20VC: Why 90% of Founders Build Startups Wrong | Why AI Growth Rates are Sustainable & Remote Work is BS and the AI Talent War | Competing with Brett Taylor and Sierra: Who Wins the Customer Service War with Jesse Zhang, Decagon

23:31So those are the two obvious ones. That is helpful for us in that we don't have to go ahead and like try to pitch that, hey, you should be investing in this, like people know. And so then it's more, it's on us to really demonstrate the business case, right? It's like, hey, we have shown that we're able to resolve this many conversations, and we've shown the rate at which you can improve it, and add new workflows and iterate on it is really fast. And so in our first year, we think that this will happen. And we've proven it in this pilot. And the customer satisfaction has also gone up. So it should be a no -brainer.

24:00That makes it easier. Can I ask, what's the resolution right we're at today for tickets? That's very different for a company and a company. Just as you imagine, like the distribution of their customers and so on, right? But I would say that like a good bar when you're fully up and running is like 60, 70, 80 in that range. and it just depends on what sort of things the AI has access to. If it's able to take a lot of actions and resolve a lot of things, then of course that's going to be hard. Berlin Ranger 607080. It's like, there's a very, very large cousin there. What do you think that is in three to five years?

24:32I think there's a couple of nuances to that question. I think this space, the reason why it's exciting is not just that that number goes up. Like, of course, that number should go up. I think in three to five years, it'll probably creep towards just consistently 80s and 90s, right? Because you're able to just so easily allow the end users to capture more logic and teach a new things. I mean, that's the sole purpose of our company exists. But at the same time, the sort of scope of AI agent will expand. I think that's the exciting part. And that's why a lot of senior leaders are excited is that when you talk about 70%, right?

25:02It's like 70 % of all the supporting queries. Like, hey, I need to reset my password or I lost my item. Like I need a new one or I have questions about my loyalty points or whatever, right? Solving those is obviously great. But if you had a really, really good AI agent, It becomes almost like a new conversational UI of your brand. It's like a concierge almost where you just talk to a lot more about all sorts of different things. Like maybe you start talking to it before you become a customer or it's helping you learn about the product and at least a more revenue because you're opting into a new product line.

25:31Or it starts to be more proactive instead of reactive. And so that's where the excitement is. And so I would say in three to five years that's going to become a lot more real where a lot of orgs will have implemented things like that gone and resolve the total conversations, and then the next step is like, okay, how do we be more forward looking and how can we be more revenue generating? At that point, the number still matters, but people will look at other stats as well. What is my retention rate? What's my conversion rate? I spoke to Varun and WinSuff about this. What are the core challenges for you from a lot of your product quality being dispersed or at the hands of someone else?

26:05You obviously sit on top of other people's models, and model quality drives a lot of performance for you. What are the challenges that come with dependence on model performance this outside of your control? Model performance is obviously quite important. I think maybe the difference between our business and something like wind service that the reasoning capabilities matter a little bit less. I would say the models as they stand today are generally good enough at solving most of the media inquiries in customer service. It's like instead of reasoning, it's more about destruction following. Can I follow all the rules correctly?

26:37Can I execute this workflow correctly? Can I take this AOP from Decagon and really make sure that there's no steps missed and so on? I would say the models are generally good enough at that. So the then challenge becomes, can you orchestrate it well? Can you figure out which models are the best at which things? Can you make sure that latency is optimized? Can you make sure that consistency is optimized? I would say less of an issue in our space. To get a $20, $30 billion outcome, I think one has to believe that you can make the transition from my post sale customer support to that conversational agent across different fragments of the consumer life cycle.

27:12What do you have to achieve to make the transition from post sale customer support to conversational brand interface for large companies? The way I would describe it is it's all about finding the right level of abstraction. So if you're being super customized, right, you would basically go to a customer and you're like, all right, what is the conversation or the types of conversations you have? and you would just like code it from scratch and be like, all right, here's an agent for you, right? That's not gonna be a huge business because it only matters to that company. So if you zoom out one layer and you're like, okay, maybe now we're solving all customer support and queries but for your industry.

