Episode 10: Rick Nucci, Guru

Second Acts with Krish Subramanian

In this episode of Second Acts, Krish is joined by Guru’s co-founder and CEO, Rick Nucci.

Rick recounts how they rediscovered product-market fit at his previous startup, Boomi (the first iPaaS that foresaw cloud’s preeminence, exited to Dell, and was last valued at $4b), the many evolutions of Guru’s all-in-one (AI Search + Intranet + Wiki) position, three principles for building in an AI-first enterprise world, how they’ve thought through pricing experiments that serve both PLG and SLG motions, and much more!

Rick: “We put an enormous amount of effort into listening to the market. And I would say 80% of listening to the market for us means listening to all active customer conversations. We certainly look at and understand what competitors are doing. I think that’s very important. I think it’s especially important these days. [With] AI there [are] constant new entrants and so you really do need to spend time and be aware of them. That pendulum can over-swing though and I think where it can become unhealthy is if you lose your North Star of what you’re doing and what your purpose in the world is, so we do try to balance that carefully.”

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(03:57) Charting Guru’s evolution as a product

(11:30) How Boomi (Rick’s previous venture) bet big on the cloud transition and differentiated against MSFT and other well-funded giants

(14:32) Connecting a huge problem with a [new] technology, a clear need, and a first mover’s advantage

(17:18) How (much) Rick and team think about competition

(18:06) Guru’s relentless customer listening rituals to keep levelling up in a competitive space

(21:02) A customer-first ritual Krish is trying to bring back and his favourite internal Slack channel

(22:35) How Guru serves customers of different sizes with a core product insight and 2 GTM motions

(27:36) Moving to a company-wide problem from departmental problems — The 3 arcs of Guru’s product-market fit

(34:20) How Guru’s path reminded Krish of Chargebee’s own opportunities and challenges

(36:24) Lessons from Guru’s old, short-lived pricing experiment

(38:51) Why Guru’s current pricing model is framed around a “dead-simple” price-point that serves an all-in-one package

(40:20) How Rick and team empower themselves to make pricing changes

(41:30) How pricing is a compass for continuously finding the right customers

(43:25) “Focus on outcomes, not algorithms” and other notes on making sense of the AI hype cycle

(49:35) Krish’s experience of the great possibilities of AI-first interfaces

(51:15) “It’s possible to have a culture of urgency that doesn’t burn people out”

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Mentioned/Resources:

Dell Discovers Internet Mojo in … Philadelphia?

The GURU of Philly Tech: CEO Rick Nucci

What AI means for the future of SaaS: Reality vs. hype

“We recently had our 100th Townhall at Guru. This is one of my favorite rituals…”

“Guru turned 10 this week…So, here are 10 learnings from the last 10 years…”

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Connect with Rick:

X

LinkedIn

Connect with Krish:

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LinkedIn

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