Clay’s Kareem Amin on Building the Sales ‘System of Action’ with AI

[00:00] We're a creative tool for growth. [00:02] And so creative here means that we give a lot of flexibility and lots of degrees of freedom to people. [00:08] which means that we give them lots of different building blocks that they could put together. [00:12] And one key thing that AI is going to help us do is to pre-configure some of these building blocks so you don't have to tweak everything beforehand. So it just lets you get started more easily and it lets you get to kind of your solution faster. [00:28] *music* [00:44] Hello, everyone. Today, we're excited to welcome Kareem Amin, co-founder and CEO of Klay, which is leveraging AI to help go-to-market teams unleash creativity and be more effective in their work. Klay is one of the fastest growing AI native applications for business. So we wanted to ask Kareem. [01:03] What makes it so magical? Kareem doesn't see human sales reps going away anytime soon, but Clay's unique approach is about balancing the opposing forces of imagination and automation. We'll hear about how Kareem applies ideas from physics and philosophy to sales, and where he sees AI tools heading. [01:26] Welcome to Training Data. I'm Alfred Lin. I'm a partner at Sequoia Capital and your guest host

[01:33] from clay and kareem was a physicist he would he then started his career at in product at microsoft and wall at the wall street journal and then he started clay in 2017 and clay is a creative tool [01:48] You grow your business, and it's redefining the way we go to market. So welcome. Yeah, thanks for having me, Alfred. All right, let's start with a controversial question. Is AI going to completely automate away the jobs of the SDR? Yeah. [02:02] I don't think so. I think that the way we're approaching it, there's maybe three ways to kind of like look at this. Well, let's actually step back a little bit to kind of help people understand what the... [02:20] role of the SDR is in the business and why everybody's focusing on it. So if you're in a traditional B2B company and you're selling to other businesses, you have to have an organization of lots of SDRs that do account research and they figure out who you're selling to and do they have the right properties. And you augment that with data that you usually buy from other data providers. [02:50] less efficient is just having lots of people doing this research. And that's why a lot of companies are focusing on improving SDR efficiency. So one thing you could do is improve efficiency by giving them tools or co-pilots. Another thing is to try to fully automate them, automate the work that SDRs do. And that's kind of the magic wand solution. Connect all your data, connect third party data, first party data. We'll figure it out. We'll send the messages. We'll do the follow-up.

[03:20] And we at Clay believe there's a third way or kind of like the – it's not quite the middle way, but it is a third approach, which is take the job to be done and give it to someone who's more technical, such as a rev ops person or a growth marketer, who can then use all of the tools that AI gives you to find creative ways to reach out to people rather than automate all the work and magically have that happen for you. [03:50] with today's technology is that you need to stand out from the crowd and AI can automate a lot of the work and maybe even be creative in instances, but it can't continuously do that. At the end of the day, you're selling to people and you need to figure out how to reach them and how to stand out from others in the market. So what is your vision for what the future holds for sales? What does it mean for sales? What's the complete stack that Clay's going to build versus what other people [04:20] and what does the sales organization look like in the future? [04:24] So I think we're trying to run – [04:28] this in our own company it's very meta right so we think there will be a go-to-market organization that combines sales marketing and customer success and you're already seeing this happen in the market at the end of the day you need a go-to-market ops organization that provides data and supports the go-to-market teams we want to be the system of action

[04:53] So the system of record could be your CRM, it could be data in your warehouse, and that's all the information you have around customers, how they've interacted with you. That's where the data lives. But then how you act on the data is going to be in clay. [05:09] Got it. So we've described it in a very sort of [05:12] theoretical way in some sense, like put it in context. Who are some of your customers? What are they using Clay for? And what are some of the results that they're getting? Yeah. Most of our customers are SMBs that can just sign up and use the product. And they find companies and people and find very unique data points about them and then use that to craft personalized outreach. [05:42] Yes. [05:43] or for your existing customers. And so for a lot of the smaller businesses, they're using it to find new customers. A lot of our bigger customers, like let's say Verkata, is using us to create personalized landing pages for people when they come to their website that are customized to them. [06:05] And so you can see that it's [06:08] a creative approach to go to market. So they have a lot of inbound and they wanna make sure that people see the right value prop when they get there. You can do that with Clay. Other people are using Clay in more creative ways. So actually we have a customer that is, sells DevTools, and they use this technique with us actually, where they monitor our status page

