung.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Yeah. Mark knows a fair bit about the consulting game
and how to run fast growing tech companies. He was
a founder of Necient, the US cloud service company acquired
by NTT in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
He was also the co founder and COO of bill
dot Com, a now very successful NASDAK listed company, and
he did nearly a decade at Accenture, one of the
world's largest consulting firms.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
So I caught up with Mark and Matthew Hater, the
Project Works president and chief product officer, in Wellington recently
to find out more about the platform they've built and
the expansion that injection of investor cash now enables them
to pursue.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
So he is Peter's interview with Mark Ortung and Matthew
Hater of Project.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Works and Mike, Welcome to the business of tech. Thanks
so much for coming on project Where. It's probably not
a company that the average ki we has heard of
in the same breath as even vand and zero, But
(14:14):
you've been chipping away for quite a long time now
twenty nineteen the company was founded, but Matt take us back.
The origins of project Works actually lies a lot earlier,
back as far as what two thousand and.
Speaker 7 (14:27):
One, Yeah, two thousand and one. You could definitely stretch
it back that far.
Speaker 5 (14:31):
So in two thousand and eight I joined a consulting firm,
a Wellington based consulting firm called Provoke and where or
the team there had started to build up some internal
ip to run that consultancy. It was called Project Control
at the time. Fast forward to around twenty sixteen, I'd
been working there for a while, was ready to go and.
Speaker 7 (14:53):
Sort of start a startup.
Speaker 5 (14:54):
Got talking to the guys who ran Provoke and also Julian,
one of my now co founders, and we decided, hey,
we've got some pretty cool ip here, seems to be
a potential market for it. People were coming and going
from Provoke at the time saying, hey, you should go
and take this product to my previous employer, like they
need that desperately.
Speaker 7 (15:15):
So we did a bit of work with NZTA, but a.
Speaker 5 (15:18):
Market validation work and decided to start shipping away, rebuilding
the product as a SaaS platform, and then in twenty nineteen,
when Provoked basically sold outright to private equity firm Bridge West,
Bridgewess kind of acquired Provoked stake and our company that
we'd founded, and then further sort of capitalized us, and
(15:40):
that's when we kind of really sort of started as
a real business. Transferred from us sort of a nights
and weekend's hobby to a company. Got Provoked on as
our first customer, so we properly separated the companies and
kind of did all of that and then kind of
got to work hiring, so we had some capital, started
really trying to achieve product market fit a little bit
(16:03):
more seriously, and.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
What was the core of that product that you were
working on at the time when you came out of
Provoke That really obviously Bridge were saw a lot of
potential in.
Speaker 5 (16:13):
So it started really as a time sheeting product you
alluded to back in two thousand and one. I think
that's where the first sort of line of code was
written when Provokes started an internal time shooting tool, and
then that expanded into kind of invoicing, resource planning, revenue forecasting,
really all the tools that you need to run a
consulting firm, and a lot of it sort of orientated
(16:36):
around sort of improving your margin and utilization. So Provoker
this great asset and kind of an edge for running
their consulting firm because they had such a great view
on the utilization of the team like pigs and troughs
for upcoming bench and margin, which ultimately drives any consulting firm.
Speaker 7 (16:55):
So that's what we had.
Speaker 5 (16:57):
Masoud who's the founder of Bridge West, he came in,
we talked to him. He had a background in services.
He kind of had that same kind of you know, yep,
I wish I had this back when I was running
consulting firms. Saw the potential, obviously liked us enough as
well to invest, and away we went.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Make When did you come on to seeing you joined
as CEO just this year in March, but have been
associated with the company before then.
Speaker 4 (17:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
So I first I came into Provoke because one of
the folks who worked for me at my prior company, Nextcient,
which was a software outsourcing company, became CEO of Provoke.
This was probably three or four years ago now, and
he asked me to join the board of Provoke. So
(17:46):
that's how I got involved with Provoke, and I met
Masud and then Masud and Bridgewest run a conference every
summer in northern California.
