Harry Brelsford interviews Mark Alayev, the founder of Thread, about his background and the company's vision. Alayev shares his journey from an MSP intern to building Thread, emphasizing the concept of "service magic" which aims to enhance customer experiences and efficiency for MSPs. Thread recently introduced voice AI and service intelligence to streamline administrative tasks, allowing technicians to focus on human interactions. Harry draws parallels between Thread's innovative approach and his own experiences at Microsoft, highlighting the importance of counterculture thinking and strong points of view in driving technological change.
Harry Brelsford 00:00
Hey, nation, nation still here at NASA. Good lord with founder Mark Alayev, Chief of Magic at Thread. I really enjoyed your keynote the other day. So first of all, tell me a little bit about your background.
Mark Alayev 00:20
So I was born and raised by MSPs, so my first job was 17 years old. I was the intern on the service desk. So went through tier 0123, then went to build software products outside and came back for another five years more in management. But really love the IT service space. Spent 10 years in it, and my final quest was, I wanted to build a product for IT service providers. And that's how and it was called Chat Genie. Now it's called Thread.
Harry Brelsford 00:53
Yeah, and I loved your nickname, Radical Mark. Really enjoyed your speech, thinking outside the box when you say you were born into it, so your mom and dad were MSPs.
Mark Alayev 01:05
No! My career was born in the MSP space
Harry Brelsford 01:09
I haven't heard that one. So raised by wolves? Well, give me a couple of your talking points yesterday and in your own words, because I really enjoyed your vision. And, you know, kind of a radical point of view, because, you know, I'm the kid that always got sent to the principal’s office and couldn't hold a job, right? So, you know, I think we're soul brothers, yeah, yeah.
Mark Alayev 01:41
Love that. So, you know, there's and the reason why I'm Chief of Magic today is really what Thread is trying to create is what we call Service Magic. And for us, service magic happens because we understand that MSPs are first and foremost are a service business, and they're trying to take care of their customers. So Service Magic is when we can have MSPs create incredible experiences for their end customers so they can get back to work, get back to their profession, right? The doctors, the lawyers, the accountants that the MSPs support and at the same time enable the MSP to be to do that very efficiently and effectively, right? Because we want them to be profitable. MSPs are very tightly knit org, like each company. You know, the employees are family, and so you want to have healthy businesses on both sides. So that's where kind of the magic and Service Magic comes from. Now, yesterday we announced two very big features. One was Voice AI, and the other one was Service Intelligence, or what we call magic three. And really what we're what we're trying to do here is have a strong point of view that we want to use AI to make service more human, and the way that we want to do that is to is to let people do what feels natural. You want to pick up the phone and call to get support. We understand that, but that doesn't mean that on every 30 minute call, a technician should spend 10 minutes creating a ticket, updating the priority, putting in the time entries, putting in the notes, documenting everything before they can go and make service magic for another customer. We don't think that's fair, and so our vision is we want to use AI to give employees digital workforce, digital labor, that can help them with that back office stuff so they can focus more on the human to human interactions.
Harry Brelsford 03:28
Yeah, when you were speaking yesterday, it reminded me I got away a Tuesday night class in AI, right? So I'm retraining myself very quickly. My background was career as a Microsoft vendor. I was on the team that invented Small Business Server, very cool when you were talking and then your nickname. And by the way, on one of the night schools, I got my hand slapped, but I said, you know where we're at with AI is exactly where we were at in like 97 and 98 with Small Business Server behind the scenes. And I'm going to be facetious, but it kind of felt like, you know, the summer love in Berkeley, California, and Hunter S Thompson, a well known Gonzo journalist who did drugs and that kind of thing. But that's kind of what we did, you know, I want to tell you, we sat around and smoked pot and had this idea that, you know, what if? What if we put a PC, on every desktop in the world? Well, that's where that thinking comes out of, right? You know, sort of that counter culture thinking, absolutely right. And that, it made me think of that, and no way suggesting to my readers you should go smoke pot and do psilocybin mushrooms. But that's where a lot of innovation came out of, like Berkeley, California and stuff, right? I mean, that's what they did, was they sat around and just ideated about what if. And that's what we did. Well, maybe we smoked pot. I can't remember,
Mark Alayev 04:56
Yeah. Well, I think, I think the broad point you were saying is, like the counter culture. You have to have a strong point of view in order to actually change the world, right? And one of, one of the phrases I love by Christopher Lockheed, who wrote play bigger, is everything is the way that it is because somebody changed the way that it was. So you have to change the world. You have to change it like, don't take anything for granted because somebody else made it that way. And so every everything is an opportunity to potentially say, what if every employee becomes a supervisor of a digital workforce of agents? What if, instead of trying to get customers stuck into an AI loop, you know, on a call, when you're calling a bank, you use AI to take away the administrative task, but instead enable the human to get to another human faster.
Harry Brelsford 05:45
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, sir, I thank you for your time Mark, and we'll stay in touch. I'm a real fan and a thread because, again, I don't fit the box, and I'll end on this. It was the same at early Microsoft, right? Because we were up against IBM, which was very suit and tie, right?
Mark Alayev 06:05
Nobody gets fired for hiring IBM, right?
Harry Brelsford 06:07
Yeah. And, you know, here, here we are. I mean, look at, you know, Microsoft has a multi trillion dollar cap and IBM, you know, the lights are on, the doors are open, they're alive and kicking. But that, that was kind of counter to what made us successful in tech. You know what I'm trying to say?
Mark Alayev 06:27
Yeah, yeah. Because they didn't change they didn't change themselves. They didn't adopt and have a strong point of view.
Harry Brelsford 06:33
Yeah. All right, sir, thank you for your time.