[06:34] to see when the website is down. [06:36] And the reason why it's down, and then they message this saying, hey, you could have avoided this if you used our product. [06:43] which caught our attention, of course. [06:45] Yeah, the ecosystem figures out, the developer ecosystem figures out way more interesting things. [06:52] things to do with your product than you might do. Yeah, of course. And, you know, just to add, like, a couple more examples, but, you know, companies like Anthropic use us to improve their data enrichment. So we've tripled kind of the data coverage that they have at a fraction of the cost. The reality is there's a lot of data providers out there that have information around [07:22] independent kind of market players, but people just don't know about them, and they don't know how to use them because they don't have great UIs. Anthropic using it, I would think that they would know how to use AI to cleanse their data and normalize and do all the things that they need to do. They do. So they do know how to do all these things. They're using their own models within Clay. Wow. Right. And so what Clay does is it allows you to, and I think this is generally going to [07:52] in kind of like various fields with AI. So I think of the foundation model companies as providing... [08:02] kind of that layer of intelligence. But then if you want to use it in a particular vertical, you want all the... There's a lot of things that you need in addition to the models in order to actually act on the data, right? So what we can do is, like, pull the data from their various data stores, be able to run...

[08:20] the model iteratively, and also enrich it with lots of other data providers, not just using the foundation models. And then, you know, you have to pass it back and generate messages from it. So we're about making that workflow easy to do. And so using their technology, but then making it... [08:39] possible to do the workflow more easily. [08:42] So how do you envision the go-to-market stack and specifically the Clay stack changing with AI over time? [08:49] Let me go back to kind of like the mission that you said at the beginning, right? We're a creative tool for growth. And so creative here means that we give a lot of flexibility and lots of degrees of freedom to people. [09:03] which means that we give them lots of different building blocks that they could put together. [09:07] And one key thing that AI is going to help us do is to pre-configure some of these building blocks so you don't have to tweak everything beforehand. So it just lets you get started more easily, and it lets you get to kind of your solution faster. So a couple of things that we're working on [09:24] is let's say you sign up to Clay. We look at your website. [09:29] We can see who your customers are from any logos or case studies that you have. We can see what you're writing. [09:36] about what you do and then figure out [09:40] Who are you targeting? [09:42] How do we find lookalike customers to that? Let's preset up all of the searches and the data that you would need for those types of customers. If you connect some of your first party data, maybe you connect your wiki or notion,

[09:55] or you connect your emails that you've sent, we can then analyze that and use that same language when we're sending out messages. And so that does sound a lot like a fully automated solution, but what we do is actually set up all of our building blocks with messages. [10:10] using AI and then lets you tweak it from there. Other things along those lines are, imagine you connect your CRM, [10:17] And we take a look at who is a good customer, who maybe you've lost in the past, and you [10:25] and look at what features you're releasing in the future and then message them. Maybe you lost someone because you didn't have SOC 2 compliance, and now you do. [10:33] So that's a good person to reactivate. So we should help you come up with these campaigns as well as do them faster using AI. [10:42] In some sense, the old world of growing go-to-market is going to be very different from the new world. And so talk a little bit about how Clay fits into the new world and maybe what are the jobs that are most at risk and what are we going to do in go-to-market in the future with Clay? Yeah, I think what's really exciting is the community that's coming up around Clay. We have over 17,000 people in our Slack channel. [11:10] There's a number of boot camps, as you know, that have come up to teach people how to do clay. [11:16] I think [11:18] The thing that Clay is doing is allowing people to try out more ideas for how to grow their companies. And our mission is really anytime you think of an idea of how to grow your company, you should be able to translate it to Clay quickly.

[11:33] So people who are having a lot of these creative ideas or are capable of that, I think, belong in the new world. I think the old world where you are... [11:44] just really good at putting together a bunch of tools to do go-to-market, or you're going through the drudgery of kind of like building a spreadsheet and enriching it with a bunch of tools, that work is going to go away, and it belongs kind of in automation. The new world is around how do you figure out how to pinpoint that someone is going to be a good customer for you, and then using Clay to do that. Do you want to talk a little bit about these Claygencies that have set up [12:13] shop and work on clay and help other companies with growth. I mean, it's such a fascinating ecosystem that has been created. Yeah, totally. [12:25] This comes back, again, to something that I say to the company all the time. When we're building the product, you can think of building a microwave, and you go and you put how much time you want on the microwave, press start, and it works. [12:40] Super simple, does what it needs to do, and [12:43] then you can think of something like a guitar, where it has six strings, so it looks very simple, but you can spend a whole lifetime doing [12:51] figuring out all the things you could do, you could play different types of music, [12:54] And while you're playing the guitar, you're also learning music. And I think it's a similar thing in clay. [13:01] Really what we're doing is figuring out how to help businesses grow. And it happens to be that using clay should be the best way to help your business grow. Every single idea for how to grow your business should be doable in clay. That's kind of our...

