Inside the AI Startup Making Customer Support 65% Cheaper

0:00One of the main benefits of AI, especially agentic AI, is that it really empowers people on the team to do more. Our whole thesis is like, how can we empower your team and how can we deliver an end result where the AI is fully in there? It gets built in the product. It's tested in the product. All the conversations that it's having, you can monitor in the product. We think that is probably a big differentiation right now. This deployment model where ultimately the customer owns the results and the process.

0:36Welcome to Grit. I'm Juven, partner at Kleiner Perkins, a show where we go beyond the highlight reel and explore the personal and professional challenges of building history-making companies. Today on the show, we've got Jesse Jang, co-founder and CEO of Decagon, the AI concierge platform reimagining customer experience. Decagon is building AI agents that help enterprises deliver faster, more personalized support across voice, chat, email, SMS, and beyond. We talk about why customer support is the perfect wedge for agentic AI and how Decagon scaled from an idea in 2023 to a$4.5 billion company.

1:12Enjoy the episode. Do you have the feeling when like, uh,

1:18okay, the feeling that I just had, like I started a company here at KP, it's growing. Yeah. Like that we incubated here. I moved in out of this KP office into a new office in January. And I was like, all right, this is like going to fit 30, 35 people. That'll last the year. And then, you know, four months in, we're like spilling on top of each other. Things are going well. It's a good problem to have. Yeah. And then we moved into a new office Monday. Fits like 120 people. Great. And I had this like weird cognitive dissonance where on the one hand, I was like, this is nice. but on the other hand i was like freaking out inside because i'm like are we gonna fill this huh how quickly are we gonna fill this right now it's too big like is this too nice like have we earned this you know you ever have that uh not really i mean we've never gone for like super nice offices nice meaning like too much space there was a little bit of that in our last office just because it was a small group at the beginning but we knew we were gonna grow pretty fast so why i mean we just had a lot of rules we were hiring for yeah and uh yeah it's engineering it's like all the all the rules kind of all add up pretty quickly and you have to get all the gna people and so on so um this our current one probably fits like 250 300 uh the previous one was like 70 max and so that was kind of a big jump um but this one's two floors so you know we start with on a floor first then we add another floor that makes sense um the new one we're trying to get everyone on like the same because like i actually feel very strongly um having one big open space is like very very undervalued and this is this office is our first office out of all of our offices that's more of a donut shape because it's like in a high rise and just like you know when you're on one side you don't really see the people on the other side as much you can't really tell when people are eating food and, um, yeah.

3:14So the new one is like one big, like rectangle. Where you can like see everything. Yeah. 500 people in one rectangle. Come on. Yeah. That's the goal. Yeah. Good, man. Well, congrats on everything. I'm excited to do this. In the beginning when you were, were you not, um, unnerved to be hiring ahead of like, okay. Like in the beginning of Decagon, you know, whatever, 18 months ago, you were like eight people, 10 people, right? Okay. And like you felt demand. Yeah. Like the market was beating you down and you were like, all right, great. I got to go hire a bunch of people across all these roles. Was it not unnerving in any way to like hire ahead?

3:59It was a bit. I mean, I think like now in hindsight, you're like, yeah, I should have hired more. Like obviously like the demand was there. These customers are going to close, but you didn't know that then. I actually think we've, we, for the first year and a half, we were, uh, we took a very conservative approach to hiring. So we didn't really hire ahead. We only hired someone when we actually felt the pain of, okay, like we need someone doing this. Uh, that went for sales as well. I mean, you know, in the beginning, Ashwin and I were doing all the sales and, uh, eventually when we hired our first salespeople, it was like, we already had deals for them.

4:34So we didn't really have hire ahead. So we didn't really have that concern. I think in hindsight, you could maybe say that was a mistake where okay you know in hindsight this is such a great market there's like so much to do here like maybe we should have just hired ahead but when you're in the moment when you're in the moment to your point you don't really want to hire ahead because you know you have all these stories of companies that hired ahead and like that worked out disastrously and then you have to fire people so for us we've always kind of taken a pretty conservative approach with building the team and like keeping it lean now of course we do hire ahead just because you have to you have to like plan out like where you because otherwise you just cannot like reactively hire this many people and things are going to break so we do hire ahead now but for the first year like first hundred people i don't really think we did too much ahead you said the first 18 months you felt like you didn't hire ahead for too much yeah like how many people were you at first 18 months not that many like maybe 50 people 50 60 people yeah we pretty much 10x the team last year we're 500 now 500 yeah you were 50 roughly a year ago something like that yeah 500 yeah come on so you don't know everybody's name in the company anymore no i'm actually pretty good with names but uh that probably stopped at around 200 ish people okay yeah 500 yeah i mean we're not all in sf anymore so we have a bunch of different offices yeah like sales yeah sales are remote we have a big hub in new york in london when did you break the when did you relent on not hiring in in office anymore it's probably our first couple like sort of strategic sales people yeah because uh you know we found people that we thought were really good and we realized that you know these people are not they're gonna be traveling a lot anyways yeah so we'll just have them be in the office when they travel here and then the rest of the time they're just traveling around meeting customers.

