Clay’s Kareem Amin on Building the Sales ‘System of Action’ with AI
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We are creative tool for growth. And so creative here means that we give a lot of uh flexibility and lots of degrees of freedom to people, uh, which means that we give them lots of different building blocks that they could put together. And one key thing that A I is going to help us to you is to reconfigure some of these building blocks so you don't have to tweet everything before. And so just lets you get started more easily and IT lets you get to kind of your solution faster.

Hello, everyone. Today, we're excited to welcome korean, a mean cofounder, and c clay, which is leveraging A I to help go to market teams, unleash creativity and be more effective in their work. Clay is one of the fastest growing ai of applications for business.

So we wanted to ask cream, what makes you so magical? Cream doesn't see human sales reps going away anytime soon, but plays unique approaches about balancing the opposing forces of imagination and automation. Well, here about how korean applies ideas from physics and philosophy to sales and where he sees A I tools heading welcomes the training data.

I'm afraid then i'm a partner at the court capital and your guest host for today we're here with cream um from clay and cream was a physicist. He would he then started his career at in product at microsoft at the wall street journal. And then he started, claimed twenty seventeen and, uh, plays a creative tool to help you grow your business. And it's refining the way we got the market. So welcome.

Yeah, thanks.

We're having me. Alright, alright. Let's start with an like, A, A controversial question. I gonna completely automate away the jobs of the S.

T. R. I don't think so. I think that the way we approaching IT, um there is 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 role of the sdr is in the business and why everybody's focusing on IT.

So if you're in a traditional B2B com pany um and you 're sel ling to oth er bus inesses, you have to have an organization of lots of S C R S to do account research and they figure out who you are selling to and do they have the right properties um and you augment that with data that you usually buy from other data providers. And so a lot of the cost is having str. A lot of the things that make you less sufficient is just having lots of people a doing this research.

And that's why a lot of companies are focusing on, uh, improving sdr efficiency. So one thing you could do is improve efficiency by giving them tools or copilot. Another thing is to try to fully automate them, a, automate the work that H S D R do and that kind of the magic one solution, connect all your data.

Connect a third party data, first party data. We will figure this out. We'll send the messages will do to follow up. And then we had clay believe there's a third way um or kind of like the it's not quite the middle way, but IT is a third approach which is take the jo B2Be don e and giv e IT to som eone who 's mor e tec hnical um suc h as a r ev ops per son or a g ro wth mar keter who can the n use all of the too ls tha t AI g iv es you um to red efine cre ative way s to rea ch out to peo ple rat her tha n aut omate all the wor k and mag ically hav e tha t hap pened for you. Um in the reason I don't think it's possible to fully automated with today's technology is IT um stand you need to stand out from the crowd and A I can automate a lot of the work and maybe even be creative and instances, but I 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 that mean for sales? What what's the complete stack that plays going to build versus what other people are going to build? And what does the sales organization look like in the future?

So I think we you know we're china run this in our own company is very meta, right? So um we think there will be a go to a market organization that combines sales, marketing and customer success. And you already seeing this happen in the market.

Um at the end of the day, you need to go to market ops organization that provides data and supports to go to market teams. Um we want to be the system of action in that. So the system of record could be your C M, could be data in your warehouse. And that's all the information you have customers, how they've interacted with you um that's where the data lives. But then how you act on the data is going to be in clay.

So we've described in a very of theoretical way in sunsets like put IT in context, who are some other customers, who are they using clay for and what are some of the results that they're getting?

Yeah most of our customers are um S M B S that can just sign up and use the product and they find companies and people um and find very unique data points about them um and then use that to craft personalized outrage. The key thing with clay is that you can craft personalized average for new customers or for your existing customers um and so for a lot of the smaller businesses, they are using IT to find new customers.

A lot of our bigger customers um like let's save her kota um is using us to uh create personalized landing pages for people when they come to their website that are customize to them. Um and so you can see that is a creative approach to go to market. So they have a lot of inbound and they want to make sure that people see the right value prop when they get there.

