Ep # 178: First Export as the Aha Moment: Onboarding for Creative Software ft. Laura Burkhauser (CEO, Descript)

Laura Burkhauser 00:05 One of the things that grinds my gears is, I hate it when people say that they have an agent, but the agent can do like four things. That is not an agent. Those are workflows. Build UI that walks me through those workflows, if you just have parameterized workflows. Intro 00:22 Welcome to Across the Funnel**,** where we dig into concrete Go-to-Market moves across sales, customer success, and account management so you can build revenue that lasts. Brought to you by Hyperengage and Dextego. Adil Saleh 00:37 Hey, greetings everybody, this is Adil, one of the co-hosts here at Across the Funnel Podcast. It was such an amazing story that we were trying to uncover for a very long time. And today we got this chance to have this story out to you guys, everybody listening. It's not just an individual success story on an individual level, but it's always a software and product that is**...** I had a huge breakthrough in the last decade or so. We are talking about how video experiences are changing. The content streams are changing across different channels and moving from text, email, even email, and transforming into video or authentic content. We are talking about Descript. We are talking about one of the senior leaders at Descript. She's chief executive at Descript. Laura, thank you very much, Laura, for taking the time. Laura Burkhauser 01:29 Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here. Adil Saleh 01:33 Likewise. So, yeah, looking at your prior journey, you've always been in the product management ever since you got out of UC Berkeley. Now thinking about your journey from the product and having somebody at the chief executive of a half a billion valuation business, I don't recall, out of these a hundred seventy-five episodes with that background in the first 7, 8, 9 years of the career, now taking on this role. So how was that transition, especially in the last, I would say six, seven months that you've taken this role. Prior to that, you were VP of product, and prior to that you were also in the product management role. So how was this transition for people listening from the product background to, of course, very, I would say, sophisticated kind of role for a product person as a chief executive. So how was that journey**,** unfolding for you in the recent times? Laura Burkhauser 02:30 Well, it's still an ongoing journey in many ways. I've been in the CEO seat now for six months and it's been an incredibly rewarding, difficult, and at times quite fun experience. But it is, I think what I would say, is a very different job. So one of the things that many people will tell you about being a PM is they're like, this is like being the CEO of like part of a product. And I am just here to say it is not. Being a product manager and being a CEO are very different jobs. And gosh, how to... I think like for me, the biggest difference between kind of being in product and being a CEO is when you are a product manager, there is a way that you can wake up every day and know if you're doing a good job, right? When I'm working on products or features, the feedback loops are fast and numerous. So I know like a good job for me means that people use my product and that they keep using my product. Right? It's like adoption**,** retention**.** All of the ways on social that people tell me what they think about the product. Looking at data and seeing how people use the product and knowing the changes that I made**,** made it easier to use. And so there are a million ways that I can feel even without anyone ever telling me I'm doing a good job. I can wake up every day and know if I am because I can see it and I can read about it. And there's something great about that. You know, it gives you this north star that you can build toward and feel really... Adil Saleh 04:07 Yeah, absolutely. And the visibility because a lot of these**,** especially in chief executive position, like you are doing so many things on a high level sitting, 30, 60 year bird's-eye view on things that are mission critical and the decision making, all of that. Versus a product manager that has slightly more visibility into what they're doing and how it's hitting the bottom line, as you mentioned. So that becomes... Laura Burkhauser 04:28 That's right. The only feedback loop that you have as a CEO for how your business is doing is how is the business doing? And of course, like the strategies that you adopt, they take months and sometimes years to like, for you to really know whether that was a good idea or not. So your learning loops are just so much longer, and yet your need to learn is so much more, and I have a theory that this is why you actually see so many CEOs being insane on social media or like adopting perspectives that feel so detached from reality. Because when you lose that sort of feedback loop that keeps you anchored to the work that you're doing every day, you become like a seeker who's out there like trying to find truth by listening to other people and like, there are a lot of other people out there who are like geniuses and futurists and like, totally right. And then there are a lot of charlatans out there. There are a lot of lunatics out there. And so