6:31That's pretty common for teams, I think. You're not always going to have all your salespeople in one office. That also kind of defeats the purpose. And then we started the New York office, I want to say, roughly nine months ago. And so that office is, we're already on our third office there. Come on. In hindsight, maybe we did not do a good job of planning offices, but yeah, we were constantly just like overflowing. It's a pain in the butt to move offices. yeah and they're like dealing with the lease the furniture yeah just like things all the time i mean you're not dealing with it anymore but it's just things yeah i mean your first office could be like a we work or something that's not too bad and then right yeah we just moved into our new new york office and uh we like it a lot and again it's like that big rectangle so we're a big fan of the rectangles the vibe's just nice how often are you going there now to like get it up and running or did you go there to get it up and running uh pretty frequently i go to new york like at least every month pretty much how much more are you traveling now that the business has taken a scaled tone if you will yeah i do travel a lot um i don't really like traveling but you know it's part of my job so traveling is usually not that bad the international trips are the tricky ones so we announced we opened up australia so going there is like kind of rough and do you um i i was out there for the sort of launch of the office okay and then i go to europe a decent amount so maybe quarterly for customer meetings yeah and we have our office there we have like 50 people there now and yeah you just got to see the team like last time i was there like before the previous time we had maybe 12 people so now all the new people they they onboard in the u.s but you know i haven't met a lot of them and so it's important for me to go and just like meet the people yeah we have a good team getting built out there and yeah you're also tough because it's not even just the time zone it's like uh oh it's 12 it's like midnight and actually there's still a ton of calls or there's still a ton of stuff to do because it's it's like afternoon here so um that that's the tough part of traveling but i'm getting a little bit more adjusted to it why do you like traveling generally i've never liked traveling ever i don't like traveling for fun.

8:50I just don't, I just like being at home. Yeah. Home is comfortable. I don't like sitting on planes. I don't like sitting in cars. I don't like walking long distances. Really? Yeah. It's kind of funny, but I just don't like it. It feels like a waste of time to you. I guess. Yeah. Um, it's just not physically pleasant either. I just like being in a nice air conditioned room doing what I want to do. Uh, my wife's a lot more into traveling, so we kind of go to the places that she wants to go to we just came back from the Dolomites for July 4th how long were you there for? just July 4th like that weekend sweet do you feel guilty when you go travel?

9:30not really you mean as in like oh I should be doing work? I mean I do work when I travel but also it's also not super responsible to like be burning full force every single day yeah but you could still know that and still feel guilty i think maybe i did at some point i don't feel guilty anymore yeah that was like there's like people yeah yeah and we also have a skilled team now that are all hard workers that's what i mean you have like leverage it doesn't feel like yeah if i go to sleep that no one's pushing in the 10x of the people from 50 to 50 to 500 yeah that's insane by the way like that's that means you're doing conservatively

10:19about probably 2 000 interviews does that feel right we've maybe done more than that that's what i mean conservatively to get yeah but it's split across the team so the team does spend a lot of time interviewing that's fine but your company is doing 2 000 plus interview over over definitely over. You're not hiring more than one in four. I mean, that's just what you have to do. There's no way around it. I mean, there are companies out there that are growing faster than us, headcount-wise. It's like everyone's growing fast. The hard part is not so much hiring the people because there's a lot of people that want to work in high AI companies.

10:53It's making sure you keep your bar high. So one of the things we do is like Revolut does this, Amazon has a version of this. You kind of have these like filters that you add on to the interview process at the end, bar raisers or whatever you want to call them, where they're just mostly selecting for culture and intensity and so on. And we've added those to make sure that we keep the bar very high as we grow. Did you add that like when you're gearing up to go from 50 to 500 basically? pretty much yeah and who's the bar raiser you um oh it was me and ashwin for a long time we met everyone up until maybe like 300 people now we don't meet everyone but now there's like you know some fraction of the company that's been here a while and we think are very good representations of the culture and so they do these bar raising interviews what percentage of people make it past or don't make it past the bar raising?

