Bhavin Shah On Raising $315 Million To Build An AI Platform To Automate And Streamline Enterprise Workplace Support

For Bhavin Shah, a serial entrepreneur with a remarkable career, the paradox of Silicon Valley was his playground. In this exclusive interview, he talks about his experiences meeting Steve Wozniak in sixth grade and going through the motions of starting, financing, scaling, and exiting companies.

Bhavin’s latest company, Moveworks, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Lightspeed, Bain Capital Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Iconic.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Building a long-lasting company requires carefully selecting investors who share your vision and philosophy.
• Execution, not just vision, is crucial for differentiating successful companies from the rest.
• Bhavin Shah emphasizes the importance of taking time to build trustworthy, long-term relationships with investors.
• Moveworks has evolved from a support-focused platform to an independent Gen AI super app that integrates with multiple enterprise systems.
• The “execution quotient” is a core principle at Moveworks, focusing on decisive action even with incomplete information.
• Bhavin values the structured problem-solving nature of the enterprise SaaS space, contrasting it with the unpredictability of consumer markets.
• Moveworks aims to be at the forefront of the next generation of AI-based enterprise app companies.

 

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About Bhavin Shah:

As a three-time entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience, Bhavin Shah is passionate about building companies that leverage cutting-edge technology to solve real-world problems, assembling high-performing teams, creating quality brands, and shipping products.

Currently, he is the CEO and Founder of Moveworks, a generative AI platform that boosts employee productivity by surfacing information and automating tasks through natural language. His mission is to make Moveworks the enterprise copilot every employee needs and loves.

Most recently, he was CEO and co-founder of Refresh.io, a company that gives people insights about the other people they are meeting. LinkedIn Corp acquired Refresh.io in April 2015.

Through his work as COO and Co-founder at Gazillion Entertainment and in product and business development at LeapFrog, he’s taken companies from inception to scale and private to public in the internet, education, toy, and video game industries.

Bhavin has degrees from Stanford University and UC San Diego in Computer Science and Design.

Connect with Bhavin Shah:

• LinkedIn
• RocketReach
• Crunchbase
• Bloomberg

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: All righty. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Deal Maker Show. So do today we have a really amazing founder, a founder that is proven. you know He’s done it day before. Right now he’s on a rocket ship like you wouldn’t believe, and we’re going to be talking about it. But again, we’re going to talk about all the good stuff. We’re going to be talking from like what it was like to grow up in Silicon Valley, also what it was like to meet Steve Wozniak in sixth grade. Imagine about this, you know the co-founder of Apple.

Alejandro Cremades: And then you know going through motions, starting different companies, ah going through exits, and also financing cycles. So without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Babin Shah. Welcome up to the show.

Bhavin Shah: Hey, Alejandro, thank you for having me here. It’s great to great to join you on this afternoon.

Alejandro Cremades: So originally born in India, but then you lived in Jakarta, and then a three-year-old, you came to the US. s So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up, you know especially in Silicon Valley?

Bhavin Shah: Yeah, no, you you got that right. you know um came Came to the US pretty young. So um unfortunately, no memories from from India or Jakarta. um But I really remember my my growing up in in the valley. you know It was unclear at that time you know how special Silicon Valley would become. And technology was around us. My dad was in technology.

Bhavin Shah: um But what felt pretty normal to us now in retrospect looks pretty unusual. For example, you know, there was this very sketchy neighbor down the street who my mom would always say, don’t go, don’t talk to him, just walk past his house, don’t stop. And he had a very messy garage and all this stuff. And once in a while, he would be outside kind of hanging out. And my brother and I and our friends would chat with him, not telling our mom. And turns out he was an engineer at Atari.