You can do that with clay. Um other people are using uh clay in more creative. So actually we have a customer that is cells dev tools and they use this technique with us actually uh where they monitor our status page to see when the website is down and and the reason why is down and then the message the same hey you could have avoided this if you used our product um which cut our attention of course yeah .

yeah the ecosystem figures out the developing ecosystem figures out way more interesting things and to do with your product and then you might yeah .

of course um and you know just to add like a couple more examples. But you know companies like anthropic use us to improve their data enrich ment. So we've tripled kind of the data um coverage that they have at a fraction of the cost. Um the reality is there is a lot of data providers out there that have information around other companies um that are Better and cheaper than the dominant 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 .

eyes anthropic using. I would think that they would know how to use A I to close their data and Normalizing and do all the things that they need to do what they do .

um so they do know how to do all these things. They're using their own models within clay. Wow right. And so what what clay does is that allows you to um um and I think this is generally gona happen in um kind of like various fields where the I so I think of the foundation model companies as providing kind of that layer of intelligence.

But then if you want to use IT in a particular vertical, you want all the there's there's a lot of things that you need um 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 the various a data stores, be able to run the model iteratively and um 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. So the were about making that work flow easy to do um and so using their technology but then making IT a possible to do the workflow more easily.

So how do you even visit uh the gonna market stack or and specifically the place that changing with A I over time?

Let me go back to kind of like the the the um mission that you said at the beginning, we are a creative tool for growth. And so creative here means that we give a lot of uh flexibility and lots of degrees of freedom to people um which means that we give them lots of different building blocks that they could put together.

And one key thing that A I is going to help us to is to reconfigure some of these building blocks so you don't have to tweet everything before hand. So just lets you get started more easily and IT lets you um get to kind of your solution faster. So a couple of things that we're working on is um let's say you sign up to clay, we look at your website, we can see who your customers are from any logos or case studies that you have.

We can see what you're writing about what you do and then figure out who are you targeting, how do we find look like 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, you know wicky your notion um or you connect your emails that you've sent.

We can then analyze that and use that same language uh, 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 using A I and then let you tweets IT from. There are other things along those lines are imagine you connect your crm and we take a look at who is a good customer who maybe you ve lost in the past and um may and look at what features are releasing in the future and then message them maybe lost something because you ouldn't have socked two compliance and now you do. 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 A I in in some sense the old world of doing good, growing good market is going to be very different from the new world and so you are talking with a bit about how Cliff its into the new world and maybe you know what are of the jobs that are most at rest? What are we gonna do go to market in the future with clay.

Yeah I think what's really exciting is the community that's coming up around clay. Um you know we have over seventeen thousand people in our slack channel. Um there's a number of boot camp says, you know that i've come up to teach people how to do clay.

And um I think the the thing that clay is doing is allowing people to try out more ideas for how to uh grow their companies. And our our mission is really any time you think of an idea of how to grow your company should able to translate IT to clay quickly. So people who um are having a lot of these creative ideas are capable of that, I think belong in the new world.

I think the old world where you are um just really good at putting together a bunch of tools to do go to market or you are going through the degree of kind of like building a spread sheet um and enriching IT with a bunch of tools that work is going to go away. And um IT belongs kind of in automation. Uh the new world is around how do you figure out how a pinpoint that someone is gonna a good customer for you and then using clay to do that.

you want to talk a little bit about these agencies that have set up shop and work on clean and helps other companies with growth in is such a fascinating ecosystem that has been created.

Yeah total I I think um the this comes back again to do something that I say to the company at all the time when we're building the product. You can think of you know building a microwave um and you go and you put how much time you want on the microwave press start and IT works super simple, does what he needs to do and then you can think of something like a guitar, where is IT has six strings. So IT looks very simple.

But you can spend the whole lifetime figuring out all the things you can do. You can play different types of music. And while you're playing the guitar, you're also learning music.

And I think it's a similar thing in clay. Um 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 kind of our mission. And I think the um agencies or agencies that have come on come up around like our product is because they are finding new ways to reach customers. And really it's it's really about connecting customers.