11:54I don't have a super... Do you have like a sense? I mean, it's definitely the majority of people make it past. Okay. Because it's the last step in the process. Right. If you're cutting the majority of people at the last step of the process, there's probably something wrong. I don't know the exact number, though. It's definitely a majority. When you add people that quickly, how often are you like having to basically reinvent every new process inside the company? like how quickly do you have to tear down a set of meetings add a new set of meetings um yeah pretty quickly i mean it does feel like kind of a new company every quarter or two roughly and i mean this is my first time or ashley and i both first time you know doing company of the size and so there are sort of some learning some mistakes we make and we're just trying to do our best to iterate there are also some benefits on doing the first doing it for the first time because you're a little bit naive in a good way it's kind of the same thing with founding a company like you're a little bit naive around how hard things are and so you actually have optimism and so there are some things we've we you try to do differently just from first principles but um yeah in general the team is structured you know kind of just based on like iterative like an iterative process as we growth.

13:13Yeah. My, my observation, like in KP with founders is like, even if you've done it before, you've never done this. Meaning like if you're Arvind at Glean, you like started a rubric, but like, okay, Glean at this size and scale with this like technology wave with like the set of variables that are on the field today, he's like never done this. You know, like Benioff has never done this in this moment. You know what I mean? And so, I don't know, I think in many ways, everyone's kind of making it up. And I think that has always given me solace. That's a good perspective, actually. Yeah, that's pretty true.

13:49You know, like even your fiercest rival, like at Sierra, Brett, who's a stud, like I love Brett, he's making it up. Like he has never been, for all of the things that he has accomplished, he's never been at a company in this market in this time at this scale yeah growing this fast just never happened yeah and uh so the type of competition the type of like you know sales cycles are also different and so everyone's learning i agree that's what i mean yeah it's like a new pricing model like it's all different yeah for sure um like how relevant really was your last company you sold it to Niantic right oh zero relevance zero um the only I think the only relevance is like it just teaches you learnings as you mature right so um that company I was solo founder which I didn't like so that was learning um and so with Ashwin it's like 10x easier and you kind of you kind of have to get lucky finding a co-founder but um we're also remote because it was during COVID that was also learning I didn't like that so now we're in person and it was also a consumer app so very different and i also i think learning there is consumer is very different from you know b2b and i just gravitate towards b2b a bit more just like mentally so those are the types of learnings that you get and you kind of also learn like intuition of how to evaluate if like an idea is a waste of time or not there's like stuff like that but in terms of like tactically like how to lead a team how to like you know run a company almost zero learning.

15:25So most of those things you just pick up along the way, or you try to learn from people that are doing it a year ahead. Yeah. I guess like, let's just imagine that was like a B2B SaaS company. I'm still not convinced that you would have learned that much. I agree. Does that make sense? Because everything's faster now. In fact, you might have learned some bad, bad habits. Yeah, exactly. So, um, so anyway, maybe if you hit your head, hits the pillow tonight and you're like, Oh my God, what's happening? You're like, well, most people feel that way yeah yeah that's true why don't you like why didn't you like besides the obvious like it's lonely why didn't you like doing the solo founder thing um i think it's two things like one is the psychological piece right it's you know you feel like you're like a single point of failure for a lot of things um regardless of how big your team is it's like a uh like you're the only one that has like a founder responsibility in context and so i mean yeah tons of respect for solo founders but it's just very difficult and the The second one is that you don't really have someone with the same level of like context and commitment to bounce ideas off of.

16:28And so a lot of ideation just takes a lot longer. Like I think if I have just anyone on our team, if we're just like talking out loud and speaking, you arrive at decisions and like probably correct decisions way faster. Because you're just kind of like another brain or another like processing unit. Now you can actually do some of this with Claude, which is kind of interesting. you can use that to bounce ideas, but it just gives you like a talking, like a way to vocalize ideas and like kind of hear feedback and you kind of eliminate bad ideas really quickly. Whereas when you're alone and you're in your own thoughts, it just takes way longer to arrive at ideas.

17:06That's the other learning I had. I was listening to, I read or listened to something that Ashwin did where your co-founder, where he was talking about in the beginning, you guys were in every day. Yep. The two of you. Yeah. That changed at some point, or maybe you're still in every day. When did you stop asking the team to be in every day? And was that like weird? Was it hard? Like, did you feel like you were degrading performance? Oh, interesting. So Asha and I are always in every day. I mean, we're not, we're in every day except for Saturday. Saturday is like wife day. It's sacred. You have to have one day at least.

