90: The One Practice Every Winning Company Has in Common: Mastering Feedback and Innovation w/ 8-Figure Founder Eli Portnoy

What if you could actually predict whether a business will succeed or fail? After analyzing over 150 companies, today’s guest uncovered the single practice that separates thriving businesses from those that stall out.

In this episode of the No Limit Leadership Podcast, Sean Patton sits down with Eli Portnoy — serial entrepreneur, 8-figure founder, CEO of BackEngine.ai
, and Harvard Business School instructor. Eli has built and sold multiple companies, and now he’s sharing his hard-earned lessons on leadership, iteration, and feedback.

You’ll hear how fatherhood shaped his leadership style, why feedback loops are the ultimate predictor of business success, and how speed always beats perfection when scaling a company. Whether you’re leading a startup or a growing team, this episode will help you rethink how to build environments where people thrive and growth accelerates.

⏱ Episode Topics & Timestamps

• 00:00 — The #1 predictor of business success
• 01:20 — Eli’s journey: 8-figure exits & Harvard teaching
• 02:00 — Leadership lessons from fatherhood
• 05:14 — Evolving leadership style from rookie manager to adaptive leader
• 08:48 — Tools & tactics for uncovering employee strengths
• 13:08 — Building internal feedback loops that drive growth
• 19:31 — Research findings: 150 SaaS companies & external feedback
• 22:36 — Tactical playbook: CEO calls, feedback owners, and weekly insights
• 29:16 — Frameworks for speed, iteration, and innovation
• 35:40 — Inside BackEngine.ai: AI-powered customer feedback
• 41:14 — The future of AI in leadership over the next 5 years
• 43:37 — Eli’s weekly leadership practice for clarity & accountability

🔗 Connect with Eli Portnoy

• Website: BackEngine.ai
  
  
• LinkedIn: Eli Portnoy
  
  

📩 Subscribe to Sean’s Leadership Newsletter: www.nolimitleaders.com/growth

No Limit Leadership is the go-to podcast for growth-minded executives, middle managers, and team leaders who want more than surface-level leadership advice. Hosted by executive coach and former Special Forces commander Sean Patton, this show dives deep into modern leadership, self-leadership, and the real-world strategies that build high-performing teams. Whether you're focused on leadership development, building a coaching culture, improving leadership communication, or strengthening team accountability, each episode equips you with actionable insights to unlock leadership potential across your organization. From designing onboarding systems that retain talent to asking better questions that drive clarity and impact, No Limit Leadership helps you lead yourself first so you can lead others better. If you're ready to create a culture of ownership, resilience, and results, this leadership podcast is for you.

Transcript

Sean Patton (00:00)
Imagine if you could actually predict whether a business will win or lose. Turns out you can. After studying over 150 companies, today's guests found the single practice every successful business has in common. And if you're not doing it, your growth is capped. Today I'm joined by Eli Portnoy, multiple time, eight figure founder, current CEO of BackEngine.ai and a Harvard Business School instructor. In this episode, Eli shares what his research uncovered about the link between feedback loops and business performance.

why speed and iteration always beats perfection, and how leaders can create environments where people actually thrive. Stick with us and we'll walk you through frameworks that let you predict success, sharpen your leadership, and accelerate growth.

Sean Patton (00:56)
Eli Portnoy has built and sold multiple companies. He's the founder of backengine.ai where he's helping businesses use AI to improve customer retention and growth. Before this, he built two other companies, both acquired for eight figures. And when he's not building companies, he's teaching the next generation of entrepreneurs at Harvard Business School. What I love about Eli is his emphasis on frameworks, iteration, and the practical wisdom that comes from being in the trenches. That's what we're going to dig in today.

Eli, thanks for being here, dude,

Eli Portnoy (01:21)
Thanks so, so thank you so much for having me. It's that it's great to be here.

Sean Patton (01:24)
You know, and not to, uh, I don't want to derail us from our plan, but right before we hit go, we were talking about fatherhood of it. And something that just popped in my head as I was hitting record was, you've obviously scaled and built companies and have learned a ton of leadership lessons. We'll get into, but you're also a father of three, right? All teenagers are about to be teenagers.

Eli Portnoy (01:43)
That's right. That's right.

Sean Patton (01:44)
What about

leadership lessons from that experience?

Eli Portnoy (01:46)
Well, those are actually the best leadership lessons. The lessons I've learned on the family side, on the personal side. know, kids are amazing. They're incredible, but they're also not the easiest because you have to mold them and you have to figure out what works for each of them. And to me, that's been the biggest lesson is these kids are born and each one of them has such a unique personality.

And the question of like nature versus nurture just becomes so obvious that at least a huge chunk of it is nature. is what they're born with and that I have to craft my parenting style and my leadership style around each of them. And I think it's the same thing as true in a company. Like you can't, you can't expect everyone to react to you the same way. You can't have one leadership style. You have to be a little bit more adaptive and ⁓ really build an environment that celebrates the fact that.

people bring different skills and make sure that you build an organization that can bring that out in everyone. And that's something I don't think I would have understood if I hadn't seen these three little humans come out and have their own very unique characteristics.