Bhavin Shah: And he would give us little EEPROMs with chips that were beta versions of the Atari games. And he would say, hey, go plug this into your your Atari at home and try this thing out and and let me know what you think. And that was like kind of normal for us. We were getting bootleg early copies of ah these games and um it was just a really neat time to be exposed to all of that. I remember you know spending my evenings on the weekends, school nights going to Fry’s Electronics, which was a popular a store where you had you know lots of computer software and hardware, and I’d piece computers together, um build computers, the the Pentium, 386, all the different versions, 486s we’d we put together. um and And that was sort of you know what we spent our time doing. I remember

Bhavin Shah: You know, almost vividly there was a day, I think I was in sixth grade or sell fifth grade, maybe, and we were debating at the dinner table, whether we should go with prodigy or compi serve because.

Bhavin Shah: To us, that was the future of the internet. You needed to decide, AOL, CompuServe or Prodigy? Otherwise, you were going to miss out. And in little did we know, obviously, how big the internet would become. um But you mentioned Steve Wozniak. I had the privilege when I was in sixth grade. um The school had to select some student to go to lunch or try to go to breakfast with this entrepreneur. I didn’t think too much about it. I didn’t know who I was going to go have breakfast with. And sure enough, it was it was Steve Wozniak.

Bhavin Shah: Of course, I knew Apple at that time, but Apple was still, ah you know, it was, I think, pre Macintosh or maybe the Mac had just come out. um ah But it was, you know, the Apple IIe, which we were using at school. So I didn’t didn’t quite recognize the significance of of that breakfast. But, um you know, you continue to bump into people. I remember, you know, Steve Jobs walked by my mom and I arguing one day in Palo Alto and He made some comment like, moms are always right. And then he kept walking and I was like, who’s that? And who’s butting in right now? And turn around and sure enough, it was it was Steve Jobs walking by. So, you know, you have these run ins, I think here, ah the serendipity has a lot to do with ah some of what makes us this this area so so special.

Alejandro Cremades: So I guess, hey, in in that sense too, I mean, what do you think, how do you think shaped you and and perhaps, you know, like your eagerness towards becoming an entrepreneur later on, you know, living in and being surrounded by all these incredible figures?

Bhavin Shah: Yeah. You know, it’s a good question because people ask me all the time, like, how do you take risks? How do you get comfortable with, you know, making these bets? And maybe I’m missing that gene that would normally help and people, uh, you know, from, or hold people back from making certain choices ah due to the repercussions. Uh, but to your point,

Bhavin Shah: You know, I grew up in an environment where lots of people I was meeting were entrepreneurs. And where that was coming from is, you know, I’m of South Asian descent. And there were a lot of my father’s friends who were coming to the Bay Area, coming to Silicon Valley. And they were starting these very now significant organizations ah that, you know, especially in the hardware space in the early, early eras or early innings.

Bhavin Shah: um And so every time I’d meet you know one of my dad’s friends or family friends, you know we call them all uncles. So all the Indian parents, friends, or aunties and uncles. And so you would sort of meet them and, oh, this uncle’s starting this this company. you know this this This auntie works at this ah young company that you know now is you know worldwide famous. So I think that um it wasn’t even really a question per se.

Bhavin Shah: um of in terms of is entrepreneurship a viable you know path one can take? However, I did have a little bit of stubbornness in my mindset, which was I did see a lot of people just wanting to be entrepreneurs because they grew up in Silicon Valley. It was sort of like, you got to do it. like you know If you’re in LA, you want to be an actor, actress. right If you’re in If you’re in Tennessee, you want to you know be doing country music in Nashville. you know There’s all these places that are tied to certain industries and domains. ah but But for me, I’ve always had this kind of belief that um you know if you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to really think about what is your unfair advantage. And if you don’t have an unfair advantage, then you know you probably shouldn’t be doing it. Now, living in Silicon Valley has its advantages, but I don’t think that’s significant enough to overcome some of the

Bhavin Shah: ah things that you have to solve for as an entrepreneur. But um but it definitely gave me the the appetite to want to go and see if there was an opportunity that fit my interests, that fit my skill set, you know, as as I got older.

Alejandro Cremades: So in your case, you know you ended up going to UC San Diego. And then from there, you went to Stanford um to to go to grad school there. But but eventually what you did is you joined a toy company out of all things. And you know it it’s interesting because it sounds like you had the entrepreneur entrepreneurial drive already in you. So what do you think took you so long you know to to really get going right away? and And instead of doing that, you decided to join somebody else.