17:50But we're in every day. Wife day? Yeah. Do whatever, but don't do work. Just hang out with her. Exactly. Yeah. And I think early on, yeah, people would come in on Sundays as well. We never had expectation for people to come in on Sundays. It was never like, hey, you're joining this job, you're going to have to come in on Sunday. We're also okay with people having lives and not being in on Sundays. But yeah, around maybe 20 to 30 people, it's like not everyone's going to be in every Sunday. Now we still have like, you know, roughly that size of people that come in on Sundays, but it's, most people are just doing work.

18:29They're just not in the office. Totally. Because Sundays is a great time. There's no meetings. You can just like, you know, get your thoughts in order and catch up on stuff. So people like that. So Sunday is kind of like a pseudo workday. But again, there's like zero expectation. Like no one's expecting you to respond on Sunday. and it wasn't like a single time where that happened and it was just kind of like a spectrum right like when you're hundreds of people not everyone's gonna come on a Sunday like that's just that's not gonna be reasonable but people are just you know thinking about stuff and uh yeah now it's a pretty good balance I mean we're in on Sundays just because Austin and I live super close to the office and so we just go in and there's a group of people that come in and um it's a good time to get some deeper work done.

19:13Are you enjoying it more or less than you did in the beginning? Like, realistically, the job today is like you're traveling a lot. I think it's one of those things where it's like, you know, when you're little, you're short. And at some point you, like, get tall. But, like, no day does it feel like, oh, I was taller than I was yesterday. It just feels like you're the same. That's kind of what it feels like. Like, I would say from the early days to now, the feeling hasn't really changed that much. I would say the only time it does change is when you're in the idea maze to maybe post-PMF and you're scaling.

19:48That is a pretty different feeling. And I think no matter what anyone says, the early 0-1 phase is way harder. It's awful. So, yeah, every stage has its challenges, but the 0-1 phase is by far the hardest. Once you're past that phase, at least in my experience, the general feeling is the same like the stuff you're doing is different but like you know it's enjoyable you know it's like kind of a privilege to be in a fast-growing company or have like this is even though like every day is not easy it's like you know this is what we wanted to do and so you have to be a bit thankful that you know this is um you know things are going well and you know i had my last company as well where like i was in that zero that first phase for like forever how long like three years maybe come on um well i was yeah i was a new grad i was like 20 at the time and i like so when you're a new grad you're like super fresh you probably think you're like i mean we thought we were like quite smart and very technically strong whatever but you just like don't really know how to do stuff yeah so we like spent a bunch of time like working super hard on stuff that was like okay we just thought about this for a few for a little bit more it's like you could tell this is a bad idea uh and now yeah so that phase is just much tougher and so now because i have that perspective it's like it's easy to have appreciation for when you're not doing that you know how long were you in the idea maze for decagon like three weeks come on yeah so we um we arrived uh maybe a bit longer than that but it's like rough rough order of magnitude it was very fast because we our main goal when starting the company was like let's not be in the idea maze you know that sucks so instead of picking idea we just um we were like very aggressive about doing this like almost like sales discovery i talked about this before but like i think most founders shy away from being as aggressive as you need to be in that phase because it feels like you're being too pushy or too salesy but no one really cares about that like you're your founder starting a new company like they'll appreciate if you're asking more tough questions like, you know, how much we pay for this?

21:59You know, where's the budget coming from? Like, how do you justify ROI internally? Like, what are the people involved? Like, those are people, those are questions that like a salesperson should ask in like a sales cycle, but early on, founders tend to not do that, and they're just doing things like would you use this? Like, you know, how useful would this be for you? And like, if you're not asking the hard questions, it's hard to tell. So I think through that process, we decided like, hey, this is like the obvious thing to build. And that was in hindsight helpful. I mean, you have to be a bit lucky, obviously, but I think that process helped us avoid a super drawn out initial phase.