Speaker 4 (17:57):
And so two or three maybe three years.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
Ago now, I met and Doug, one of the co founders,
Doug along with Matt, and I really liked them.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
I liked the product.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
And when I was at an Excient running I was
a services company. When I joined, we were about thirty
five million US and we grew up about one hundred
and thirty million over a seven year period. And during
that time we had done the same thing. We needed
a product like this. We actually we tried a bunch
of stuff in the market. Our whole business was around
making software for other people with a great user experience,
(18:30):
which we had boiled down to this tagline, life's too
short for crappy software and all the stuff we tried.
We tried about three of the products in the market
at the time. They were all really crappy like they
were expensive, hard to use, and clunky. So we, like provoked,
started building our own and the team actually asked at
one point, can we turn it into multi tenant?
Speaker 4 (18:52):
Can we take it out? So there was a little bit.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Of that idea and had I had done a bunch
of SaaS companies previously, and I knew how they needed
to be capitalized, and we were a consulting firm turning
a profit, so we never went down that path. But
I felt the pain of as effectively as a customer
looking for a platform like this. So when I met
Matt and Doug at the conference and I saw their
(19:16):
product and saw what they were doing, I could tell
very quickly that it was a good fit and that
there's just and we've now done a lot of market researchers,
literally tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of consulting
firms they.
Speaker 4 (19:29):
Need this product. So yeah, I was excited to get involved.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
I actually went and approached Matt and Doug and asked
to be on the board, and we spent a little
bit of time kind of getting to know each other,
and so that was roughly two years ago that I
joined the board.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Yeah, you'd think you consulting firms. The US is the
heart of those sorts of businesses. You think, you know,
a Silicon Valley starter would have this covered. But yet again,
like with zero and cloud based accounting software vanned with
invoicing and receipts and all that sort of thing, a
gap in the market there that wasn't being served well
out of North America.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
Yeah, I think there are Silicon Valley startups that went
after this, and like most Silicon Valley startups, they got
pulled into going up market and they did sort of
the prior version of startups, which was build features to
sell the product, not to make a great user experience,
not to make something that's a joy to use. So
(20:26):
there are products out there that are you know, a
lot of them will not call you back unless you
have five hundred employees in your firm or more, and
most of them are not a joy to use. So, yeah,
so there is this gap I believe in the market
for us, which is really for small and mid market
consultancies who need something simple, something powerful and easy to use.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
And take us through. You are working with all the
big sort of platforms that consulting firms or any business
might be using, the likes of hubspotob Zero and many more.
So how do you integrate into all of these sort
of platforms that are likely to sit at the height
of a consulting business or other type of business.
Speaker 5 (21:09):
Yeah, so, I mean, we have a lot of discussions
around where the demarcation points for our product should be,
and today anyway and for the foreseeable future, we've decided
that we should sit with accounting on one side, CRM
on the other side, and task management also kind of
in the middle because those problems are largely solved. There
are household names and all of those categories already, so
(21:32):
there's no point in us trying to go and take
on you know, zero and QuickBooks or hubs and Salesforce
head on like those are pretty good, solid products, but
there's this massive white space in the middle. So, you know,
we've worked really hard on our relationship with starting in
New Zealand with the likes of Zero. A good chunk
of our customer base are also zero customers, ensuring that
we have the best integration there. So Project Works does
(21:55):
a lot of things, like a lot of our current
or our prospective customer base coming and they use multiple
point solutions or spreadsheets to kind of make this up.
So we're trying to take that kind of middle area
that is made up of these kind of cobble together
solutions and then integrate with the problems that are already solved,
like the CRM and the accounting side, and then largely
(22:17):
some of the task management side, like jerror in particular
is quite dominant too, So trying to create an experience
that's really seamless between all those systems. You know, we've
just brought on some of Mark's old team up in
the Valley who have a huge amount of experience building
integrations at a really high level, so they've come in
and sort of started to build out some of that.
(22:38):
So it's a very sort of seamless experience. You can
just operate in side project Works and your information is
just kind of flowing sort of seamlessly between the systems.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
That's great. So it's using APIs as something to transfer
all of that data into project works.
Speaker 7 (22:53):
That's right.