Bhavin Shah: You know, I think the Steve Jobs quote that, you know, you can’t really make sense of things looking forward, but you can looking back to some extent and understand how they might’ve influenced you. ah Look, I think for for me, what really got me interested in that category was at at the time, so if you think about where I was, so at UC San Diego, I was there during the first beginnings of the dotcom boom. And I was a student. And so technology was very interesting. It was it was happening everywhere. But I got an opportunity to work ah with um Dr. Sally Ride, who was the first female astronaut in space. And she had put together a program where ah basically students could take pictures of the Earth from a camera mounted on board the space shuttle.

Bhavin Shah: And I just was like, wow, this is super innovative. You can control a camera that’s way up in the sky. And it was, it was sort of having a secondary benefit of educating middle school students about, you know, earth sciences. So.

Bhavin Shah: That was a project that you know I worked with her on for three and a half years ah and really started to just find a lot of interest and love for this idea of using technology in education. Because obviously internet was booming. People were using technology for everything. and It was disrupting retail. It was disrupting you know every category of business. And so this was another form of kind of thinking about disruption, access, and you know availability.

Bhavin Shah: in know in a way that was never achievable before. So that got me really excited about this intersection of education and tech. I then decided to go come back up to the Bay Area and go to grad school. And you know Stanford just happened to have a program that combined those two. It was a little bit of computer science, it was a little bit of education.

Bhavin Shah: And then I mixed in a little bit of the B school with with all of that. And it just kind of exposed me to a new category and I think it’s this intersection of different areas that you find a lot of entrepreneurial opportunity when you’re bringing domains together when you’re thinking about things.

Bhavin Shah: in an original way. right When folks talk to me and and my sons now in high school you know about what to major in, I will say and you should you should double major. and Double major in something so that you can see the world from different perspectives and maybe find a way to leverage those two perspectives into a unique advantage that you might have. So long story short,

Bhavin Shah: I spent time at Stanford learning about this intersection and then I met the founders of LeapFrog, which was a fledgling toy company at the time, I think about 70 employees, and joined them and started to work in various roles from product management to business development.

Bhavin Shah: and saw that company scale to about 1200 employees and took it, the company went public in 2002 on the NYSE. And I think to your question though, why not just start something right away?

Bhavin Shah: ah To my earlier point, I didn’t have necessarily some insight or some advantage that I could bring to the table that I thought was was durable, but I had some experience, I had some some knowledge

Alejandro Cremades: Thank you.

Bhavin Shah: um And I also wanted to to learn, you know, I think we end up learning as individuals throughout our lives. And it just felt like a really amazing opportunity that that met my my needs. Again, not I’m not one of those individuals that, you know, I’m going to start a company because that’s the thing I want to do. I want to start a company because I feel like I have a unique insight um into into the space or into the category.

Bhavin Shah: So um you know with with all that sort of you know being being the backdrop, yeah, went and joined joined the company and you you know saw what what it takes to go from private to public, what it takes to sort of you you know think about brand, what it takes to be um you know really insanely focused on product quality, because the founders there just had a really you know deep passion, but also skill at at building a really high quality organization.

Alejandro Cremades: So eventually, you know, a the time comes to go at it as an entrepreneur. And that is with a gaming company. I guess the experience here, you know, as they say, you know either succeed or you learn. And obviously it was not the outcome that you had the desire or hope for, but it was a good day moment for you to really discover yourself and learn about yourself too. So so talk to us about this say chapter.

Bhavin Shah: Yeah, I think it’s a you know, it’s a chapter that I I don’t shy away from but it is a chapter to your to your point in which I learned a lot about what it takes to build a successful company, what to do, what not to do now, looking back. It also taught me a lot about myself, ah what what I’m good at, what I’m not good at.