22:37How long before you raised your first round? Well, technically we raised our seed round like before Asha and I started working. Like we decided like, hey, let's be co-founders and then we hadn't even incorporated yet. And we had like zero ideas, but then we just raised a small seed round from A6 and C. that was before we had anything that's nice it is yeah i mean yeah people have different perspectives on seed rounds i think for us it was like yeah definitely the right choice i mean i think everyone in our seed has been like a great partner for us it's just any inch of credibility that you otherwise wouldn't get at that point yeah it's worth it yeah like people often ask me like what do you optimize in the early investors i think like no investor will help you find pmf faster like that that's like not expectation like no matter how good the investor is so the only thing that you can ask from them is like like one first of all like don't be a negative impact um but then two just be like emotional like just like emotionally supportive and help with like help hustle for like introductions and stuff like that introductions to hires and introductions to customers uh but like no one's going to in fact when we were first deciding to do this most of our investors and like some very smart like you know founders we knew were like no don't do this this is a dumb idea because it's too obvious um in hindsight like obviously we didn't listen to them but uh yeah no one's no one like really knows you know like no one's gonna have ideas like when people ask me for like perspectives on like what they're working on it's like you know no one's really gonna have nearly close to the level of depth to give like a credible you barely even know about your own business like yeah you're figuring everything out for the on the fly right now so i think um so i think optimizing for mid-career investors in the early stages i think is like actually the sweet spot because they have the time and the sort of motivation to like really grind for you yeah a lot of the super senior gps i think are very good while you're scaling but in the early days given that no one's going to help you find pmf anyways you might as well get someone that has like a lot of time and like prioritizes you yeah yeah i've taken a different approach but but yeah i mean there's not only one approach that's just the approach that we did i took more of the like avenger ring approach yeah just purely signal yeah and then i have like the team of kp people that are amazing at helping me but i'm not relying on the board member themselves right in the same way yeah and like you know founders funds whole thing is like we don't want it like it's anti-signal.

25:15You do you. Yeah, exactly. I think they're really good investors though. They're great. Yeah. But like Trey's whole thing is like, you know. Yeah. Trey's whole thing is like, the board meeting should be an hour. You know, like that type of thing. Yeah. So. True. How long did it take before it became clear to you that you had PMF? And what was the, was there like an obvious like, oh yeah, here we go. I don't think there was like a, like a clear cliff or anything it was like a gradual yeah scale up i think maybe we were like a million in revenue it was just me and ashman then still but i think it's repeatable enough where how many customers ish six okay maybe yeah six customers a million in revenue it's like okay well yeah there's a lot of people that want this people are willing to pay us real contracts like there's probably something to be done here in hindsight i would say uh yeah there's also we're kind of lucky to choose a space i mean this space and coding maybe are like the two big ones for ai that are like very horizontal and just like very obvious maybe law use cases yeah law those are a bit more vertical i think there's other vertical use cases as well like law like some healthcare use cases but just in terms of like being horizontal like um we didn't know that going in obviously like it wasn't like we were mapping out the market and in fact i don't think it's wise to do that because that's pretty noisy but it's not like we were mapping out the market it's like okay you gotta do this but i think around that time we felt like there was product market fit and then did you raise the a right after that pretty much yeah so all of our rounds so far have been uh aggressively preempted i mean it's not always going to be like this but we never really did a fundraise we just every round is just someone giving us a term sheet i guess and then we had to decide if we wanted to do it most of the time in the past we were pushing it off because we're pretty adverse this goes back to like generally we've been pretty conservative about hiring also been very conservative about fundraising because i mean there's so many like instances where you raise too high of a valuation and then And, oh, well, you know, there's like cycles, you know, it's like, it's not always going to be super easy and super, you know, hot in the market.

27:36So we have always tried to push it off. But yeah, I mean, there's obviously some benefits of raising. In the early days, raising gives you validation, gives you sort of more people around the table. Well, after a certain point, though, I think there's diminishing returns of that. And like raising mostly helps you just like reprice your equity. if you're hiring really fast then like maybe raising a higher valuation helps with that because people just people shouldn't do this but pretty much everyone just like takes the dollar value of your equity so that's that's like kind of a marketing event right yeah it's a good marketing event yeah like i think like one thing you could do is just like raise small rounds more frequently yeah like ramp does this very well for example yeah because every time you raise you could announce something and it's like something that a lot of people will guarantee to read so you just put some messaging in there that's good for you do you have a perspective on getting to know investors versus not uh yeah uh you mean like ahead of the raise yeah ahead of the raise because they're all reaching out to you like your inbox has been and will be flooded with them oh yeah i think you definitely get to know them even even if the sole purpose is just like you can gauge how helpful they'll be so like no one no investor will ever be as helpful as during that like phase where they're trying to close a deal because like you're like they're sole focus they're like super incentivized to help so if you ask them for help then and they're not that helpful then you know that they're not going to be that helpful when they're on your cap too so you can kind of just you know get to know them just be friendly just get a feel for like how you vibe with them and like if you get along with them long term if you feel like you know there's trust and then you can ask them for introductions or help with like a problem that you're you're you're dealing with and if you feel like they're helpful then that's a really good signal um so we've done that for pretty much all of our rounds and i think that's led us to construct a very good cap table i think i think we're probably one of the companies out there if not the the single company that like leverages the cap table the most just because uh i don't know we just found it be effective and it's like a self-reinforcing loop right if someone helps you and then you close a deal and like you get to tell them and their whole team that like hey you guys like this led to like real value then that's great for them and then they'll help you more so it's self-reinforcing do you ever reach out to the investors that you want to talk to or do you just respond to the ones that reach out to you like do you buy into the like thing so far it's been mostly the uh ladder like people just like we respond to people that reach out because the the investing world is not not that big so like generally we know people and so i don't think there's anyone that uh we haven't met that like oh we really want to meet this person yeah yeah were the b and the c basically back to back?