Sean Patton (02:53)
Mm, it's beautiful. Just because I'm selfish, what advice you got for a brand new father of a seven month old?

Eli Portnoy (02:59)
Well, we were talking about it a little bit before, every single moment is just an incredible, incredible gift. And it goes by really fast. I was telling you that my oldest daughter is about to go to college and I look back and it just feels like yesterday that she was in diapers and now she's a full grown adult. And so just make sure you enjoy every moment of it. Almost.

I don't regret any moment that I spent with her. I don't regret any moment that I put everything else away and just devoted my attention to her or my other two kids. I don't even remember like that big and poor email or that meeting or like any of that other stuff that I prioritize over them. And so just make sure that it's all about them in my opinion.

Sean Patton (03:45)
a great reminder, I think, as we talk about, and we go into here about like business leadership and experience and how even like leading others and how.

I think it's my opinion, right? That one of the different differentiators between leadership and management is management's about efficiency of systems. Leadership is about leading the whole person to inspire and empower them to become an even greater version of themselves than they thought possible. And that includes, like you mentioned, like holistically as a human being, like not just in terms of business outcomes.

Eli Portnoy (04:17)
Yeah, for sure. I think, you know, when I look back on my career, leadership I'm most proud of are the like getting to work with people across companies and where the relationship was built deep enough where it wasn't just about what are we trying to get done with this company in this moment in time? It's like, what are you trying to get done in your career? What are you interested in? What do you excel in? Where do you need coaching? And when you can marry that and what

you're trying to do as a leader and it all comes together. It's just a beautiful thing.

Sean Patton (04:50)
So how was you talk about, you you've evolved, you know, as a father, right? You know, 17 years of fatherhood for companies later, a lot of, I'm assuming, you know, ⁓ growth. I know there is cause we talked already, growth and evolution through that. like, how has, how do think your view on leadership has evolved since your first company to today?

Eli Portnoy (05:14)
A lot. I mean, my first company, made pretty much every mistake that a rookie manager makes. was my first time managing people. And I really, really didn't understand what it meant to manage. And so most of my focus was on hours. was on basically the, the wrong things to look at. wasn't on, the quality of the work or the output or the thinking or the creativity was just like, I need a control and those are harder things to control. And so I,

I just resorted to controlling the things that I could see and feel and touch and feel like I was doing a good job as a manager. And those tended to be all the wrong things. And, ⁓ and as I've, gotten a little bit more experience and I definitely don't have all the answers because management is just something in leadership. That's something that I think takes forever to really learn. ⁓ I'm much more focused on trying to put people in a position where they can succeed. Cause I think everyone is naturally.

drawn to opportunities where they can be their best. And I think people do their best work, accomplish the most in situations where they are thriving, and they do really, really poorly when they're not thriving. And so the first question I ask myself always is, like, where do I like, what do need to do? Where do need to put them? How do I get them to a place where they are producing their best work? Because as soon as they do that, then all of a sudden, it just like reinforces itself. And it becomes this like virtuous cycle where they just keep getting better and better and better.

And a lot of that starts with just understanding who they are, their strengths, their weaknesses, ⁓ and also trying to understand like, what are the ways that they react best to the types of like, some people really like autonomy. And so how do I empower them to be in a place where they have that autonomy? And some people really like structure. And so my leadership really starts there. It's a lot less around the things that I used to care a lot about.

Like ours, like ours is literally the worst thing in the world to be focused on, but I didn't know what else to focus on. And so that's what I focused on. And now it's just a lot more around like, what do you need to be the best version of yourself that you can in this role? And the, part of that, one of the learnings that's a little bit more negative that's come from that is not everyone is compatible from a working style standpoint and not everyone does their best work in the company that someone is building.

And so sometimes realizing that for them to do their best work, has to be somewhere else. That's also been empowering because I used to think about it in the, in the context of they're good or they're not good. And that's, that's not, that's not true. I've seen people who do amazing in one company and don't do amazingly in the other company. And a lot of times it's just a, a fit issue. And so coming to the conclusion that it's not something negative or positive about the person also makes it much easier to have the conversations.

and to get them to a place where they can do the best work, which is somewhere else and they appreciate it. so, so just a lot of learners have come from, my evolution of thinking and what I focus on and what I'm trying to do.

Sean Patton (08:12)
You know, one, I agree with everything you said, and then one sort of like limiting variable to that, I think could be just like people in general aren't necessarily great at self-awareness of even knowing, you could ask them sometimes like, well, how do you like to be led? What type of work do I do? And like, I feel like they could even struggle to give you an appropriate answer if they haven't done a lot of sort of like self-work or reflection or that sort of thing. So as a leader,

What are some tools or conversations or questions that you use? Like, how do you draw that out? ⁓ Or is it like a test and tweak different things? Like, how do you draw that out so that you can make the best decision, in partnership with them?

