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Tommy Wang, Chief Business Officer at ClickUp, on the rise of the all-in-one

Jan-Erik Asplund
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Background

The “compound startup” model has become all the rage with the success of companies like Rippling ($350M ARR in 2023, Kleiner Perkins, $1.4B raised) in HR and Ramp ($295M net annualized revenue in 2023, Founders Fund, $1.9B) in finance. We reached out to Tommy Wang, ClickUp’s Chief Business Officer, to talk to an OG all-in-one that’s rapidly scaling in productivity.

Key points from our conversation via Sacra AI:

  • Contrary to the ~2010 consumerization of the enterprise dogma that founders should build simple & elegant best-in-breed point solutions, ClickUp counter-positioned as a horizontal all-in-one productivity solution for every industry, every company and everyone at work, combining tasks (Asana), docs (Quip), Kanban (Trello) and more. “The reality of how ClickUp broke through the noise and found early success is we simply worked harder and faster. We burned the midnight oil in the early days and shipped new features every week, which we still do to this day. Product velocity is unlocked, in my opinion, more than anything else by sheer grit and concentrated talent.”
  • Versus Microsoft Office and Google Workspace, ClickUp competes as a fully integrated & interoperable bundle, not as a point solution that can be displaced by a copycat using distribution leverage. “I’m a little less worried about Microsoft pulling a Teams on us since our product’s a lot more complicated than chat. The more power and flexibility that you build in, the harder it is for an incumbent to rip you off. ClickUp’s built on a rich hierarchy of relationships, a ton of primitives, custom workflows, a growing ecosystem, and an organic community of partners, coaches, and users that serve as a moat for us over time.”
  • As a generalized, horizontal all-in-one, ClickUp has the upside optionality to back into department-specific products & workflows representing massive categories like CRM (HubSpot), performance management (Lattice), and issue tracking (Jira), as it aggregates engagement and data within an organization. “We’re focused on really owning all work data as the foundation for a company’s knowledge and workflows. . . We’re analogous to past waves of no code tools such as ServiceNow, SharePoint, or WordPress [which] focused on generic needs first before configuring solutions and a wide range of workflows. ”

Questions

  1. What do you mean when you talk about "all in one" at ClickUp?
  2. How does ClickUp's platform strategy differ from other compound startups like Rippling that build multiple products around a core system of record?
  3. ClickUp is one price per seat with access to all features/functionality for the whole org. How do you see the tradeoffs and benefits of that approach vs. having a separate price per seat and capabilities based on role (Figma / Zoom) vs. pricing per seat per product (HubSpot / Freshworks)?
  4. Companies in this category like Monday and Asana spend a lot on sales and marketing. How does ClickUp think about managing CAC and building an efficient sales and marketing operation?
  5. Who is ClickUp’s customer, and how has that evolved since the company’s inception? Are there any particular big verticals that are represented, and how heavy are you on tech vs. non-tech?
  6. Tell us about ClickUp's land and expand motion. Do people sign up because they want an all-in-one or because they want to use a particular product? Who adopts? Typical product you see customers landing in first and how do they expand their usage and seats from there?
  7. Can you break down how important self-serve & PLG is as a GTM for ClickUp vs. outbound sales + partner-driven growth? How has that changed over time?
  8. Productivity software is an insanely competitive category where success hinges on product velocity. Can you talk about the approach to building product at ClickUp and any unique approach to architecture that enables you to ship new product especially quickly?
  9. Monday and Asana went public around the same time. Since then, their fortunes have diverged, with Monday growing overall revenue much faster, enterprise revenue much faster, etc. What is Monday doing right in this space?
  10. Zeb talks about figuring out what people didn’t like about tools like Trello and Asana and using that to drive the product direction for ClickUp early on. What are the core things that ClickUp differentiates on vs. tools like Asana and Monday today?
  11. To what degree do you see companies using overlapping project management tools, e.g. one team using Asana, one team using Monday, and one team using ClickUp? Do you see that changing as companies look to cut spending and how do they think about consolidation?
  12. Microsoft and Google have productivity bundles with huge distribution that are layering on more project management tools, like Microsoft’s Notion-like Loop. How does ClickUp’s positioning as an all-in-one work when selling to companies that are already 100% in one of these ecosystems? What's the risk of more direct competition from Office and Google Apps?
  13. Airtable is a lego / building block type tool that enables customers to build lightweight apps for different use cases. What is the nature of competition between tools like Airtable and ClickUp?
  14. To what extent can ClickUp’s design and whiteboarding tools eat up some of the use cases that teams have for tools like Canva and Figma? What might teams do in ClickUp and what might they still do in a Canva or Figma?
  15. Building an ecosystem with incentives for creators to generate content, plugins, and templates has been a key part of building a platform for companies like Figma, Notion, and Airtable. ClickUp has a verified consultant program—how do you think about what kind of ecosystem you want to build and who should be driving it, e.g. open-source contributors or paid partners?
  16. Building “verticalized” instantiations of a horizontal product is a strategy that companies like Airtable have used to sell into the enterprise and drive higher retention and price per seat. Is there a world where you go deeper into verticals like “ClickUp for Sales”, “ClickUp for Issue Tracking”, etc?
  17. What is ClickUp’s philosophy around AI? Is it foundational to your long-term vision for the company?
  18. If everything goes right for ClickUp over the next 5 years, what will it become and how is the world changed?