27:44And then you might be able to build some level of abstraction so that they can go into your product and fill around with some things and build their agent and now they're able to do all the common workflows, like refunds or chargebacks or whatever. And then when you zoom out one more and that's where we're at is, okay, now we have this abstraction layer, AOPs, that allows you to build essentially any sort of conversational support inquiry. When I say support, it's the dynamic of the user's coming inbound to you, and you have a procedure that you're executing. Now, I think we have a pretty good abstraction layer for that of how you can just use that framework and customize it to any sort of use case that is support -specific.

28:22To make the jump to what you're saying, you have to go from that to one level of distraction even higher, which is, okay, now, how do you design any conversation? And the tricky thing with any conversation is that it's not just that dynamic I mentioned where the user is coming inbound and you're running procedure, it could be very open -ended, right? You're reaching out to them and your job is like charm them into activating their account or something. We already seen some of that with some of our customers where we're helping them with that and I would say it's still pretty early stages. That's how you evolve from the current framework into something that's more.

28:53How do you think about Godraels that you're willing to impose versus not willing to impose? And is it like a slider on preference for customers in terms of the freedom that agents have say I come and I Start asking questions that are inappropriate to what extent you can choose to respond slash completely not slash say a joke that kind of puts it away How does one think about the guard rails that one has? Yeah, those have to be customized from customer customers You essentially have to give them the option to enforce these guard rails and then our job is if the guard rail is set then we need our infrastructure to be one where we're heavily monitoring them and making sure that doesn't happen.

29:31There's like a bunch of techniques you can use for this. You can have essentially a supervisor model that's there when the core agent is running and it's sold job is to check the guard rails and make sure that they're all passing and if not, then it'll instantly rewrite the response. There's stuff like that that you can do, but it really depends on the company, right? Like if we work with financial services clients, they might say we never want AI to give financial advice, which is a very reasonable thing. And so that will be a car real date. We have to put in, and if you're in a retail space, probably you don't care about that car real.

30:01And so you might have other ones, and it has to be really customizable. I actually had a lot on the show from Robinhood the other day, and they built their own customer support engine. To what extent is that a concern? That I hate this argument that a lot of ECs have, which is like, oh, the biggest customer's scale out of your solutions, because they very rarely do shop -fine stripes or greatest on -play, I think. But to what extent is that a concern that the biggest companies in the world do build their own and it works better on their own data in that way? I would say from our experience so far, very few people will build it themselves.

30:33Robinhood is, I mean, they have an exceptional engineering team and they also have the different philosophies. And so I think there will be a couple of pockets of players that are more of that profile that are happy to build it themselves, where they're super tech heavy and generally on the sort of like the lower enterprise side of things. What we've seen in just the enterprise at large is that folks may have done some work internally. Some people experiment with GBT or somewhat and they quickly realize that to actually get something production level, you need a lot more than that. You need essentially a whole framework for non -technical users to come in and build and adjust things.

31:08You need learning, monitoring, observability, but the ability to run experiments, and maybe testing and stuff like that. Why build that internally? It's just, it will take you way too long and it's not really what your engineer should be doing. And so that's generally what people come to and that's when they decide to partner. So I would say it's not very common that we see people doing the full in -house approach, but sometimes it'll be a hybrid, right? It's like, hey, there are certain things we want to own in -house. And so then it's our job to really flex around that and make sure that we can provide the support they need elsewhere.

31:38How much of your new code created today is AI generated? Vlad said 50 %, Benny off said 50 %. Same for you. Yeah, roughly there. The lines get blurred because oftentimes what will happen is like, hey, I'm sitting down to this project. Let me just have the agent take a stab at it first, and then you go in and edit things and move things around. So there's a bit of like teamwork there involved, but 50 seems about right. I don't actually know these days. Do you think in five years time you'll have more or less engineers? is. Oh, more for sure. At our stage, we cannot get enough engineers right now.