you're suddenly in this vulnerable position being exposed to all kinds of, you know, crazy ideas and it makes you just start to sound a little deranged. So I feel more empathy for deranged CEOs than I ever have before. I'm gonna be a voice for them in the future. Adil Saleh 05:46 Yes, I hear that a lot like this is not the easiest of the times to be a chief executive and also, especially like it's a huge content stream and huge noise that keeps you overwhelmed and keeps you on the toes all the time. And there's so much that's going on and things are so much uncertain at the times as well when it comes to growth, when it comes to valuation and multiples. Funding rounds and, you know, it's always been tough in the valley these days for AI power. So now going back to when you were the VP of product, I know that at that time, because we were the user, so I had the team reviewing everything. Like we were doing content inside Descript. There was like three, four months window and every AI, sorry, every video editing software, they had this baggage of implementing AI like, enabling users to use transcripts to do the editing and framing and all of this part. So how was that transition? Because that could have driven a lot of your customers if you do it right, like for a software to think and could have gone wrong, it could have lost a lot of customers too. So, because it's also a competitive, saturated category, talk about video editing. So you were the VP of products. What kind of initiatives have you taken? So at that time and what was the customer feedback in the first place while you were implementing AI for the first time? The AI that was like, well, conversation AI was good enough for the transcripts and videos. But again, when it comes to context, when it comes to branding, it's a pretty tricky part of the product because I was just, before that we were trying to build our own product. That still is a product, a fun project, like the hardest bit was to do the framing for the podcast. It was good. But there were some content creators that were like having moving objects, like YouTube content, YouTube content creators. It was so hard for us to, you know, correct this framing part. And they started to look, the video started to look so ugly. So, that spectrum implementing AI for some of these problems? Or in general, what was your experience and what kind of feedback you got at that time? Laura Burkhauser 07:55 Yeah, I mean, I think that there have been a gazillion new AI models and tricks that have come out over the last several years, and then there have also been fundamental technological shifts in the way that we interact with software. And I think like Descript was at the forefront of AI video editing. We are a script-based editor. That is like our number one way that you edit video within Descript is by editing the script, right? And so our entire model is built off of that. And what was great about having that is as soon as LLMs came out, what are LLMs immediately good at? Editing text and, okay, editing text is how you edit video. And so we got multimodal for free as soon as kind of LLMs became commercially available to use in your product. And the question was, how should we implement them into Descript? And the first thing that we did was we created like a toolbar. AI tools, and this is because like our belief was, you know, chat boxes were just starting to come out. And there were two reasons why we didn't use chat boxes at that point and why we still believe that like, chat boxes are great, but they have a time and a place and it's not everything. And those two reasons are: the first is, many people, especially people who are not yet climbing the AI sophistication scale, are going to want buttons that look deterministic. They're not gonna want a big blank box that's like, how do you wanna edit your video? And they're like, I don't. No, I'm not a video editor. The whole point of me using your software is that I don't know how to edit video. And so you don't wanna show those people a blank box. You wanna show them buttons because that's what they're used to. And that also meant that we could quality test our buttons and make sure that they're actually gonna give customers something that feels good. So that's where like, remove filler words, edit for clarity, remove word gaps, eye contact, green screen, clips, translation, all of that like lives in our predetermined buttons, and we sort of added them one by one as these things came online. We also did a lot of like research to understand how customers actually record. So for example, we have both kind of de-rambling buttons for people who are doing what you and I are doing where we're having this sort of like spur of the moment conversation. It's not rehearsed. And so what you're gonna find is, I use the word like a lot. I'm gonna like stare blankly at the camera and think about my answer for a second. And we're gonna need things to kind of de-ramble. But then other people, like YouTube creators, the way that they record is they like have a piece of paper and they like look at the paragraph and then they like try to look into the camera and say the paragraph and they mess up. And so they have like five or six takes of them doing this same repeated take. And so we also have a button that's just like remove