Um you know you don't want to receive something that you don't care about um 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 um messages that uh 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 to stand out from the crowd. And currencies are really small teams, usually two to four people. Um sometimes they're bigger that are using clay to help other companies grow.

Um the reason we've come up is that they have found this to be an incredible opportunity to make money. There is a number of clear encies that are making you know over a million and run rate and that have started six months ago. Um and fascinating yeah and so the yeah they they just finding that this um and on a lot of other people S D S are up skilling um learning kind of the techniques of growth and using clay to do IT because they know that they can make a lot of money because there is a big gap in the market.

I want to move on to product a little bit and you have a clay research agent or agent. What is that? How does that incorporate A A I to help uh with the sales process?

Yeah so cogent is an implementation of the react paper. So essentially you know A A N A I agent that can make a plan and then executed using all the tools that we have. Um IT is incredibly useful to find real time information that uh Normally humans were needed to do IT because it's very new ones.

So you might want to say go to a um company's website and see how many pricing plans they have or see if they have an enterprise plan um and a pro plan or see if the difference between the poplar and the basic plan is five hundred dollars. And these can all be indicators to you that this is a good company. Um and what our agent does is IT has access to a number of different tools. So being able to scrape the website, being able to summarize the information or um using alams kind of understand the context um and IT also has access to a number of uh close specific tools. So data around companies and people that we get from other sources and IT uses that to um give you the answer to your question.

many of the people i've talked to that use clay call IT magic 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 that on something that you do on top? Is that there the workflow, the user experience that describe where the magic happens?

Yeah that's a that's a great question. I um maybe this is an unorthodox response, but we love this. Yeah I think the magic and our competitive advantage um is not in one single thing that we do um but IT is in the approach that we're taking. So we have a belief that um sales and go to market as a creative act.

Um I think everybody else has treated IT much more in a um how do we process this fun, al, as quickly as possible? How do we automate as many of these tasks as possible and how do we grow the top of fund and you know every step in the fund. Um and I I think that that's obviously necessary, but I don't think it's sufficient.

And we we will be talking more about this uh, in the future, but actually 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 thresh hold become uh a way of going from you know through the fund, right? But actually and you mention that I studied physics and electrical engineering, but um a lot of these metaphors, at least in the company, are pretty nerdy.

But you know the in in in physical there's activation energy right of your boiling water you're boiling IT and IT starts bubble but only when IT reaches a hundred degree cells does IT starts to face shift right to gas. Um and I think it's kind of similar like these analogies make sense in other places. So if you are you know interacting with a brand, you might have like a few moments of the light but only after you cross like a certain thresh hold do you then become a customer.

Um so you know the that way of thinking about IT allows us to build the 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 um we have fun building the product. Um we we we literally use kind of the word creative.

I've probably use that so many times already in this podcast um to entry in kind of that idea that you're playing with, that the companies called clay because you are also putting together things, your building, your manufacturer, you want to have that feeling of creation. And I think that we've been able to communicate that feeling through the product. And and that's why people love IT and want to use IT because they feel like they're building something new.

I don't know if this is a contradiction or your holding things intention, but your physicists so your scientists but you're also creative. You're you're making your producing a making music. Um you talk about cars, a creator tool, but you also talk about the people who use IT are a good market engineers or developers. So um how do you think about clay is is to open posing forces held intention or unifying two opposing forces? How do you think about that?

I think IT is two opposing forces held intention. And I think that's where that's where the most interesting things happen. Yeah um and and I and I think um you know like you you want to be uh a creative tool, but also you need to allow people to um do the workflow or the process um and at in value, right? So you need kind of the automation, but before the automation, you have to figure out what is that, that you're actually doing and then you need to be able to do IT quickly. Um but we have a lot of values at clay that kind of hold that tension um and IT may be a small digression here but um there is a you know famous philosopher gol, who thought that like the movement of history was about things being intention so you know you have the theses and then antitheses and then they create the syntheses and that's how things move forward um for him I was kind of like a very mystical thing to moving towards god um but I think that that general kind of like theme is one that we kind of like uh, believe in IT clay.