[13:17] And I think the... [13:19] agencies or co-agencies that have come up around our product is because they are – [13:29] finding new ways to reach customers. [13:35] And really, it's really about connecting customers. You know, you don't want to receive something that you don't care about. And the more research you do beforehand, the more likely you are to reach someone who actually wants what you have. Because no one wants to send... [13:50] messages that you don't respond to or don't look at or that are unwanted. And the only way to do that is to do this research and to come up with new clever ways to stand out from the crowd. [14:01] And clay agencies are really small teams, usually two to four people. Sometimes they're bigger that are using clay to help other companies grow. [14:14] And the reason they've come up is that they found this to be an incredible opportunity to make money. [14:19] There's a number of collegencies that are making over a million in run rate that have started six months ago. That's fascinating. [14:30] Yeah, they're just finding that this – and a lot of other people, SDRs are upskilling – [14:36] learning kind of [14:38] the techniques of growth and using clay to do it because they know that they [14:43] can make a lot of money because there's a big gap in the market. [14:46] I want to move on to product a little bit, and you have a clay research agent or a clay agent. What is that, and how does that incorporate AI to help product?

[14:57] with the sales process? Yeah, so Claygent is an implementation of the React paper. So it's essentially, you know, an AI agent that can make a plan and then execute it using all the tools that we have. It is incredibly useful to find real-time information that normally humans were needed to do it because it's very nuanced. So you might want to say, go to a company's website [15:27] plans they have. [15:28] or see if they have an enterprise plan [15:31] and a pro plan or see if the difference between the pro plan and the basic plan is $500. And these can all be indicators to you that this is a good company. And what our agent does is it has access to a number of different tools. So being able to scrape a website, being able to summarize the information or using LLM to kind of understand the context. And it also has access to a number of Clay-specific tools, [16:01] people that we get from other sources, and it uses that to give you the answer to your question. [16:07] Many of the people I've talked to that use clay call it magic. [16:11] um because it's a magical experience and in some sense the question we always have is like where's the magic is in the models is it on something that you do on top is it the [16:23] the workflow, the user experience, then describe where the magic happens.

[16:29] Yeah, that's a great question. [16:32] Maybe this is an unorthodox response, but... We love those. Yeah, yeah. [16:37] I think the magic and our competitive advantage is not in one single thing that we do, but it is in the approach that we're taking. [16:54] sales and go to market as a creative act. I think everybody else has treated it much more in a, how do we process this funnel as quickly as possible? How do we automate as many of these tasks as possible? And how do we grow the top of funnel and every step in the funnel? [17:17] And I think that that's obviously necessary, but I don't think it's sufficient. [17:23] And we will be talking more about this in the future, but actually... [17:30] It's much better to think about this in terms of moments. So you're creating these different moments for people that, after a certain threshold, become a way of going through the funnel. But actually, and you mentioned that I studied physics and electrical engineering, but a lot of these metaphors, at least in the company, are pretty nerdy. But in physics, there's activation energy.

[18:00] So if you're boiling water, you're boiling it and it starts bubbling, but only when it reaches 100 degrees Celsius does it start to phase shift, right, to gas. And I think it's kind of similar. Like these analogies make sense in other places. So if you're, you know, interacting with a brand – [18:16] you might have a few moments of delight, but only after you cross a certain threshold do you then become a customer. [18:25] You know, that way of thinking about it allows us to build a tool that's made for turning any of your ideas into reality quickly so that you can test these different ideas to create these different moments. And we treat – we have fun building the product. [18:44] We literally use kind of the word creative. I've probably used it so many times already in this podcast. [18:52] to enshrine kind of that idea that you're playing with it. The company is called Clay because you're also putting together things, you're building, you're manufacturing. You want to have that feeling of creation. And I think that we've been able to communicate that feeling through technology, [19:09] the product and that's why people love it and want to use it because they feel like they're building something new. [19:15] I don't know if this is a contradiction or you're holding things in tension, but you're a physicist or you're a scientist, but you're also creative. You're producing and making music. You talk about clay as a creative tool, but you also talk about the people who use it are go-to-market designers.