30:32All the rounds were roughly like six months apart. Six months. Yeah. Okay. Which again, it's not always going to be like that. So we shouldn't plan for that. But six months, I think is a little bit too frequent. Do you? Yeah. And like all things equal, they're too frequent. But if you're in like the heavy growth mode, like you kind of have to raise to keep the momentum going. You know, one of the feelings that I get deep down that makes me quite uncomfortable is that everybody, how do I say this? You just kind of, everyone just kind of assumes like, yeah, the good times have been good for the last few years.

31:09You just like, it normalizes. It just normalizes. And that means like customer budget continues to like fall out of the sky. That means fundraising continues to, like it hasn't been that hard. You know, I think like probably your team feels that way. Like it's just growing. It's just, you know, it's growing faster than anything ever yeah no i wonder if you like how you relate to that yeah i mean you just want to like uh have a steady mindset across everything right you can't get too high during the highs you can't get too low during the lows so you're always trying to counterbalance like we we say internally all the time that it's not always going to be like this you do and yeah even when we do say it even though we say it we also know that like just viscerally like yeah everyone's kind of expecting just constant growth right but most businesses aren't like that like a lot of the ones that are now growing fast like grew super fast during Xerp era and then like there was like a couple years of like kind of roughness and then now they're growing again like it is cyclical and yeah we want to make sure we're talking about that um like you know we've had very good quarters last few quarters, like when we recap the quarter, we tell everyone like, Hey, obviously it's great right now.

32:25Like everyone should be ready and that it's not always going to be so easy. So you got to build the toughness right now. You got to build, uh, you know, the grit right now. And that's, that's a message we try to, you know, make sure we emphasize. Doesn't matter. Does it? Yeah. It doesn't matter. We have, um, we have like very few people that have sort of left the company, but, you know, we've had a few go start their own companies. And yeah, maybe there is a world where like if it ever becomes harder to start your own company, like that will happen less, but I actually don't think, I think even when there's a downturn, it'll still be pretty easy to start a company.

33:07I think the only good thing about a downturn may be that it might be easier to just recruit. That's the hope, yeah, because there's so many companies right now. Too many. Yeah. And that's like, that's a good thing for the world generally, but yeah, it makes recruiting very difficult. And it's also really easy to be a founder. So a lot of people, a lot of people at Decagon have like a very strong entrepreneurial sense, like they were founders before or they want to be founders. And so if the barrier to entry is very low, then people just do it, even if they don't have an idea, even if they're not sure if it's the right time.

33:44Yeah, I was, um, we did a debrief on a candidate yesterday and at Roadrunner, there's a lot of people that are ambitions to be founders. Yeah. They're very spiky. And, you know, this candidate during the, like when we were talking about her, I was like, Hey, this is going to sound like a weird comment, but like, um, she is like a software engineer, software engineer. This is what she loves to do. Yeah. and this is what she wants to do. And in two or three years, she just wants to be better at this craft. And I was like, you know, there's something low maintenance about that that I really like.

34:20I like, I don't know, just like, that sounds nice. Like you can't have a team full of those people. You can't have a team full of, but I'm like, you know, like having some people that just like love this thing. I appreciate that. Why don't I get both? Yeah, you can just get both. You can get both, but there is more maintenance with spikier people that have huge ambitions. Yeah. There's a tax, and there's obviously upside that you get with it too. I think that happens across all roles. So early days, when you're spending up anything, the generalists are very valuable, because it's like one person with all the contacts, they can do a lot of things.

34:55As you scale, you kind of start hiring more specialists, because now the functions are defined, and it's like, okay, let's just get someone that's really good at this, because they're going to be spending all their time doing this. And I think that that's applicable to all roles. Like I think even our sales team, our original team, was very, very, I think we got quite lucky with the team. It was very smart, very creative, like very just like self-starting. And you cannot find like hundreds of those people. So I think as we've grown, we've kept the bar very high in terms of just like intelligence, but now we have different personalities, right?