So describe the company culture then how do you hold things? intention. I you know i've walk through your offices, definitely has a very cool vibe and and yet people are very serious, working very hard at the same time. But that's my surface view. What how would you describe the culture?

Um we tend to describe IT as chill high achiever s and so um what that means is you know we minimize um like we can acknowledge things like anxiety or fear or frustration um but we don't necessarily react to IT in the moment um and we focus kind of on having a clear mind so that we can do great work um and and I think you can do great work when you're not constantly feeling um in a rush or I think the clarity of mind is really the key thing so you can see all of 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, as you collect information and you share information, we're not necessarily trying to judge you in the moment. We're trying to understand who you are.

We're trying to communicate what is available and who we are and then we can use all of that information at the end to make a decision. Um and so that's kind of like a common theme. Ers collect information first and then have the clarity of mine to be able to make a good decision after that.

Um another thing that might be interesting is we have a culture. H, actually, the value that we use for this is called negative maintenance. So because some people .

are high maintenance, you wanted to be the opposite.

Some people are high maintenance, some people are no maintenance and what we want is negative maintenance. So you remove work from people around you um whether IT is because you are kind of in a place of like bringing down the tension so that we can actually have that clarity of thought. Um the other thing that we do is is we um I call IT, there's always away.

Other people call IT like make IT. Make IT work and make IT great um and in some ways that is attention because you want to make you want to ship something quickly, you want to make IT possible for people to do new things. And you also want to a do amazing great work that um you know you spend time, which requires time.

And so the baLance there, we leave that up to people's judgment. Um we are you I think one of the important things actually in a company is making sure that you're aligned the people, the market, what your building um needs to be aligned, right? If you're building a rocket ship, you can't make IT work, then make IT great.

That needs to be great from the beginning, otherwise something really bad happens. Um if you are 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. Um we ship things as soon as we are able to and then we continue to craft them until their meeting. Our standard of great that .

is really great to hear um and it's I think it's a great advice for many founders to just know where you are on the attention scale. Yeah um your vision is very broad um and very expensive. So where one way to ask an open ended where does IT end in maybe you on the unambitious founder IT doesn't end. But but tactically ally, would you ever build an A I sdr yourself?

So yes um the the way we would do something like that, they would need to um need to be similar or be aligned with the clay approach. And so N A I S T R built by our company would have all the different components of N A I S D R and give you complete control over each peace. Um so that IT doesn't become commoditize, right?

That does everything that every other A I sdr does. Um so what does that mean in practice? That means that you need to have a piece that can take in a your company data and figure out which industry are in and who you've targeting. So let's call that an A I I C P identified and we're already built that part.

Then you need a second part that finds look alikes um and IT might connect to your cereal to see who are your best customers use what company you're like and who you tend to reach out to and then find look legs and he needs to do that on a regular and then we need to connect to your own eternal systems to see what your style is and how you communicate with customers. And each one of those can work together and can be configured and tweet so that you can have um all the components of what an sdr does, but with full control and with full ability to mix and match different parts of IT. Otherwise I wouldn't be a play.

A I S C R N A I C rm I I like where .

you're going with us, yes. So um an A I C R um I think the way to think about IT is what is the role of A C rm um in a place where there is the ability to use all of the data to you know take actions and C R M have been set up for S C R S to N A to enter data into them and for people to pull information and have that be centralized there um but if people don't need to be doing that manually, I think the role of the C R M changes and IT potentially becomes a less important piece of the stack.

Um in fact, lots of serum try to stop you from pulling data out because they recognize that they are 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. Um and I think a lot of companies have started to move their data into data warehouses so that they have full control.