Eli Portnoy (08:48)
I mean, so I do agree with you, like people are generally not very self aware. That's that's true of me too. Like I, have lots of blind spots. I have lots of things that I don't really, ⁓ that I think I'm good at not think I'm good. And so I appreciate that people don't always have the best self awareness. And I also appreciate that I am not ⁓ I am not necessarily better at identifying what they're good at and what they're bad at and like drawing it out. If they don't have the self awareness, it's, it's a little bit ⁓

I don't know, inappropriate for me to think that I could do a better job of having that awareness for them. At the same time though, I do feel that by giving people lots of latitude and opportunities to try different things and see what starts to work and what starts to not work. And that makes it much more obvious to both of us of where their comfort zone is and where they do their best work. And so a lot of times it's like,

giving people a lot of flexibility to try different things and to move outside of like the very, very rigid role that they were initially hired for. And that's much harder in bigger companies and it's harder as we scale. But the benefit and one of the reasons I love the early stage is that things are constantly moving and shaking and then there's opportunity for people to take on things all over the place. And then it becomes really, clear. And I have lots of examples of this over the course of the last 10 years or so where someone

I hired someone into a specific role where I had a defined need and I thought that they would be great. And based on their experiences, I thought it would work. And then very, very quickly, either they were drawn to something else or I started to like have a need somewhere else. And they started to like move in. And then it became so clear that this was such a better fit for them. They were happier. They were doing better. ⁓ The output was incredible. And so part of like, part of it is just having a flexible work environment where people are not

put into these boxes and can't move out of those boxes.

Sean Patton (10:40)
Would you say, know, I think one thing I see with that is, I mean, awesome strategy and be able to test and tweak. And if you have someone who maybe isn't excelling and you can't, you know, it seems like the effort is there, right? Sort of like intangibles, but it's like not, doesn't seem like a good fit. Like exploring, ⁓ you know, different roles in the company. Like one issue I see is like getting at that early enough that, know, before

You like you reach this point where they're just like, all right, screw this. you know, they're just like, they're out already. They've already, or they've already had four interviews, you know, like, like they're, they're so checked out or so jaded or the relationship is so strained that it's hard for them to even switch teams or whatever. like, is there, is that like, would you say the key there is to like notice and like take action, like more proactive, like early, like, Hey, this isn't quite something I feel like you're doing fine, but not great. Right. and exploring early before.

you know, the proverbial, you know, poop is the fan.

Eli Portnoy (11:35)
Yeah, I

think by nature of the early stage work, like very, very quickly, they're touching different things and you start to see strengths. And I think it's really important to focus on those strengths. And so if even if things aren't going well, if like you're immediately gravitating towards those strengths and you're acknowledging those strengths and you're understanding why the other things are harder, like I think it leads to an on-defensive series of conversations that make it much easier to figure out where they need to go. And without them getting to a place where

they feel like they need to leave because I think a lot of times people, you know, people feel like they need to leave because they're not being recognized because they're not given an opportunities because they're struggling and they're not doing their best work. And I think if like the ethos of the company is to find the right fit for folks quickly, then you acknowledge the things that they're doing ⁓ that are working really well. And there's

there's more emphasis on trying to problem solve the places that aren't rather than like, this isn't working because you know, there's flexibility and they know there's flexibility and there's other opportunities. And again, not every environment is built like this. It's not even just from a management sample, but even from like, if the company is stagnant, that it doesn't work that way. So you do need like a fast growing early stage startup where, where lots of things are changing all the time. But if, if you're in that environment and it's really easy and it's exciting and it like, it just.

It allows for that fluidity where I don't think people tend to, like people don't tend to leave that early or get discouraged that early because they see light in other places.

Sean Patton (13:08)
So I'm hearing you talk about creating an internal feedback loop of information, setting that down to your employees, getting that back. ⁓ And so this is interesting because this is really a big lesson for you has been how we set up feedback loops internally and externally. So before we move on to external, which I want to get to next, in terms of frameworks and the structures around ensuring you have this internal feedback loop.

Eli Portnoy (13:13)
Haha, yes.

Sean Patton (13:35)
What are some maybe tactical suggestions or things that companies or leaders should look at to make sure that they have a system set up that's gonna facilitate this free flow of information and iteration inside the

Eli Portnoy (13:46)
Yeah, so ⁓ it's funny because when we talk about feedback, it actually reminds me that one of the things that my kids tell me that I like, I am a broken record about is feedback. And it is one of those leadership lessons that I've learned going back to the kids piece because as a human being, like I just don't feel like we can get better if we are not hearing feedback. And I think the biggest challenge that you

Kids, adults, managers, leaders, fall into is that they don't get that feedback group. And so they don't change and they don't evolve and they don't get better. And so the advice I give my kids all the time is just surround yourself with people who have your best interests at heart and who will tell you the truth. And if you can do that as a person, you will get better. And I think that same thing as dress as a manager, as a leader, as a company. And so there's a few things. The first is you have to create an environment where

getting and giving feedback is celebrated. Too many managers are really, really not open to hearing feedback. And if you're not open to hearing feedback, you will not hear feedback. People will close up and they will not be comfortable talking to you about these things. That means they won't talk to you about the things that they're struggling with, but they also won't talk to you about the things that you're doing that make their jobs hard. I remember one very specific example at Sense360, which was, you two companies ago, the, um,

one of the very early employees, he was leading product for us. And he once came over to me and he said, you you send these emails, these long emails with thoughts and like they're very thought through and thoughtful. But like, I don't think you realize that like the hour or two that it takes you to write them ultimately leads to us spending maybe two full days responding to it and thinking about it. And it derails everything that we're working on. And you might not feel it.