Interview

What do you mean when you talk about "all in one" at ClickUp?

Since we started in 2017, ClickUp has been branded as “one app for all your work." The vision was always to bring together tasks, docs, goals, and chat, to put all your work in one place. A single app for both collaboration and communication to break down silos at work.

If you look at our current product portfolio, we offer tasks (Asana), docs (Notion), goals (Lattice), chat (Slack), time (Toggl), issues (Jira), search (Glean), whiteboards (Miro), clips (Loom), and so much more in a single app. That’s what we mean by “all in one.”

With the added power of relationships, hierarchy, integrations, automations, custom apps, and AI, users are able to easily configure ClickUp as a no code platform into exactly what they need. As a flexible, un-opinionated tool, ClickUp configures to users’ needs and preferences, instead of forcing them to work how we think they should – in fact, our only hard opinion is that this app’s for work, not personal. We leave the rest up to our community and customers.

For me, it’s funny but gratifying to see everyone branded as “all in one” nowadays. I’ve now seen a couple dozen decks in the last month with the words “compound startup,” and some even toss in “AI” for good measure. That’s the flavor of the day in SF right now. But if you rewind the clock 5-10 years, it was a polar opposite reaction from most VCs. People felt “all in one” or “everything to everyone” couldn’t be done and, even the year before we raised our Series A, the popular wisdom investors gave was to build for a specific industry or persona, to make the app more rigid and opinionated. Thank God we chose to listen to our customers and intuition.

ClickUp is still for everyone. We serve teams of all sizes, in all industries, and across functions. The reality is, until ClickUp, Rippling, and Revolut came along, super apps just haven’t been seen in the Western market. Us succeeding flipped the narrative to “all in one.”

How does ClickUp's platform strategy differ from other compound startups like Rippling that build multiple products around a core system of record?

ClickUp takes a very different approach from Rippling, Zendesk, or HubSpot, and even the last gen of enterprise software giants like Workday, Atlassian, or Salesforce. Those solutions are use case driven and tend to focus on a specific group of needs: HR, support, engineering, sales, etc. Rippling seems deliberately focused on HR and employee data, whereas we’re focused on really owning all work data as the foundation for a company’s knowledge and workflows.

Our product is more generalized, akin to no code apps such as Monday, Notion, or Webflow. We provide easy to use and highly configurable app builders. We’re more analogous to past waves of no code tools such as ServiceNow, SharePoint, or WordPress. Each of these focused on generic needs first before configuring solutions and a wide range of workflows.