Bhavin Shah: You know, you learn things the first time you’re building a company, the first time you’re leading a larger team, ah the kinds of people you work well with. Who do you manage well? Who do you not manage well? um Who lifts and who raises the bar in the way that you you need it raised? How do you raise the bar for others? And then how do you think about culture? How do you think about hiring? How do you think about um capital raising? How do you think about investors? How do you think about all the different facets that go into building an organization. And, you know, luckily I was in my late twenties. I saw a lot of things early in in my career that I could then, you know, really take forward and learn from. Most entrepreneurs, as you know, from from this podcast and and other work you’ve done, you know, it takes a few tries to get to a place that people

Bhavin Shah: then you know respect and admire the work you’re doing. These things like everything else does take practice, does take um experience to do and it does take time. So I think that you know from from that perspective, learned learned a lot, learned also that you know sometimes all your best ideas don’t work out the way you intend them to be. And we started the company on the basis of being an educational gaming company ah focused on the large format MMORPG, specifically, um you know, for, for younger kids, and then found out that that wasn’t going to be very, very fruitful. um And we didn’t have the kind of, ah you know, early wins that, you know, some other products in that space ah did. And so as a result, we ended up converting the company into a more of a developer shop that did work on behalf of other brands and

Bhavin Shah: and licenses that we would build games for. So that turned into a very different kind of business, which you know was fine, but wasn’t the thing that gave me a unique um ability to to do something special with.

Alejandro Cremades: Well, alluded to what you were saying earlier, obviously, the more you swing the bat, the more chances you get to hit the ball, right? And and and i always, as an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur, and you went at it again. And that was say definitely a moment where you were able to hit that ball you know and hit it well. So talk to us about how refresh you know comes knocking, and then how did that the idea end up becoming you know quite a successful outcome?

Bhavin Shah: Yeah. So it’s a, it’s a good point. And, you know, I think that when you wrap up one journey, you do do a lot of self-reflection and you think about, you know, what you want to do next. And, um, you make a good point, you know, once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur, it is hard to go and now work for someone else, uh, to go and you know, take direction if if you’ve had time where you could sort of call the shots. But not impossible. And I see people obviously do that successfully. I think in my case, refresh was an opportunity that I had sort of um experienced in real life. I had some previous journeys when I was at LeapFrog where I was

Bhavin Shah: working with some world leaders on some sort of initiatives ah to help um individuals in need, specifically in Afghanistan. It’s a long story, but what I discovered was that how to how do world leaders get prepared before meetings and they had a digital or they had a paper dossier and people would write stuff up and they would get briefed on who they were meeting when they last met, what they talked about, you know how to shake their hand, like everything down to the to the you know sort of every moment that they were going to spend, um you know what their last the person must ask them about in the last meeting, et cetera. So I was like, this is pretty interesting. and

Bhavin Shah: I wanted to create a digital version of that. And you know keep in mind in 2012, the world was all about these different social networks and databases. We were um you know connecting through to all these different services. And and that product made a lot of sense um to sort of bring break forth. And it was an interesting product. We had a lot of great users on the platform. um and you know But also what what sort of became clear is that that product success was predicated on the cooperation and the openness of of all of these data sources, because essentially you’re sort of reading from those. You’re you’re making queries into those. And the world was evolving. The world was changing. um People started to pull back on some of those systems and access. And you know people started to get concerned. And so it wasn’t an idea that I recognize as one that was going to be all that enduring and all that like you know durable, and if you will,

Bhavin Shah: So, i you know, the folks at LinkedIn had been paying attention to us and they came knocking and, um you know, we kind of worked out an arrangement that that made sense for for both parties.

Alejandro Cremades: And they obviously undisclosed the amount. So we’re going to have to leave everyone in the uncertainty as to what kind of outcome that was, but they always you know an exit is a great exit. So I guess in in in that regard, you know what have been some of those same you know takeaways when it comes to M and&A? What should be the general philosophy and what can you share with the founders listening?

Bhavin Shah: Yeah, look, I think ah you know people recognize that entrepreneurship can be very rewarding. We also know that on average, most people won’t succeed. But because of that dynamic, um people sometimes get very fixated on that outcome. And the problem with that is companies are not sold, they’re bought.