Like you're sending it to us as like context and you're just thinking like, this is helpful, but you have to realize every time you send one of those emails, that's two full days that are burned because we are going to dissect that email. We're going to think about it. We're going to respond. We're going to talk internally. We're going to rewrite the response. We're going to, and like, you have to be aware of that because that is the cost of sending them. And same thing for like little requests. You slack me on about this little thing to you. It's like a three second thing to me. ends up being a two hour thing.

I learned from that, that I needed to hold back all of the thoughts and things that I was thinking about and I needed to create structure. every single person that I work with, we obviously have a one-on-one. It used to be like these free flowing things and now I'm very structured. All the ideas I have, all the things I want to share with them, all the questions I want, I document for myself and then when I meet with them, I bring it up and we talk about it and it's way less jarring, way less sporadic, way less frantic.

And it's made it much easier for them, but that only was possible because that someone great who was willing to give me feedback, but I was also willing to internalize it. And so that's the first thing you just have to create an environment where people are comfortable giving you feedback and where you respond in a non-defensive way and you encourage it. First and foremost, second thing is you need to have the outlets for them to share these things. So you have to make sure you have one-on-ones. You have to make sure you make space for it. You have to make sure to solicit it like culturally, you just have to go and

and solicit it because people will not just give it to you, especially when there's a power dynamic of a manager and someone who works for that manager. And then the third thing is you have to find secondary avenues for that feedback to come in. So you have to make sure that like your co-founder is soliciting that feedback on your behalf and is willing to share it with you. You have to have early employees who are comfortable getting that feedback and telling it to you, even if it's like hurtful and like difficult to hear.

And you have to have those secondary channels so that you're hearing the things that are maybe not coming in a direct way. And then as you get bigger, you have to do things like surveys and you have to be more process and structured. But like in the early stages, that's all it takes is giving people the comfort to do it, the space to do it, soliciting it, and making sure you have secondary channels.

Sean Patton (17:40)
Well, as a frameworks guy, you've set that up very well with your steps. I like that one, two, three. ⁓ And I think that a key part you mentioned there that sort of touches all of those is like leader modeling, right? Like in person, like giving the feedback to others, receiving the feedback in front of others so that it becomes like, asking for that feedback. And sometimes,

it's so powerful when you can do that as a leader in a public setting versus like one-on-one. So others can see you receiving feedback, being vulnerable, honestly, like receiving it and thanking, like, ⁓ like really taking it in and modeling it that way. And then it's like, ⁓ this is, know, like this is the culture here as a, you know, so I think that it sort of like fit into all three of those boxes was this like modeling lead by example.

lead with vulnerability is what I'm hearing.

Eli Portnoy (18:33)
I think I definitely think so. think leading with vulnerability is super, super important because if you can't be vulnerable, no one else will feel like they can be vulnerable. And if someone can't be vulnerable, then they can't actually ⁓ dissect what they're doing well and what they're not doing well and work on the things that aren't going well and take accountability for them and just evolve and get better. And so I think vulnerability and lack of ego are one of the core character traits that I look for in other people. And then I try to model out.

⁓ and yeah, you like none of this works if someone isn't vulnerable, like someone who is not vulnerable and willing to like accept that they are not perfect and who doesn't have the growth mindset of like, actually want to get better. I'm not perfect today, but I want to strive and work towards getting better. We'll not appreciate feedback. We'll not hear feedback. We'll not react well to feedback. ⁓ and so all of this is in the context of building a team that is willing to be vulnerable, willing to have no ego, willing to have like a growth mindset.

Otherwise none of it works.

Sean Patton (19:31)
I love that. So let's shift external because you got an interesting story where you studied 150 SaaS companies ⁓ to see how companies dealt with external customer feedback and had some interesting findings. So let's shift about feedback external to the company.

Eli Portnoy (19:47)
Yeah. And it goes back to what we were saying before, where like, just feel like feedback loops are the most important way for any system process organization to change. And one of the things that I've been like very, very fascinated by is this idea that companies that are able to collect feedback are better, but I didn't have like a really great way of quantifying that. And it just felt like intuitively that was the case, but I couldn't find any research that actually proved that that was the case. And so.

What we did is we went out and we surveyed 150 companies and we asked two sets of questions. like question set number one was how do you collect customer feedback right now? What are the things that you are doing? Do you, do you send out NPS surveys? Do you send CSAT surveys? Do you have like a customer advisory board? Does your CEO meet with customers? All of those things that a company might do record video calls. Do you have AI analyzing all the things that you could possibly think of?

In order to collect feedback, we asked them what they were doing and how they were doing it, how frequently they were doing it. And we use that data to basically come up with four stages of maturity, of customer feedback maturity. On the one end, you had very, very beginner ones that weren't really collecting much feedback. And then on the other end, had expert where they had all of the systems of processes to continuously collect feedback from their customers, use it and make sure that it was distributed to the right people in the organization.