[19:34] engineers or developers. [19:37] Um... [19:38] How do you think about clay? Is it two opposing forces held in tension or unifying two opposing forces? How do you think about that? [19:47] I think it is to opposing forces held in tension, and I think that's where... [19:54] That's where the most interesting things happen. We agree. [20:02] And I think, you know, like you want to be – [20:07] Yeah. [20:26] But we have a lot of values at Clay that kind of hold that tension. [20:31] And, maybe a small digression here, but there's a famous philosopher, Hegel, who thought that the movement of history was about things being intentioned. So, you have the thesis and then the antithesis, and then they create the synthesis, and that's how. [20:50] things move forward. For him, it was kind of like a very mystical thing, so it's moving towards God. But I think that that... [21:00] general kind of like theme is one that we kind of like believe in at Clay.

[21:05] So describe the company culture, then. How do you hold things in tension? I've walked through your offices. It definitely has a very cool vibe, and yet people are very serious and working very hard at the same time. But that's my surface view. How would you describe the culture? [21:35] and [21:36] But we don't necessarily react to it in the moment. And we focus kind of on having a clear mind so that we can do great work. And I think you can do great work when you're not constantly feeling... [21:52] in a rush or [21:57] I think the clarity of mind is really the key thing. So you can see all the different pieces of what's happening and then use that information to commit. So we do it in our interviews, right? One of the key things that we do in our interviews is you collect information and you share information. [22:15] We're not necessarily trying to judge you in the moment. We're trying to understand who you are. We're trying to communicate... [22:21] what is available and who we are, and then we can use all of that information at the end to make a decision. [22:27] And so that's kind of like a common theme is... [22:29] Collect information first. [22:31] and then have the clarity of mind to be able to make a good decision after that. Another thing that might be interesting is

[22:38] We have a culture – actually, the value that we use for this is called negative maintenance. [22:45] Because some people are high maintenance and want it to be the opposite. [22:48] Some people are high maintenance, some people are no maintenance, and what we want is negative maintenance. So you... [22:54] Remove work from people around you [22:56] Whether it is because you are kind of in a place of like – [23:02] bringing down the tension so that we can actually have that clarity of thought. The other thing that we do is we... [23:13] I call it, there's always a way, other people call it like make it work, then make it great. [23:21] That is a tension because you want to ship something quickly. You want to make it possible for people to do new things. And you also want to do amazing, great work that you spend time, which requires time. And so the balance there, we leave that up to people's judgment. [23:38] I think one of the important things actually in a company is making sure that you're aligned [23:44] the people, the market, what you're building, [23:47] Um... [23:48] needs to be aligned, right? If you're building a rocket ship, you can't make it work, then make it great. It needs to be great from the beginning. Otherwise, something really bad happens. If you're building a go-to-market tool where people need to be able to do their tactic now and actually doing it first before other people is super key –

[24:09] We ship things as soon as we are able to, and then we continue to craft them until they're meeting our standard of grade. That is really great to hear. And I think it's great advice for many founders to just know where you are on that attention scale. Yeah, totally. Your vision is very broad and very expansive. [24:32] One way to ask it in open-ended is, [24:36] Where does it... [24:37] end and maybe you're you know i'm ambitious founder it doesn't end but well tactically would you ever build an aisdr yourself [24:48] So, yes, the... [24:51] The way we would do something like that, though, would need to... [24:56] Thank you. [24:56] need to be [24:57] similar or be aligned with the Clay approach. And so an AISDR built by a [25:06] our company would have all the different components of an AISDR and give you complete control over each piece, so that it doesn't become commoditized. It does everything that every other AISDR does. So what does that mean in practice? It means that you need to have a piece that can take in your company data and figure out [25:32] which [25:33] industry you're in and who you're targeting. So let's call that an AI ICP identifier. And we've already built that part. Then you need a second part that finds lookalikes. And it might connect to your CRM to see who are your best customers, use what company...