Bhavin Shah: Which means that if you’re out there and if if someone even catches a bit that you’re basically doing this for the purposes of some sort of an exit, it’s not something that motivates the buyer necessarily to really partner up. Now that’s not true in all cases and you have firms that specialize in helping companies get sold and there’s a lot of that work that goes on in M and&A and there’s you know ah different perspectives when it comes to PE firms and and how they go about choosing companies that they want to wholly own or or you know buy into and then run eventually. But I think when it comes to you know why you start a company and what you do with it every day and how you operate it and how you think about it,

Bhavin Shah: it really needs to be something that you believe you can give your very best to, irrespective of the outcome, irrespective of what um comes to bear. Now, that journey, as you know, is is long. And you know I was told, so we’re we’re about eight years in, I’m sure we’ll get into movers a little bit, but I was told, hey, you know to really do something significant in the professional world, you’re probably gonna spend at least seven years building it. Now it’s not universal. It’s not a, you know, that some cases things happen much faster, but it does take that much time for a lot of people to build something of of any significance. And then to really have an impact on how the world works, how the world operates, to have an enduring impact even beyond your own legacy, that takes at least 14 years, if not more. So I think that it’s the ah requirement to stick with something long enough

Bhavin Shah: That then could lead to certain outcomes, but you know if if you’re thinking about that too much I can tell you seven years will feel like an eternity And and you sort of aren’t gonna set yourself up for success

Alejandro Cremades: so then Let’s talk about moveworks because obviously you are now eight years plus in and following that philosophy. so um Why moveworks? you know You were now two companies in. You know you had a clear understanding on on how to go about building and scaling and and doing the whole thing. so Why did you think that moveworks was good enough of an idea you know to really take it seriously and take action on it?

Bhavin Shah: Yeah, you know, Alejandro, I think, as you probably know from all your interviews, I mean, the more you’ve done this… the more cynical you get. the more yeah Everything’s a bad idea. People pitch me ideas all the time. Ah, that’s that’s going to fail for these reasons. That’s not going to work for these reasons. And you know call it wisdom, but call it cynicism. Call it just simply you know ah seeing what the real world is, which is not a meritocracy. It’s much more than that, right? Much more complicated. And so um you know the move work story

Bhavin Shah: ah was one in which we were essentially doing a bunch of research um into the world of enterprise. And having been in toys, having been in video games, having been in mobile productivity, I said to myself, look, I have the energy to do another company. So that was sort of the basis, right? I talked to my wife, it was like, you know, so what do you want to do now?

Bhavin Shah: And it was like, I want to go do one more company, but I want to do something that I can really s sink my teeth into and do for the next 20 plus years. right Switching industries can be fun. It’s exciting at times, but it can also um not leave you as deeply as deep of an expert you know when you’re done or as you’re going through it. So I thought, hey, let’s sink my teeth into something that I could really learn a lot and hopefully have big impacts.

Bhavin Shah: And AI to us was was one of those areas that really felt like it had a very long horizon in which we could we could operate. ah So that was the starting point. And then of course, talking to CIOs, we were discovering more and more that there was very little use of AI, that a lot of the work that was being done inside the enterprise um was still very manual, that was using you know very people heavy. And this whole category that we got ourselves started in which is transforming the help desk, was really based on this idea that, hey, if you could apply machine learning models, which my co-founder from Google and Facebook and other you know and and other places came together with me to form this, we realized that if you could understand language, you could take an employee’s request or a question or issue

Bhavin Shah: And you could pretty successfully solve it end to end by triggering workflows and doing certain actions. So it was that kind of realization that language was actually the problem and that if you could get good at it, you could actually do the work of a lot of or do a lot of work for companies that today was very inefficient. It was taking three days on average to resolve.

