Tonkean turns 10 🎉

Time truly flies…this weekend, Tonkean turned 10 years old!  🎉

To celebrate, Tonkean co-founder and CEO Sagi Eliyahu sat down for a special 1x1 interview with none other than Kelly Eliyahu, Sr. Director of Product Marketing at Salesforce and, importantly, Sagi’s wife! 

Kelly has been there alongside Sagi for the entirety of the crazy, cross-continental Tonkean journey—in sickness and in health, through product launches and company pivots.

In a heartfelt and wide-ranging chat, Sagi and Kelly reflect on:

The vision that inspired him and his co-founder, Offir Talmor, to start Tonkean and how it’s more relevant today than ever before

Sagi says: “The reasons we started the company 10 years ago are even more relevant today. I had the opportunity to be an executive in a public company. I felt at different levels how un-fun and ineffective working in a big company can be and how much time is spent on work you don’t want to do or that’s irrelevant to your work.”

That’s where I had the aha moment. Business processes are about people, not data. To get anything done, almost always you need people. 

But 100% of enterprise software is about data. It revolves around tickets. The tickets become the reason for the work. But it ignores the why. And there was a missing layer, which had to do with coordination between people. That layer had many names over the years. But pretty early on we started calling it “orchestration.

Over 10 years, the vision has not changed one millimeter. Every time we thought we were going to change or adapt it, we just kept coming back to the same place."

The obstacles Tonkean has overcome in that time—including the company-saving pivot Sagi made…on he and Kelly’s wedding weekend!

"It was three weeks before our wedding," Sagi recalls. "I’d spent the previous year talking with hundreds of investors. We had customers, we were making an impact, but something wasn’t clicking with the market or with investors. We hadn’t raised money. People did not believe in the vision of orchestration. We were considering joining other companies. We had that option. 

Just before our wedding, I decided finally to use different, more commonly understood words to describe what we were trying to do, hoping that would resonate. I tried it out, and spoke with investors, and described Tonkean as “RPA with a human in the loop.” Robotic Process Automation was very different than my vision for orchestration. But it was successful at the time. The ability to talk about our problem statement using the language of the time made the difference. 

It all came down to the wire, which came down to our wedding weekend. That weekend, I decided to keep on building. A few months later, we raised our first big round. The rest is history."

The bold future the whole Tonkean team is building toward

"You waited 8 years for the world and for technology to catch up to the initial idea. There were foundational pieces with the advancements in AI that created this unlock, now everyone’s talking about orchestration. Where does this go from here?" Kelly asks.

"What we’re thinking about now is, how do you bring agents and humans together to the same end?" Sagi replies. "I do think the market and the world is in a very pivotal moment for how it looks to interact with software and tools with work. Everyone in the industry is freaking out for good reason. There’s a massive opportunity. We’re positioned very well to show the world how much we can bring about this reality sooner, especially for the most advanced and complex enterprises. That’s what this next year is about."

The lessons Sagi and Kelly learned through it all

"Most basic," Sagi says. "There is no white knight. Both because new entrepreneurs, we want to believe, but also because the ecosystem pushes that narrative—people posting, just do X and you’ll be fine, or, hire so and so and they’ll fix everything—none of that exists. Nobody has the answer; if they did, the business you’re creating would already exist. If you’re creating something new, by definition there will be no answers. And for a lot of people, that can be very frustrating. 

You have to have an understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve, and you need to believe in your core that the problem is worth solving. Then the question becomes, how do you get there? 

Understand why you’re doing this." 

We’re not typically ones for nostalgia. But we’re so proud of what we’re building here at Tonkean, and though we’re truly only just getting started, it’s been fun to take a quick look back. This conversation is a great start.

Check out the full conversation between Kelly and Sagi below, or at https://www.tonkean.com/mbopod