[25:51] you're like and who you tend to reach out to and then find look-likes. And it needs to do that on a regular cadence. And then we need to connect to your own internal systems to see what your style is and how you communicate with customers. [26:05] And each one of those can work together and can be configured and tweaked so that you can have all the components of what an SDR does, but with full control and with full ability to mix and match different parts of it. [26:22] Otherwise, it wouldn't be a clay AISDR. What about an AI CRM? I like where you're going with this. Yeah. So an AI CRM... [26:34] I think the way to... [26:36] think about it is what is the role of a CRM in... [26:42] a place where... [26:44] There is the ability to use all of this data to take actions. And CRMs have been set up for SDRs and AEs to enter data into them and for people to pull information and have that be centralized there. [27:03] But if people don't need to be doing that manually, I think the role of the CRM changes and it potentially becomes a less important piece of the stack. In fact, [27:18] Lots of CRMs try to stop you from pulling data out because they recognize that they're the system of record and they want to keep the data in there. So they have like low rate limits, various kind of things that just get in the way. And I think a lot of companies have started to move their data into data warehouses so that they have full control.

[27:39] So I guess the short answer is I think an AI CRM will look very different than CRMs look today. [27:48] and [27:51] Clay is starting kind of... [27:55] Uh... [27:56] In a way, CRM isn't very useful if it doesn't have data in it, and we're focused on finding the data, finding the customers, and then connecting to wherever you store your data about customers today to make that more actionable. And also taking action. In some sense, you're a system of action. Yes. [28:16] And so when we talk to some customers of yours, they brag about that aspect and the results that they're able to generate. But I'm going to let you brag about some of the results. And do AI sales outreach perform as well as humans, even though you kind of know that it's a problem? [28:36] kind of a bot doing it or an email doing it or a campaign doing it versus a human outreach. [28:42] Um, a, it... [28:44] So what you actually, let me reframe that for you. So I think outreach does better when you have better data, [28:52] around who you're targeting and when you have a clever idea of how to get people's attention. So the example I gave you before of looking at the status paid, that got my attention. [29:04] Because I knew that the product was down, so it's about the timing. I knew that there was an issue, and they were offering me a solution. And that got my attention. And they were using clay.

[29:16] So that was extra interesting. But I think what we found from our customers is that people who are – so SDRs who have data and automation that is powered by clay are getting – [29:31] twice as much kind of like results, opens, and responses as people who aren't using it. Twice as much. Twice as much, yeah. That's huge. It's a huge, huge difference multiplied across the number of SDRs that you have. [29:49] And so everybody who ends up using it, then sometimes they kind of have some SDRs get some of the data and the centralized automation through clay and others don't. [30:01] overperforming by quite a big margin, um... [30:04] And I think this is just the beginning. As the market kind of understands the full range of things that we do, at the moment, I think a lot of people think of us as really amazing data enrichment and really good for outbound. But really, our ambition and a lot of our customers, our more sophisticated customers are using us for inbound and for expansion as well. [30:28] And that's kind of the range of things that you need to do to grow your company. [30:33] And it's a full loop. So let me give you an example. If [30:38] Let's say that you are a company like Figma, and you have a design tool, and you're going to release kind of dev mode for developers. Well, you can take a look at how many...

[30:54] How many of the companies that you have have like five designers or more? Let's target them. And then let's then go and do outbound to the head of engineering and let them know, hey, your design team is using Figma and you should also be using the dev mode for your engineering team. [31:13] so that you decrease the back and forth. So here you're combining inbound and outbound in order to expand a customer. And I think that's what's really interesting about Clay, is being able to have an idea like this, [31:27] and action it really quickly. You know, you've given a lot of examples. What's been something that's surprising about clay that people don't quite understand about clay yet? [31:37] I think the... [31:39] At the end, the output from Clay isn't necessarily an email or just updating your CRM. [31:46] But some of our customers have sent physical mail, right? So you can connect to any API, and we have a bunch of mail APIs, so you can create personalized messages and send physical mail, which has had really great results. But that our ambition is really you should be able to create any kind of message, whether it's a personalized website or even an ad website. [32:11] and created through clay, and that's just a channel. [32:16] So the message needs to be created through Clay, and it's personalized because of all the research that you've done and all the data that we've provided you, but then you can send it across any channel. That's really cool. And in terms of where do you see – what are the areas of improvement that you're working on?