Bhavin Shah: a typical IT issue, even with the best-in-class workflow tools and systems of record. So we were in the air of instant. There was DoorDash. There was Uber. We were like, why does this stuff take so long? So that was a sort of genesis. And we started this company on the early days of Slack, because we also recognized that the secular shift of of communication tools in the enterprise was also shifting. So we said, hey, AI was in a pretty interesting spot. We didn’t know about the next phase, which you know obviously we’re in now, but we said it was a pretty good spot. We had the secular shift of communications platforms like Slack and Teams emerging. And then you had the secular shift of mobile. you know I started to see my my parents use WhatsApp and I was like, oh, hold on. People like short form. People need to get work done and they’re doing it

Bhavin Shah: um you know more prolifically in these platforms than ever. So maybe we can surface ourselves in ah in a new way as a sort of you know bot slash co-pilot in his early days. So that’s that’s really what kind of engendered it. It’s you know perhaps not a made for Hollywood story where we’re on the streets of Paris haing trying to hail a cab and getting frustrated, but it is a story in which um I remember ah you know just going and meeting you know ah handful of CIOs, then meeting a dozen CIOs, then meeting 30-plus CIOs, and sort of making sure that what we were learning was a universal phenomenon. And once we had that conviction, um you know we started the company.

Alejandro Cremades: So why don’t they are becoming the business model of move works? How do you guys make money?

Bhavin Shah: Yeah, so we’re an enterprise SaaS AI company. We have this agentic reasoner. It’s a called a co-pilot. that spans across the organization and talks to all the different systems of record, business systems, automation tools, and it allows employees to search and take action. So think of it as a generative AI co-pilot that’s for all employees um for them to interoperate with all these different services and functions within their org.

Bhavin Shah: So we charge, as a SaaS company, in in two ways. One, we have a ah per-user um license model based on the size of the organization. right There’s different different pricing. And then we also have a consumption-based model in which customers can choose based on sort of active users. And um you you know what we find is that you know either one of those works for our customers. and it’s a it’s ah It’s an opportunity for us to keep driving more more impact and more usage to be able to bring more capabilities to users. And a lot of it centers around this ability to do actions, update systems,

Bhavin Shah: you know, get you access to this, you know, manipulate this other record, um update a purchase order, you know, find out who’s the owner of a particular account. All of that stuff can now be done through our product, which improves, it drives productivity, but it also reduces the burden that companies face on the service desk, which is then how people think about the value proposition for what we do.

Alejandro Cremades: and And here as well, I mean, you guys have raised quite a bit. I mean, you guys have raised over $300 million, $315 million to be precise. How has it been through the journey of going through the motions and through the different life cycles here you know to to get this money in?

Bhavin Shah: Yeah, well I you know as my as my co founder likes to say is when we started the company we were using stone age machine learning. And these were statistical technique techniques you know, ah ones that are named after trees and forests and things of that nature. And then in 2019, we.

Bhavin Shah: uh, we’re one of the early companies to deploy the BERT model in production. We started to use it for, you know, discriminative tasks. And, um, as the transformer models became ah more and more prolific, we started to use them in our architecture. We never had a toolkit that you would build and design workflows. It was all done through this reasoning engine. And you asked about the capital and and where, where, where that comes into picture is we had invested a lot in a lot of very deep, um,

Bhavin Shah: learning techniques. We have human annotation teams to help measure model performance, to fine tune models. And then, of course, as the world got even more interesting with GPT 3.5, and we were working with GPT 3 prior to chat GPT coming out, we were working with GPT 2 even before that, um we started to see the opportunity really expand.

Bhavin Shah: And no longer were we limited by a particular domain or a particular set of use cases ah with the older AI systems that we had built, but now we can actually go quite broad and wide. And so that’s where we’ve actually invested a lot of R and&D to build a truly agentic system, one in which ah people um you know can leverage our platform to have a real conversation to talk across a lot of different systems um and have it be just as fluid as chat GPT, but also with no hallucinations, with real deep um understanding of permissions and rules and and logic that is required to be able to act and securely perform the tasks on behalf of the individual.