my repeated takes, right? This kind of, observe the customer, understand the jobs they're trying to do and develop buttons was the first thing that we did. And then it broke because of course it did. I mean, not like literally broke, but it broke as a UI pattern with clips because, as soon as we had clips, people were like, thanks so much for clips, but actually like, I wanna tell you how many clips I want. And we're like, okay, we'll put a little box in there. And they're like, okay, well thanks for that, but I wanna tell you how long I want each clip to be. We're like, okay, we'll put a little box in. They're like, thanks for that. I wanna tell you like what topic I want you to find the clips on. We're like, okay, well we'll put a little box there. And then like the seventh little box that we put there we're like, maybe it is, maybe we also need that chat box, because there are some people who know exactly what they wanna ask for. Right? And those people are better served by an open prompt. And so, like that's the UI thing that makes us think like, okay, we need an open prompt at this point in our product development. And at the same time, the technology like, LLMs are now smart enough. Agent brain power is now smart enough that we can actually build an agent, like a real agent. Because one of the things that grinds my gears is I hate it when people say that they have an agent, but the agent can do like four things. That is not an agent. Those are workflows. Build UI that walks me through those workflows if you just have parameterized workflows. Only show me a text box if you're open world. And I could type literally anything into the text box and your agent would know how to handle that. And so many people out there, especially in video editing who claim to have agents, they don't have agents. They have like six models that they've put a text box in front of and you've gotta ask for one of those six things to happen or you're SOL. And so anyways, that's just like my rant about agents, I'm totally off the, But, okay. So your question is like, how did we, in a world where technology was kind of coming out, AI was coming out like crazy. How did we add it into the platform in a way that helped us grow instead of making us like, get replaced by someone's vibe-coded project? And like, my answer is by building products that deeply understand customer workflows. By knowing when to then build the much harder, more ambitious thing that allows for emergence and how to not like, don't like scotch tape it together and call it an agent. Build a real agent if you think agents are the future. And then like, I think also in a world of AI, where building apps is very easy, you need to stand out by making sure that your software is reliable and robust. And so, especially this year, I think like one of our differentiators from a lot of kind of newer things is like we're real robust software that feels like it can do multiple jobs. It's not one inch deep, it's several hundred feet deep. Adil Saleh 14:01 Yeah, so I mean, from a user perspective, like we are using it from the times when Descript didn't have AI. Now this AI that is doing everything for us and has the context and capabilities that have, you know, that has reasoning and critical thinking because for our podcast, just imagine like 170, 180 conversations with different, most of them like 40, 50% are incredibly different industry verticals and product leaders at different roles. And for an AI to understand topic, stories, talks, and, you know, cuts and everything, it's been so exceptional. And that is something like we absolutely love at Descript. Now thinking about success, now you have some of your industry vertical. It's mostly agencies using it and their success is kind of shared, like they're able to retain the clients. Some of the like, could you also give us a walkthrough on some of the industry verticals that are your prime focus and where success matters a lot and they're not like, so sticky, like you're always moving and retention becomes a little more tricky than other verticals. So could you give us a little bit of the customer segment side of things? Laura Burkhauser 15:12 Yeah, so Descript primarily serves people in media and marketing, and we do this like at all scales of media and marketing. So at the very smallest scale, someone in media is someone with a podcast, right? And someone in marketing is often someone who is like, let's say a solopreneur, like a coach who needs to market their coaching business. And so like, that's like if you're talking about just on self-serve, the media and marketing people that we serve are, you know, podcasters, coaches, YouTube creators, solopreneurs, all the way up to industry-leading media, like whether it's sort of like industry-leading new media companies or traditional mainstream media companies on enterprise accounts and marketing teams at the biggest enterprise tech companies in the world. They run on Descript as well. So we're really good for marketers, really good for people in media, all the way from one-man shops to, you know, 10,000... Adil Saleh 16:20 Large in the kind of practice. Interesting. And now thinking about your post-sales motion, I know that onboarding and adoption has been the most critical. I mean, everybody tells us like we had done a survey