Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Tom, thanks so much for joining us,
Thomas Martin, Glance
Keith. Thanks so much for having me.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
I'm excited to talk to you because we're going to talk about Glance, which is a company that when I think about as a consumer, it's great that we have this ability with technology to do so many things on our own. But sometimes I just want to talk to somebody to help me out and figure out what I'm trying to accomplish. So let's talk about Glance and what you guys do?
Thomas Martin, Glance
Yeah, so Glance, Glance is a company that's really focused in the mid to enterprise markets, we engage customers easily within their digital journey I think of so many times when you today are trying to get engaged with someone, we help those customers connect with businesses in the moment, you know, wherever they are on the web, on your mobile device, to provide a guided experience. And by being able to do that in the moment, companies are able to increase customer satisfaction customers are happier, you know, there's better brand loyalty, it drives revenue, because oftentimes, people abandon journeys, because they're like, I don't have enough information, or it gets a little too difficult. So you abandon and we're like, well, we can help you convert and change the conversion rate, drive revenue, you can also expose things like oh, by the way, Keith did you know we also do this. And so having those ability to connect people at those critical moments, wherever they are in the journey, we are trusted by some of the largest brands in the world. We think of some of the clients that we work with, like, hey, oh, it's tax season, Intuit, TurboTax. QuickBooks, we do work with, like, with Constant Contact Us Bank, you think about US Bank, where people can walk into branches anymore. And suddenly, it's like, all those modalities have suddenly shifted to just digital. And when you suddenly you're like, hey, I wanted to speak with someone, and I can do it from within the application. And they can understand exactly where I am, I don't have to go back. And, you know, they asked me 20 questions like, Why are you calling? Where are you? And so we've done that type of work, to be able to provide that ability to be able to, we like to say, see, show and share anything with just a simple click, we know that we're a technology that's embedded into customer journey. So we naturally are working with partners, and have integrations to companies like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Twilio, Genesis, many other companies like that.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Well, you mentioned the TurboTax, Intuit example, which I think is perfect, because if I'm spending time doing my taxes, and doing taxes is not easy, although TurboTax makes it easy, I still probably have questions, and to be able to hit a button and talk to someone live to help me figure it out and move on with my day is phenomenal.
Thomas Martin, Glance
Yeah, I mean, the thing about taxes is you do it once a year. And oh, by the way, your life continues to change, and so does the tax code. And so what I did last year probably isn't what I'm going to do this year, I changed jobs, I got married, I have a kid, I bought a new home, and you realize the tax code is changing. And so when you can connect with someone, even if you're smart, like I can do my taxes, but what if I want to have someone review it and say, Hey, Keith, that I don't leave anything on the table? Can you just do a quick review to you know what, this is so easy? Why don't I have you guys just do my taxes for me. And so when you think about having the ability to do it on your time in your space, you look at the economics, how many people have someone do it for them, you know, like walking down the street to a CPA versus the do it yourself? You know, we're helping into it pioneer that do it together with space in a digital environment that suddenly allows for TurboTax to grow into a completely new market to generate new revenue. It's really cool.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Yeah, and that's just one use case. There's every industry can benefit from this. So what's the history of the company? You're CEO of Glance. So talk about the you know, the background story of the company and how you got involved.
Thomas Martin, Glance
Yeah, so we were a company that's not that new. We were actually founded back in 2000. I came on board in 2013. We started to really launch our first enterprise product in 2015. We are originally based out of the Cambridge Arlington area on Mass Ave, we've moved our headquarters to Wakefield. We've had a satellite in Portsmouth, but over this past year, we've become kind of a company that has people all over the place. We've got three people working on the West Coast, couple people in California, Oregon, people all over the place because you realize we used to be this Boston centric company. Now we're just like, what, what do you find talent? Well, we're finding talent all over the place. We were a company that was bootstrapped from the beginning. Our founders bootstrapped the business. We've had some customer funding, but we've been a profitable company. So we've gone into the market we, you know, when you think about being a bootstrap company, you really become very capital efficient about how you do things. But this past couple years, has been a tailwind. Because suddenly people are like, wow, you know, I do need to meet my customers in their digital journey. Humans do like to still do business with other human beings. They like to do business with people they know, like and trust, and how do we do that as a business when they can't walk through the front door? So how do we provide that connection. So, we've been that business that has built a strong business with some amazing brands, we've got close to 67 employees today. And we're continuing to grow at a rapid pace, you know, close to, you know, I would say, north of 30% Plus, not gonna give you all the stats, but uh, you know, this is a company that's seeing some great success
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
On terms of that growth, for hiring what different functional areas are expecting to hire for?