32:11We're hiring engineers so fast. In five years, I think we'll have to be mad at the originers. The single biggest problem in AI B2B will be hiring for the next year, 18 months. Do you agree? And how do you think about the challenge respectfully? I bet that's one's a hottest fart company, but no offense against anthropic matter and cursor where you're just against, you know, massive sun styles of cash, how do you do that? Well, actually, typically I find we don't compete with them to like the large companies. I think people who want to work there versus people that want to work at a company's art stage are usually not the same folks.

32:49And so I don't think there's too much direct competition with those folks, but to your point, there's a lot of companies hiring, right? So it is a big challenge to make sure that you and the best folks. Is it just gotta be clear about, what is the unique advantage of working at a place like us, right? And I think we have a pretty unique culture. I think everyone here is along where they're opting into like, we're in the office all the time and we're working hard and that's gonna lead to somewhere. That's gonna lead to me leapfrogging my career or you know, financial outcomes in the future. So why'd you prefer in person?

33:20It's just way more productive. My last company, we were remote so because it was during COVID and I think there's pros and cons of that, but I think overall just personality wise, it just comes down to the founder's personality. like, after an hour, doing a lot of communication in person, it just allows ideas to flow a lot faster. Do you work Saturdays? Saturdays and so Saturdays is essentially a spouse day, because most of the team here is married, and we need to spend time with our families. Most of the team is married. That's interesting. When I spoke to Sam Altman, he said that actually the majority of open AI's team is in the 30s.

33:54I compare that to Brandon and McCall, who are the most people in the early 20s. How do you think having a 30s predicated team changes the company? Yeah, so when I say team, it's more the leadership team. I would say we all got married quite young. So I got married when I was 24 in Auschwitz. Whoa. Pretty young as well. And our VP of engineering, VP of APM, they all married in the last year. So I don't know, we just have a group of folks that got married quite young. 24. Yeah. Was it love at first sight? Yeah, I mean, we met in college. So I was a sophomore, I shoot a junior year and first person I ever dated, we just got along well.

34:35Wow, that's amazing. I'm a romantic. So I love stories like that. That's awesome. And so we have a predominant 30s predicated team, work super fucking hard and that's how we win talent and cool. When you think about like alternative competitors today, which one do you most respect and why? Yeah, it'll probably be the two I mentioned. So Salesforce, we actually are pretty familiar with the Salesforce team. We have some folks on our team from Salesforce and people like to dunk on the older like bigger players But they're also dealing with a completely different problem They just have so much scale that you just have to build something that can take on that scale and yeah I think they have a really smart team working on it So we have definitely a respect at that for them I think the competition there hasn't heated up as much because they are more of a Almost like a horizontal player like they they're just trying to be horizontal off the bat whereas we're obviously starting from much more of a vertical approach.

35:28Why do you think Agent 4 doesn't have the success that they wanted it to have? I have Benny or Phon. I've had him on many times, he's an old brand, and he would accept that. It's not really my place to say that. I would say what I've seen from the outside is that there may be getting pulled into too many different directions because they have too many customers. That could be one. Then it's also the classic one where it's just hard to move fast when you're file type things that prevent you from watching things fast. And so it's just hard. We mentioned hiring. One thing that is important in hiring is ownership.

36:01People feel like they have equity in their part of a company. The last round was at 1 .5 billion. What revenue were you at when you raised at 1 .5? We don't share a revenue directly, but last year we went from roughly 0 to a figure's error, and we raised towards the end of that. So that was our series B. And then series C was, we announced it recently, but we closed it. It's been a couple months at this point, but we've had tremendous work this year. It's been amazing. I guess I'm just wondering because I saw another one of your interviews founders in arms and you mentioned the hidden dangers of high valuations.

36:37I was just like intrigued to hear your thoughts on that. Do you feel that it was a high valuation you raised up? I thought it was, I mean, it's, those, these are things are all subjective. I will say we kind of raised that my higher evaluation up to like 1 .5 to 2x. The reason why you don't want to is that it creates a couple of weird dynamics. And so what does it create that you didn't want for founders listening who have options like you did and maybe aren't aware of them? So there's a couple things just mentally it just creates like, okay, well now the goalpost is here. So all the wins you do have just feel a little bit diluted.