For example, ClickUp is rated #1 for many things you wouldn't expect, such as form builder, time tracking, and PPM. We're even rated #3 on G2 for CRM after Salesforce and HubSpot. It comes down to owning the work data, rather than either customer or employee records.

The issue is particularly pronounced when working with cloud GPUs, where the bandwidth between storage and CPU memory is often limited - you're not going to be working with state-of-the-art SSDs with super-fast transfer speeds.

As a result, end users must absorb the significant cost of transferring the model from storage into CPU memory. What we provide instead is a system to manage multiple model weights in CPU memory, allowing users to quickly swap different models in and out of their GPU- with advanced tricks like page locking and parallel processing to speed things up even further.

ClickUp is one price per seat with access to all features/functionality for the whole org. How do you see the tradeoffs and benefits of that approach vs. having a separate price per seat and capabilities based on role (Figma / Zoom) vs. pricing per seat per product (HubSpot / Freshworks)?

I think it really depends on the stage and maturity of the business, as well as the segment you’re in. People usually have a “fair baseline” for the price and pricing model they’re willing to pay in certain categories of software. Pricing strategy is also changing quickly from paying for seats to paying for value. ClickUp's approach has always been more value-driven.

We're orienting long-term towards what is fair and what is going to earn us the maximum usage from customers. The more they utilize us, the more value they get, and the more valuable we'll be to them in the future. We're optimizing for healthy cohorts over short term profits.

ClickUp gives you access to almost an all-you-can-eat buffet for the lowest possible price, and we only charge more on plan tiers as users start to adopt more niche, advanced features. This gives users more value upfront to justify the price and get a mutual win-win. Usage sells the product in freemium models, which allows sales to focus their time on the highest value opportunities.

Then there are also a number of things we're doing on chat, analytics, and AI seeing incredible adoption, including over 50,000 teams on the waitlist for chat alone. These signals tell us there’s demand for more consolidation across products, add-ons, and solutions.

Companies in this category like Monday and Asana spend a lot on sales and marketing. How does ClickUp think about managing CAC and building an efficient sales and marketing operation?

Well, to start, Monday is one of the best performing software businesses in the public markets. They're hyper-efficient with $1 billion of ARR and $200 million of FCF. It's incredible. They’ve set the standard for what top class efficiency looks like at scale.

We are on par with Monday in that regard and much, much more efficient today, having cut our payback by over two-thirds since the “growth at all cost” phase. It was a different game during the ZIRP and COVID era, but expectations reset after the Fed rate hikes and high growth software got hit the hardest back in ‘21. The last 3 years were a tough but necessary reset.

Thankfully, we have some really discerning investors – such as David (Sacks) at Craft or Alex (Clayton) at Meritech – who’ve taken pains to help us position ahead of the curve. In the past couple quarters, the focus on growth has renewed and investors seem to still value growth 3x more than profitability, but the difference now is investors look for durable growth at a reasonable cost. You need to focus more on LTV to CAC and GM-adjusted payback than before.

Our business is lucky to have endured well. We’ve managed to grow faster this year while cutting spend, and we’ll be cash flow breakeven at the end of year.

Who is ClickUp’s customer, and how has that evolved since the company’s inception? Are there any particular big verticals that are represented, and how heavy are you on tech vs. non-tech?

ClickUp has actually benefited from never really being tech-heavy. It felt like the SF startups only heard about us in ‘21 after we raised our $400m Series C from Andreessen and Lightspeed. Until then, we were bootstrapped for the first 3 years. We literally didn't have the money for ads.

The only way anyone found out about us was through organic word-of-mouth or from our blogs.

Even starting from $1 million or so of ARR, ClickUp has been about half international, half US in terms of users and revenue. And from the start, we’ve served companies from mom and pop shops to Fortune 100 large enterprises. That hasn’t shifted much as we matured, though we do see more strategic IT buyers and larger public companies taking notice.

Early on, and to this day, the use cases we see the most frequently are:

1. IT and product development at the top

2. Marketing and creative as a close number two

3. Then services and agencies in third place

There's also a big long tail of alternative use cases of course. Oftentimes, we land in a team or function then land-and-expand across the account.