The second set of questions were all around performance. How are you doing from a growth standpoint, from a retention standpoint? How are your product launches going? Are they successful? Is your product being used a lot? Or how are you winning against competitors? What are your sales win rates? Just all of the things related to the outcomes that you expect from companies that are doing really well. And then we looked to see if there was a correlation. Do performance metrics look better?

if you're further along that maturity curve. And it turns out that pretty much every metric improves if you collect more feedback and that intuitive sense that I had that, and I think most of us have that if customers really care about, if companies really care about their customers and are listening to those customers, they will naturally better serve those customers. They will do better with those customers. They will compete better against competitors. They they will just build a better business. They end up showing up in the data very, very

clearly. And there were a lot of like really interesting findings. But to me, that's, that's the biggest finding, like, you've got to listen to your customer, and you have to systematize it and actually invest in it to make sure that you get the benefits, the full benefits, ⁓ especially in this market. That's so tough.

Sean Patton (22:17)
So how, a, maybe give a, if you have it, like a few examples of like what that looks like in practice, maybe for like, maybe like a SaaS B2C, you know, maybe SaaS B2B versus like a retail company. you know, what are some different ⁓ ways that you see that companies could do this successfully?

Eli Portnoy (22:36)
Yeah. So I'll, I'll give some like very, very tactical things that I think companies can do. And then maybe I'll talk a little bit about like systemically what I think the, the answer is, but on the tactical side, the first thing is we found that if the, if the CEO spoke to customers on a weekly basis, not every customer, but just made it a point to at least speak to one customer on a weekly basis, those companies dramatically outperformed companies where the CEO didn't do that.

first tactical thing I would say is make sure that the CEO, the leader, the person who's building the strategy and like guiding people towards where they need to go, making resource allocation decisions, make sure that they are talking to customers at least once a week so that they understand the customer, they understand the pain point, they understand what they care about, they understand the competitive landscape. ⁓ So that's first thing and first and foremost. The second thing that I found was that companies where someone actually owned

customer feedback where someone was not just like the de facto person, but there was like real accountability and responsibility and maybe even some like budget around how to do this. Those companies also did dramatically better because like it's hard to say you care about customer feedback if no one in the organization actually owns it. If it's just something that maybe happens because those organizations, they just deal in tribal knowledge and customer anecdotes. They're just

someone hears it on one call and then thinks they know and then talks about it and then other people think they know that's what customers want and that's not real data. That's not real customer feedback. That's not really listening to customers. I actually have one story where ⁓ after my last company was acquired, the CEO of the acquiring company was on a customer call and on that customer call, they heard something from a customer, a feature that they wanted and completely anchored against it because they had one call about us and on that call, this one feature had come up.

And the amount of pressure we got to build that feature was immense, And we had never heard of that before. No other customer ever wanted it. We went and we talked to a whole bunch of our customers to see if like it was something that they would value. No one cared, but the pressure was immense and we ultimately had to build it. And then no one ever used it. And to me, that's, that's the opposite of caring about your customers. That's basically not, that's dealing in anecdotes and tribal knowledge.

And so the second thing I would say is just make sure you have an owner, someone who in the organization is responsible and accountable for collecting and disseminating ⁓ customer feedback. And then the third thing, and I'll stop rambling, but the third thing is ⁓ making sure that that owner of customer feedback is putting together a weekly email with like two or three things or insights that they've heard from customers and just sharing it with the rest of the organization. It's such a small, easy thing to do.

It takes a minute for everyone to read it, but it just grounds the people and like what our customers say actually matters. We're listening. We care about it. This is a currency that like we are modeling matters in this organization. If you do those three things, you'll be ahead of most companies. There's, there's obviously more, but I would start with those three very tactical things.

Sean Patton (25:41)
I'm just thinking of how powerful those three things could be. And I love how you sort of caveated the CEO talking with customers with like checking it. cause like, can't tell you like, ⁓ I have a lot of examples from my military experience, right? Of like, you you're like in, let's say you're like in a sector or whatever and somewhere overseas, whatever. And you know, you're like there every day and then

the general flies in for his once a year thing and like sits down and like some random tribal leaders like, what we really need is this. And he's like, why have you guys done this by now? Like, it's like not a thing or like, you you can't, you're just like, God. And then you just know that's going to be like your nightmare for the next 30 days as you, this, know, before he forgets it, it just moves on to the next thing. Like so many times, right? It's just like this little thing that comes down from high. It's just like, all right, let's, that's like one data point. Let's check that against others, you know.

Eli Portnoy (26:33)
Sack.

Sean Patton (26:35)
and have it a formal way to do that. is awesome. If you're not the CEO and you're in a growing company, but maybe you're like a director or a VP or somebody like that, and you see this as an issue, but you don't control the P &L, what are some ways maybe that you've seen this work at a smaller scale or...

that they can implement right away or is it time for them to build sort of a business case and present it to the hire?

Eli Portnoy (27:09)
⁓ that's a really good question. I don't know that I love it when something that's super easy and cheap to implement, ⁓ starts off in a big company with a business case, because I feel like if I was a VP or a director at a company and I saw a gap, what I would do is I would just say, okay, well, it's easy enough for me to talk to a few customers a week or, ⁓ to hear it, like to listen to a couple of gon calls.