37:12And you're like, okay, well, that was cool. But you know, the goalpost is way over here. So and the whole team just feel a little bit demotivated. It's like, okay, we're working so hard. We are making progress, but everything's been for so high. The second thing is that it makes hiring a little bit weirder because people come in and they're getting their equity packages, but it's like, okay, well, how long will it take you to get to this valuation? Whereas I think that our current valuation, hopefully, is not gonna be that long. So that's the dynamic that you see. And then lastly, I would say it just really limits your optionality in the future.

37:45Like when you think about people with that braze, that huge valuations that I've known folks that have done this, you get to a point where you maybe are still doing well as a business, but the market's changed and you're just not able to raise at that price with some healthy, multiple on it. And so then it just feels like your business is lost momentum, even though maybe internally you feel like, well, you know, we've been growing steadily, you just maybe not as fast as we could hope, but still at a fast rate. And then you just feel like it was not a big company. So I think those are the main dangers.

38:13When you project forward this market, I always kind of try and think about market makeup and composition, like your Uber and Lifestyle market or a much more even distribution, maybe a little bit more like cloud where you've got three or four players with 25 % to 30 % each. Is this a winner -takeable market or is this a more evenly fragmented market with three to four players? I think there's a pretty rarely enterprise market that is a winner -takeable market. Most of the winner -takeable markets are more marketplaces where there's heavy network or like more prosumer type markets. Do you not think Salesforce is a winnate cool?

38:46Well Salesforce is a little bit different. There are some... I mean, you could say HubSpot, but it's like 300 billion versus 30 billion. No, that's fair. I think our space probably will have multiple winners, hopefully not too many, and hopefully we're one of them. I think it's just hard to say like why there would be a huge single winner here. The reason is that there's not that many network effects from between customers, and then there's also just different things that different companies want. So that's the reality. There is switching costs though, no? Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, there's switching costs with most enterprise software companies.

39:21And so that's why the next few years matter so much is that a lot of people are evaluating this right now. And so you have to get in front of them and make sure you showcase why you're the best. How important is contextual memory to switching cost? When you think about providing incredible experience to your customers and having that enriched data that you have, when a customer moves, does one allow portability of data with them, or is that a loss that you bluntly crystallize when you want to switch? I mean, there's some things you can port over, right? Like, you're still going to have the conversations, and you're still maybe going to have these sort of outlines of your operating procedures and so on.

39:57But the thing that is unique to most platforms is that it's almost like how people talk about system of record normally, where it's like your stuff is saved in there, and I mean, Salesforce is a great system of record. They use this configuration language and stuff like that so that you've already invested hundreds of hours to configure it. So you're like, okay, I'm locked in. That's kind of a system record. I would say for AI solutions, it's more of like a system of intelligence where you're storing the business logic and you're storing the way that your business works. Ideally, that updates over time as well, but that's the thing that started to port over.

40:28I will say what we're noticing in the market though, is that people really care about not being locked in. People care that, hey, the solution that you have is more agile. That's why we've created our AOP system around this concept of being a lot more transparent. It doesn't feel like, okay, I just bought this AI solution. Even though it's working well, it feels like a black box. I feel like I'm just locked into it forever because I don't even know how to move on. Do you think in five years time we'll prompt in the same way that we prompt today? That one's hard to say. I don't imagine it'll be too different.

41:00Maybe we'll say, hey, give me X -tone, make it X, add Y. I don't know, I think it feels like the most outdated way of bluntly working with these engines. It's like for me, the other one, it's like choosing which model you run on. Are you kidding me? We're not going to do that in a year. Yeah, I think there'll be more of learning from examples that will happen. Because if you just think about how humans learn, if you bring like a really good human, or an agent they learn by shadowing and kind of seeing examples and so on, there's probably going to be more of that in the future. Right now, it's prompting as the best way.

41:32Jesse, what do you think you believe that most around you disagree with you on? I'll give a sort of work related one and then more of a out there one. So the work related one is, I don't know how hot of a take this is nowadays, I feel more people are buying into this. But at second, we really value just like clock speed really, really highly. In clock speed, I just mean like how fast your brain works and how fast you can learn. This is across all functions, right? Obviously, it's important for engineering, but for sales and for marketing and so on, and like a bunch of our top sales reps, they're just like really smart people.

