Commonplace's Benjy Meyer

In our latest Sage spotlight, Benjy Meyer, CPTO at Commonplace, shares his experiences with vendor discovery and discusses how Sagetap helps him match and meet top-tier vendors based on his key initiatives:

Key Takeaways

• Benjy Meyer is the CPTO at Commonplace, a B2B2C platform built environment professionals use to consult and engage communities in making better places.
• Benjy underscores the importance of personal learning in understanding emerging risks and opportunities and finds value in learning about things he didn’t know he needed to worry about.
• He finds Sagetap useful for solving specific problems, continuous learning, and helping vendors create and validate new markets.
• Two of the top vendors Benjy discovered on Sagetap based on his top initiatives are SingleStore and Descope.

Full Transcript

Benjy Meyer: So I run the tech, product, and data teams at Commonplace. I'm the CPTO. We're a B2B2C platform that's used by built environment professionals to consult and engage their communities on making better places.

So I'm a CPTO, I'm probably 70 percent product kind of guy, 30 percent technology kind of guy, you know, I'm not an engineer.

I'm not a CISO. I've grown up as a product guy, a founder, and I've learned technology management, engineering management, DevOps management, infrastructure management, et cetera, along the way. You guys you've got quite a big focus around cyber security,

Three years ago, it wasn't something I knew a great deal about. Now I'd say we're probably one of the leaders in our stage of company around ISO 27001 and all security and infosec stuff that goes with it.

One of the things that I think is really important is around the kind of personal learning space. it's about learning about things that you never really knew you needed to worry about. Emerging risks, emerging opportunities, and those things aren't things that you can google that easily either. Right. So, yes, Sagetap is really useful for that kind of mission where I've got a problem statement and I need to go solve it, but it's also about trying to ultimately help vendors create new markets and validate those markets.

Um, and it's been great talking to some businesses that really understand that and really want to do the discovery questions and the calls around that. So yeah, learning about things, which I frankly didn't know that I needed to worry about.

Sahil Khanna: Are there any vendors that stand out to you from your Sagetap engagements?

Benjy Meyer: I really enjoyed my discussions with SingleStore.

Um, SingleStore is something that I would probably have just never found by looking for it by, you know, just searching for things that help you speed up your analytics queries on a customer facing analytics dashboard. We have again, a very specific use case here. which means that without a kind of completely replatforming, we're unable to optimize some queries and along came Sagetap, where you know, across my desk as it were, when I was hanging around in Sagetap one evening. Um, so this looks super interesting, need to find out more. but it's it's a great home run in terms of how it can help a business like ours scale and pretty affordably as well.

You know, I want those dashboards to load fast. I want my customers to get that feeling of we are a data company and we're serving them as well as they could get from, an enterprise level business information type solution. Um, so Singlestore are there to do that, and yeah, quite excited about the potential that that can bring.

The other one is Descope and, Descope impressed me for a different reason. So, I explained earlier on the call that we'd had a couple of attempted implementations on a solution to effectively, change up and switch out our authentication experience for users on both sides of our marketplace, the B2B and the B2C side. And that comes with implementing some new standards around single sign on multifactor authentication, so on and so forth. And we looked at a couple of options after doing our first round of evaluation and bumped into some big problems along the way and again, I was hanging out on Sagetap and Descope came across my search and I was like, oh, this sounds really interesting and ultimately Descope, you know, they're up against huge incumbents. There's very well established authentication companies out there. But what Descope's able to do is just run their platform a lot more efficiently, innovate faster. So they've got this great AB testing suite where you can test different logins on your audience and see which works and change up your flows which is great. And they're just developing stuff super fast. They're nimble. They have a low cost base and their competitors, and therefore we're able to benefit from that. I got to talk to the founder. I really enjoyed that experience. He was a super inspiring guy. He put me in touch with his team and he pops in and out of the discussions every now and again, and we're on Slack with him.

So yeah, I've done loads of learning on Sagetap and that's ultimately what, what motivates, uh, me to continue to use it. But the value that I can bring to the company is, is evident in the fact that we've implemented Descope now.