Let me just go do that. It'll take me an hour and half at 2X speed to listen to three, four customer calls a week and to write an email that I send out. And let me just start sending out the email. No one's going to say, why are you sending this out? And once I start sending it out, people will start to see the value of having this stuff done. And then I can start to articulate the reason why I should spend a little bit more time. And then eventually once I've proven the value, I can build a business case. that...

whole thing will take a lot less than building out the business case and then ⁓ justifying it to all bunch of folks and bro and trying to get buy in from a bunch of different folks like just listen to the calls, write the email and ⁓ see if it's valuable. And once you start proving out it's valuable, spend a little bit more time and then make it part of your OKRs. And then eventually people will just think of you as the as the owner of feedback. And then you can start building a business case for why you want to go spend money on it. But

If you go and tell people you want to do this and you spend a whole bunch of time on it and you need budget upfront and like you haven't done anything around it, I just don't know how well that that works.

Sean Patton (28:35)
That's good. I hope you're passing it onto the MBA students at Harvard because that's like such a, that's such like an MBA thing, right? It's just like, well, let me do some research and I'll put together my slide, you know, I'll write my memo and I'll, and then I'll, I'll proof my case and then we'll, you know, yeah. Uh, so I love, I love that. And it really goes along with, know, really on brand for you and your experiences building successful companies with, iteration, right? So even when comes to feedback, like iterating that, like, are you just going in doing something and

and learning iterating off that. you know, what are some like frameworks for you when it comes to, you know, innovation to testing iteration that you view successfully in your companies or what's that look like?

Eli Portnoy (29:16)
I mean, you're not going to be surprised to hear this, but it really starts with talking to customers. I really do believe that building something in isolation is a bad way to innovate. The story around ⁓ Henry Ford, where he said that ⁓ if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have set a faster horse. And people oftentimes use that example to say, you can't really talk to customers. They don't know what they want. I actually see it differently. I think people knew exactly what they wanted.

faster. They wanted faster. They wanted to get from point A to point B. They were identifying the problem. The problem is they were too slow. They didn't know the solution for how to get there. And so I think what the first thing for innovation is you have to identify the problem. people are very, good at identifying their problems. They're not good at solving the problem. They're not good at coming up with what the right solution is. And that's where you can come in. But first thing in innovation is figure out what the problem is. Talk to lots and lots of

people and customers and prospects to figure out what that problem is and then go and come up with your unique solution. The second piece is to just go as quickly as possible to the root cause. Like don't get bogged down in feature creep or business cases or models or like just put out in the simplest way possible what you're doing so that you can iterate and hear what people are saying and figure out. Like I have never built a business where I had the right idea on day one and we quite executed that idea.

And we built a real business every single time. It has been an evolution, a multi-year evolution to go from, think this is an issue and this is how I plan to solve it to like, actually didn't fully get the issue correctly. It's actually a little bit deeper in the solutions, not quite right. And they're telling me this and we iterate and we pivot and we go into new directions and we learn something new. eventually like through this messy experiment.

We end up getting to something that really is valuable and has product market fit and we can build and scale a business around. And so the second piece of it is just put stuff out there. Don't spend too much time on it and just get feedback. then the last thing, the last thing is like orient everything around speed. There are so many trade-offs that we have to make and so many different ways that we can make decisions. And I tell

people here at Pack Engine and every company I've ever been at is like, our goal isn't perfection. Our goal isn't all these other things. It's just to figure out how do we move fast and everything we do structurally about how we organize ourselves is oriented around us being able to move fast. And sometimes, sometimes that's really, hard to do, but it's so important because if you can move fast, you can get to that nugget of insight and that,

that product market fit faster. And that's all that matters. You can figure out all the other stuff later. You can figure out how to slow down and how to build all the like, get rid of the tech debt and all that stuff comes later, but you haven't earned the right to do that until you've gotten to product market fit. And until you do, your only goal should be to product market fit as fast as humanly possible.

Sean Patton (32:16)
Hmm. So what I'm hearing here, a few things. One, I think this is not just at the beginning, but always in iteration is, you know, stay in love with the problem, not a solution.

Eli Portnoy (32:28)
Yes.

Sean Patton (32:29)
Right? Like the, the, so when you're, so when you're, well, I had, I had like 30 seconds where you're talking to think about it, man. The, no, but like you mentioned, on the cost, on the customer side, like they don't, they know the problem they have. They don't know, or they're not thinking in terms of the, the possible solution or what the right solutions like there, it's like asking the right question and listening, not for

Eli Portnoy (32:31)
Better said than what I said, but yes.

and

Sean Patton (32:55)
listening for the, like you said, root cause, like listening to actually get to the root cause of like what the real problem is. and, and then, ⁓ and then as you move forward with innovating, not, falling in love with any particular solution, but still focusing on problem. Because my next question was like, what are the biggest impediments to iteration and speed that you see?

Either structurally or like just culturally or with theater or whatever.