Speaker 5 (22:53):
Yeah, So most of the integrations are sort of API based,
and then we have kind of taskers that are sort
of auto edically sinking and calling out to external APIs
and bringing data in or sending data out.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yeah, that white space in the middle you talk about,
it is clearly an area where's a lot of demand
for you know, this year, you've raised five million dollars
US at a valuation of one hundred million dollars New Zealand.
I read somewhere that your revenue has grown something like
one hundred and seventy percent in the last year.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
There was one number out there, so we were in
the ink five thousand, number five five seven, and that's
a three year measurement. That was seven ninety eight, So
just under eight hundred percent over three years last year.
I don't know the exact number, it's roughly eighty percent.
Speaker 7 (23:37):
Yeah wow.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Yeah. So and and if this is not you were
talking about, you know, the some of those startups been
a bit too high end. You know, it was an
expensive product. I didn't want to talk to you unless
you had five hundred employees. I mean, this is not
a super expensive product or something like forty bucks a
month per user. So and there's no real sort of
limitation on the low end as to how many users
(23:59):
you can have in a consulting business that can take
advantage of this very much like democratizing it in the
way that Rogerie did with accounting software.
Speaker 5 (24:07):
Yeah, so we've found, like with a lot of the
features and project whereas, you don't really need a product
like ours until you're around ten around ten users, So
we typically work over that ten. Like you know, if
you're a new kind of consulting firm and you've got
kind of rapid growth ambitions and absolutely, you know, we
take those those customers on as well. But it's really
(24:28):
sort of once you get to that ten fifteen where
you have challenges with resource planning as the founder, you
no longer just know what everybody's doing. That's when Project
Works really starts to shine, I think. But we haven't
really found like a top end of user kind of
limitation yet. We've got customers with a few hundred users
and they're working really well too.
Speaker 4 (24:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
One of the things I'm most proud of is that
if you look across we're over five hundred consulting firms
using the product. Now, if you look across that base,
they're growing on average about twenty percent a year, which
is not typical for like I come from Naxian and
a lot of people that I worked with went off
into other consulting firms and that has been rough in
(25:09):
consulting for the last one to two years. And there
are not a lot of firms growing at that twenty
plus percent. So having the whole five hundred of them average,
that is pretty amazing. We've got a great group of customers.
They're thriving. Hopefully we're helping them do more of that.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
And are you seeing interest at the sort of the
top end of town the deloittes into PWCs and the
extenture is do they typically build their own bespoke systems
to do this sort of collaboration and project work or
are they on your radar as well?
Speaker 7 (25:39):
They are.
Speaker 5 (25:40):
Yeah, so we've got a fantastic sort of partner channel
and we do a lot of work just generally with
partners who maybe ranging from just referring us leads through
to doing full implementations. And yeah, we have various conversations
going on kind of across all spectrum of size consultancies.
Speaker 7 (25:58):
I would say, yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
Yeah, you've come on board as CEO. You knew the
company quite well and the founding team. What's it like
representing a New Zealand founded company in the US. Obviously,
they customers don't really care. They just want to use
to deliver a great product. But are there any nuances
about having a team here as well as sort of
(26:21):
the sales and marketing and all of that in the US.
Speaker 4 (26:25):
Yeah, it's been for me, it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
I'm really enjoying putting the two cultures together. Some of
the you know, the language, you get nuances where there
will be moments where I think I know every word
that was put together in a sentence, but I have
no idea what the sentence means. So even though we're
both speaking English, there's a lot of colloquial that I
don't necessarily get. I'm learning it quickly, so that for
(26:48):
me is fun. But in the US people are quite
open to hearing that we have this product with five
hundred plus customers that's well proven, but they haven't heard
of it because we've been in primarily Australia, New Zealand
in terms of our customer base, and then we tell them,
you know, we're about thirty thirty five US customers today,
(27:11):
so it's not that there's no one there, and we've
proven that the way consulting firms work is pretty much
the same. And we're really in five countries, so in
addition to those three, we're in Canada and the UK,
and we get pulled into the UK just because zero
is so strong there, so we just you know, we're
not actually on the ground with salespeople in the UK,
but we're getting demand anyway.
