David Karandish is the Founder & CEO of Capacity – an enterprise artificial intelligence SaaS company headquartered in St. Louis, MO. Capacity’s secure, AI-native support automation platform helps teams do their best work. Before starting Capacity, David was the CEO of Answers Corp. He and his business partner Chris Sims started the parent company of Answers in 2006 and sold it to a private equity firm in 2014 for north of $900m. David sits on the boards of Varsity Tutors (an on-demand, real-time learning platform in the ed tech space), Create a Loop (a computer science education non-profit tackling the digital divide by teaching kids to code), and Prepare.ai (a non-profit providing educational resources and strategic guidance about Artificial Intelligence to individuals, communities, and companies). David lives in St. Louis with his wife, Erin, and four kids. When not working, he enjoys spending time with his family and playing ukulele.

• CEO Hack: Walking, listening to podcasts every morning, and taking a 24-hour break every weekend
• CEO Nugget: Don't wait to prioritize your health
• CEO Defined: Leading a team towards achieving personal and professional goals

Website: https://capacity.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidkarandish

FULL INTERVIEW

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Transcription

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00:02 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:29 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. And I have a very special guest on the show today. I have David Karandish of Capacity. David, it's awesome to have you on the show.

00:50 – David Karandish

Thanks for having me.

00:51 -Gresham Harkless

No problem. Super excited to have you on. Before we jump in, I wanted to read a little bit more about David so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. David is the founder and CEO of Capacity, an Enterprise Artificial Intelligence SaaS Company headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri. Capacity Secure AI Native Support Automation Platform helps teams to do their best work. Prior to starting Capacity, David was the CEO of Answers Core and he and his business partner Chris Sim started the parent company of Answers in 2006 and sold it to a private equity firm in 2014 for north of 900 million dollars.

David sits on the board of Varsity Tutors, an on-demand real-time learning platform in the ed tech space, create a Loop, a computer science education nonprofit tackling the digital vibe by teaching kids to code and prepare.ai, a nonprofit providing educational resources and strategic guidance about artificial intelligence to individuals, communities, and companies. David lives in St. Louis with his wife, Erin, and 4 kids, and when not working, he enjoys spending time with his family playing Yucca Laili. David, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:59 – David Karandish

Let's do it.

02:00 – Gresham Harkless

Let's do it then. So to kind of kick everything off, I know I read your bio. I wanted to hear a little bit more on what I call your CEO story. We'll let you get started with your business. Yeah. So we started capacity in January of 2017 and The whole genesis of the company was that I saw the convergence of a bunch of different factors happening. We had the rise of artificial intelligence, where I think that the Christmas before, the top item sold wasn't a phone or a laptop or a video game. It was Amazon's Alexa. And so I had this thought, what if we could bring an Alexa-like experience into the workplace where you had a digital assistant of some sort that you could ask your question to, get an instant response back, and then go from there?

Pretty quickly realized that we weren't quite ready to all start talking to our computers just yet. And so we launched our version of capacity, initially focused in chat, where you could put capacity on your customer-facing website, or you could put capacity within your intranet or Slack or Microsoft Teams instance for your internal team. Our mission is to help teams to do their best work, and the way that we go about executing that mission is that we want to automate the support function of your organization. So that means answering as many questions as we can, automating as many tasks as possible, and then creating a seamless experience for any of the human work in the mill.

03:36 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, I absolutely love and appreciate that, especially the vision that you have, but also understand because I think, and you definitely correct me if you find this experience that timing has a lot to do with executing something. So you also want to have that vision, but you also want to understand what will have the legs so that people can take to it. And then you can start to transition from there.

03:56 – David Karandish

Yeah, I mean, I think 1 of the hard parts about being in cutting-edge technology is getting the timing right. So, you know, I'm very, very, very bullish on VR, as an example, long-term. But I don't think VR in the short term outside of gaming is going to have a very big impact over the next 5 years. Conversely, people have been talking about AI for years and years and years. And right about the time that we got involved, Margo started a tip where this is no longer some theoretical type of software that is used to help people beat Street Fighter. This is applicable technology that you can go apply to the way that you work.

04:38 – Gresham Harkless:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think sometimes people don't realize how they're already using AI, as you mentioned, smart speakers in ways like that in Siri and things like that are already incorporated into their lives. So having it and taking it a step further and being able to have it so that people can get the answers and whatever they're asking for, you know, as you mentioned, it says so well.

04:58 – David Karandish

Yeah, thank you.

05:00 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. And so I wanted to hear a little bit more about how you serve the clients. I know you talked a little bit about it, could you drill down a little bit deeper and let us know how you serve your clients, and how exactly it works for those businesses and organizations?

05:14 -David Karandish

Yes, I think the folks at Greylock put out a pretty interesting diagram of how the modern tech stack works. So the way that they would come to describe it is that you have 3 layers. You've got your system of record. So think of that like your CRM, your help desk, cloud drive, your ERP, all of these big databases in the sky. All these companies have moved their on-premise and their legacy systems of record to the cloud, and Lots of big companies and vendors have popped up for each of those. However, people realize that these systems of record are really terrible systems of engagement. These databases are great for storing data, but they're not great for accessing it.

So if you've got the system of record layer at the bottom. Up at the top, you've got the system engagement layer where you've got websites, mobile apps, and now increasingly conversational experiences that are providing that engagement layer on top of that system record. Now, Newer to the stack, I would argue in the last 5 to 10 years, is the middle layer of what they would call the system of intelligence.

