Guy Nirpaz remembers the smell of orange blossoms. He was born in a moshav, an agricultural village in Israel, to parents who farmed for a living. Years later, writing about software customers, he reached for the trees of his childhood. An orange grove offered a useful way to think about a business whose income arrives season after season.
The metaphor became the title of a book, Farm Don’t Hunt. It also gives a way into a career that can otherwise disappear beneath the vocabulary of enterprise software. Nirpaz’s recurring concern is the relationship after the purchase. Getting a customer to sign is a beginning. The interesting work occupies the months that follow.
There is something pleasingly inconvenient about that emphasis. A sale has a date, a number and a person who can announce it. A continuing relationship has countless small decisions, most of them unsuitable for a victory photograph. Nirpaz has spent much of his working life trying to make that quieter work visible, measurable and worth doing.
An engineer meets the disappearing customer
Before he ran Totango, Nirpaz worked on the machinery of software. His career included a chief architect role at Mercury and an executive vice president of engineering role at GigaSpaces. He studied computer science at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo. These are useful details because his later customer philosophy carries an engineer’s interest in systems: what can be observed, what can be changed, and how quickly can a team learn?
The move to cloud software gave that interest a commercial setting. Software could be delivered at a distance. Customers could begin using it without the old rituals of installation and could also stop. A vendor might see an account, a contract and a renewal date while understanding remarkably little about the person trying to get a job done.
Nirpaz co-founded Totango with Omer Gotlieb in 2010. The name came from “it takes two to tango,” a reminder that a customer relationship requires participation on both sides. The dance metaphor was cheerful; the business problem was less forgiving. A subscription made the next payment contingent on continued usefulness.
That gives his early work a particular tension. Digital distribution made reaching customers easier while making knowing them harder. Somewhere between the signed agreement and the cancelled subscription, there were signals a company could use. Totango’s proposition was to give those signals a place in everyday work.
A common language, then a working method
Nirpaz did more than build a product. He helped convene the people who were beginning to perform a new kind of job. The Customer Success Summit began in 2013. A 2015 presentation recorded more than 1,100 attendees at its third gathering. The meeting gave practitioners somewhere to compare the work before all its habits and titles had settled.
In March 2016, he and Fernando Pizarro released Farm Don’t Hunt: The Definitive Guide to Customer Success. Its practical ambition owed something to Scrum, which had influenced Nirpaz as an engineering manager. A useful operating model lets colleagues discuss the same problem without spending the first half of the meeting negotiating the dictionary.
In his account of writing the book, Nirpaz recalled giving a Scrum book to his direct reports so they could share a language for their work. He wanted customer success leaders to do something similar with his own. The desired outcome was a team that could build and revise its practice together.
That is a revealing choice of ambition for an author. A book can be a monument to its writer. This one was intended to circulate through an organization and become useful in somebody else’s meeting. His preferred test was practical: could the idea survive the handoff from the person who understood it first to the colleague who had to use it next?
“The customer journey is a company’s most important product.”Guy Nirpaz, January 2023
The journey gets a product roadmap
By 2022, Nirpaz was making an argument that sounds natural coming from an engineer and rather more demanding coming from a CEO: treat the customer journey as a product. At Totango’s executive forum, he described it in familiar development terms, including a roadmap, a backlog, iteration and releases.
The implications are concrete. A difficult onboarding experience becomes something a team can redesign. A confusing transition between departments becomes a piece of work with an owner. A renewal arrives after a history of interactions that can be examined and improved. The customer’s experience acquires the kind of attention normally reserved for the software itself.
He also argued, in a conversation with Jeanne Bliss, that customer success belongs across the company and requires leadership from the CEO. That makes organizational boundaries part of the problem. The customer may experience a single relationship while the supplier experiences several departments, each equipped with an explanation of why the matter belongs elsewhere.
The phrase “customer journey” can drift into brochure language. Nirpaz’s product framing gives it chores. Somebody must decide what to improve, measure whether the change helped, and return to it. A roadmap has a useful way of spoiling the illusion that a warm intention is a finished piece of work.