Alejandro Cremades: and and Obviously, you know when it comes to um to raising money here, i mean you had done this before, and you came from doing it you know going around the block yeah a few times. so How did you guys go about selecting the right investors for this? and and Also, how how has it been to going through through one round to the next? i mean How has it been that experience as well?

Bhavin Shah: Yeah, so it is a good it is a good question. And I think that um capital raising is is always an art. it’s It’s a thing that um you know requires an understanding of incentives, an understanding of individuals. I think what is the case, though, is people tend to invest in people they can trust, people who ah they have alignment with.

Bhavin Shah: and To your point, I have had experience you know raising capital in the past, which built so certain relationships and certain know-how that has allowed you know me to bring resources to this company. um it is It is something in which I think I’ve learned a lot about who to pick, what kind of partners you want. Because I think one of the things that, at least the way I view company building, is it’s a very precious endeavor. It’s a very important endeavor. It is your life’s work.

Bhavin Shah: Now, again, some people view these as very fast moving, you know, experiences. They build a company a couple of years later, they sell it. um But if you think about it as more of something you want to be running in 20, 30 years from now, the cap table does become quite important. And you think about who’s on that cap table, who you who you’ve you know let in, who you’ve taken money from. um While there’s many sources of capital these days, I think having um and awareness of who those individuals are, what you think about them, do you have vision lock with them, do you have the same philosophy as them, is really, really important. And so I had the fortune of of working with a few a bunch of venture capitalists over the years, but specifically MoveWorks began that journey with but Lightspeed um and their deep understanding of enterprise.

Bhavin Shah: Software was what really helped us think about building this business and understanding all the things that we needed to get right to be successful. And then Bain Capital Ventures came in um and then we had Kleiner Perkins and Iconic join and so on and so forth. And we have other investors that you know continue to sort of provide value add. ah But these are all folks that I can call. These are all folks that I can you know get advice from who ah continue to be big supporters and um who really understand this journey of what it takes to build an enduring company. um You know, one of our investors used to be a CEO of a public company, Enrique Salem, and that perspective really, really helps. You have folks like Mamoun, a Kleiner, who’ve seen the best of the best and always has sage advice or are from light speed, really being a champion of this business from from day one, but also having deep enterprise experience with a lot of his other investments.

Bhavin Shah: So a lot of guidance there and a lot of introductions and things of that nature. So look, I think I tell people take it slow. Um, investors always tell me, uh, Hey, if you’re doing around, let us know.

Bhavin Shah: We can move really fast. And I’m like, I don’t want to move really fast with a relationship that I can’t get out of for the rest of my, um, endeavor. Right. I want a relationship that I can truly bet on and trust.

Alejandro Cremades: Thank you.

Bhavin Shah: And for that, it takes time. Got to get to know people. Uh, you got to do your homework on both sides.

Alejandro Cremades: Absolutely. Now, obviously, you know, like they’re banking on the vision, you know, and not only investors, but also employees, you know, customers. So when it comes to the vision, and Bobby, and let’s say you were to go to sleep tonight and you wake up in a world where the vision of move works is fully realized. What does that world look like?

Bhavin Shah: Yeah, so look, I think, ah you know, your point about vision is is right, but vision is easy to come by. In other words, like anyone could dream about going to Mars, but it takes actually execution that actually discerns the winners and the losers, the ones who who make it happen, the ones who don’t.

Bhavin Shah: And I think that’s something that we’ve been you know really indexed on. In fact, one of our operating principles is XP, execution quotient. How much can you just act ah versus trying and to bait or deliberate? Because you’re always going to work and in a sort of impartial, um or i’ sorry, in a you know world in which you don’t have all of the data, partial awareness of of what the right answer might be.

Bhavin Shah: So, you know, when you talk about our vision and where we are headed, uh, we came out with this platform, you know, as I said, starting in the support function, but it’s now become something that enterprises are now using across every department from HR to procurement, to finance, to facilities, to marketing, to a variety of use cases that we bring out of the box, but also they’re extending. And we’re seeing the usage continue to increase quarter after quarter.