Eli Portnoy (33:23)
Yeah, there's, there's a few. So I think one is like naturally people are oftentimes predisposed to not make mistakes. they'd rather not make the mistakes than get to a mistake faster. And I think building a culture where mistakes are completely acceptable, as long as you get them there faster, get them there as fast as possible. I think there's a lot of like, there, there's a certain element to the type of people that you hire. So.

people who have bias for action and bias for getting there quicker. And then I think there's a lot of system and structure things. Like, ⁓ there it's just, it's just a matter of like making the trade off at every point of what you're building. So you have features and priorities and like everything sounds great. And it's like, yeah, we should do that and be so cool. It's like, okay, will this help us get to where we're going as fast as possible? Do we need this to get there or do we not? just like,

building a culture where you're saying no ⁓ as a first pass. There's just so many things. I don't have necessarily a framework around it because it's more philosophical. It's just at every point optimizing for speed and being comfortable with the fact that you are sacrificing lots of other things because you're prioritizing speed.

Sean Patton (34:40)
And when I heard you say in there too, was like being like obsessed with like the main problem. Like I keep the main thing, the main thing type of a deal, you know, like what's the main problem, not like the ancillary nice to haves and just like, just go for that, you know, ⁓ like really, this maybe it's not a great example, like really effective triage, you know, like, and I got to be going back to my military stuff here, but know, it's like, okay.

Eli Portnoy (34:48)
Yeah.

Sean Patton (35:04)
medical stuff. It's like, well, yeah, he's, you know, we've got a little burn here, a little cut here. And then it's like, well, it's, know, he's bleeding out. It's for moral artery. Like, let's figure that out. Like just stay with that until that's done. You know, like you don't get, don't get sidetracked by all the other things that, can happen. Um, and you know, it's interesting cause I feel like we're able to move maybe faster than ever now because of things like AI. And obviously you're like smack dag in the middle of that, right. With, you know, back engine AI. So

Eli Portnoy (35:14)
Exactly.

Sean Patton (35:32)
You know, first, why don't you talk about what, just so everyone has some context about what back engine.ai is first, and then I've got to follow up.

Eli Portnoy (35:40)
Yeah, absolutely. So, so I do agree with you. Like AI is just an insane accelerant in every dimension. The idea around Back Engine is to help you help organizations basically be able to capture and understand customer feedback dramatically faster. it's just like a completely different way of collecting it, capturing, disseminating, and making sure that it's hitting all the right places. And so we're building a tool that connects to all of the different ⁓

touch points that companies have with their customers. So email, video calls, support tickets, product usage data, ingests all of it, and then uses AI to help everyone across the company make better decisions through that data. it helps AEs and CSMs do more with their customers and do it more efficiently and close more deals and be able to take on more customers and deliver better service because they're really hearing what those customers are saying.

And it helps product teams better understand what features and bugs and technical issues there are. And it makes sure that they're like actually acting in context and it helps marketing teams better understand when their testimonials and build out case studies. And it's basically all about saying like there's this treasure trove of information inside of all of the customer interactions and AI can help us analyze all of it and pull it out and make it useful and get back to that.

going back to that feedback maturity curve, go from beginner to expert with AI in seconds rather than having to invest in a whole bunch of different things to get there and maybe never get there.

Sean Patton (37:15)
Hmm. I mean, as someone who's building my own company and working with other companies and, ⁓ I've been able to keep my team really small and do a lot the last few years because of AI. and, it starts getting overwhelmed. mean, I literally have a task because I just had my like, ⁓ bookkeeper send me my, you know, my, my monthly loom video. And I'm just like,

How many AI things have I signed up for trying to solve, you know, because it's like, you've got all these different feedback points and different AI, you know, all these different app tools, giving you feedback, trying to solve individual problems. And then half the time, you know, one tool expands their capabilities and now you have overlaps and you have redundancy and what tools are coming in. And so the ability to just say, Hey, sort of this business line of effort of getting and receiving customer feedback and be able to take that across platform and

Eli Portnoy (37:43)
Hahaha

Sean Patton (38:08)
and put it in a useful way. mean, just, I mean, it sounds amazing. It sounds like a no brainer. know a lot of companies that would want this. And so I guess my question for you then is, you know, there's all those other tools out there. You're building AI company. How do you use AI inside Back Engine to improve operations and decision-making?

Eli Portnoy (38:28)
Yeah, so we obviously use our own product very, very extensively. So we've got Slack channels set up where feedback on the product goes into and Slack channels on ⁓ the accuracy of our AI and Slack channels on churn risks and happy customers and testimonials, all that. And it's not just me, but like everyone at the company is deeply engaged with these Slack channels and constantly hearing what those customers are saying. And then we've got weekly reports that are going out to the different teams around like the key things that they need to be hearing and so on and so forth. So

very, very heavy use of our own AI, including like our AEs and our sales people and our customer success managers using it on a daily, daily basis for almost every interaction with customers. Beyond that, ⁓ I'm a super user of AI in terms of just like the work that I do. I find that the best thing about AI is that it's a reasoning agent. It's basically able to

look at information and.

come up with like really smart approaches to things or analyze or analysis and like synthesis. It's just really good at understanding what's happening and coming up with things to do. thing is AI doesn't have any context. It just doesn't have any context. So if I go and I basically try to come up with a strategy by working with chat GPT, it's going to do a really, really bad job because it doesn't know anything about me. doesn't know anything about the company. It doesn't know anything about the challenges. So