Tell us about ClickUp's land and expand motion. Do people sign up because they want an all-in-one or because they want to use a particular product? Who adopts? Typical product you see customers landing in first and how do they expand their usage and seats from there?

It's hard to choose since people come to us with both very small and very big needs. Many find us from product hooks that aren’t even prominent, such as our forms, dashboards, or OKRs.

I think, to your point, a large majority of people do seek us out when they experience some sort of task, project, or portfolio management need. It’s our bread and butter.

The analogy I drew to ServiceNow is helpful to expand on here. A company might start out using ServiceNow for ITSM, but they’ll end up using them for employee experience in HR, help desk in customer service, and so on. We have that same approach, as our lands in accounts often start small and quickly spread across new pockets of the business – from marketing to services, operations to product, and so on.

Can you break down how important self-serve & PLG is as a GTM for ClickUp vs. outbound sales + partner-driven growth? How has that changed over time?

The history is that when Zeb and I first met, it was actually 100% self-serve with under a couple million revenue. By the time we did our Series C in 2021, we were already over a third sales with the rest being self-serve. Today, we're probably half sales and half self-serve, with about 5% coming from the channel.

Fundamentally, we’re a PLG (product led growth) business, so we're very efficient. Our outbound sales motion is more of a warm outbound into our existing install base, whether they're free or paid, and programmatic outbound, which is more of a combination of paid ads and automated outreach. We're not fielding an army of thousands of sales reps pounding the phones every day cold calling. That approach can work, but it's not the most efficient.

Productivity software is an insanely competitive category where success hinges on product velocity. Can you talk about the approach to building product at ClickUp and any unique approach to architecture that enables you to ship new product especially quickly?

The truthful answer is that any team that achieves a $5+ billion market cap does so by excelling in execution. People expect a philosophical or strategic answer, but while we grow more strategic and wise over time, no amount of smarts compensates for a lack of hard work. The reality of how ClickUp broke through the noise and found early success is we simply worked harder and faster. We burned the midnight oil in the early days and shipped new features every week, which we still do to this day. Product velocity is unlocked, in my opinion, more than anything else by sheer grit and concentrated talent – Zeb calls them 10x, 100x engineers.

For instance, the last few years, I've actually spent a great deal of time hiring for engineering. It was the #1 priority to stabilize and scale our product so that our innovation doesn't grind to a halt. We've been focused on continuous improvement, and we've acquired incredibly talented product talent – small teams of startup founders and founding engineers working in universal search, business analytics, resource management, and so on. We're essentially acqui-hiring teams that share the same attitude and work ethic. The sell is simple: we offer a captive customer base to product focused teams who really enjoy seeing users get value. We give them a huge platform for distribution, a lot of autonomy, and a chance to make a big impact for customers.

As for the architecture question on how we enable people to ship fast, we keep the experience flexible by re-using the same data models and frontend components. All the reusable building blocks we spent time writing made our app more composable for our developers too.

Monday and Asana went public around the same time. Since then, their fortunes have diverged, with Monday growing overall revenue much faster, enterprise revenue much faster, etc. What is Monday doing right in this space?

My views on this have evolved over time. What I tell people nowadays is anyone who builds a billion-dollar business is probably doing many things right. Dustin did ok on his first business – a little friends and family app called Facebook – and the co-CEOs at Monday execute very well.

To speak to the divergence: we track it very closely. One trades at about a 4x multiple, the other at about a 14.5x multiple. It just comes down to growth and profitability. Asana is growing around 10% year-over-year with a 7% free cash flow margin, spending about $15 million in free cash flow. Monday, on the other hand, is at 34% year-on-year growth with a 22% free cash flow margin. When you add those numbers up, you get a very different picture of what each business does, how consistently they execute, and how profitable they’ll be at maturity.

That's what investors are responding to.

As I said, people still value growth inherently a lot more than profitability. I reckon Asana will get there too in terms of free cash flow margins. It's just that Monday is growing a lot faster and fairly efficiently nowadays, so that efficient growth is rewarded.