[32:33] on the product and specifically that's in your control? And what would you like to see? [32:39] from some of the foundation models and how [32:42] they can help you do even better with some of the work that you're doing. [32:45] Yeah, what's next for us is, so you can think of it as starting from third-party data, so that's data that you can find on the web around companies. And what we're moving towards next, and that obviously powers outbound because you don't know much about these people. They're not yet your customers. But what we're moving towards next and what we're doing for next year is, [33:07] is first party data. So we want to connect to [33:13] You know, we're about to release something where you can connect a segment. So we can take kind of all of your product analytics. We'll connect to your billing data. We'll connect to your marketing website visits. We'll connect to your gong calls, your emails. So there's all the information that you have as a company. [33:29] and then help you use that information to reach out to the right people and say the right things, the value prop that you're offering. That's going to be a very big task, and there's so many ways in which this can manifest. [33:42] You were talking earlier about our ambition. Our ambition is to be the singular place that you come to. [33:50] for any growth idea. And what that could look like is imagine that you're building a new product onboarding experience. Well, why shouldn't that be personalized? [34:02] using clay. Why shouldn't there be a bot on your website that's helping your customers book

[34:10] even some of the meetings using clay and having a personalized experience around that. So we are very much thinking about the full process, [34:19] spectrum of things that can be done to help you grow your company. And we will be building products in each of those categories. [34:27] Are you comfortable talking about how big the company is, how many employees, how many customers you have, how much revenue you have, and how you charge? [34:37] Um, we've posted a couple of things publicly around this. So I'll, I'll talk about some of the public thing. Um, but we, um, [34:47] The company is about [34:49] 75 full-time people now. We have over 4,500 customers. We have, you know, [35:01] probably around 100,000 users from those customers. [35:08] our... [35:10] We've never really talked about our ARR directly, but... [35:16] Okay. [35:17] I think the information had a list of top 50 startups where we were there, and they kind of estimated our ARR and... [35:27] I think they said it was above 20 million. And that's kind of in the range of truth. I like to take it all the way back to the beginning when you start the company and... [35:40] 2017

[35:41] Did you expect to be where you are today? [35:44] Thank you. [35:45] Well, it took us a lot longer than I expected. [35:49] It took us through the circuitous route to get here because – [35:53] the vision did change. Right. [35:55] It was quite circuitous. So we started off with the ambition. It was a very... [36:03] broad ambition and abstract of giving the power of programming to an order of magnitude more people [36:10] and we [36:11] thought about the different metaphors that people would understand to do programming. One obvious one is kind of like a workflow editor. Another one is a spreadsheet editor. [36:23] We realized quickly that a spreadsheet is the world's most popular programming environment. [36:28] And... [36:29] As soon as we kind of built the spreadsheet, we realized that one of the things that people do in spreadsheets quite often in businesses is build lists of people and companies that they are trying to reach out to. So we actually had the idea for what Clay would become. [36:47] pretty early on. And so it wasn't something that we stumbled upon or that we discovered. We kind of [36:54] reached it through analysis. And then my co-founder, [36:59] started doing some prospecting to find us customers. And he was like, this is very complicated. There's so many steps. We can definitely help with what we've built here. [37:10] And so all of that was actually something that we –

[37:14] came to quite early, the process of committing to building that. [37:19] was more circuitous. And it's actually where we stayed for a long time. [37:25] I almost think of it as, you know, if you've ever played a video game and there's the fog of war and, you know, the map wasn't kind of fully visualized and we kind of walked around the whole map, saw all the different kind of things that we could do and then returned to, [37:38] to the right location. [37:42] So for us, the decision to commit to building... [37:47] for go-to-market people was really around figuring out [37:51] Why are we the people to do this? I did not start in sales or marketing, and I think a lot of go-to-market tech is started by people who... [37:59] saw the problem firsthand. We came about it as a... [38:05] way of removing kind of repetitive work. And you mentioned before that I like producing music, but I really like tools like Ableton Live that are components that you connect together to [38:21] produce music. And I really liked the idea of giving that power to more people. And so that's kind of how we came to the idea of being creative and giving the power of programming so that you can be creative. [38:38] within the field of go to market. - Teams, yeah. [38:42] Would you have done anything different? Looking back now, now that you understand it was a bit circuitous, could you have changed any of the...