Um so I guess the short answers, I think an N I C R M will look very different then C R M look today. Um and we are um play starting kind of a in a way the the and very useful if IT doesn't have data in IT. Um and we're focused on finding the data, finding the customers and then connecting to whatever you store you are date about customers today to make that more .

act and also taking action you like in some sense of a system of action. yes. And so when we when we talk to some customers of yours that they brag about that aspect and the results are they're able to generate. So um but i'm going to let you brag about some of the results and do A I um sales outreach perform as well as humans even though you cannot know that it's kind of a boat doing IT or email doing IT or campaign doing that versus .

a human outreach. Um a so what you actually let me reframe that for you. So I think outreach does Better when you have Better data around who you are targeting and when you have a clever idea of how to get people's attention. So the the example I gave you before of looking at the satisfaction that got my attention because I knew that the product was downward about the timing, I knew that there was an issue and they were offering me a solution and that got my attention um and they were using play to do that.

So knows extra interesting, but I think what we found from our customers is that um people who are so S D S who have data and um automation that is powered by clay are getting twice as much kind of like results, opens and responses um as people who aren't using IT and twice as much, twice as much that's huge. It's a huge, huge difference. Multiply across you know the number of sdr that you have um and and so everybody who ends up using IT, then sometimes they kind of have some sdr, get some of the data and you know the centralized automation through play and others done.

And so they're over performing by quite a big margin. Um and I think this is just the beginning as 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 is really amazing data enrichment and really good for outbound.

Um but really, our ambition and a lot of our customers are our more sophisticated customers are using us for inbound and for expansion as well. Uh, and those are the that's kind of the range of things that you need to do to grow your company um and it's a full loop. So let let me give an example if um let's say that you are company um like fig ma and you have a you you have a design tool and you're gonna release of uh that you know dev mode for developers.

Well you can take a look at how many um company how how many of the companies that you have I 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 figura and you should also be using the dev mode for your engineering team so that you um decrease the back and forth. So here you're combining inbound and outbound in order to expand a customer. Um and I think that's what's really interesting about clays being able to have an idea like this and action IT uh really quickly know .

you've given a lot of examples. What's been something that surprising about clay that people don't always understand about clay?

I think the the the the end the output from play isn't necessarily an email or just updating your c rm. But uh some of our customers have sent physical mail, right so you can connect any A P I. And we have a bunch of male A P I, so you can create personalized messages and send physical mail um 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 um and created through clay and uh that's just a channel. So the message needs to be created through play and its personalized uh, because of all the research that you ve got, all the data that we provided you, but then you can stand IT across any channel .

that's really cool. And in in terms of like where do you see what you what are the areas of improvement you're working on, on the product and specifically that your that in your control? And what would you like to see from some of the foundation models and how they can help you do even Better with some of the work that you're doing?

Yeah, what's next for us is so you can think of as a starting from third party data. So that's data that you can find on the web around companies um and what we're moving towards next. And that obviously powers outbound because you don't know much about these people are not yet for customers.

Uh, but what we're moving towards next and what we're doing for next year, it's first party data. So we want to connect um to 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, uh, will connect to your billing data, will connect to your marketing website visits, will connect to your gun calls, your emails. So this is all the information that you have as a company and then help you use that information to reach out to the right people and say the right things.

The value problem you're offering um that's going to be a very big task and there's so many ways in which this can manifest. So you were talking earlier about our ambition. Um our ambition is to be the singular place that you come to for any growth idea um and what that could look like is imagined that your building a new product on boarding experience well why shouldn't that be personalized using clay? Um why should there be a boat on your website that's helping your customers book um even some of the meetings using clay and having a personalized experience around that. So we are very much thinking about the full spectrum of things that can be done help you grow your company, and we will be building products in each of those categories.

Are you comfortable talking about how big the company is, how many employees, how how much how many customers you have, how much revenue you have, how you charge?

Um we've posted a couple of things publicly around this. All i'll talk about some of the public thing um but we the the companies about seventy five full time people now um then we have over four thousand five hundred customers. Um we have uh you know probably around hundred thousand users from those customers um and are we've never really talked about our L R um directly, but um I think the information had A. Uh like list of top fifty startups where we were there and they kind of estimated our err and uh ah I think they said I was above twenty million um that that's kind of uh in the range of truth.

I like to take IT all the way back to the beginning. When you start the company in twenty seventeen, did you did you expect to be where you are today?

