The following interview is a conversation we had with Ken Babcock, CEO of Tango, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $20 Million Raised to Help Companies Turn Any Process Into a Shareable How-to Guide
Ken Babcock
Thanks for having me on, Brett.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we begin talking about what you’re building, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Ken Babcock
Yeah. So before starting Tango well, I actually met my co-founders at Harvard Business School, which is where we started tango ceded the idea, started talking with customers, and then eventually actually dropped out of Harvard Business School. But I had a full career before HBS and most of my career out in the Bay Area. Working at Uber from 2014 to 2018, which was a series of ups and downs, I was a data analyst there, as well as member of the product strategy team. Wore a lot of different hats, but phenomenal experience seeing what a generational company looks like. But ultimately, before Uber started my career in consulting, which is where I went right out of Cornell University in upstate New York. Cornell is where I met my wife. Today we live in the Chicago area with our dog and our son Quinn, who’s closing in on his first birthday.
Ken Babcock
So that’s a little bit about me. Nice.
Brett
A couple of things I want to zoom in on there. So let’s talk about Uber 2014. That was right when they were really blowing up, right?
Ken Babcock
Yeah, it was pretty amazing. I had been exposed to Uber through consulting because you’re traveling to cities and you’re getting on and off of planes, and so you need a taxi or a ride share service. And I believed so strongly that the company was going to completely change the landscape for how we got around cities, and it was already doing that. And so when I had an opportunity to join, it was a no brainer. So moved from New York to San Francisco every week at Uber was a record week. I mean, it was kind of like a parody of itself, getting into all hands meetings and all the metrics were green up into the right new best week ever. I mean, it was pretty surreal. And so seeing that and also just seeing how driven everyone was and ambitious people were, it just made it such an incredible place to work.
Brett
And then when did AI Transcription co happen? Was that in, like, 2017.
Ken Babcock
Yeah, it was right around then. So I think one big learning from Uber, when you have a best week every successive week, you tend to reinforce everything that you’re doing. Well, everything we’re doing is working. And clearly with Uber, that wasn’t the case. There are a lot of really good things happening, but there are a lot of bad things that were getting covered up. And so that 2017 year, which kicked off with Delete, Uber, and a lot of other stuff coming out and Travis ultimately being forced to resign, the ultimate outcome was the right one for Uber. But the path to getting there was hard for employees, for investors, for users. I mean, it had a lot of us questioning, are we ethically aligned with the company? Which was challenging. But ultimately I stayed through Dara, put a lot of optimism in the hearts and minds of employees.
Ken Babcock
And so I stayed at Uber for another year after he joined.
Brett
And have you watched the Showtime TV show yet? Super pumped.
Ken Babcock
Yeah, I think myself and some of my old Uber colleagues, we had some zoom rooms and some chats going, and it’s funny to see the Hollywood version.
Brett
For sure, with how they depict Travis Kalanick there. How accurate do you think that is? And some of the other main players in the show, how accurate is that?
Ken Babcock
Oh, man, I’m not qualified to talk. I was in a meeting with Travis maybe two or three times, but the data points that I do have, joseph Gordon Levitt did a pretty good job. He was extremely mission driven to a fault, but also extremely charismatic and did a phenomenal job getting people to join Uber, getting people rallied around what were doing. But, yeah, I would say fairly accurate. Yeah.
Brett
Nice. And two questions we’d like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick. As a Founder and entrepreneur, what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Ken Babcock
Yeah, I mean, it’s always hard to pick one person and say, oh, yeah, I try to emulate every element, but I’ve always looked up to Phil Knight and Nike as a brand. I think there’s a lot of amazing learnings, which he outlines in his book Shoe Dog, about building a company, building a brand, building a team. For me, the takeaways there, some of the best ideas have already been formulated, but they just need the right market. I mean, he was ultimately turning a technology that was developed in Japan into something that would apply to the American running market. And also the way that he trusted his employees and built those relationships to encourage trust, as well as just taking bets, taking big bets that people hadn’t done before. I mean, before Michael Jordan, shoe deals really were a thing. And now you look I mean, everyone’s got a shoe deal.
Ken Babcock
So it’s a pretty inspiring read, and I find that a lot of what he did in those early days are things that I come back to and think about with Tango. Yeah.
Brett
My girlfriend went to school in Oregon, so went up there to visit and were driving home to SF and we listened to that book on our way home and it was really good. It’s really refreshing to get outside of the world of Tech as well and hear from a non tech Founder and learn from their perspectives and how they built things up.