[38:52] things along the way or you just, it was a process that you needed to go through? I think it was a process that I needed to go through specifically. So I don't, I don't think that, um, it couldn't be done faster by someone else. Um, I think it, [39:05] took me and the team time to [39:09] see the power of what we've built to hear from a lot of the agencies that you talked about were actually power users initially and we didn't focus on them we kept the tool very broad and I also needed to develop the muscle of how to focus and I think a lot of people talk about focusing but then the embodied kind of understanding of what focusing means and how often you have to say no and how many times you've [39:39] see distractions and think that they're the right path, but they are distractions. And so going through a couple of cycles of those helped me understand how to focus. And so when we committed to, [39:50] we really committed. And as soon as we launched the product, it immediately resonated with customers because we removed all the language, [40:01] around and being broad and [40:03] focused it just on go-to-market, which is still a huge kind of area. We're talking about sales, marketing, and customer success. That's half of a company. [40:13] And so that was enough. [40:14] That was enough. Half the company is enough. Half the company is enough, for now. But once I learned how to focus, and once I committed to the mission of helping companies grow, we then kind of used the underlying intention of giving the power of programming to be very, very different than every other tool in the market. So we've made a lot of choices that –

[40:42] are unorthodox, right? A lot of go-to-market tools are built to be, you know, press one button and get leads, and then maybe AISDRs, you know, connect a few things, don't worry about it, it's working in the background. Whereas we ask people to invest time, and we ask them... [41:01] to learn how to use our product and to learn how to do growth. Now, of course, some of that could be simplified, but really we're asking for you to kind of be a partner with us, and we've designed the tool to have a very, very high ceiling. [41:18] So, you know, like Photoshop or Figma or, you know, Ableton Live, you can continue to improve your craft. [41:29] in clay and learn things and do things that no one has done before. And so that's what I think makes us different in the market. And that was part of the path. It's basically the remnants of the path that brought us to this point. You mentioned something that I find interesting. [41:50] interesting because it [41:52] you had this process that you had to go through. [41:55] And I think when you started the company, you were a perfect person. [41:59] founder problem fit, founder market fit for bringing the power of programming to the masses. How did you go through that process? What was the turning point where you said, hey, I'm the right founder for building a creative tool for go to market?

[42:16] I held on to the initial... [42:22] Thank you. [42:22] the initial intention, and you can see it throughout. So there's no product that looks like clay because of that initial intention. And what I realized is I... [42:34] um, [42:35] And you can kind of argue whether this is mental jiu-jitsu or the truth, but I... [42:42] held on to that initial intention and through that, um, [42:48] I believe that actually... [42:50] go-to-market teams are doing a lot of work [42:54] that could be done programmatically if you only knew how to program, and that there was a large number of people who wanted to do things and that their mind could be open to the things that they could do if only they knew what was possible, and that giving... [43:14] them and like this group of people, the power of programming, um, [43:18] is actually kind of a... [43:22] realization of that initial vision. And keeping that word creative, really, you could think of it as creativity, or you could think of it as maximum flexibility, which is what I wanted to empower people with so that they can turn any idea they have into reality. And so this is a good starting point. [43:42] for that very, very large vision.

[43:46] Thank you for taking us through your journey and congratulations on all the recent success. And I think, you know, [43:55] When we sort of look at all the sort of landscape and AI, there's a lot of talk around technology and foundation models and what's next in that space. But I think you've built one of the most interesting AI applications that the world has seen, and you're revolutionizing the way that sales is done. So thank you for sharing your journey with us and also for allowing Sequoia to be your early shareholder of the company. Yeah, I'm very happy that we partnered early, and I really appreciate this, Alfred. [44:25] Let's wrap up with a few of our standard questions. What's your favorite startup other than your own? [44:31] That's a really great question. [44:35] I think it's our sourcing list. I really like Suno actually. That makes sense because I like I've met the founder and I really like being able to generate music. It's very much aligned, you know, the creativity. So, yeah. [44:51] Any others? Just that one. [44:54] Another company that maybe I admire because I really like the approach that they're taking is Linear. They're just very... [45:04] thoughtful about how they approach building products. So yeah. [45:09] Creative tools. Creative tools. All right. What's your favorite AI app that's on your phone? [45:14] Oh, AI app on my phone. Yeah.