last year, late 2025, and we have captured all these GTM leaders, that data from them and we figured out like 35% of the customers, they actually churn between onboarding and adoption stage. Meaning they don't have the right triggers, they don't have the right nudges, they don't have the right playbooks. They might not have the right process. They might not know the customer goals, what they want and how they perceive value during this stage. And eventually they churn whether it's monthly, quarterly, or an annual billing. So this is the biggest thing. So now thinking about onboarding to adoption, what kind of initiatives have Descript have in place internally to measure success during this life cycle from onboarding to adoption? Laura Burkhauser 17:16 Yeah, so I think that, you know, Descript has this aha moment where someone who never thought that they could be a video editor becomes a video editor. And in order to get them to that, we used to need to take you into Descript and have you upload media and then learn to delete media in order to edit your video or to move words around in order to edit your video or write new words in order to make your lips move and say those things. And what has been great about generative AI is that it's much easier to get someone to that aha moment. But I think that in things like media creation and especially on the consumer side, what you see with a lot of these gen AI startups is like they can get to several million customers very quickly. But the churn is crazy. It's just like next month, none of those people are there. And my diagnosis for that kind of software is not like, wow, you weren't sticky enough. Like, you guys suck at onboarding. My analysis for that software is like, your customers don't have a real use case. They're just tourists. And tourists are, you know, sometimes Adil Saleh 18:45 they're not there to stay, right**.** Laura Burkhauser 18:46 The tourism business is sometimes a lucrative business to be in. But man is it a high churn business to be in. And I think like a lot of, so like the Sora app, infamously, like everyone downloaded it and no one came back. And I think that's just because like most of us don't have a use case for short generative videos that are kind of like funny memes, especially once you start charging, right? Like, that's when you really find out if you have a use case. But that's really not Descript's problem, like, we all have problems. Descript's customers often come with a clear use case in mind. And so because of that, we have less of a tourism effect, and more of like customers are coming to Descript because they have a job they need to do that actually makes them money. Most of our customers are monetized in some ways for the way that they create, whether that's through podcast sponsorships or like I said, they're a solopreneur and we're critical to their business making money because we help them stand out by creating content. Like this is how people are using Descript. And so because they can tie us to the money on their side, they understand the value of it. And so I think that makes us a little bit different than a lot of other AI video companies and the kinds of churn problems that they may encounter. Now where we encounter churn is sometimes, I think that we used to have a lot of problems if you didn't come to Descript with media in hand. And generative AI has helped us like create onboarding paths for you, even if you don't come with media in hand. So you at least understand how much, how the product works. Is that helpful? Adil Saleh 20:36 Yeah, it is. I was also thinking along those lines because we know all the features and experiences and what kind of power features that might indicate to your team that, hey, this customer is gonna grow in this spectrum and that's how there's an expansion opportunity. And if I don't use it, If you don't capture the data, like, hey, this customer is not utilizing or leveraging these features, these modules inside it, maybe number of videos, edits, uploads, you know, exports, there's so many things that you can do. Yes, search is very minimum. That could be self-serve, as you mentioned, for a customer like us, like it's a very small customer. But what I'm seeing is like, expansion could be a bigger concern because your customers over year and over day, they kept on growing because of course, as you mentioned, they're monetized apart from the ones you're talking about. But we are not monetized, a lot of these content creators, agencies doing it as a service to the clients, they're monetized. As you said, they keep on growing. So is there any kind of processes or any kind of triggers or nudges you have for customers in the mid-market to enterprises? Laura Burkhauser 21:43 In mid-market and enterprise, the motion's a little bit different. Yeah. So the great thing about, if you do a sales-led deal with us, like, we can actually get in and onboard your entire team. And I think that's often necessary. Because self-serve customers are very self-motivated. They have found you. They're like, let me find the amazing content creation tool of my dreams. Oh my gosh, it's Descript. I'm very motivated to learn how to use it. And at enterprises, you know, sometimes you are very excited to become a content creator. And sometimes you're like, oh god, a