Speaker 4 (27:33):
Which is also fun.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
So one of the other things is not necessarily key
we but being a company of our size, we're about
forty some people, we're effectively a multinational selling in five countries,
and we're now set up as a US company. Matt
and I both spend a little more time than we'd
care too with sort of the lawyers and accountants working
out how you deal with being a global company that
(27:56):
I think most companies don't get to that until way,
way long later in the gross cycle. So that's been
interesting as well, but I think that'll be a real
strength for us. There's also kind of just some funny
things about Americans with New Zealand. So I have a
lot of conversations now with people about New Zealand and
they all start off with New Zealand is amazing, And
I'll say, oh, have you been? They say no, Like
(28:20):
you know, so there's this funny thing like they all
know it's amazing and they all love it, but they've
never been. It's I'm not sure why those two go together,
but it's it is.
Speaker 5 (28:30):
I think maybe the amount of Lord of the Rings
kind of references I've had speaking with your customers and prospects.
Speaker 7 (28:37):
It's like, oh yeah, beautiful Lord.
Speaker 5 (28:40):
Of the Rings.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Yeah, what's it like for you?
Speaker 4 (28:49):
Met?
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Because you know, the sort of the mancha really for
New Zealand startups is go to North America as soon
as possible, particularly for a product like this, that's where
the biggest market is. Get in there early. But then
if you're in the zero ecosystem, it makes sense really
leverage that huge customer base we have in New Zealand
(29:10):
and Australia where you can sort of test the market,
test the water. How did you sort of approach that
knowing that ultimately this is a product that you'll want
to take on the US with but trying to find
your feet here with the project works first, I think
you have.
Speaker 5 (29:25):
To have a rarely large vision, but you need to
start acting kind of a little bit more tactical there. Right,
So the US market for US is great, it's English
speaking culturally, Like, there are differences, but they're not that
big from a product perspective as well. You know, we
don't deal with things like tax or payroll, which are
(29:47):
traditionally quite different in country to countries.
Speaker 7 (29:51):
You know, like if you look at something.
Speaker 5 (29:52):
Like zero, their products has to be very different in
the US market to deal with tax. Everything we do
is the same Australia, New Zealand, US with some subtle differences,
you know, Z's versus ESSES is kind of kind of
being a little bit facetious, but it's kind of the
extent of the difference. So you need to have a
(30:12):
vision and an addressable market for where you want to
get to, but you need to start.
Speaker 7 (30:16):
Sort of operating tactically. So that's kind of what we did.
Speaker 5 (30:19):
We went all in on kind of zero Australia and
now more recently we're starting to work more into the US.
But we knew from the start, like we weren't doing
anything locally that was going to box us in and
prevent us from getting into the US market.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Yeah, even sort of legal stuff. I mean that's not
dealt with in Project works. Better is that that will
be dealt with on one of those other platforms that
you integrate with.
Speaker 4 (30:41):
That's right.
Speaker 5 (30:42):
They dealt with all the hard problems and we're just
right on their coattails.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
So you should have designed it for immediate and sort
of easy uptake in other markets.
Speaker 4 (30:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (30:52):
I mean it's multi currency. It's not multi lingual yet,
but that will come in time. But just having the
multi currency and not dealing with X payroll integrating really
well with those systems obviously, but we don't have to
solve those headaches. It means we're very well suited for
global global mark Mike.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
You know, this year really has been the year of
real uptake of generative AI based products, the year of
co pilot from Microsoft. I just came back from Silicon Valley,
the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft as well, and now
talking about the era of AI agents moving beyond just
a chatbot to something that you can set tasks to do,
(31:31):
will automate things on your behalf interesting your perspective on
how project works fits into this your strategy around AI.
Are we going to get to a point where project
works agent is going to be talking to an M
YOB or a zero agent.
Speaker 7 (31:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (31:48):
Fascinating stuff, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
I think for US, AI presents a huge opportunity because
there's if you look across sort of the workflows the
consultancies go through every know, all the way from the
beginning of looking to get new clients, signing them up,
getting their projects specified, delivering the projects, and then getting
paid All throughout there, there's all sorts of tasks that
are document heavy and mostly sort of a ministrivia that
(32:15):
people don't want to do. So we see AI tools
within project works really making those easier and lowering.
