I keep relearning the same things building Holly. The way to work with agencies representing a meaningful (and growing!) percent of the US population is to relentlessly commit to being useful.

Commit to that, and the right idea becomes obvious.

At CalPELRA, California’s biggest HR conference – call it our Super Bowl – we brought printers and ink instead of printed mugs and stress balls. What’s useful, a piece of swag you toss out when you get home? Or a custom report that you can use on Monday?

What’s useful, an hour-long slide presentation from a vendor, or an interview of a colleague about what actually helped her support 900 IT staff while cutting org complexity by 14%?

What’s useful, another demo that will blur into the rest, or something you can hold in your hands?

The result was unbelievable.

Printers instead of pens

Instead of the usual conference swag mugs, stress balls, pens (sorry if that’s what you took) we invested in printers, paper, and ink to run live analyses of MOUs for more than 100 agencies using Holly’s new ChatMOU capability.

For those not immersed in California labor law, an MOU is the collective bargaining agreement cities, counties, and special districts use to govern their labor relationships. They range from a few dozen pages about benefits to 330-page behemoths with numerous side letters – and every agency that bargains needs to be prepared with their peer agency knowledge, too.

That’s when the real fun started: One director watched his report print: “Wow, my team has to write these reports all the time. Except it takes us a whole lot longer than 45 seconds.”

The City of Menifee brought their Police Officers Association MOU—the most in-depth one they had, full of different types of special pays that are typically difficult to identify manually. They expected the system to miss some of the niche categories. It caught all of them, breaking down overtime, uniform allowance, education pay, and more into simple tables with the right level of detail to understand total compensation.

The booth turned into a rapid-response newsroom. Paper stacks vanished. I learned it was possible to Uber Eats printer ink from Staples when we went through the first, then the second batch of ink!

We’d assumed most MOUs would be under 8 MB, maybe a couple hundred pages. Then someone gave us a 30 MB file with handwritten notes all over the document. Keiv was scrambling to increase the maximum size threshold and fix document formatting for scanned PDFs while Rahul kept his cool at the booth.

At one point, four agencies chose to wait for their reports and keep talking to us instead of getting free drinks. For the hundreds of agencies we served – excited to talk soon! For those we missed… email mou@hollygov.com and let’s talk 🙂

Jenna and the standing-room-only session

“An Art & A Science: AI-Driven Class & Comp in California’s Largest County.”

I was worried no one would show because it was the last session before happy hour. But our session with Jenna York of San Bernardino County filled the room so quickly that people ended up sitting on the floor and leaning against the back wall.

They stayed the whole session as Jenna talked through modernizing 124 IT classifications, analyzing more than 600 PDQs with an eight-person team, preparing for negotiations across a large union environment, and making classification work transparent, equitable, and explainable.

One place that stood out to my surprise? Plagiarism tracking in PDQs.

HR departments get position description questionnaires (PDQs) back that just rehash the class specification or describe the job someone wishes they had. Holly kept that number below 30% and triaged them so the department could focus on the most ambiguous cases.

Several people came up afterward and said the volume of PDQs San Bernardino processed would be absolutely impossible in their agencies without Holly.

Ann from Contra Costa County told me, most people were used to vendors talking their books at conferences. It was refreshing instead to focus on Jenna’s experience. Nothing wrong with selling something that works, that’s useful, but Jenna’s presence made it real.

When we finished, it was nearly impossible to get away. Max Stoff, our Founding Go-To-Market Lead, had to send me eight messages to pull me away from the crowd so we could get back to the booth.

If you missed the session, you can access the notes here and the slides here!

The winning team

While the technology mattered, what stuck with people was how the team showed up.

Rahul kept the booth running smoothly, moving between demos and conversations without missing a beat.

At our packed wine event, one small team showed up—newer to CALPELRA, didn’t know many people. Rahul greeted them and helped them settle in. They were a close-knit team working in a specialized area within labor relations and typically didn’t get exposure to new technologies like Holly.

Instead of pitching, we talked about how Holly came to exist and why we saw the need to bring AI to this space. They found our approach inspiring enough that they tracked us down at the aquarium on the final night to get another picture and thank us for our hospitality.

None of the other vendors had two founders present, so when I’d tell an agency, “Let me introduce you to my co-founder Cherie Chung,” people were genuinely surprised. At one point Cherie was working on a new edge case in our approval workflow when I saw one of the counties we’d been chasing for weeks. I pulled her aside, and it was exactly what we needed to move the conversation forward.

Max put himself in the shoes of the customer. We were talking with one agency for maybe 20-30 minutes before we got into what Holly does. By then, we’d built so much trust talking through their pension questions, their strategy decisions about collective bargaining alongside the class and comp work we do every day—that it was simply a no-brainer to set the follow-up meeting.

Keiv kept everything running as our printing volume pushed the system into new territory. We worked early to late, co-hosted a wine event with Oracle, shipped features, met with agencies, and closed contracts. Not bad for a week in Monterey!

We didn’t try to be impressive. We tried to be useful.

When you focus on the problems your users actually face, and nothing else, trust forms. No branding substitutes for that. No pitch replicates seeing your own work made clearer.

To CALPELRA, to the agency leaders who gave us their time, and to everyone who walked away carrying a printed report instead of swag: thank you. And to the team—if we channel this same clarity into everything we build, the years ahead are going to be extraordinary.