new piece of software. I'm so busy. Like I don't have time to learn this. And that's where really sitting down and making sure that someone gets to their first export and understands, gets to that aha moment, understands that they can be a content creator and how easy it is to do something like turn slides into video or, you know, you can kind of ask like, because we all have different workflows, right? And a lot of people who work in companies like their workflow is to actually start with a different kind of deliverable that has their message in it. It might be a slide deck, it might be a document, it might be a series of Slack messages. Adil Saleh 22:53 Yeah. Different tasks that they're performing based on their goals. Okay, so this is more enterprise motion, like you're thinking it's, you would recognize it as a more white glove kind of sort. Not so much of a hybrid touch, but it's more white glove and post-sales, like post onboarding. What kind of process do you guys have? Laura Burkhauser 23:11 It is more white glove and then I think there are some, We don't do nudging for that kind of thing. Like I wouldn't just like email enterprise customers into getting them to use the product. But one of the things that has changed about post-sales with Underlord is we have templates that you can use. So basically like repeated workflows or saved prompts that like you wanna do over and over again. And so sometimes what we'll do with an enterprise customer is they have a very specific set of use cases in mind, right? They're like, I have a really old media library, and what I want you to do is like consistently do these six steps on like whatever files I give you. And so what we might do is have a sales engineer work with that company to design the perfect repeatable prompt to get them into the automation space so that they are not spending time getting all of their files in, running the first seven steps. Like all of that is done automatically and that really helps them kind of capitalize on the savings. Adil Saleh 24:12 So I recently, two or three months ago, I just found out inside your platform that you're trying to also help people build these playbooks using AI, the copilot, the chat interface that you're talking about, playbooks for different content categories or content pillars that they can build inside it. So how is that going along for like most of the mid-market, because this is a bigger use case for just a podcaster, content creator, like solo content creator, thinking, helping, enabling teams to build their content pillars, build their content categories. And of course the scheduling part also comes alongside. So are you guys also thinking along those lines to have some sort of scheduling in the near future, the social media side? Laura Burkhauser 24:57 Actually, yes. Here is what we are doing. I would love to plug and actually give you early access to our API. So we have now built Underlord as a background agent, and what Underlord can do is listen to any of the triggers you have. So you can either use Zapier or you can use like Claude Code to set up an automation where you can listen for like publishing on an RSS feed or for like dragging files into a folder or like whatever kind of trigger you wanna create. And then you can use our API to import, so like import all these files that I just dragged in. Or import the article that I just published on this RSS feed as text and give it an AI voice because I wanna do like a faceless video creation automatically or whatever. And then you can do a background agent. So like any prompts you would give Underlord and for our beta users, like I will work with you to find the prompt of your dreams. But any kind of workflow that you wanna automate with Underlord, you put that in there. Or you could do it as several separate prompts, if that works better, if that prompts better. And it will do it automatically for you. So then the next time you log into Descript, all of those like files will be there. They're already being uploaded. They'll already be edited and you can just start to look at them and we think you're still gonna like, need to look and review. But I think just like the amount of content that you as a business or as a media, we would be able to get out, it's gonna be daily instead of weekly or monthly. Adil Saleh 26:37 Oh, that's gonna be a deal. I mean this is something that we've been discussing internally, but for a team, like how we can do that at scale. Because at the end of the day, it's all about doing content that is unique, we are creating it and some tool to, you know, add to it and furnish it. And then, you know, we get it out at scale, like number of posts and all of this. Because all of this starts right here, we were talking like the content gets created right here. And then, we are also thinking about a lot of, you know, my friends using Descript after being referred by me. They are also thinking of like how we can replace the social media and scheduling part as well as this like, So are you guys also thinking about like having social media scheduling and publishing going forward or, because these workflows have become so smart and it's kind of an adjacent use case. Laura Burkhauser 27:26 Yeah, so that would need to be the like, so the next part of it is an export API and that is where