Well, IT took us a lot longer than take us through .

those securities route to get here because the vision did change.

right? Um IT was quite irritated but so we started with the ambition um he was a very um broad ambition and abstract of giving the power of programing to an order of magdi de more people and we thought about the different metaphors that people understand to do programing. One obvious one is kind of like a workflow um editor.

Another one is the a spread sheet. Um we realized that quickly that a spread heat the world's most popular programing environment. And as soon as we had to build the spread sheet, we realize that one of the things that people do in spread sheet quite often and businesses is build lists of people in companies that they are um trying to reach out to.

So we actually had the idea for what clay would become pretty early on. Um and so I wasn't something that we stumbled upon or that we discovered. We kind of reached that through analysis and then um my co founder started doing some prospecting to find those customers and you know he he was like, this is very complicated.

There are so many steps we can definitely help with what we've built here. Um and so all of that was actually something that we came to quite early. The process of committing to building that was more circuit um and is actually where we stayed for a long time.

Um I almost think of IT as you know, if you've ever played a video game, there's the fog of war and and you know the map wasn't kind of fully visualized and we kind of walked around the whole map. So are all the different kind of things that we could do and then return to like the right location. Um so for us, the the decision to commit to building four go to market people was really around figuring out why are we the people to do this when I I did not a start in sales or marketing.

And I think a lot of go to market tech is started by people who about a problem. First hand, we came about IT as a um way of removing kind of repetitive work. And um you mentioned before that I I like producing music, but I really like tools like able to live. Um there are components that you connect together to produce music um and I really like the idea of allowing giving that power to more people um and so that's kind of how we came about what the how we came to kind of the idea of being creative and giving the power of programing so that you can be creative within the field of go to Marks seems yeah would you .

done anything different looking back now now now that you understand that was a bit circuitous. Could you have changed any of the things along the way or you just IT was a process that you needed to go through.

I think he was a process that I needed to go through specifically. So I I don't that um IT couldn't be done faster by someone else. Um I think IT took me in the team time to see the power of what we've built to hear from a lot of the agencies that you talked about, what 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. Um 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 um 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 we really committed um and as soon as we launched the product, um IT IT immediately resonated with customers because we removed all the language around that being brought and focused just on go to market, which is still a huge kind of area. We're talking about sales, marketing and customer success at half of a company. Um and so that was enough and I think that .

was enough.

Half the company is enough. Half the company is enough now um but but once we once I learned the hard to focus and once I committed to the mission of helping companies grow, we then kind of use the underlying um intention of giving the power of programing to be very, very different than every other tool in the market.

So we've made a lot of choices that are unorthodox, right? Lot of go to market tools are built to be um you know press one button and get leads and then maybe A I S D as Price you know connect a few things. Don't worry about IT. It's working in the background where we ask people to invest time and we ask them to learn how to use our product and to learn how to do growth.

Um now of course, some of that could be simplified, but really, we're asking for you to kind of be a partner with us um and we've designed the tool to have a very, very high ceiling so you know lake photoshop or fig ma or um you know able to live. You can continue to improve your craft um and in clay and learn things that and do things that no one has done before um and so that's what I think makes us different in the market. And that was part of the path. Uh it's basically the reminds of the path that brothers, to this point.

you mention something that I find um interesting because you had this process that you had to go through. And I think when you started the company, you you were perfect, found our problem with, found your market fit for bringing the pair of programing to the masses. How did you feel go through with that process? What was the turning point where you said, hey, on the right founder for building a creative tool, forgotten market?

I held on to the initial um 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 am and you couldn't kind of argue whether this is mental, digital or um the truth, but I held onto that initial intention. And through that um I believe that actually go to market teams are doing a lot of work that could be done programmatically if you only knew had a program and that there was a large number of people who wanted to do things that in in the their mind could be open to the things that they could do if only they knew what was possible and that giving them and like this group of people, the power of programming um is actually kind of uh, a realization of that initial vision and keeping that word creative really you can think of IT as creativity or you could think of IT as maxim flexibility um which is what I wanted to empower people with so that they can turn any idea they haven't into reality um and so this is a good starting point for that um very, very large vision.