Speaker 4 (32:24):
The amount of labor required.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
In the near term, I think you'll still want a
human touch, so but you know, take a look at
something before it goes to the client. Maybe in the
longer run, agents will just completely interact on your behalf.
But I think because most of our clients are consultancies
or engineers or architecture firms, they have a sort of
a high production value and a high touch with their clients.
(32:48):
I think they're just going to want to check it.
They're going to want to look at it. So it'll
be creating a lot of things for them, which makes
their lives easier. But I don't know if at least
not into twenty five. I don't think they'll just be saying, yeah,
just send it without me even looking at it.
Speaker 4 (33:05):
We'll see.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
So what's your strategy map in terms of development and
around integrating AI. Have you been experimenting with large language
models and generative AI?
Speaker 7 (33:17):
Yes?
Speaker 5 (33:17):
So, I think a big part of what we'll win
I think with products like ours with AI is the data.
You know, we're not building our own LM or anything
like that, but we do have a lot of data.
So we're running we're kind of running proof of concepts
and to like more sort of point parts at the
moment to test you know what sort of quality we
(33:40):
can get out and where we think the opportunities are.
So some examples would be spinning up a new resourcing
team and knowing like the right resource you should have, right,
so a statement of work comes in. You've got to
spin up a team. What availability do I have, what
skills do I need? What kind of mix of team? Members,
like they need a junior.
Speaker 7 (34:01):
What personalities work well together, all of.
Speaker 5 (34:04):
These kind of factors, and ideally having a some sort
of AI agent that can spin up that team. So
that's one example of a concept that we're working on.
Also analysis of your current workforce, how satisfied or what
sort of churn risk they are, Right, you can use
all these like minor heuristics, like somebody might have been
(34:26):
really good in time they're doing their timesheets and now
they've kind of started to slack off a bit, or
someone takes like a lot of leave, or someone's working
with other people.
Speaker 4 (34:33):
That have left.
Speaker 7 (34:34):
But there's all this the otter that.
Speaker 5 (34:36):
You can use AI to sort of suggest like, hey,
maybe you should check in with this person. They could
potentially be.
Speaker 7 (34:41):
Unhappy or at risk or whatever. So there's kind of a.
Speaker 5 (34:44):
Few sort of point bits we're doing well at the
same time where we're doing a lot in the integration
space as well as like you've kind of alluded to,
and we want to be able to be kind of
an insights engine for your consultancy.
Speaker 7 (34:58):
So you've got to get data and be able to
say like, hey, we.
Speaker 5 (35:02):
Think you are charging your margins are not quite high
enough on this project, you should up your rates for
this particular resource because we think that's actually probably more
fair and you're not going to lose customers because of it,
and so being able to be like a project management
co pilot. So we're kind of, you know, testing away
(35:22):
like various things, and it's probably been all the proof
of concept stage at the moment. Yeah, I know if
you'd add anything to that mark any of the others.
There's a lot of little bits and a lot of
ideas being kind of played with.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
I think, yeah, quite a few ideas. I think.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
Also the other thing that we can do when I
go out and talk to customers about it, they're often
experimenting with some of the models that are out there
in public and playing with us. We can select the
best model for each given task and really make sure
we're tuning it and getting the prompts really well executed.
And so that will in a funny way, that alone
(35:58):
takes away some labor around the consultancies who today might
be going to an open AI and trying to engineer
their own prompt to get it to do something, and
then we'll just bring it in as part of our
product to generate a given document and then once it's
generated and accepted, we have all the metadata and just
goes right into our system, right, so we can help
(36:21):
them tune it and we can help them sort of
integrate it right into our flow. And that's ultimately where
a lot of our value is is that we have
that backbone of data and everything flows into there, and
then whenever they get to the next task and the
next one, we have it all in a structured way.
Speaker 4 (36:37):
It's great.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
How do you do that sort of comparative to give
a consulting firm an idea of how their rights are
comparing to others out there in the market. Do you
do you somehow and put that data from market sources.
Speaker 5 (36:52):
So yeah, there's a lot of work for us to do,
especially on the kind of security and legality side here.