I can speak better to what we're doing, but my perspective on Monday is they're great at go to market and fast follow well on product. They broke through the noise by building a fantastic paid acquisition engine, and they've executed a bit better than Asana on the land-and-expand sales motion, especially in SMB and mid market. Overall, my impression is that Monday has a stronger go to market across marketing, sales, and channel relative to the rest of our competitors.

Asana, from my perspective, seems to do a bit better in large enterprises. They have a couple of folks on the strategic team over there who are absolutely ripping. My impression is they're pulling off some really big deals in the $5-10m range that you don't see as much of yet from Monday. But you know, everything takes time.

Zeb talks about figuring out what people didn’t like about tools like Trello and Asana and using that to drive the product direction for ClickUp early on. What are the core things that ClickUp differentiates on vs. tools like Asana and Monday today?

Well, we didn’t start 7 years ago with just Monday and Asana. We showed up late to the race with a dozen well-funded competitors doing around $100m or more. You only remember the winners, but few remember all the competitors we overtook. Many ended up selling to private equity.

It really comes down to vision: we aim for flexibility and power without sacrificing ease of use, which is a lot easier said than done. The flexibility stems from the fact we started clean without any preconceived notions of how people should organize their work. Zeb, as a born and bred founder, never worked in a corporate setting prior. He didn't know how people worked, so he came in listening closely to customers from a variety of industries, as diverse as manufacturers, massive hospitals, and small agencies. When you have such a diverse set of customers and teams ranging in size from 10 to 10,000, you build in a lot more flexibility from the get-go.

That's one part of the architecture that's really hard to change. If you start out opinionated, it's really hard to make an app less opinionated over time. But if you start out less opinionated, it’s way easier to make it more opinionated over time (or to preserve that flexibility).

As for power, I'll give you one clear example, though there are probably a thousand I could name once we get deeper into a product demo. The one that comes up the most nowadays is we bring together both communication and collaboration. This is something that no one else does. All of the other collaboration tools out there – whether Monday, Notion, etc – are fairly undifferentiated on functionality, so it’s on us to keep innovating on experience. Earlier this year, we released chat and there’s more to be unveiled.

These two lanes are fast converging. With AI, changing interfaces require adaptation to not get left behind. I think if you're very surface level and purely application focused in productivity, it’ll get harder to hang onto daily active usage as more apps give people simple, intuitive ways to access data currently hidden away by hierarchies, clicks, and silos.

To what degree do you see companies using overlapping project management tools, e.g. one team using Asana, one team using Monday, and one team using ClickUp? Do you see that changing as companies look to cut spending and how do they think about consolidation?

The cycle of bundling and unbundling has been happening for ages. It's not a new phenomenon. We're currently in a new cycle of re-bundling after seeing a proliferation of SaaS over the last 10 years. Many IT departments were overwhelmed by the pace of change and end users began innovating ahead of the curve. A "shadow IT" world emerged, where end users started picking up tools like ClickUp, Slack, Dropbox, or Notion, as well as hundreds of point solutions.

The issue is that end users usually think mostly of their own function or use case, without really considering other teams, when they pick up a tool. I'll give you an early example of this.

When we look at a simple suite like Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that started off as the same product, most people have a preference or default that feels more natural to them. These three apps were all generic until functional users got ahold of them and started infusing more opinion into how they should work for that particular group. Even worse, those apps were handed to dev teams with differing styles and assigned to personas with differing opinions. There was very little coordination for a long time. So you ended up with Word for the everyday worker, Excel for finance and ops teams, and PowerPoint for marketing and creative folks, but they don’t feel integrated or interoperable.

It’s so dumb, but the same thing has happened a hundred times over in most businesses with every function bringing in a dozen tools that solve their needs but creates overhead for other functions and silos the information. That's why so many product suites in the enterprise don’t feel at all integrated. It’s akin to buying a lego set with four or five pieces that don’t connect. They just happened to be sold as a bundle, but the pieces have nothing to do with one another.