Ken Babcock
I try to draw as much inspiration as I can outside of Tech. I don’t know if that’s we can call that maybe a hangover from being at Uber in San Francisco at the peak of the tech boom, but I’m not one of these people that puts Elon Musk on a pedestal, though. Those people are dwindling. But I try to find as much inspiration because so much of building a company is about building a team, and that happens everywhere. So even Bill Walsh’s book. The score takes care of itself. There’s a ton of learnings that you can apply to a tech company. So I agree with you.
Brett
Yeah, that was my next question. If you had to pick just one, what book would you say has had the greatest impact on how you view the world?
Ken Babcock
Yeah, probably culture code. I mean, I know I mentioned like three books here in the last four minutes, but Culture Code is an amazing book and it’s all about teams. It’s all about what makes the best teams. I think this actually is sort of the unifying theme that brought myself and my co-founders together to start Tango, which is that there are intricacies in making a team successful. It’s not just the sum of a team’s parts, and there’s so much that goes into it. And like I said, building a company is so much about building a team, but also what we’re doing at Tango is very much how do we leverage the excellence and make sure that’s available to everyone on a team. I love that.
Brett
Now let’s talk about what you’re building a bit more. So can you talk us through the origin story behind the company?
Ken Babcock
Yes. So Brian, Dan, and I met at HBS. I mentioned that, but what we really started clicking on was this theme of team performance. It’s something we all cared about. Dan had actually been captain of the Brown football team in Undergrad. There’s a team right there. Brian had exclusively founded companies which, like I said, so much about team building. And then for me, I became a manager of people really early in my time at Uber at a team of seven when I was 24, which, frankly, probably shouldn’t have happened. But the three of us, no matter what idea were talking about, it always came back to teams are so complex. We want to understand more about them. We want to find the problems and pain points. And so the big one that we tried to focus in on was you have high performers on teams.
Ken Babcock
Why is it that not everyone can perform at their level? There’s a million answers to that. But one piece of that puzzle is it’s not readily accessible. What a high performer does to achieve those results. They’re their process, their how. And so what we said, you know, is like, how can we actually make that more visible? And that really became an improvement on documentation. When you talk about documentation, even when you say the word, people kind of start rolling their eyes a bit. Takes too long to create. Once you do create it gets stale very quickly. And then once it’s stale, it just becomes a pain. People are pinging you, hey, I think this is broken. And so we started focusing on documentation because we felt there just had to be a better way of doing it. Like, people are executing on processes daily, and that’s what makes them great, how they do their work.
Ken Babcock
How come there isn’t a passive experience to creating documentation? And so that’s really what we built with Tango. It’s a Chrome extension that allows you to create documentation of everything you just did in the flow of work. And we create that step by step tutorial in a matter of seconds. Then that can be easily shared or exported to your internal knowledge base or Wiki. And that just increases the velocity of knowledge sharing because it’s so easy. When something’s stale, then it’s as easy as just turning on the Chrome extension again. So that’s really what united us and starting Tango.
Brett
And who’s your true competitor then? Is it people just doing nothing or people doing Google Docs? Or is there an established player in this space?
Ken Babcock
I think there’s really two alternatives. One is the extremely clunky. Let me open a word, Doc. Let me take a bunch of screenshots. Let me put those screenshots in a folder. Let me edit those screenshots. Let me then paste them into the Word Doc. People don’t need to hear me go on and on. But that’s kind of the old way of doing things, which I think has contributed to we have an NPS score of 89 because the old way of doing things is so painful. And then I think the other piece and I view them as both a competitor but also a complement to what we’re doing, which is screen recording. I think Loom has gotten so popular during and post pandemic, where people record themselves walking through documents or walking through presentations. But there’s a lot of inefficiencies in that it’s inefficient. To record a Loom, you got to say the right thing, you got to do the right actions, or else you got to retake it.
Ken Babcock
And then for the viewer, it’s also a really clunky viewing experience because if you’re trying to replicate what that person is doing, you got to pause, rewind, rebuffer. Instead, we feel like the format and the methodology that we’ve created with Tango is much easier for someone to replicate. And so Loom is great for a lot of things, but we’re much better for process replication and process capture.
Brett
And in terms of market categories, where does the product fall? Is this like business process management? Is it team performance? How do you think about the market category?