[45:17] It could be a standard AI app, but if... [45:20] It must be on your phone if you love it that much. [45:23] That's a good one. I was going to say cursor, actually, because I've been trying to... [45:27] write a little bit of code on some hackathon products. That works. That's an AI app. Yeah. [45:34] Anything on your phone that you want to share? On my phone, I've just been having lots and lots of conversations with ChatGPT, as everybody else is doing, I think. On other markets, do you think of that AI can disrupt, whether in the short term, medium term, or long term? [45:49] You know, I've been talking to a bunch of friends around... [45:53] like expert network kind of interviews. And I'm kind of curious about that because it's – yeah, I think that people – [46:04] There's a lot of work that's being done where people are trying to collect information, and it's pretty repetitive. [46:14] But it's almost like gong, but not for sales calls, for expert networks and collecting information from people. Like, what are the top problems in your company? What are top issues? And then being able to analyze that. I think that's an interesting thing. [46:27] underserved market with old incumbents. What's your advice for other startup founders? I think the alignment piece sounds... [46:38] like wishy-washy or not very concrete, but I think... [46:43] it's a key element. So you need to, you know, we talked about knowing where you are on the spectrum of a couple of things, right? Is this a product that is sales-led or product-led? Is this a product that every feature needs to work perfectly or you need to ship things...

[47:00] as quickly as possible and then perfect them. [47:03] Tied all of that back to what is your ambition? Why do you care about this? [47:10] product or mission, when you're spending so much time working on it, you really need to have that [47:18] connection. Otherwise, you... [47:22] I guess maybe to say something kind of like new that isn't often said, I think you need to have your own internal compass. Otherwise, you will get lost. And if you are lying to yourself... [47:38] I think the – [47:40] This is something that I think about a lot. I think the cost of lying isn't... [47:45] you know, anything that'll happen that maybe no one will catch you on a lie, maybe you won't go to hell. But the cost of lying is actually disassociation. [47:53] from yourself and when you lie about anything [47:57] In particular to yourself, you lose your ability to navigate through your feelings, and so you don't have an internal compass. You don't know what's good. You don't know what's real. You don't know what's good. [48:07] You're just doing things, maybe even things that you think are good, but you won't actually know... [48:13] if they work or not, unless you take real risks and you're honest about your ambition and why you're doing things. I love that, having a real internal compass. In the fog of war, sometimes your compass is not clear to you. How do you... [48:29] You seem like a very thoughtful person every time I've talked to you. How do you get that clarity?

[48:35] Yeah, I think the clarity is through being honest and then taking real risks. And so what I found is that in the past I've taken risks that have been hedged. [48:47] or [48:48] You know, you... [48:50] you might think it's a risk. Let's say I'm building a feature and, um, or even like taking a direction of the company where I'm like, let's do go to market tools. Right. But if I don't actually, uh, if I think, well, I'm kind of doing it because a couple of people have told me that this makes sense and here's how it works. And I should do this. As soon as you hear the word I should, right. You know that it's not really what you're thinking. Um, [49:18] And then if it fails, you don't really know – you don't have a felt sense of like whether this – it might be not your honest opinion. So you're like, well, it failed. It wasn't my honest opinion. I didn't take a real risk. Let's do something else. And if it succeeds, you don't really know why it succeeded. [49:33] But for me, what I've done is... [49:37] take real risks where I don't know what the results are going to be. That's how I know it's a real risk is that I actually don't know. And I'm okay with failing. And you have to be okay with failing publicly and acknowledging that. That's when you know it's a real risk. And that's how you kind of build up that internal compass and navigate like a fog of war. [49:58] That's great. That's really great advice. [50:02] Final question. [50:04] and very open-ended, long-term focused, enduring focused. What do you think the

[50:10] best possible thing that can happen with AI in the coming decade. [50:14] I think the best possible thing would be... [50:18] The, there's obviously like an amazing set of applications that could be done with AI, but I'd have to say that it, [50:28] would be [50:30] recursive AI, right? So like AI that can improve itself. That would be the dream, right? An AI that actually can help improve itself and accelerate itself. And that should lead to lots of other developments across the board. [50:48] Otherwise, we'll get stuck in whatever local maxima we get to with the current kind of set of techniques. [50:58] Thank you so much. Congratulations on all your success, and thank you for being so generous with your time and coming on to training data. I appreciate it. Thanks, Alfred. I appreciate it. Thank you. [51:07] *music*