Before software as a service had a name, Jeremy Suriel was burning customer service software onto CDs and mailing it to enterprises.
In this episode of CTO Confidential, Mike Rispoli sits down with Jeremy Suriel, cofounder and CTO of Kustomer. Jeremy has been building in this space since 1997, starting with chat servers for GeoCities and Lycos, then a widget company Mark Cuban backed and AOL acquired, then Assistly, which Salesforce bought and turned into Desk.com.
Nearly thirty years of watching the same fundamentals survive every platform shift.
We get into:
- Chat servers, Java applets, and shipping software on physical media
- Why they took the worst offer on the table because it came from Mark Cuban
- Pivoting a virtual desktop into a widget business over margaritas
- Why AI should drive and humans should approve
- The 10 percent of customer conversations where brand loyalty actually gets built
- What proactive support looks like when it works
- Why pricing is the boring problem blocking the exciting features
- Where junior engineers get real experience in an AI native world
- What Jeremy actually screens for when hiring now
Connect with Jeremy:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremys/
X: https://x.com/jeremysuriel
Kustomer: https://www.kustomer.com
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