The following interview is a conversation we had with Hersh Tapadia, CEO of Allstacks, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $16 Million Raised to Build the Value Stream Intelligence Category
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders or in the frontlines building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who is building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Frontlines Media. Now let’s dive right into today’s episode. Hey, everyone, and thanks for listening. Today I’m speaking with Hersh Tapadia, CEO and Co-Founder of Allstacks, a value stream intelligence platform that’s raised nearly 16 million in funding. Hirsch, thanks for chatting with me today.
Hersh Tapadia
It’s great to be here. Really appreciate it.
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.
Hersh Tapadia
Yeah. So I’m Hersh Tapadia. I’m the Co-Founder and CEO of Allstacks. I think my background is best summed up by I was an engineer by training, started my career at NC State in electrical engineering, and later went on to do biomedical engineering. And I mentioned that specifically because I found myself over the course of my career at the intersection of fields a lot. And so what that ended up exacerbating, as I think about a lot of the problems I ended up solving, was it was how do you translate something from point A to point B?
Hersh Tapadia
And so when I did a lot of healthcare software work as a head of engineering or head of product, it was not just how do I translate the value of software that we’re building, like the problems we’re solving from a technology perspective, but also how do I communicate those in a way that resonates with somebody who’s from a different field altogether? So a healthcare person on the other side communicating with a software person, and how do we get aligned on what’s the value we’re building and how we create that? And so, over the course of my career, I’ve been fortunate to do a few different things. Coming out of school, I got to start a company that was focused on tuberculosis diagnostics. So we built a medical device that was studying whether or not you had a TB infection.
Hersh Tapadia
And it was using computer vision to automate all of the manual inspection techniques. And then after that, we ended up getting that company acquired into a company that was spinning out of Johnson. And what we got to do there was leverage some of those same techniques, but apply it to the supply chain security space. And that was a really cool place to be. It’s a company called Surrex. It’s now called veronetics. It’s been around for quite a while and continues to grow. In fact, just as an aside, I was pleasantly surprised to see one of the patents my Co-Founder and I filed when were in there just issued.
Hersh Tapadia
But what were doing was were analyzing these big disparate sets of data to try to figure out if something was a real package or a fake package or a real drug or a fake drug or it was in the wrong place. And we had this really cool technology where we could take a picture of a box with an iPhone, and we could tell you, based on how the ink bled into the fibers, whether it was the original box or somebody had made a copy of the box, even if they use the same file to make the copy. So there we really honed a lot of our skills around data analytics and machine learning and API integrations. And all the while, were faced with trying to understand how does it work to communicate what we’re doing in software to a pharmaceutical industry.
Hersh Tapadia
Because fundamentally, the way these things work are different. We think about building software as this continuous process, this Iterative process. But a lot of times, if you’re, say developing a drug, you preload all the R and D work. You figure out how it builds, whether it works or not. We do the clinical trials, and then once we’ve decided that this formulation is good, we start manufacturing it. And from that point forward, it’s really just cost we get sold. And so, fundamentally, there’s a misalignment in which how the pharmaceutical industry works and how the software technology industry works. And so I started to sense this tension.
Hersh Tapadia
And this tension was ultimately what led us to build All Stacks, because they said there’s got to be a better way to communicate what’s going on with Allstacks without having to just kind of finger in the wind, qualitatively solve this problem. And so eventually, I had left this company, and my Co-Founder and I, Jeremy Freeman is our CPO. Him and I were poking around, wondering, what do we do next? We knew we wanted to be a software company, and we knew we wanted to have something to do with developers. And we said, well, we’ll just embed ourselves into different teams. And as we do that, we’ll figure out what people are complaining about, and we’ll solve that problem.
Hersh Tapadia
And so what everyone was complaining about was ultimately this problem of managing expectations between different stakeholders, because it’s really hard to get a read on what was going on here. And so with all that in hand, we thought there was something here. And that’s what kicked us off. To start off stacks. Nice.
Brett
Very cool. Well, before we begin diving into All Stacks, one question we like to ask, just to understand what makes you tick as an entrepreneur and as a Founder, is what Book Is had the greatest impact on you so far?