These days, consolidation is picking up thanks to three factors: ease of use, security, and cost. The end users, CIO, and CFO all have a say in purchasing decisions these days.

If you can offer a flexible experience, consolidate the risks of app sprawl, and save companies money by replacing expensive point solutions, you’re in a great place. We're hearing many IT leaders say, "we might as well run an evaluation to decide a winner since we're using four or five different productivity tools with overlapping functionality."

As an all-in-one platform, ClickUp is actually getting a huge boost right now from that tailwind of re-consolidation.

Microsoft and Google have productivity bundles with huge distribution that are layering on more project management tools, like Microsoft’s Notion-like Loop. How does ClickUp’s positioning as an all-in-one work when selling to companies that are already 100% in one of these ecosystems? What's the risk of more direct competition from Office and Google Apps?

There are two vectors to address: the degree of integration and the level of focus.

I'll start with the degree of integration. Take Microsoft, for example, all their products roll up to the same person - a guy named Jeff Teper. However, each of those products are owned by a different manager, a few dozen engineers, and a team of designers. The end result is that you still can’t convert a PowerPoint presentation into an Excel sheet, or cells in an Excel sheet into paragraphs in a Word doc. Unless you copy and reformat it manually. If Microsoft’s bundle is effectively a sum of the parts, we aim for a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

Even now, when you look at the Microsoft products, whether it's Viva or Teams or Office or Power or SharePoint and so on, they feel very distinct despite being bundled. It's like flipping between different channels on a TV. Yes, it's the same cable bill, it's the same TV, but it’s still disconcerting when you go from a baking show to a horror flick to animal planet.

It’s half about the details in my opinion. It’s about being close enough to, and caring enough about, users to fix all the papercuts. The Microsoft 365 bundle is solid but they stand no chance from a product quality standpoint compared to a focused founder who carries the product vision and oversees the entire product end-to-end. They had that while Bill and Steve were around.

Most people don’t know the history of how these things came about. Microsoft had their own homegrown founder, Brian McDonald, who was the original inventor of what became Microsoft Projects. This guy is incredible. He coded the first spreadsheet app for the Mac, sold what became Projects to Microsoft, then created Outlook for email, turned around Bing in search, and then finished his career launching Teams to take down Slack in chat.

Back in the Bill Gates days, Microsoft had this amazing knack for identifying and bringing in exceptional builders. We do the same thing today with the acqui-hire strategy we’ve been prioritizing over the last year. We’re giving founders a huge platform, lots of autonomy, and lifting blockers out of their way so that they're able to better serve our customers.

Then let me speak to the focus and passion piece a bit. I’m a little less worried about Microsoft pulling a Teams on us since our product’s a lot more complicated than chat. The more power and flexibility that you build in, the harder it is for an incumbent to rip you off. ClickUp’s built on a rich hierarchy of relationships, a ton of primitives, custom workflows, a growing ecosystem, and an organic community of partners, coaches, and users that serve as a moat for us over time.

I’m also less concerned since most of the guys like Brian are retired now. He was there from ‘89 to a couple years back. These days, there aren’t many founder profiles at Microsoft who have the ability to rally folks from a dozen different orgs and many layers of reporting to create that magic. There are so many talented folks at Microsoft, but few combine the product genius, technical aptitude, and political savvy to ship a great all-in-one product and also bring along 25,000 other people. The building is hard, but big company politics and dependencies make it near impossible for a new crop of product leaders to be as emboldened as Brian’s generation of intrapreneurs.

For Microsoft or Google, who have a couple hundred thousand employees and a productivity app that makes up less than 5% of revenue, this isn’t even close to the top of their priorities. However, we are 100% focused and 10 times as passionate about the product that we're building than the 5th generation of engineers maintaining an app. Not only is the market massive and expanding, our product is also the most integrated and innovating fastest.

Airtable is a lego / building block type tool that enables customers to build lightweight apps for different use cases. What is the nature of competition between tools like Airtable and ClickUp?