Ken Babcock
Well, like any good Founder, we’re thinking about almost an entirely different market altogether. But I would say it touches on process management, process optimization. You think about companies like Salonis and what they do, process mining. It also touches on knowledge bases. Those are the canvases for how knowledge is shared. We’re sort of the paintbrush, if you will, so it touches on that. But the way we’re really thinking about it is kind of what we call like productivity intelligence or knowledge intelligence. This idea that over time what we’ll be able to do is actually validate. What are your best practices proactively as opposed to you having to do that? Staleness of knowledge, staleness of process should be completely eradicated. That’s a belief that we have as well. And so that category is one that’s so underdeveloped and probably ties back to my answer on competitors. Right.
Ken Babcock
And so it’s not necessarily what the product can do today, but long term that’s the direction that we want to head is being as dynamic and ever changing as your business is. Right. There’s a rate of change of any business, and so we want to be able to adjust best practices to reflect that.
Brett
And what types of activities are you pursuing to create that category?
Ken Babcock
Demand? Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is brand and solution awareness. I think when we talk to users, we don’t have to spend any time explaining the problem. The market is hugely problem aware, which is great for us, but where they lack understanding is really on the solutions. I think one challenge is that people don’t even know what to Google. If you’re going through a clunky documentation exercise, something that you’ve done time and time again, but you know that you have to do it, you know that it’s painful. You don’t even know that there’s alternative. And so what we’re trying to do is spread more awareness of this new way of doing things. And that’s a combination of PR campaigns, influencer marketing, even recognition. Like, we’re named a Google Chrome favorite extension of 2022. We’re named to fast companies. Next big things in tech.
Ken Babcock
Those are all amazing accolades, but it’s all in service to making the market more aware that a better way exists.
Brett
And what do you do to agitate that problem and create urgency on our end? For example, we’re a small company, about 20 people, and all of our process docs are Google Docs. They’re anywhere from ten to 70 pages long. Depending on the process. But it does work overall. We have checklists there, people follow them. And I think there’s probably a lot of companies who are in a similar situation where what they’re doing is, okay, what do you do to create urgency to make someone switch and try and use a new product?
Ken Babcock
Yeah, so I think that comes down to our AHA moment for us. We measure that constantly. I think one week we had our best week ever. It was 4.8 minutes average new user to get to that AHA moment, which is creating your first tango. And once you do that, you see that, oh man, that documentation that I was creating that would take me hours, just took me minutes. And so part of getting users to see that value is embracing the product led growth strategy that we’ve had, where it’s a freemium model. People can get started today all on their own. They can try it and if they love it, they can continue using it. If they don’t, it’s just as easy to kind of remove it. And so that frictionless experience is what we’ve prioritized such that people can come in and see that value.
Ken Babcock
You’ll also see like on our website, we just are very clear about what that problem is and we try to use language and phrasing and understanding that reflects what our end user is feeling around documentation.
Brett
And on the topic of PLG, is that something that you started from day one or when you started, was that the goal was to have a PLG go to market motion or did that come up later?
Ken Babcock
I mean, yeah, it wasn’t something where I’d say we just had the utmost conviction from day one. But what we started doing was talking just about who is going to feel this problem most acutely. And we kind of use the vitamin painkiller framework. And so when we talked to team leaders and managers, they were definitely reflecting more of that vitamin, oh yeah, this will be good for me. Or like, this is good hygiene, we should do this. Oh, that’ll cut down on that. Okay, great. But it wasn’t something that compelled them so much that they were like, can I try it today? When we talked to their individual team members or the frontline people, the people responsible for creating documentation, that was when eyes started to light up. That’s when people were like, oh my gosh, what have I been doing all this time? That was pretty powerful.
Ken Babcock
And so we said, if that is the case, we need to gear all of our marketing towards that person. And the best way to reach that person and get them using it is going through kind of a bottoms up product led growth strategy. Because going tops down, we’re going to miss all this demand. It’s going to be something that’s going to be at the hands of that team leader. And so that’s really where the product led strategy came from.
Brett
And can you share any numbers that demonstrate the growth and traction and adoption that you’re seeing today?
Ken Babcock
Totally. We launched in September of 2021, so 15 months ago, we’re over 250,000 users today, and revenue has accelerated nicely. But most of that growth, almost 40%, has come from what we would call virality, but referrals word of mouth, which is really powerful. So that is part of the nature of documentation. Someone creates something, they share it with somebody else, and then that person says, holy cow, what did you just do? And then they go ahead and they download Tango. And so that for us, has kept our acquisition costs incredibly low, but has also scaled in a way that has been pretty powerful.