Hersh Tapadia
Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s actually something that came up last week in our leadership, all fans. I found myself kind of getting tired of business books. At some point it all sounded the same and right about at the same time. A friend of mine handed me this book called Boys in the Boat. And Boys in the Boat is this really cool book. It’s about this rowing team, this crew team that was at the University of Washington and eventually ended up going to the Berlin Olympics and winning the Berlin Olympics. And the book is one of those books you might be familiar with, devil in the White City. It’s a similar kind of narrative where there’s two stories that eventually connect.
Hersh Tapadia
So it’s a story about building the University of Washington crew team juxtaposed with N*** Germany’s attempt to gain like global credibility by hosting the Olympics and building the Olympics. But the main point of the book, not to spoil it, but the lessons in the journey, not the conclusion, is that when they were trying to build this crew team, when they put the ten by the number strongest rowers in the boat, what they found was the boat was not performing. It wasn’t that fast. But when they put the set of people in the boat that were the most harmonious could work together really well, they found the boat would effortlessly outstrip all of the other boats. And so it was this really fascinating lesson about how we have to build teams.
Hersh Tapadia
We can’t just reward individual performers, but we have to build teams and the teams have to work really well together. And as I read this book and just consume this, the thing that really struck me about this book was it wasn’t just about how they work when they’re on, but it was also what these people do when they’re off. Where do they come from? What are their backgrounds, what are their motivations? How do their life experiences color the way they go about their day? And you really have to understand the whole person in order to construct this team. And if you can do that, you can really build an effective organization. Nice.
Brett
It’s very refreshing to hear something other than Zero to One by Peter Thiel. I think that’s what 80% of people say when I ask that question. So refreshing to hear. And I’ll check that out. That’s super interesting.
Hersh Tapadia
It’s a really fun read. Nice.
Brett
Awesome. Okay, cool. So I’ll dig into that and then now let’s dive into all stacks. So I read on your website you describe yourselves, the Value Stream Intelligence platform. Can you explain what that is?
Hersh Tapadia
Absolutely. So fundamentally, if we take this out of technology land and say what problem are we trying to solve? The problem that we’re trying to solve is a problem of expectation management with our stakeholders. So if you think about what I was saying earlier about how we got to now the challenge that we have in a software development organization is that software development is often this like silo that sits off to the side and the business is this like, super instrumented running machine. And we’re trying to figure out what’s changing on the ground, because all of our companies are software companies now. We’re trying to figure out, like, is that feature going to show up? Are we going to be able to resolve that bug? Are we going to deliver?
Hersh Tapadia
When we say we’re going to deliver, what return are we getting for the investments we’re making in software? And there’s this chasm in between these functions that’s really hard to bridge. And one of the challenges we have is that when we find out something is not going to go the way we wanted it to go, it’s a surprise. And when you think about what are you actually upset about? You’re actually upset about the surprise more so than you’re upset about what happened. It’s the way you found out. And so colloquially, the problem that we’re trying to solve is this surprise problem, this expectation management problem, so that we can help get aligned on, hey, this thing that were building, this feature, this bug that we’re trying to repair, it’s not going the way we expected it to, or it’s going better than we expected.
Hersh Tapadia
And here’s what’s changing so that when the final conclusion comes, it’s exactly what we expected and no one’s surprised by it. And we do that by integrating all the different types of data that’s leveraged by your developers, you QA people, your product folks. And we integrate all that data to get signals that help us understand what process does our software development organization use, how are we trending towards the outcomes? We’ve committed to, say, delivering a release or shipping a feature and what specific tactical items are breaking those processes that if we can recover quickly, we can keep everything on track. And so the way it works is we analyze all the data that your developers primarily are already generating and the tools that they already work in the way that they already work. Nobody has to change any behavior or process.
Hersh Tapadia
We grab that data, we analyze it historically and going forward, and we give you dashboards that give you a set of forecasts on your key commitments, metrics around your process, analytics and alerts around where you’re breaking those processes. So that your organization can have this really holistic, data driven view of how the engineering is functioning and how the stakeholders of engineering can work together with engineering to really be effectively delivering for the business.
Brett
And is value stream intelligence an existing category, or is that a category that you’re creating?