Bhavin Shah: as more employees use this to navigate a particular ah you know thing that they’re looking for or um to run a particular process. right It’s things that are common, that are infrequent, that tend to get people stuck. And they’re like, wait, how do I do this? Or where can I find this? And they’ll spend 20 minutes you know when instead our tool becomes this essential discovery engine. And the underlying plugin architecture gives us the ability to talk to all these systems. And the agentic reasoner gives us the ability to interoperate and to answer questions and to pull data from different systems. It’s quite magical when you see it. and And we’re really excited about what it’s now doing for us and doing for our customers. So when you think about like going to sleep, and this never happens by the way in the enterprise world, you have to grind out every new customer and new deal. um But what you do find or what we do hope for, and we’re seeing this already, is that we become this employee experience hub, this co-pilot that is independent.

Bhavin Shah: that is not biased based on you know what system of record you have. These companies and organizations that have co-pilots for their systems of record don’t make it easy to work with the competition. They don’t work extra hard to make the competition’s product work better with yours. But for us, we see everyone as someone that the organization or customers want to be able to feed into this experience. And so being that independent um sort of facility capability that then companies can control really puts us at the center of the employee’s journey throughout their day. um And we become more of a Gen AI super app that people can go to and access lots of different systems. Now, it doesn’t preclude

Bhavin Shah: you know, ah companies from having other co-pilots, right? GitHub is actually a customer of MoveWorks and they use obviously GitHub co-pilot for engineering and code writing, but they also use MoveWorks for all the other hubbers um to be able to navigate the different services and and and and search, you know, ah tools that they have and and documents and things of that nature, as well as take action. So I think that we’re starting to see that emerge um around the world.

Bhavin Shah: Uh, and you know, with, uh, you know, 300 plus large enterprise on the platform and many millions of active users every day, every week, we are, we’re seeing kind of this vision.

Bhavin Shah: kind of take place and take hold. But I would say that you know the vision is is easy for me to dream about, but it’s the, as I said, years of work that it takes to refine this and to support your customers, to navigate with them um this whole new world and and make sure that you’re you know delivering a quality experience that they themselves can be excited about and and rely on.

Alejandro Cremades: So let’s say now instead of thinking about the future, we think about the past. okay Let’s say I put you into a time machine and I bring you back in time, maybe to that moment where you were about to give the um the the the notice at LeapFrog after that amazing journey. and And you felt that it was time and to venture into the unknown, into becoming an entrepreneur. Let’s say you’re able to stop that younger self and give that younger self one piece of advice before launching a business. What would that be and why, given what you know now?

Bhavin Shah: Yeah, well, that’s an easy question, right? Because we can all look back and have have this sort of perfect clarity. I think ah what I found is that I wish I had gotten into enterprise SaaS much earlier. I think this is a space that’s really exciting, one in which there is a lot of reasoning behind what success takes or what it takes to be successful. I think, you know, I was previously in the consumer world and what’s what’s tough with that is you sort of never know ah for sure if the work you did that day is going to amount for much. Whereas in the enterprise world, the puzzles in front of you just got to figure out how to put it together. So it is it is different and and one in which I think um i’ve I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. I think the act of of selling, the act of sort of figuring out this incredible puzzle that is the enterprise was something that I think, again, going back

Bhavin Shah: if I had sort of had the foresight, I would have gotten into. And some did, right? Salesforce started in 98 and ah Workday, I think seven years later and you know a bunch of other you know great companies, Okta and others really saw the early beginnings of that. But I think what it’s now positioned given the stage that we’re in now is there’s a new generation of of entirely AI based enterprise app companies and we get an opportunity to become one of those and build a company that I think the next wave of SaaS is gonna be really predicated on.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. So, Babin, for the people that are listening, I would love to reach out and say hi. What is the best way for them to do so?

Bhavin Shah: Obviously, go to our website, moveworks dot.com, but you can go to LinkedIn and and and send me a note. Happy happy to chat.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, easy double, Babin. Thank you so much for being on The Deal Maker Show. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us today.

Bhavin Shah: Thank you, Alejandro.

*****

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