you could then like also have like, build in the trigger to export to whatever kind of like third-party publisher you want. So I think like a lot of these apps that all they do is kind of like publish to social, that's gonna get swallowed up by like automations at the Claude Code level. And Descript will play really well with those automations. Adil Saleh 27:49 Yeah. That's super exciting. I'm so sorry to cook you on all this with the product. I know that you left that role behind like 6,7 months ago. Laura Burkhauser 27:56 No, this is where my heart is. And I think that's kind of like one of the reasons why I was the pick for the role is like**,** we are going through this incredibly disruptive time in technology right now, and the person that you have at the helm needs to understand what's going on and how the way that we do work is changing forever. And they need to be very connected with the product strategy and deeply understand how changes in what is going on in technology are going to totally change the way that you think about your company's strategy. And so like being able to have the time, the reaction time and product strategy to what's happening in the market, be as small as possible, is actually like what winning companies are gonna be able to do. And so that's, I think like that's why you make your VP of product the CEO right now, when like other times you might make your VP of marketing the CEO or you might make, you know, whatever. Adil Saleh 28:54 Yeah. Love it. And there is another viewpoint to it as well, because when this all vibe coding came up and all these non-technical co-founders and even CEOs started vibe coding and Replit and Lovable and, you know, sitting with the product team and technical team, hey, I need design in this. They had an industry experience. They were good at customer centricity, they knew it. But now, a year and a half down, all those people, they're scratching their head because they don't know how the user experience works. Like how are they gonna retain more customers building the right product and product that echoes with people, experiences, behaviors, psychology. And there comes people with the product background like yourself, that know this and this is how it connects the dots. With somebody with that eye of market, customer, but as well as the product side of things. And, you know, it was such an amazing, looking at like how you've evolved all this experience and now at Descript you're looking, having all these lenses and going all guns blazing. Laura Burkhauser 29:56 Yeah. Adil Saleh 29:57 Love it. So now thinking about your industry expertise, like your viewpoint on like how this, I saw some of your videos about like the employment gets redefined and how these new roles are coming in. A lot of people already know like what roles it's gonna replace, but not many people know like what new roles and new functions that are going to be added or transformed with this AI, just like when the internet came. And just like all these biggest shifts in the past three decades happened. So what's your viewpoint on this? Laura Burkhauser 30:33 Yeah. You know, the first thing I'll say is like anyone who claims to know exactly how this is going to shift market forces is doing a good job of acting like, No one I think knows with certainty. But I can tell you what some of my observations suggest. My observations suggest that a lot of teams are going to become much smaller. And that people will much earlier in their career, be forced to develop judgment if they want to stay relevant in organizations. So like in EPD where I have the most experience, but I'm also like, now I'm leading marketing temporarily at Descript. And I'm seeing this in marketing too. There are sort of people whose entire jobs used to be like safe hands that could implement. Safe hands that can implement is not a job of the future. And instead I see people succeed who are able to see, I think there's still room for people who can go deep and people who can go broad. If you go deep, what you are doing is owning something business critical, but like working with agents on that thing and essentially like supervising. So we might have like one very senior engineer, for example, just looking at transcription at Descript and working across a transcription roadmap. And what we would expect that engineer to do that we never would before is like start to have that roadmap in their head. And so we would rather hire like one very senior engineer who can think kind of like a product manager who can think like the customer, but with a deep sort of like knowledge of the Descript model and of the transcription model. Kind of working on transcription at that very senior level. And then maybe you have like one other person in case that person decides that they want to go start a startup and so you have like a little bit of redundancy. Whereas before that would've been a whole team, just like a transcription team. So I think that is one, with like a lot of more junior people that are doing a lot of the work while you have like a more senior tech lead or EM and a PM, a designer, like every single service needs to have a full team. And I don't think that every single service needs to have a full team now. Then I think you have teams whose remit is much more broad, where they