Hersh Tapadia
It’s a category that exists that we’re deriving a bit. So for a while there’s this idea of value stream management. And value stream management was something that kind of popped onto the scene about ten years ago. And the promise of value stream management hasn’t quite been realized to date, in the sense that a lot of the original players in value stream management were beholden to how the data structures worked at the time. And so it required a lot of manual work to get the systems ready for mapping out. How does a company realize value from idea to delivery? And so in that get your jira all aligned to a specific way of operating, make your developers work a certain way and so it take a note of services work to get implemented.
Hersh Tapadia
What we’ve done five years in to this journey is we’ve applied this intelligence layer to ValueStream management which is why we call it Value Stream intelligence. And what it allows us to do is it allows us to take this perspective of don’t change anything to get started you just plug in with all stacks. We’ll map out, analyze everything using our data models and because we’re conforming to you rather than you conforming to us, we can take this really iterative approach to discovery turning the lights on and then taking this really incremental approach to process change and process improvement. And because of that we find adoption goes a lot faster and value is realized a lot quicker in this agile way rather than this very manual whole hog way that you had to do in the past. Got it.
Brett
And looking at Gartner site they have value stream management platforms. Of course they have their acronym VSMPs. So if you’re just looking at that there’s like I think 16 companies on there. Do you have your customers comparing you side by side to those different platforms or do they view it as something completely separate from all the tools in this existing category?
Hersh Tapadia
What’s really fascinating about this is it depends and it depends on a lot of different features. So there are the old school value stream management platforms that we often sit alongside of because we have deeper operational data than they have. And so we can be very complementary. Then there’s some of the current crop of folks that are about the same age and traction as us and we’ll compete directly with that. But to be honest, this market is still pretty new and very large. And so most of the deals that we go through we’re actually not competing at all. We’re going after them solo because what we’re actually competing with is maybe somebody, some enterprising person said this data is really important, I’m going to build something in tableau for Power bi to really get a handle on it.
Hersh Tapadia
But now the organization is scaled to the point where that’s no longer tenable and they’re looking for a solution. Got it.
Brett
And then what’s the go to market motion here? I see on your website there’s a free trial. Are you entirely product led? Do you have a sales.org? What does that look like?
Hersh Tapadia
So we’re a hybrid. We have plenty of customers that come in. They can self service set up. We also have a sales.org that we leverage towards our ICP. Typically we’re looking at kind of upper middle market and lower enterprise type customers with the sales.org. But one thing we offer to all customers, regardless of size and who sets up, is that we have a very accessible customer success organization because ultimately we’re here to help teach you how to fish and help you solve problems. And so no matter who it is, they get to link up with us and we can embed inside their organization using chat tools and things like that.
Hersh Tapadia
And using that, we’re there to brainstorm and solve problems with them because what we want to do is we want to get our customers to the place where they’re not saying, I need to understand this like baseline metric. I want to see how many stories we completed or how much code we constructed. We want them to be able to storytell with the data. And so what we say is we’ll teach you how to storytell, we’ll teach you how to advocate for your positions and assert your impact on the organization and we’ll help construct those stories with you if that’s what would help you be successful inside of your.
Hersh Tapadia
And by doing that, our customers, they’re not just saying, here’s a dashboard, and I looked at it every week, they’re actually making persuasive arguments for the value they’re creating and the resources they need inside of their orgs. Interesting.
Brett
And how much traction have you seen so far since launching?
Hersh Tapadia
It’s been really great. It I mean, one thing that’s really interesting about our market is when we launched the company in 2018 to about 2020, what we saw was obviously there’s the early build part of the product, but there’s also this kind of market education that goes on. So why do you care about this data? Why is it important that you have this data? Yes, sales and marketing is data driven, but should engineering also be data driven? And there’s always been this tension in engineering. The thing that’s changed from 2021 onward is the market has totally come around to this position where we now when we interface with customers, we’re not teaching people why this data is important, what value they can get from it.
Hersh Tapadia
What we’re showing them is how they can leverage the data to storytell rather than what happens when you get the data. And as soon as that changed in the market, what we found is that adoption is really scaled rapidly and we’re seeing larger and larger organizations and those organizations join us faster and faster. So now we have partners that we work with. We have large kind of enterprise companies, we have a number of fast growing startups and mid market orgs that we work with as well, all in service of. We want to be a really integrated, data informed organization as part of the business. Nice.