So think of that as the platform that sits between your system of engagement and your system of record to help you access information across your stack. So you think about something like an onboarding experience, you might need to pull a document from your cloud drive, you might need to schedule a meeting on your calendar, and you might need to say, file a ticket with your help desk all within 1 process.

So if you've got your system record, system engagement, and system intelligence in the middle. If we map that framework back to what we're doing at capacity, it maps very well to our 3 major product lines. We have our AI-powered bot, that connects to your knowledge base, Think of that as your system of engagement. You can ask it however many questions you'd like. We get currently around an 84% match rate. So industry standard, we would put us up against any bot out there on the planet. On the other end though, we also provide a system of record, both in terms of your help desk for managing the tickets and queue of work that your team has, as well as your cloud drive. So you can upload documents and actually ask questions

07:31 – David Karandish

into those documents and answer them. But in the middle layer, we have our workflows part of the platform. That's where we are automating the key processes that you do day in and day out. So knowledge base and chat at the top helped us in cloud drive on the base and the workflows in the middle. So that's what we end up providing to our clients, a full-stack solution for automating your support.

07:56 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, I love that. And I've always looked at, and I don't know if you feel the exact same way, that having that ability to automate those tasks, automate those things, questions that people are asking, or processes that you're going through, it allows you to be more present and to me, do the things that can't be automated as well. And you get to spend more time there, be more impactful and greater at that because those things that don't necessarily need to be done regularly are automated and allow you to kind of build and grow and execute your company to a better level.

08:28 – David Karandish

You think about how many times a day we get interrupted. It's just a constant stream of pings and texts and emails and taps on the shoulder and tickets. And it's funny, we kind of lump what we're doing under the help desk umbrella. But 1 of the things That's interesting about our approach is that to my knowledge. We are the only help desk out there Where we started with the bot and automation and added the help desk on top Everyone else has started with the help desk and then they tried to automate it. And So we are the first kind of bot-first or automation-first approach to building out a modern help desk software suite.

09:09 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Do you feel like it is like what I would call your secret sauce? It could be for you personally as well too, but do you feel is that ability to have the AI as a foundation, have the technology as a foundation, and then find out ways in which to solve those problems, so to speak, as you mentioned, help desk, or questions or knowledge base that you might have internally. Do you feel like having that foundation sets you apart?

09:29 – David Karandish

Yeah, we believe that by starting with AI, we have a competitive advantage because we don't need to conform to previous patterns of understanding of what you do if you didn't have automation at the front of your help desk. And so as an example, 1 of the first things that we built into the help desk was the ability to map the unanswered question back to the knowledge base itself. So the next time somebody asks that question, the AI has learned it, it's part of what's going forward. The other thing that we do is the training of the AI itself is intricately tied to the help desk. And so the 2 like talk with each other and go back and forth day in and day out.

10:18 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome.  Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

10:31 – David Karandish

I have 2 very seemingly boring but life-transforming hacks that I'll throw out there. The first 1 is 1 I started just this year in the face of the pandemic. And that's an old practice called walking. Every morning I get up and the first thing I do is I go for a 3-mile walk. It's not a run, not trying to race someone, I'm not trying to chase someone. Just taking the stillness of the morning, I use it as a time, I use about 30 minutes to kind of pray and walk as I go and I'll use another 30 minutes to listen to a podcast or whatever I'm, you know, whatever I'm interested in. It's just a great way of starting your day centered and focused on what you need to go do. I do recommend getting winter-appropriate gear.

So whether it's good boots or a nice set of gloves or I have a little balaclava I wear on, which is great for the pandemic, but I also look like I'm trying to break into someone's house. So get the appropriate gear. But, watching is something that's transformed my last year and also helped me get in shape as well. And then the other thing I try to do while I work a lot of hours, I work nights, I work parts of the weekend, is I always try to take a 24-hour email and work Sabbath. So from Saturday afternoon to the afternoon, if there's a fire, you can call me, but I'm not on Slack, I'm not on email, I'm not checking, I turn corrective messages off on my phone.

And so it just gives me time to take a break, to spend time with my family and recharge. I can tell you: that there's such a difference in my energy level doing that week in a week out from the few times I don't.

12:20 – Gresham Harkless

And so now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It could be related to AI or technology, or it might be something if you were to hop into a time machine, you would tell your younger business self. If I

12:32 – David Karandish

we're gonna jump in my DeLorean and go back in time and talk to my younger business self, I would tell myself not to wait on prioritizing my health.

12:44 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So David, what does being a CEO mean to you?

12:55 – David Karandish

Yeah, I think there are a few different things. I think Being a CEO means I get an opportunity to lead a team toward achieving goals that they never thought possible. Both personal goals and professional goals.

13:11 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, David, truly appreciate that definition again, and I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best I can get out of view and find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

13:27 -David Karandish

Yeah, so just to recap, We're building out the support automation platform. We can work with large multinational organizations down to startups who just want to get our customer support on their websites. If you want to check us out, go to capacity.com. If you ever have any questions, email me, David, at capacity.com. Happy to help.

13:47 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, I appreciate you again, David. We will have the links and information in the show notes, but thank you so much for building this awesome business having AI at the forefront, and reminding us of how important it is and is ever present in our lives. So I appreciate you again, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

14:05 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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