are still more like product management-led, but maybe like the work they're doing is more shallow and they're just like working across, like really led by business needs, working across things to ship very quickly. And I think that that team is still smaller, though you really need someone with like strong business, strong customer, strong design, and strong engineering. And my guess is, there are very few people who are good at all of those things. Like I do think that if you are good at all of those things, you are more limitless than you've ever been before. Like, we've all met these people who are like half PM, half eng, half designer, sorry, those don't add up. And these people are limitless and they can basically all go create gazillion-dollar companies now, or $10 million profitable companies with no venture now. I think like most people aren't kind of like that, right? Like they have kind of one thing that they're great at, and those people will still work in organizations and in teams, but the teams will be smaller, the remits will be wider, and more and more of the work will be done kind of by agents. Someone on LinkedIn told me like, they think that there's not gonna be like a difference between in title between PM, designer, and engineer, that instead we'll all be members of the technical staff. And I think that that's right. I just think like different projects will have different kinds of members of the technical staff that are on them, but all of our roles are gonna get a lot busier, which is very exciting to me. Adil Saleh 34:44 Yeah, of course. Every business now thinking of not just implementing AI for the sake of AI, but just trying to optimize their bandwidth**.** Having operational excellence, save cost, you know, tooling and all of that. Laura Burkhauser 34:58 It's not just about cost savings. So just the important, This is one of the things that I wanna say because I feel like when you talk about smaller teams, a lot of the time what people hear is like, oh, like downsizing or like making, saving money by employing fewer people. But like, I actually think, you know, even at places that aren't trying to necessarily save costs, like saving costs is not on the list of their top three priorities. Those teams will still prefer to have smaller teams because there is a premium. Smaller teams are intrinsically better than larger teams because the cost of communication is expensive. The cost of collaboration and getting everyone like highly aligned is expensive. And so when you have smaller teams, you can move faster, you can move with impunity. You have like more ownership. You have fewer people who are like, I don't totally know why we're doing this, but someone told me it's what to do. And so like the decisions they make are just worse because they don't really get it. And with smaller teams, everyone who's like working on it deeply understands what they're trying to do and the work is better. So that's why when I say smaller teams, I don't mean smaller teams so we can save a penny, I mean smaller teams so that there's more ownership, so that we can get things done faster and better. And maybe now instead of having a hundred engineers on 10 teams, I have a hundred engineers on 50 teams and I'm able to like work on 50 different areas of the product. Whereas before I could only work on 10. Adil Saleh 36:30 Yeah, with a lot of chaos and loss, getting information getting lost in translation. Things not getting done in the way that you want. Yeah. Love it. So now this also takes us to our last segment. We're not gonna take much of your time, or like, not more than five minutes. It's your team culture. Like what kind of operating principles have you**...** Of course you've been here for almost three years now, and with your background from Twitter, now X**.** What kind of initiatives are you taking team-wise? Just if you can talk about only your team or overall as a culture, what kind of operating principles, the DNA that has stood the same ever since you stepped in and what kind of new things? I don't think it has changed so much. And apart from the workflow with this AI, but people, behaviors, you know, how to get best work out of people. How does this get under one umbrella of like operating principles? Laura Burkhauser 37:23 And I might say some things that are different than what other people say, because I feel like I know what my CEO script is, which is sort of like, I want people that are agentic and not mimetic and I want people that work hard and I want people who take ownership and like, yes, of course, obviously, like we all prefer that. I think that's kind of a boring insight. And instead, what I'll say is like Descript is in the business of building creative software and we employ creative people and we think creativity is really important. And what you need to be creative isn't just like grinding hard and being agentic and being in the arena. Like you also need a culture that values risk taking, that like stands behind people's creative choices even when you don't fully like, understand them. And that allows for a culture of play. Like there's this way that you cannot be creative if you're not being a little bit playful. And that's something that I feel like no one ever talks about, kind of like the playfulness of their culture. But I think at every single good creative company that's there, because like when you're so grind-set mindset and you only see like one foot in front of you because you're trying to like just get through all of your work, I think you like miss opportunities for real creative thinking. And so like at Descript, I think we value hard work. We value being agentic, but we also value being playful and silly and taking creative risks and taking**...