So any of this is really just perfect accept at
the moment. I think the way that it will shack
down is it will need to be an opt in
system for our customers. Obviously, they own their data and
that's you know, the data we have is incredibly important
(37:13):
to their business, right, So I think the technology stream
is kind of running is one part, but we're also
running unfortunately, like a more time of lawyers. But you know,
it's just as important of a piece to this puzzle
ensuring that the data is protected. And if we do
start using production data on third party language models and things,
(37:35):
you know we're doing that in a in a safe
and secure way.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Yeah, that's really important. But yeah, I guess if you
use it in an anonymized way, it's going to provide
really good insights to Project works customers as well. They
know that they're getting real world, accurate comparisons for their rates.
Speaker 7 (37:53):
That's right.
Speaker 5 (37:54):
Yeah, So there's kind of two like for this kind
of comparison data, there's kind of alluded to two key
ways you can go. You can sort of stack rank
and test against competitors if you wanted to, and there's
pretty good guidance, Like there's a company called SPI that
puts out the SPI Consulting Report, So couple one hundred
page document on just kind of the general consulting industry
(38:15):
trends and where margins should be and how you sort
of stack rank. So that data's readily available out there.
So there's a way that we can kind of build
all of that in I say, customers wanted to get
an idea of how they ranked against sort of a standard,
but didn't necessarily want to have their data shared in
a comparison with other companies.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
So Matte, you've transitioned to a role of what president
and chief product officer. That's right, Mike, you're in the
hot seat as CEO. You've just raised five million bucks.
That's great. What does that now allow you to do
and what's your sort of vision for the sort of
the next twelve months for the company.
Speaker 4 (38:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
So one of the big things we've done is we've
opened up a development and product team in the Bay Area.
So as Matt mentioned, we've hired several people I've worked
with before in a company called bill dot com, which
was a fintech offering for small mid market businesses. So
they have a really good idea architecturally what we need
(39:13):
to do, and they also understand this integration play. So
one of the things I think they'll help us do
is just speed up our ability to move and add
to the product and keep making more valuable for our customers.
Speaker 4 (39:27):
So I'm excited about that.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
We've also grown our sales team in the US and
we've begun doing a lot of work in the US market,
so getting a lot of feedback, a lot of conversations,
and we've begun adding US customers at a faster clip
as well. So those are probably the two big things
we're doing. And then just broadly speaking here in Wellington,
(39:49):
we've grown the team pretty significantly, both on the go
to market side and on the product and engineering side.
So those also help us go faster on the pre
and I think it'll help us go faster in the APEC, Australia,
New Zealand markets, so broad them, you know, more product
stuff faster, and then getting out too the market faster
(40:12):
as well.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Watch you sort of outlook for business. I mean, we've
come through in New Zealand it's a sort of a
tough recession, but still not out of it yet. The
US market, it seems to be a bit more buoyant
for consulting. Is that a business that when times are tough,
are looking for these sorts of solutions to get more
efficiency into their business.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
Definitely, And I think one thing that I've seen throughout
my career when times are tough, there are a lot
of smaller companies getting started. People get laid off from
the big companies and then they just you know, out
of necessity, we'll go out and create new firms. And
so you'll see a lot of these ten twenty person
consultancies getting into the market and they don't necessarily have
(40:54):
the background in it, so they love to have a
platform like ours. In addition to the software, we're doing
a lot of work on just kind of giving back
to the community we have. I think we did the
math and it's like one hundred and forty five years
of experience in consulting in our group, and so we've
been writing a lot about that on our website and
our blogs, and we've launched the Project Works Academy, which
(41:16):
is a set of free courses you can take on
how to differentiate your firm, how to scale your firm.