Thomas Martin, Glance
There are really three key areas that we're focused on engineering is probably our key most important area. And on that engineering side, you know, we've got people that are developers that are doing code in real time stack, a lot of the modern tooling of, of JavaScript frameworks, is most of the stuff that we're working on is all inside of the web. We also have people on the operation side, but engineering is probably our biggest focus. And then our go to market where we've been hiring a lot of people on the sales and marketing and investing there. So over the past few months, we've done a lot of hiring and in marketing, but also the partner set aside because as a, as a company, that's part of a journey, we recognize working with other partners who have relationships with a company that we want to do business with, it just makes sense to be able to focus on growing those areas. So engineering, sales partnerships are our biggest areas that we're looking for people.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Now, once someone joins the team, at a Glance, what's the culture? Like? What's the day to day environment? In terms of working there?
Thomas Martin, Glance
Yeah, so we have, when someone comes on board, I will tell you that, you know, some of the most recent feedback, we've spent a lot of time to think about how do we actually want to bring somebody into the company, and we have focused on making sure that we don't drop people to sizzle in the pan, you know, immediately we're like, Keith, you know, we're going to have 30 to 45 days of onboarding. And so we've built a pretty rigid structure on how we actually bring people on, to get them exposure to actually have interviews with people to go through training, because we've started to build our own coursework, so that people can understand, you know, the market, the technology, our positioning, how we go through, and take our product to market so that when people go through that process, you know, they now have started to build relationships, because you realize working in a virtual environment, you know, even if you're working in the Boston area, we don't really have anyone going into the office, you know, we closed our offices back March 2000. You know, we've got them open now. But you know, very few people are going in because of the concerns with, you know, the, the COVID, still here. So, being able to bring people on and onboard them has been a huge win for us. Because people suddenly are like, Wow, I feel like I can jump into my job and be productive by taking that time. So they're going to find out that we have a really solid and deliberate onboarding structure to really help change the equation so that we have spent all this time to find someone, we want to make sure they're on boarded. So they become really successful. We have a flexible work schedule, you know, when you think about PTO, we want people to live their lives, you know, you sit there and like, Oh, I got a doctor's appointment, I gotta go to a kid's play. It's a matter of like, doing your job being available, and over communicating. And so we have put in systems in place to be able to allow for those things to happen. So, you know, we're big on Google. So we have Google for business, we use Slack, we've gotten many ways to be able to communicate, and make sure stuff is shared, we're big on the Atlassian stack. So we've got things like JIRA projects, and we use Confluence and, and so a lot of information is available and to be able to be published and shared. Some of the I'll dive into some of the things that are like our core values. So when people sit there and they're like, information, easy to be found, you know, we're one of our core values is being transparent, and trying to share that information. And so, other people have said, Hey, I'm just in onboarding into the company. We do quarterly meetings, to share where are we? What are our financials look like? What are our sales numbers? Where are we struggling? It's not just like raw ride, it's really about like, you know, getting people empowered with the information that we have to be able to do their job really well.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Now, the job markets very active out there, there are lots of opportunities for people to explore, which is a good thing. We want an active job market. So why is now the ideal time to join Glance?
Thomas Martin, Glance
You know, people are always looking for an opportunity to contribute, and to be part of an organization where not only do you get a chance to contribute, but you also get a chance to shape how things are happening. And there's opportunity because over the past 13 months, we hired 18 people, we're trying to do the same thing, you know, this year, so we're bringing a lot of people on board. It doesn't mean that we're like creating this huge hierarchy structure, everyone has to work for someone. But we're creating an environment where people have the ability to shape the future of Glance and to participate in where we're going. This is a market as you think about opportunities. There's some great altruistic components to recognizing that we're helping people live better lives, we're getting people connected with people that can help them make really important decisions in life. You know, think about like enrolling in health care dealing with your finances. So you're jumping into a company that has really cool technology, we're going out and pioneering a new space on how humans get connected in digital journeys. And it's a fun place to work. So I think this is a place that people should be like, Yeah, I want to be there because, you know, I always ask people like, do you want to be on an escalator going up or down? No one says down everyone is like I want to go up. So that's what Glance is.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Well, if you are instant exploring opportunities at Glance, you need to go to their company page on VentureFizz, which has all their job listings there. Go to venturefizz.com/glance, and you'll see all their job listings. Tom, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the details on the company.
Thomas Martin, Glance
Great, Keith, thanks so much for having me.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