It's just not all that helpful. It's like hiring a very smart PhD and putting them into a company and then basically being like, solve this problem for us. Well, if they don't know anything about how you operate and what you do and your competitors, like it's going to take them months of ramp up before they're actually helpful and productive. And I think of the same thing of AI. But if you combine AI with like chat, GPT's deep research, and you can basically have chat, GPT go and collect the context that it needs. And then you basically, when you prompt the AI, you give it that deep research.

then all of sudden it becomes incredibly helpful. So I respond to people on LinkedIn using ChatGPT with all the deep research. when we get security questions, I already have an agent that will help me do that. And when ⁓ people ask me ⁓ to produce content, when we need to come up with strategy, when we need to think about our marketing and our messaging and our website,

These are all projects that I've now built where I've combined the power of the raw reasoning and a whole bunch of deep research pulls on best practices for how to do that specific task I'm trying to do. And so I'm using it every day across almost everything I do. I can't think of anything that I'm doing where AI is in at least a small piece of it.

Sean Patton (41:09)
So if you look ahead, let's not go too far, because things are crazy, but all right, five years. Yeah, yeah. What do you think the biggest shift in how AI is going to change leadership in organizations over the next five years?

Eli Portnoy (41:14)
insane.

It's a good question. And I actually don't know the answer. What I see a lot with leaders is right now they're in this in-between stage where they have FOMO. They hear about how everyone else is using AI and how it's driving incredible transformational ⁓ changes. And they are not seeing that internally in their company. And so I think a lot of leaders are right now feeling a lot of pressure to figure it out. And they're hiring consultants.

like trying to like appoint AI, chief AI people inside of their company. They're like doing all this stuff. And right now I don't see it working for a lot of people. What I see working is individuals inside of companies who have a lot of creativity and foresight, like coming up with clever ways that they themselves are using it. And what I think we'll see over the next few years is that those clever things that people are doing on their own will start to get productized where companies will basically build products that do these clever things and that

⁓ also guide people on how to use them because I, think the biggest barrier to AI adoption right now is the fact that it's literally just a chat bot and you need to know what to ask it. You need to know what to do with it. You need to have the imagination and most people don't have that. And so you seeing a very inconsistent application across the, ⁓ across most businesses. And as those things, as those use cases start getting productized and turned into like,

things that you don't need to come up with the idea for how to use them and you don't need to come up with the prompt, but it's like you push a button. I think you'll start to see these products get rolled out widely across companies and then you'll start to see ⁓ usage and adoption increase. But we have to wait for these products to come out because I'm pretty convinced that chat bots on their own are not sufficient for most people.

Sean Patton (43:08)
Hmm. Interesting. So much great stuff, dude. I got one final question for you before we, wrap, like maybe what's, what's a daily, I mean, you've been hugely successful as you continue to grow in these different companies and you mentioned how iterating for yourself, even in your family with leadership and yourself is like been the key. So like where you're at now, what's maybe a daily or weekly.

practice you have, you know, leadership wise to keep yourself sharp and growing.

Eli Portnoy (43:37)
So one thing that we do at Back Engine is at the beginning of every week, everyone, myself, all of us, we send an email to like the whole company, like, this is my focus for the week. This is what I'm trying to accomplish. And then on Friday, we respond back to each other with like, this is what I accomplished. This is what I didn't accomplish. And I find it to be a really helpful exercise for two reasons. One is on a personal note, everyone is basically saying, this is what matters.

And this is going to guide me for the week rather than reactively just kind of like, this is what's coming up. And this is, I'm just going to like firefight all day long and not actually drive the things that matter. I'm intentionally defining what matters. then I'm, I'm going to do that. And I'm holding myself accountable because the entire organization is going to see if I'm actually doing the things that I said I would do. more interesting reason, and the reason why I have people like send it to the entire company is because we are a remote company. And I feel like there's.

There's a whole new operating model that needs to be intentionally thought of for how to work in a, in a company where not everyone is meeting every day and not everyone is seeing each other. And people are like in different corners of the world. And by making sure that everyone is seeing what everyone else is working on, it gives you context. gives you visibility. also creates ideas. It's kind of like my version of the water cooler where you're just bumping into someone and talking about something and that sparks an idea.

That's what I'm trying to do with these emails and we found them to be very effective. There's, still some optimizations and some ways that we're going to change them to make them a little bit easier to produce and easier to consume. But, ⁓ so far, I think it's working really nicely.

Sean Patton (45:12)
That's awesome. People want to learn more about you or connect with you. Where are you most active and where can they go to learn more about Back Engine?

Eli Portnoy (45:19)
Yeah, I mean, ⁓ our website and LinkedIn are probably the two best places. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. ⁓ People can also email me. My email is elifpackengine.ai. I'm always happy to respond to folks.

Sean Patton (45:31)
Awesome, man. It's been super fun. I love this conversation and I know I learned a ton and I think we just spit it out like almost 50 minutes of amazing value to people. So thanks for that,

Eli Portnoy (45:41)
Thank you, Sean. This was a lot of fun. really appreciate you having me.