Simpler software, a larger company
Totango’s own product changed along the way. In a 2021 interview, Nirpaz identified a 2018 decision to simplify it and make it modular, allowing companies to implement it in stages. A free entry offering followed in 2020. In September 2021, Totango announced a $100 million Series D led by Great Hill Partners.
The sequence matters more than a funding number alone. A company selling help with customer adoption was confronting adoption in its own software. The modular approach acknowledged that buyers have different starting points. They might need one useful piece before they are prepared to take on the larger system.
It is easy to admire a comprehensive product in a demonstration. Living with it can be a different assignment. The promise of implementing in stages gives a customer room to develop confidence through use. In Nirpaz’s story, simplification belongs beside growth because the work of making a product easier to take up is part of the commercial work.
Then came a change in his own assignment. On January 12, 2023, Totango named Alistair Rennie CEO and announced Nirpaz’s transition to executive chair. The announcement described his next focus as product innovation, customer success advocacy and time with customers. The founder who had led the company for roughly twelve years was handing over its daily operations.
Series D announced
Seed funding announced
Two separate company funding milestones. These figures represent investment rounds.
The friendship that outlasted the contract
Nirpaz’s public writing occasionally takes a less formal turn. In a 2024 LinkedIn post, he described meeting for drinks with an executive who had given him an early major opportunity at Totango. The customer had become an investor in Perspective and a lifelong friend. Nirpaz wrote: “I build products, companies and relationships.”
There is an entire career compressed into that small reunion. The initial commercial connection became useful in a later venture, but he described the personal bond as the point. A customer’s place in a founder’s life can change. The relationship may persist after the company, the product and the original reason for meeting have changed.
He can be impatient with the less considerate forms of business communication. In a 2017 Medium post, written after receiving a sales email over morning coffee, he advised sellers to begin with value for the recipient before asking for time. He described himself as curious about new technology but protective of a productive day. Even curiosity, apparently, has an inbox limit.
There are other pursuits beyond that inbox. His Founders Network biography describes him playing lead guitar in a rock band based in his Palo Alto garage. The same biography records that he commanded a tank battalion. These details broaden the picture without requiring a tidy theory of personality. An engineering executive can also have a rehearsal to get to.
The next question is why
Perspective AI brought Nirpaz back into the founder and CEO role. The company emerged from stealth on January 30, 2025, announcing $4 million in seed funding from investors including Village Global, Array Ventures, Honeystone VC, Recursive Ventures and Darkmode VC. Its focus was customer understanding through AI-mediated conversations.
The new venture extends the earlier question. Usage data can reveal a change in behavior. A conversation may reveal the reason for it. A buyer may have a goal the product team never anticipated, or a difficulty that an account record does little to explain. Perspective’s stated aim is to make that kind of understanding available across more conversations.
That remains an ambition to be tested in use. A machine can ask a follow-up question; the company receiving the answer must still decide what to do. Customer insight earns its place when it changes a decision, an interaction or a product. Otherwise, a firm has merely acquired a more articulate archive.
Nirpaz has also described the attraction and the pitfalls of using AI in his own work. Reflecting on 2025, he wrote about replacing blank documents with conversations. His safeguards included setting a goal, limiting rounds of revision, imposing an end time and bringing in fresh reviewers. He recognized how an agreeable system can keep a user polishing long after a decision is due.
A familiar concern returns
In June 2026, Nirpaz published Getting the Joy Back into Customer Success. He argued that the profession had become better at managing customers at scale than understanding their individual circumstances. His proposed direction was more individualized success, supported by the ability to learn about each customer’s goals and context.
That concern ties his newer work to the older one. He has moved from engineering systems to customer software, from a book to a leadership handoff, and from Totango to a company built around conversations. Across those changes, his attention keeps returning to the person on the other side of a business relationship.
The appealing part of the story is its persistence. Software changes quickly. The obligation to be useful renews itself more slowly, one interaction at a time. For Nirpaz, the next harvest keeps bringing him back to the work between harvests.