Brett
And as I’m sure you’re well aware at this point, bringing an innovative idea to market is never easy. What would you say has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far, and how did you overcome it?
Hersh Tapadia
It’s a great question. I mean, I think the biggest challenge in a lot of these startup situations is really about timing. I had a really great investor tell me there’s this kind of fundamental market dynamic, right? When you have a new or relatively new category, which is that is the market growing faster than you are, or are you growing faster than the market’s growing? If you’re growing faster than the market is growing, at some point you’re going to hit a ceiling and you’re going to crash right into that ceiling. And when you do that, you’re kind of capped out on growth, right? And from a startup perspective, when you’re investing into growing as fast as possible, sometimes you hit that ceiling and it’s very painful because you’ve been spending unnaturally to get to that point, especially in the past few years.
Hersh Tapadia
What we’ve been really fortunate is we’ve been able to kind of time our growth, some by luck, some by intentionality, to the growth of the market. And as this market is really blossoming right now, we’re able to scale into it. Whereas I think if we had started the company ten years ago instead of five years ago, we might be running into that ceiling right now. So there is this sense of there’s a little bit of luck. You can’t really time a market, and bringing that innovative idea to market is hard, especially as the market is relatively new. But we feel really fortunate of having been able to thread this needle.
Brett
And what excites you most about the work you get to do every day?
Hersh Tapadia
What I really love in particular and this goes back to my background a little bit the most dissatisfying thing about engineering for me was context. I felt like were always building, were learning, were being taught to operate in a vacuum as engineers, and it almost made me not want to be an engineer anymore. And so being able to work in this place where what we do is provide a platform to help engineering organizations live in context instead of outside of context, so that any developer inside of their organization can draw a line from the work that they’re doing day to the goals of the business and understand how those things line up. That provides color to the experience of being a contributing part of an organization in ways that engineering often doesn’t get to experience. And it can be really unsatisfying.
Hersh Tapadia
One of my earliest jobs, I actually just left because I couldn’t find anyone around me who could explain, what do we actually do here and why does the company care about this task? Because we can explain that I found it so unsatisfying that I left and found another job. And so the fact that we get to give the tools to deliver that context to our customers so that more people can have that holistic satisfying experience and more engineering organizations can fully participate in the visions of business, not just by happenstance, but with intentionality. That’s super exciting. It’s like the culmination of everything I was dissatisfied over my career to date. Nice.
Brett
That’s amazing. And if we zoom out into the future, what would you say is the five year vision for the company?
Hersh Tapadia
It’s a great question and I bet if you went back and asked some of those folks you’ve interviewed previously twelve months ago, they’d have a very different five year vision today versus twelve months ago. Just looking at how the markets changed. My vision is we’re looking for ways to make enduring impacts where engineering is enabled to help their organizations realize the value that engineering is bringing to the business. And realize is a very intentional word, right. Because both see the value and gain the value. And depending on where an organization is in this journey, they may 1 need to see it and then gain it. Maybe they see it, but they don’t know how to realize it. And they want to do that.
Hersh Tapadia
But we are the platform that enables companies to do that in a way that if you think about the business and engineering as two trains running on parallel tracks right now in most companies, what happens is those trains are running on these parallel tracks. They look out the window, they can see each other and they’re wondering if they’ll stop at the same station. And every now and then they stop at the same station. Some values realize and they feel good out about it, but most of the time they don’t actually know. What we want to do is we want to make that one train. Nice.
Brett
Amazing. Well, unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today. But before we wrap up, if people want to follow along with your journey, where’s the best place for them to.
Hersh Tapadia
So you can find us allstacks.com. I’m actually the only person on the internet with my name, and so if you look me up, my name is my handle on pretty much everything. Twitter is Hersh Tapadia, LinkedIn is Hersh Tapadia. Shoot me a note, my email is my name. Easy to find?
Brett
Sounds easy enough. Well, thanks so much for your time, really appreciate it and best of luck in executing on this vision.
Hersh Tapadia
Sounds good. Thank you so much.
Brett
All right, keep in touch.
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