We don’t really see Airtable in the market to be honest. I know we’re not competing for the same dollars at least, since we haven’t seen them in a sizable direct compete in ages. If a prospect was already using Airtable company wide, I still wouldn’t have any trouble selling them ClickUp. We can land ClickUp with any stakeholder up or down in the ladder and expand once we have a wedge, similar to how ServiceNow or SAP have a solution for every C-level in the enterprise then work on selling their other solutions to the other C-level functions.

So no, I don't think we're truly competitive with Airtable. Definitely not in the existential sense.

To what extent can ClickUp’s design and whiteboarding tools eat up some of the use cases that teams have for tools like Canva and Figma? What might teams do in ClickUp and what might they still do in a Canva or Figma?

It happens often but it’s not the focus. We only give teams the option, rather than forcing it on them. Whether Canva, Figma, or ClickUp, we all already have our own giants to displace already so it doesn’t really make sense to beat each other up over a 1% overlap. That said, if you gave it enough time, we’d all eventually converge. People think of Rippling as an HR tool but I wouldn’t be shocked if they chose to do CRM or help desk in the next 5 years.

I think any competent team can and will add new products, but it takes longer than you think to win significant market share. Take the example of Workday, which is dominant in HCM in the enterprise but still fighting to gain relevance with CFOs for their financial planning suite. It takes a while, measured in decades, not years.

ClickUp’s value prop is that we bring all your work in one place and keep your teams working in the same platform, so of course some users will choose to use our whiteboards over Canva or Figma, but the really hardcore whiteboarding users will probably still use those tools and we’re okay with that as long as they use ClickUp too.

Building an ecosystem with incentives for creators to generate content, plugins, and templates has been a key part of building a platform for companies like Figma, Notion, and Airtable. ClickUp has a verified consultant program—how do you think about what kind of ecosystem you want to build and who should be driving it, e.g. open-source contributors or paid partners?

It’s the most strategic lever for long term defensibility. My advice to founders looking at layering in a channel motion is to take sincere interest in how your partners make money and what they need to build a sustainable business. I often say: treat our partners the same as our customers.

Anyway, in the beginning, our community came together organically before we started adding resources to nurture and grow it faster. At this point, we have hundreds of affiliated consultants and dozens of what we call regional SIs - service providers that joined us from either bigger ecosystems, such as ServiceNow’s or HubSpot’s, or direct competitors, such as Smartsheet and Monday partners who started hearing about ClickUp more and more.

Some of these partners are exclusively building their practices on ClickUp, while others couple us with a complementary tool, such as the HubSpot plus ClickUp consultancies that customize CRM and marketing solutions on HubSpot then configure operations and services solutions on ClickUp for their clients. They say "ClickUp plus HubSpot is a complete operating system for everything: go-to-market, operations, and back office."

We're not playing in the big SI game yet and just starting to see success with AWS marketplace. It’s not one big push, but nudges over years. Ecosystem requires really long term thinking.

Building “verticalized” instantiations of a horizontal product is a strategy that companies like Airtable have used to sell into the enterprise and drive higher retention and price per seat. Is there a world where you go deeper into verticals like “ClickUp for Sales”, “ClickUp for Issue Tracking”, etc?

We land in engineering a lot, whereas sales usually follows another team in. Even in the early days, we saw a lot of Jira competes and it was very exciting to see technical and non-technical finally coming together in the same tool. That said, I don’t think it’s essential to win on sales or engineering first. It’s much more practical to surround those functions, meaning you win over the product and product marketing teams around engineering, or the customer and revenue ops teams around sales. The two functions are oriented very differently though.

With engineering, devops will likely stay very fragmented, the adoption happens bottoms up, and developers ultimately care most about best in breed. And with sales, there’s a tendency to go with tried-and-true, the adoption happens top down, and salespeople usually prefer simplicity over power. Both functions have big budgets so there’s a lot of competition.