Brett
That’s such a fascinating product, too, where the virality is built into it because.
Ken Babcock
Of what it does. Yeah, I mean, you see that with a lot of, I mean, loom, we already talked about loom, like, similar story there. And I think that’s the best outcome. Right? Somebody shares something, somebody believes in something so much, or they see the value, they’re putting their credibility behind a product as opposed to the product trying to communicate. It just a much higher likelihood to sign up, activate, engage. It’s awesome.
Brett
Yeah, I think that’s the dream for a Founder.
Ken Babcock
Right?
Brett
I had the Founder of Fireflies AI on a couple of weeks ago, the AI notetaker tool that pops up on the meetings. And were talking about something similar where their virality is built right into the product because every time they join a meeting, bam, it’s right there, advertising and driving users to the product. So I love those types of products.
Ken Babcock
Yeah, fireflies is great. We’ve used them before, and I totally hear you people are like, who’s that other person in the meeting? It works.
Brett
Exactly. Now, are there any types of companies or market segments that you’re really seeing a lot of adoption with?
Ken Babcock
Right now, we’re very horizontal, so we see a ton of company sizes, industries, roles, but the ones that are the most engaged tend to have a direct responsibility of either internal or external training. And I’ll explain that a little bit. So external training, customer support, customer success, they also have internal components of that as well, but that’s really powerful. And then internal training, it teams L and D. I would say that those four groups have been really awesome for us. And so over the course of the next year, we’re going to continue to lean in and probably actually lean in more heavily to those personas.
Brett
And if you had to break it down into one thing you got right and how you’ve been able to rise above the noise and get, I think you said 250,000 users, what would you say you got right?
Ken Babcock
I think it was just a clear communication of value and realization of value. That metric I mentioned earlier, time to AHA moment. So many companies struggle with that. There’s so many software tools that I think we all probably think of where the product tour takes a while. There’s a million widgets. You don’t know where you need to start. It just becomes very cumbersome. And for us, simplicity has been the beauty of it, which is like, we’re not going to overwhelm you with features because we think that’s additive. We’re just going to focus on the core job that you’re trying to do, which is create documentation faster. So I think that’s the thing that we got right was optimizing for that AHA moment.
Brett
And looking through your website, I have to give you credit, it’s one of the best websites I’ve seen in terms of communicating what you do. A lot of the websites that I go on today, I read it and I walk away thinking like, so what the h*** does that company do? What problem do they solve? It’s like immediately unclear and full of buzzwords. But I definitely recommend to all the listeners to check out your website because I think it’s a master class in really just simple communication and really simply explaining things in an easy way.
Ken Babcock
And it hasn’t always been that way, to be clear. But yeah, the website is Tango US, so give it a look. But I do think it’s hard for founders sometimes to operate what we call like high low. You got this super high altitude where you’re thinking big picture, long term vision, being super ambitious in everything that you say and do, but then also going low and speaking directly to the end user. And I think we’ve obviously had some great team members that have pushed us in that direction. But that website is an example of going to that lower altitude, getting closer to what the customer cares about, as opposed to trying to impress an investor, which is not what the website is for.
Brett
That seems to be one of the main causes, at least from what I’ve seen and from my conversations with founders, there’s obviously very different messages. An investor is buying what the future looks like, but a customer doesn’t give a crap about it. Right? They don’t care what the future of how to guide look like or the future of documentation. They just want to know how it can solve their problem. I feel like most of the websites I see where they’re really struggling, it’s clear that they’re conflicting or kind of combining those two. They’re trying to speak to investors and customers at the same time. And I think in the end, that ends up not speaking to either of them.
Ken Babcock
Really totally agree with you.
Brett
And in terms of your go to market, what would you say was your single greatest challenge and how do you overcome it?
Ken Babcock
Yeah, so it’s interesting to hear you talk about how the website makes everything very clear. Like I said, it’s take a note of iterations. But back in the day, we struggled with communicating verbally what the product did. And I think the reason for that was some lack of familiarity. Probably also the language that were using. We didn’t nail a perfect elevator pitch, but what we realized there was that demos would get the job done in like 30 seconds. You could easily show a demo of Tango because it’s simply, let’s go through a process and then in a matter of seconds, let’s see exactly what that spits out on Tango. And so we just started saying, okay, if we can find more and more opportunities to visually display this product, the better. So that’s why we leaned into influencer marketing on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, because that gave us an opportunity to visually demonstrate the product.