Thank you for taking us uh through your journey and uh congratulations on all the recent success. And um I think you know when we serve, look at all the of landscape and there's a lot of talk around technology and foundation models and what what's next enough space, but think you've built one of the most interesting A I applications that are the world is seen and your revolutionizing the way that sales has done. So thank you for sharing your journey with us and also for a long scored to be a early shareholder of the company.

Yes, very happy we ordered early and I really appreciate the cell n let's um .

let's wrap up with a few of our standard questions. What's your favourite tes start up other than your own?

Not a really great question.

I think it's it's her person list.

Um I really like to know actually that makes sense because I I like I I met the founder and I really like being able to generate music is very much a line you know the creativity .

so yeah any any others just that one .

another company that maybe I um admire because I really like the approach that they're taking is uh linear. Um they're just very thought ful about how they approach building products. Um so you creative tools.

creative tools, all right, what's your favorite AI APP that's on your phone?

Oh, A I up on my phone yeah um give .

in saturday I am. But if IT must be on your phone if you .

love IT that much, that's a good one. I was going to say curse actually because i've been china write, uh, a little bit of code um some hackathon .

products works yeah 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 um um on other markets you think of that A I can disrupt ether in the short term, meeting term or long term.

You know i've been talking to a bunch of friends around like expert network kind of interviews um and i'm kind of curious about that because it's uh yeah I think that you know people there's a lot of work that's being done where people are trying to collect information and it's pretty repetitive um but it's almost like gong, but not for sales calls for um like 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 underserved market uh with like old and combat.

What's your advice for other start of founders?

I think that the alignment peace sounds um like wish I wash or not very concrete, but I think 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 that is this a product that every future needs to work perfectly or you need to ship things as quickly as possible and then perfect them and tide all of that back to what is your ambition? Um why do you care about this product or mission when you're spending so much time working on IT? You really need to have that connection.

Um otherwise you I guess maybe the to say something kind of like new that isn't often said. I think you need to have your own internal camps, otherwise you will get lost. Um and if you are lying to yourself. Um I think the this this is something that I think about a lot.

I think the cost of lying isn't you know anything that happened that maybe no will catch you on the line, maybe you won't go to hell, but the cost of lying is actually disassociation from yourself and when you lie about anything um 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're just doing things, maybe even things that you think are good, but um you won't actually know 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 um .

having a real internal compass in the fog of war, sometimes your compass is not clear to you. How hurt you you you seem like a very thoughtful person every time i've talked you like how do you serve? Get the clarity yeah .

that I think the clarity is through being honest and then taking real risks. And so what I found is a in the past, i've taken risks that have been hedged um or you know you you might think it's a risk letz.

I am building a feature and um or even like taking a direction of the company where i'm like let's to go market tools, right? But if I don't actually um 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 ah 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 and then if IT fails, you don't really know you don't have a felt sense of like whether might be not your honest opinion. So so you're like, well, IT failed.

IT wasn't my honest opinion. I didn't take a real risk to do something else and if IT succeeded, you don't really know why I succeeded. But for me, what i've done is um 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 OK with fAiling um and you have to be OK with fAiling publicly and acknowledging that, that when you know it's a real risk and that's how you kind of build up that internal camps and navigate like a fog of work.

that's that's great. That's really great vice um on final question and very open under long term focus in during focus. What do you think the best possible thing that can happen with the eye in the coming decade?

I think the best possible thing would be the there's obviously like an amazing set of applications that could be done with the eye, but I I i'd have to say that IT um would be recursive A I right. So like A I that can improve itself, that would be the dream. And A I did actually can help improve itself and accelerate itself, and that should lead to lots of other developments across the board. Um otherwise we'll get stuck and you know whatever local maximum we get to with the current kind of um set of techniques.

Thank you so much. Congratulations on all your success and thank you for are being so generous with your time and coming on to training data. Appreciate that. Thanks again you. Thank you.