Talk Desk

Talk Desk was founded in 2011 by Tiago with the goal of disrupting the call center market. The interview describes that market as a $22 billion space still dominated by legacy players like Avaya, Cisco, and Genesys, which had sold largely the same systems for 20 to 30 years. Gadi Shamia, who joined as COO around 2015, was drawn by that opening, by a product that already had a couple of hundred customers, and by his working relationship with Tiago.

The company offered a fully integrated cloud call center with voice, SMS, and agent management. Customers could be operational within minutes or days, from teams of five to 10 employees to operations with hundreds of agents. Talk Desk charged software license fees to users and also charged for telephony, so customers got one vendor, one bill, and one company to work with. Pricing ran from $65 to $125 per user per month depending on the subscription, plus a typical $30 to $40 per month on telephony, which is usage-based. When Shamia joined, the company had about 20 people, and most of the early product development was done by a very small engineering team.

In the early period, Tiago was the company's only salesperson. He positioned the product and showed it to prospects himself, and was able to win well-known brands as customers. By the time of the interview, the company had grown to about 1,200 business customers, with around 50,000 seats. Shamia said new customer signups are the larger driver of growth, with seat expansion amplifying it.

A key strength was the seasonal flexibility built into annual contracts. Many customers, especially e-commerce businesses, ramp up toward the November to January peak and then scale back. Talk Desk gives them a bank of users they can draw on during peak season, so they are not stuck paying for unused licenses. Shamia said the company is in a net negative revenue churn position on an annual basis, though he declined to share the exact net revenue expansion figure. Most customers pay annually upfront, which helps fund sales and R&D. The company also had a co-founder leave after about four and a half years. Shamia did not go into specifics, saying he would not discuss that personal matter.

Talk Desk has about 250 employees, roughly half in R&D, and about 80 in sales, including SDRs, sales operations, and account executives. The company has raised $24.5 million in total, with the last round in July 2015. Shamia said the company is still burning cash, but at a relatively low rate, and that it expects to raise another round sometime that year without urgent need. The interview did not disclose current revenue, MRR, or ARR.