35:32Like some of them are much more experienced. They want to kind of come into like a playbook organization and just execute. And I think that's very normal. You presented to a group of 50 CIOs in this thing called Kios that I represent for KP. Yeah. And I was sitting next to you. And you know what I thought was interesting? I really want to get your reaction to this. I think Brett at Sierra was in the last one. You were at this one. I kind of like got to watch them both and see how they play out. One of the things that you, that I thought you really emphasized was the implementation. Yeah. Like on the deployment.

36:13Yeah. And I thought you went out of your way to make a point that this was like a unique differentiation. Yeah. For how you think about your business. Is that true? And like, maybe like, what's your, yeah. Happy to. What's your thoughts on that? Um, yeah, maybe, uh, maybe I can just just like zoom out contextualize everything so historically we know we don't really talk about competition etc just because like the space is actually like pretty noisy and there's like all these different things going on i think now is a little bit more solidified i think we're a bit more established sierra's more established and so i think we have a more clear perspective on on the two um and i think broadly like when you're building company i'm sure you relate to this like um like everyone so you you want to build a culture where like you know you're the main character right like we we just we view the world as like we're the main character there's like all these challenges and competitors that might be out there but like it doesn't really matter like we're kind of on our journey so we want to want to come up with things from first principles and like you know again like we're the main character on our journey um if i could hand select like a competitor would i have chosen brett taylor probably not it's like if you could choose like who you're competing against like you know the ex-ceo of salesforce and cto of facebook like yeah obviously we have a lot of respect for them but that's just like that's not how life works you know life it's a very honest and true you're like um you're on your own journey and you like challenges will come up so you have to deal with them yourself right and like that's how that's how we view it and so like you know if we're good then we should figure out a way around it so the way the way i with this like from my perspective at least this space has played out is, you know, you have Sierra, they're very good at getting into like enterprises and they're, you know, they've scaled their team really quickly.

38:06And, you know, I'm sure Brett is great at talking with leaders. And obviously that's a skill that, you know, we've, we've developed. But their deployment model is more similar to like a Palantir where they, they're really focused on, you know, forward deployed engineering and, hey, like we can do it for you or like trust us right we have really smart people and we can we can solve the problem for you at the end and uh i think our our main thesis right and like this is again it's like not in the context of cr like when we were first starting the company our main thesis for like hey what is our viewpoint on this space is that model doesn't really make that much more sense that much sense as the ai models get better like that model makes a lot of sense where like hey you're a big enterprise you maybe don't have the talent internally to like move at that speed or like kind of do something and so working with a partner having them do everything for you could be attractive but one of the main benefits of ai especially agentic ai is that it really empowers people on the team to do more and so if you think of like cloud code or stuff like that it's like yeah you can have non-technical people that can build a lot more now than they could before so that's like a big theme of ai right so our whole thesis is like hey can we create a deployment model where you know we're still going to be white glove because again we're working with enterprises it's never just going to be like here's software go use it so we start we still have like people that are staffed but it's more about how can we empower your team and how can we deliver a end result that is like fully in control of your team right so like everything that's get built that gets built is not code it's not like you know something that engineers have to go and configure every time, or you have to ask us to come and configure it.

39:52It is in the product. So it's like, can you build a product where the AI is fully in there? It gets built in the product. It's tested in the product. All the conversations that it's having, you can monitor in the product. And that's kind of the main thesis, right? It's like kind of this deployment model where, you know ultimately the the customer owns the results and and the process so yeah i mean we think that is probably a big differentiation right now right like back to the point of you know we're in a space where there's a lot of sort of defaults right like if there's all these big platforms like salesforce and google like you know you can use their solutions um you know maybe you know like you know brett well and and yet we're winning a lot of these big deals and so the only way we can do that is through product and obviously i hope they like me and they like ashley they like our team but um it's like you have to build a product that is superior and the way we've done that so far at least is kind of a product that really enables people to build and empowers them and makes it so that you know the ai is owned by them was there a part of the company as it grew that you feel maybe like an org or a function that you most misunderstood?