Ken Babcock
So the early mistake was trying to pitch it at every moment and trying to use text when in reality the product kind of sold itself.
Brett
And you mentioned TikTok there. So I have to ask, how are you seeing that work for you? I feel like that’s been the big talk the last month or so as everyone’s gearing up for 2023 content marketing plans, or marketing plans in general. From a B to B perspective, I think that’s somewhat debated. Should you use TikTok? Should you not use it? So what’s your experience been with TikTok so far?
Ken Babcock
It has to be very specific to the company, right? It’s not a one size fits all. I think it’s worked for us because of that visual component and because of the influencers that we’ve worked with. So we’ve thought very deeply about what audiences do we want to reach? How are those audiences reflected in certain influencers and communities? Do certain influencers target like, a specific persona that we care about? So all of that has kind of played into it, and TikTok has had amazing communities for learning and development, for operations professionals, and for productivity. And so for us, it made a lot of sense. So I don’t want to get on here and tell everyone that they need to be on TikTok, but if it starts making sense for you from a communication of value, from a persona standpoint, from an audience standpoint, then yeah, go for it.
Brett
And on the topic of influencers, can you give us an example of what an influencer looks like that you’ve worked with?
Ken Babcock
Yeah, so they’re typically somebody who speaks to or embodies a specific persona. So a great example, we worked with a teacher that a bunch of L and D professionals and other teachers follow because a lot of her content isn’t just specific to her classroom or what she teaches, but it’s how to communicate concepts, how to educate people, how to get people using new software. And so for us, were like, oh, that’s a perfect fit because she’s speaking directly to those It folks that are following her. So she did a few videos for us. They performed super well, and we’ve seen continued high engagement from those users. So it’s not necessarily the group that has the biggest following. You think, oh, I want to go through the biggest influencer. It’s really the group that has a niche enough audience that engages with that person at a high level.
Ken Babcock
So I tell people to steer away from followers and actually think more about viewership relative to that follower count.
Brett
So we’re not going to see Kim Kardashian pushing Tango anytime soon?
Ken Babcock
I don’t think so. I don’t think so. But I have been surprised so many times on this journey.
Brett
We’ll see what’s the most surprising thing that you’ve had as you’ve built this company out?
Ken Babcock
I think the biggest thing, maybe it’s not a surprise because I did feel this at Uber, but I think we’ve been able to attract amazing people and amazing talent largely because of the mission. A lot of what we’re trying to do is accelerate knowledge transfer, bring teams up to speed, leave less people feeling siloed or not having the answers. And that’s resonated with so many people, which has been kind of a confirmation of what we thought about the market and the future of work and how enterprises need to change. But it’s also gotten us to hire some just awesome individuals, and uniting the team around that mission really makes everything easier as a CEO. So I saw that at Uber for sure, but I was sort of surprised when I saw it play out at such an early stage with Tango.
Brett
Interesting. And last question here for you. If we zoom out into the future, what’s the three year vision for Tango?
Ken Babcock
Yeah. So today we’re focused on creators of documentation. So saving them time, creating that documentation. The next step called maybe in the next one to two years, it’s really building for that consumer of knowledge, the person who’s on the receiving end of the documentation, how do we help them replicate process, how do we help them walk through a process? How do we help them give feedback back to the creator, that stuff that we’re going to build for. And then once that loop is created, creator to consumer and the feedback loops are there, that’s when we can really start to do some interesting stuff around Tango. Actually telling organizations, here’s your best practice. Here’s the tools that are driving efficiency. Here are the people that are driving efficiency. Here’s how people improve once they’ve replicated a certain task. Those are all things really powerful that I think Gong has done a great job for sales teams with this and, like, looking at the audio file and making inferences and insights on what makes teams effective.
Ken Babcock
We want to do that for anything that’s on your screen. Right. So much of people’s process is digital. We should be telling organizations, hey, here’s what your best practices and here’s what your team should be following.
Brett
Amazing. Love that. Unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today before we wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey, where’s the best place for them to go?
Ken Babcock
Tango us. That’s our site. You find everything you need there.
Brett
Awesome. Ken, thank you so much for taking the time to chat and talk about what you’re building and share your vision. This all sounds super exciting and look forward to seeing you execute on this vision.
Ken Babcock
Thanks, Brett.
Brett
Keep in touch.
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