Pat Casey, ServiceNow CTO & EVP on AI Platforms and Enterprise DevOps

**Grace Gong** (0:01)
That's crazy. We'll yapp about it on the podcast. Oh, the podcast started.
Hi Pat, welcome to Venture with Grace.

**Pat Casey** (0:08)
Nice to be here.

**Grace Gong** (0:10)
I'm so excited about the conversation, honestly.
Okay, so before I will fully start the conversation, I want to give a quick shout out to our amazing sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Nebius, the automate cloud for AI innovators. Nebius provides AI infrastructure you can count on, combining reliability and speed with flexibility and engineering support, matched by hyperscalers. AI leaders like Meta, Shopify and Higgsfield already partner with Nebius to run their AI workloads. Plus, venture-backed startup can save up to 150K on compute costs when they apply for access. Visit nebius.com or nebius.com. to learn more.
Okay, I want to start with, you were employee number nine at ServiceNow. You're basically one of the co-founders of it, and maybe we could start with what were some core lessons that you have learned since you've been with the company for over 20 years.

**Pat Casey** (1:02)
Oh, wow. So when I started with the company, I started with Fred. We had two job titles. We had Fred Luddy and we had engineer, and I was not Fred Luddy. So I handled the keyboard engineering.
Early days, you learn a lot about just functional skills. I was a good engineer before ServiceNow, but this is 2005, 2006, and a lot of things we take for granted these days weren't there. There were no hyperscalers. You wanted to be a SaaS product. You state a center space and put servers there and you managed them.
A lot of the techniques were still being developed. It's like, oh, we want to be browser-based. That was new in 2004 The paradigm at the time was full fat clients. Some sort of C thing, you'd fire up a full-on development environment. As long as it was learning as you go. In hindsight, you drink it from a fire hose. If you're willing to put the time and the effort and you'll learn a lot. I mean, your skills, I think probably inside of two or three years, I got dramatically better at my craft. But it's an enormous amount of stress and late nights. And sitting in the office at 10.3 at night, eating top ramen for dinner. And I was like the beef one's better than the chicken ones. But everyone's got their preferences there.

**Grace Gong** (2:31)
For sure.
I want to chat with, since I feel like ServiceNow evolved a lot since 20 years ago. And then nowadays we're in the AI era. Maybe we could talk about if ServiceNow have three different phases from the beginning, starting, finding product market fit to the scaling stage to right now. It's the growth stage, but also you have to catch up with every AI new development. How do you think about what were some core things that you were working on? And how do you evolve with these three different phases as the executive and CTO of the company?

**Pat Casey** (3:08)
Yeah, so I think you're right. Early days of ServiceNow, it was all about like, can we build a product that solves a problem people have? And then can we actually explain it to them? Like if you hit those two boxes and it gives value, you've probably got a business. But if you don't, it really doesn't matter like how amazing your technology is or how amazing your vision is. You got to have both, you got to have a good product and you got to have a project market fit, no fancy way to put it. And ServiceNow, we kind of found our way there relatively quickly. I suppose a little known fact is that ServiceNow was originally founded like it was supposed to be a platform company. Like Fred's vision was not, hey, I want to do applications. His vision was, I'm going to build a workflow platform that regular people can use to build meaningful business workflows. That was his elevator pitch. And we would go into some early prospects. He and I go, we're like, hey, we know you from a previous life. Like Mary, we'd like to talk to you about our platform. And poor Mary would be like, well, what's your platform do? And we'd say, well, does whatever you want it to do. And it was this awful little circular discussion. So we actually wrote the first version of our IT service management product as a demonstrator. We're like, because then we knew it would be next, Mary, we're like, hey, Mary, one of the things the platform could do is IT service management. Let me contextualize that for you. And what we saw with the early customers is nobody was buying a general case workflow platform from nine guys in a shed in 2005 It's also a little abstract, but they're interested in the app. So people would say, well, stop talking about that platform, but that IT service management product, like I have an IT department, we could be better at service management, tell me more about that.