I think it’s much more likely that an engineering or sales team chooses to use ClickUp as well, rather than being the function that leads the way. If all of your supporting functions are already using it, it makes sense. Otherwise, we’re one of a smattering of options and we’ll win quite a bit of business that way too, but we won’t consolidate market share.

Over time, as AI really levels the playing field from an end-user interface standpoint, I think you're going to see a lot of the functions that you might ascribe to an issue tracking tool (e.g. Jira) or CRM (e.g. Salesforce) show up in whichever interface you’re most used to working out of, whether that’s tasks, docs, chats, or etc.

We don't know exactly how that's going to happen yet. I don't think anyone has a crystal ball, but we do see a tidal wave of change happening at the interface layer. I just know ClickUp is really well-positioned to capitalize, and we're an extremely fast-moving team.

What is ClickUp’s philosophy around AI? Is it foundational to your long-term vision for the company?

AI will likely be the greatest productivity enabler of our generation. Every wave of innovation in productivity has started with simplicity or power with a tradeoff between the two. The magic of AI is that it seems it’ll allow us to increase power and simplicity at once.

This is probably one of the most exciting times to build software. We feel incredibly lucky that we had this posture of flexibility and power from the start. I don't know how we got this lucky, but we've landed in the perfect spot at the perfect time. Application layer companies with flexible and powerful interfaces, such as ClickUp, Notion, and Figma, all stand to benefit immensely.

For ClickUp, it’s about embedding that intelligence and reasoning across our product - in tasks, docs, goals, chat, time, cards, automations, and more - so that we’re able to abstract away the tediousness of project management and allow people to focus on the work that is uniquely human, whether it’s applying creativity, empathy, or judgment. There are so many micro use cases littered through every worker’s day that most people won’t think to configure themselves, so we add touches of delight - such as automated custom fields, conditional logic with agents, and proactive answers or reminders - to help users learn to adopt these shortcuts.

AI definitely benefits fast moving incumbents more than startups, in my opinion. Long-standing institutions like Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle won’t be going away anytime soon. The challenge is embedding AI into your product in a way that helps users deepen their usage. Half the world is still moving from pen and paper to digital, from on prem to cloud. Our job doesn’t end at making it possible, but guiding users through digital change and adoption. We have to learn how people currently work so that we’re able to embed AI-enabled productivity hacks into their day to day.

If any founders or engineers reading are passionate about AI tooling for systems migrations and digital transformation, feel free to jot me an email: [email protected]. I’ve thought a lot about this and would love to hear from you.This approach is particularly interesting because when you begin developing version control or continuous deployment systems, you need a way to deploy onto a running server. A key component of this deployment is the distributed system daemon process that handles memory management. We started here specifically because this component enables you to handle requests from continuous deployment systems - such as swapping in new models, preparing them in CPU memory, and transferring them to GPU memory when the inference process is ready.

To accomplish any of this functionality, we need the daemon process running and managing memory and models. This serves as the centerpiece of our infrastructure, from which we can build out additional capabilities spanning from training to deployment. We've chosen to start from the deployment end and work our way backwards.

If everything goes right for ClickUp over the next 5 years, what will it become and how is the world changed?

Well, let me speak to the last 5 years first. I think our impact the last 5 years was that we flipped the best-of-breed mantra in software and helped hundreds of thousands of teams consolidate their app sprawl. We started off way down the list, and are now ranked #1 on G2 and Gartner as the leading project and portfolio management solution in the market today.

In the next 5 years or so, I look forward to seeing ClickUp continue on its path to being a billion dollar revenue business and the system of engagement for companies big and small. While we may well grow into a de facto operating system for SMBs, we will likely also grow into a central hub for knowledge and collaboration across enterprises.

I’m proud of where we are today. It wasn’t easy repositioning the business on efficient growth and public readiness these last 3 years but we did it. We have a resilient and efficient business, a top class management team, and a rapidly maturing organization, from our employee base to the data, systems, and processes that support them. It’s been a real joy to see many of our early hires grow into senior IC roles and take on management duties.

One of our core values is: grow 1% every day. Our team’s learning fast, and still very hungry.

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