41:12The first one that comes to mind is probably marketing. I think a lot of people probably marketing like is so broad, right? And so fuzzy. Yeah. So fuzzy. And the people in marketing, just like in sales, are very good at marketing or selling themselves. yeah yes yeah that's that's that's a good point um yeah marketing i would say one i think we hired it a little bit slow though i think that's that goes back to one of those like the original question of like could we have hired ahead there like probably yes but it's so hard to like decide like what is the pain point for marketing i think my perspective on it has changed now i've also learned a lot more about you know the field and you know we are very strong marketers but like marketing itself is also super different right like like product marketing like kind of really being able to talk about like what you're working on is like very different from like growth and demand gen which is also very different from all like all like trying to improve your brand and uh like all like social media strategies and whatever it's just like like none of these are like very like systematic in a way where you can just like reason through everything there's like there's a little bit of art to it obviously you can you know build systems to track everything closely but um yeah that's probably the the function that where i had to learn the most on what um hire was your first marketing person like uh what number it was first 30 people 30 yeah okay and what type of marketer was it uh product marketing and do you think you should have done something different no we don't know the counterfactual but i think product marketing has worked out for us as starting as the starting point um so ploma who's our vp of marketing and uh actually came from glean yeah uh yeah i think she's she's done very well and i think the the thing with product marketing is because it's more amorphous that actually like fits better in your early early company because your early company is like very amorphous so like having a product market that's just smart and can kind of like flex around like what the needs are is like good and then once you kind of get to a point where you could be more systematic and like you know do more skilled like performance marketing uh that's when it's time to have you know growth people at least that's my pov have you found it hard to prioritize your time in the right areas is the company shape shifts so much hard not really but it's definitely like a constant effort that needs to be like we constantly have to be self-reflecting on should i be spending my time on this or should i is like is there more valuable stuff that i should be working on but i wouldn't say that's like necessarily that hard i think the hard part is like forming the initial bench of like just like teammates that can do a lot of things that you would be doing and do it better than you that's hard because in the early days you may have no clue what you're doing so it's like if you have no clue what you're doing how do you evaluate if someone's going to be way better at you than this and also be world class but once the team starts forming that becomes easier How did you and your co-founder meet?

44:29We had a lot of mutuals before so I knew one of his previous co-founders who's now one of the founders of Cognition and we yeah we met just through mutual friends and we officially like started chatting about um working on a company at a uh andreason horowitz offsite got it yeah and do you feel like dumb luck like you got lucky uh in terms of finding a co-founder yeah that you like yeah actually like like you know it is very luck-based i would say but it's not that dissimilar to like finding a spouse you just have to like it's like the right person right time you just like if you have enough shots like opportunities then like hopefully someone fits but yeah but that's like very contrary to popular belief like you know at yc they tell you like you know make sure you work with someone that you've known for five years by the way my experience is more similar to yours and i count my lucky stars every day interesting i didn't know that was a prevailing advice yes yeah if that is then i don't agree with it i think the thing doesn't matter a lot more are hey do you want the same things out of life i think that's like the most important thing like are you equally committed to being a founder do you want the same thing out of the company if that's not aligned which i think is not aligned for most founders i think that's going to be tough to work out and then after that is like do you guys kind of operate at the same level um but yeah so maybe if you are friends for a long time maybe it's more likely that those are true right but i think that matters a lot more than knowing someone for a long time when founders come to you now like asking you stuff what are the types of things that they're trying to figure out oh and it's all sorts of stuff like usually it's i mean the same thing right so you always kind of pay it forward like anyone that is like maybe a year ahead in terms of progress has a lot to offer you know someone because it's like the most it's like you're in the same time period it's like everything's relevant um like for us um like there are a lot of founders of who i really like uh you know ramp is a company i really like but you know they're a bit older etc but you know those guys i think i've executed really well i think harvey's been really gracious with their time just because they're exactly a year older than us and like we've been pretty much on the exact same journey so yeah you just ask them about everything and like you know when people ask me it's like pretty much anything back to our earlier point it's like you can only really talk about your own experience like i think venturing out like trying to give opinions on people's situations is a little bit dangerous because like you don't really know their situation that that in depth but if you can talk to your own experience that's hugely valuable yeah because then people have a data point of like oh okay so this is this is what the team look like this is what the customer base look like um here's how we dealt with like you know when execs don't agree on something or whatever Yeah, that's the, you know, like, that's the point of the show, you know, it's like, you know, you tell your experience, then if somebody listens and is like, okay, I can like glean something from that.

47:29Like, I mean, right now, this is my own selfish endeavor of being like, all right, what number was your marketing hire? You know, like, okay, like, doesn't mean it's necessarily perfectly true for me, but like, it's interesting. Yeah, it's just a data point. That's all you need. Like, it's interesting. Just the data points, you know. You know? And then as the company grows, there's fewer and fewer data points that you can ask. So each one is very valuable. What do you mean? Well, like there's, like at our current stage, there's fewer and fewer companies that have been at this stage in this environment, like a couple months ago or six months ago.