** Adil Saleh 38:59 Taking chances, doing experiments, failing at experiments, and, you know, learning from them, you know, because this is all about it. Like for an individual, let's say being employed at Descript or any company, the biggest thing should be that how faster we can experiment and learn and, you know, get into the maximum, get it closer to the maximum potential of AI, generative AI and how it's evolving, keeping up with it, and doing the task better. And so how big is the team at this moment? Laura Burkhauser 39:28 The team is about 160 people right now. Adil Saleh 39:31 Okay. And your team, you mentioned that you worked passionately with the marketing team yourself as well. That's cool. Laura Burkhauser 39:38 Right now I'm working closely with the marketing team. Adil Saleh 39:42 You must be having a lot of ideas from, you know, so many things coming. Laura Burkhauser 39:47 I am learning so much. I am a humble learner of the parts of the business that, you know, I haven't spent a couple of decades in. And very grateful to the team for helping me learn and yeah, excited to see what we can do in this new age. Adil Saleh 40:02 Yeah. And it's just, You mentioned about new age. A lot of these women listening to this, I'm a big advocate about women in the leadership roles and we had handful of them, unfortunately, like 25, 30 of them in the past four years. But now, what is one thing that you want to suggest or advise these women building products or building things like more on the leadership side, having their products on the leadership roles. What is that one thing that you think that they need to do in order to not just compete, survive. I know that like we are on record, but for a woman, it's sometimes harder in different, not in just the United States, but overall and globally. So what is that one thing that you suggest as a woman for women to keep going? Laura Burkhauser 40:47 I think it's to always find a woman. I think when I was in consulting, first I worked in the Boston office and then I moved to the San Francisco office and moving to the San Francisco office was the most important thing I did because in the Boston office there were women partners, but all of them showed up in almost exactly the same way. Which was to say like, largely in the same male-coded ways that the male partners did, and I understand why, like that was very Boston at the time. Moving to San Francisco and working with women partners in San Francisco was the first time that I saw women partners that I was like, oh, that's how I might run a meeting. Like, I could see myself running a meeting that way and being able to see a leader show up as a leader in the way that I knew I could, was transformative to me and how far I thought I could get. And so there are a lot of different, like we are all women in different ways. But I do think that like the way we show up socially, like, probably isn't gonna change a lot. And so being able to find a woman leader who you think embodies leadership in a way where you're like, her, I could do it like she's doing. It just gives you like this, Okay. That is my, That's what I can embody in those moments**.** When I'm not quite sure how to show up, I'm gonna embody that person in my head. And so I think having that for me has always been really helpful. Adil Saleh 42:20 Yeah. Would you like to share that more about that person? Who's that person or inspiration that you always look up to, to people? Laura Burkhauser 42:28 It's changed, but the very first was my now good friend Preda. And I remember a woman, Amy Ko, gave a presentation, very important presentation while she was eight and a half months pregnant. That was like a really important moment for me. Adil Saleh 42:47 Oh, that's so inspiring. Laura Burkhauser 42:48 And then, yeah, my boss, Jen Brasso at Le Tote and yeah, I have been very lucky. My boss, Sanaz at Twitter, I've been very lucky to have some incredible women leaders that I've been able to... Adil Saleh 43:03 Absolutely. It's luck as well as, you know, you have this not just the hunger, but just a vision and foresight and eye to look that in that person and seek inspiration and seek motivation and get driven by people and about human connection too. So I mean, it was amazing to know all of this. And before coming into this podcast, I was just saying that I'm going to talk to one of the most intellectual women out in the valley these days. And I'm gonna learn a lot. That was the only motive I had. And thank you very much for all of your insights and your viewpoints and your energy was infectious. Laura Burkhauser 43:40 Yeah. Thanks so much. Talk soon. Outro 43:42 Thank you very much for listening to Across the Funnel. If you got one useful GTM idea out of this show today, please share this with a teammate and hit follow. Explore Hyperengage at hyperengage.io and Dextego at dextego.com.