So as a lot of people are jumping into consulting
for the first time, we're trying to help them just
you know, with the models of how do you run
a small consultancy, not even necessarily our software, just how
do you run a consultancy? And it kind of goes
with our overall approach, which is we want to help
(41:39):
these firms grow. We want to be the place they
go to learn how to grow and then to give
them the tools that they need over time.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
So this is not what those in the industry would
call a sexy product. You know, sometimes we can get
a little repped up in these cool exciting stuff like
you know, Open Stars, Fusion Energy.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Production, but or Halter or Hold Yeah exactly, which which actually,
you know, just amazing. The businesses coverage this week of
how much revenue Halter is doing for fantastic hanging collars
around Cow's nix.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
And creation and number one on the Deloitte Fast fifty
this year fifteen hundred percent year on year increase in revenue,
which is just astounding. But something like this which is
kind of you know, not overly exciting, but just if
you can do it right and you can get it
in the you know, the most user interface friendly way,
(42:37):
and you can get that adoption and that excitement for
those people who it's for, these consultants, then you can
just have a really massively runaway successful business like we
saw with zero.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
Yeah and fast growing as well. They're also on the
Fast fifty, not not up there with with Halter, but
definitely making it onto that list, so growing revenue quickly,
which is great too. I think really interesting things about
them one is that again tapping into that ecosystem approach,
and Zero is at the heart of it. So as
Mike pointed out, there they've got customers in the UK.
(43:10):
They don't really have any staff there, but they've got
a lot of customers, so that is going to be
important to service. And it's off the back of Zero
being so strong in the UK market. So people in
consulting firms are using that for their accounting and they're
going but I need to do project management and I
need to keep an eye on the productivity of my
team of consultants. This can plug into zero as well
(43:33):
as other platforms as well, and I think that's been
so successful for you know, obviously for Zero building at
Eco system and all the New Zealand startups that have
tapped into that. So that's hugely valuable. And the other
thing is just where we're at in the economic cycle.
As Mike pointed out, he's been in the consulting game
for a long time and in tough times you see
(43:54):
people go out on their own, sometimes they get laid
off and they set up consultancies. You know, three or
four really smart people who get together and build a
consulting firm and and do quite well. But as that
starts to grow, all the complexity they had in their
own business starts to creep in and they need to
deal with that admin because ultimately, the thing about consulting
(44:16):
is you've got a limited number of hours per week
times the number of people that you've got in that business,
and if you chew up two or three hours even
a week, that's you know, thousands of dollars potentially you're
not you know, billing to customers. So this is actually
it's not particularly sexy, but this is solving a real
problem for quite a lucrative part of the you know,
(44:37):
the tech market, or even other types of consulting. It
might be legal, it might be business consulting. This is
this is really important to get right.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
Yeah, definitely. And you know, if you can do it
really well at that small to medium size level and
then you can start to scale that out on a
massive level, there's no shortage of market and there's going
to be the the case where when you get that reputation,
the moment a new player comes on or like you say,
one of these people goes off and does it themselves,
(45:07):
it's going to be the first thing they think of
is to go to Project Works and use them for
that side of the business.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
Yeah, so they got forty staff. At the moment, Mark
will be based it is based in Silicon Valley building
out a team there. He's getting people on board that
he trusts from his previous track record at bill dot
com and the likes thirty five customers in the US.
So you can see the potential growth opportunity they have there.
(45:34):
That's why Bridge West has led this round, invested this money,
and they see a lot of upside here. So I
think this is going to be a fascinating one to watch.
To see this company, it's five years old, it's really
established itself as a quality software maker in this part
of the world. Now we're going to see, hopefully in
the next couple of years, how this key we startup
(45:58):
is going to really ten x what they do in
particularly in the North American market.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
So that's it for another episode of the Business of Tech.
Thanks very much to Mark Ortungu and Matthew Hater from
Project Works. We'll keep a close eye on their progress.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
Yeah, and let us know what you think of Blue
Sky and how you're dealing with the in sertification of
online platforms like x and Facebook forever.
Speaker 1 (46:24):
Now, yeah, there's got to be somewhere other than LinkedIn
worth hanging out. Show notes for the Business of Tech
are in the podcast section at www dot Businessdesk, dot
co dot nz, where you can stream the podcast in
full every week. It's also available from iHeartRadio with your
podcast platform of choice.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
Get in touch with your feedback and we'd love to
hear your suggestions for upcoming guests. Email me on Ben
at Business Desk dot Co, dot and z and add
me on Blue Sky because I am actively looking for
people to follow and engage with, so please do follow
that link.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
That's it for this week. Another episode coming your way
next Thursday.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Until then, have a great week.
Speaker 4 (47:08):
Yahm
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