42:05And they're just like figuring stuff out from first principles, like there's go, go, go, really aggressive. So lots of matters a lot more, to us that matters a lot more than things like experience and necessarily being able to sell to this industry and so on. So what did you then go very fast on that with the benefit of hindsight you wish you'd move slower on? For example, I had the chance to do 11 laps of seed round with like a 250K check. I was literally very quick. I said no, it doesn't meet our own ship. We're busy. Move on next next. Oh, sorry. I misinterpreted it as you made the investment.

42:39But yeah, it was 250 K at 25 million. We're a big fund. It's like 1%. But I should have done it. And I would have done it if I'd spent more time on it. And I haven't tried to focus on efficiency and clock speed. Interesting. I think we're still not old enough to really know how some of these decisions have to pan out. But I think mostly most of our decisions at our stage are pretty reversible. So if we decided to, hey, we made a bad decision, we can reverse it. It could be higher as we made in the past, would be the mean one. When you look at the highs, you've made in the past at the mistakes.

43:11What did you not see that you wish you'd seen? By the way, I don't actually don't have like a battery issues with any of these folks that I left. I still think quite highly of them. I think we just did not have a good enough understanding of our own culture. I don't think we even crystallized this clock speed concept until recently. And so I think there were more cultural issues that we didn't select for. And we were just selecting for like, okay, like, yeah, maybe you know this industry well or so on and stuff like that. So how does the crystallization of clock speed transpire in job interviews?

43:38What do you do ask to determine clock speed availability? I would say that when I interview people, that's the only thing I look for because the rest of the team does look the actual interview. My job is that I just have a conversation with them. I talk about the projects they've worked on in the past. They talk about how they make decisions. I asked them to explain stuff to me, like, you know, maybe something that I don't really know much about and you know Something that they worked on. I mean one part of it is like how are you articulating stuff? But it's just like how fast can you think right?

44:04Like I changed the topic and like ask about this other thing and that's helpful Yeah, it's more of a general feeling I wouldn't claim that we have some perfect measure of clock speed It is just I think it's become just a view that we hold pretty tightly from a product perspective What have you not done that you think you should have done and how have you reflected on that? It's kind of a new one's the answer, but Ashwin had or previously a palantir and both of our personalities I think we really gravitated toward this like you know forward deployed concept the thing is I think for deployed and For some reason for deployed engineering is just so hot right now like people are just like so hot everyone wants an FD You've got an FD.

44:44I want an FD Exactly, and so I think our mistake was we over indexed on that a little bit because I don't think that concept necessarily makes sense in all use cases. In our use case, the types of things that people care about across different customers is generally pretty consistent. When that's the case, you have way more advantage building products first approach. Over time, we found this good middle ground where there are of course still forward point elements of what we do because we have large customers. I think within the space we lean much more on the product approach. That allows us to scale faster and allows us to enable our customers more as well, where they don't feel like, hey, I need to message Decagon for everything.

45:22I asked you what you believed that others disagree with you. And you said that was one that just got and then there was another one, which was maybe, I don't know, less. So the other one that I've been talking with people about is, right now, a lot of people are really stressed, or if you're working really hard, you're really stressed. Stress is generally seen as a very bad thing. That makes sense because you like negatively impact your health and maybe showing your life span and things like that Generally what people do after that is they try really hard to mitigate it and do all these like wellness things or like physical balance and things like that And my view is that they actually does more harm than good and instead you should just embrace the stress and treat it as Almost like an advantage in that Also, there's no stress in your life.

46:09You're probably like your life is not as exciting, right? So like you have to race a lot more. So what extent do you just think all of me? So just a bit wet. I'm just going to call a spade a spade like your grandparents, my grandparents, they went through World War, they went through farming, they went through rationing, like no offense. Your engineer is a debating between cursor and windsurf and what the new MCP XYZ protocol is like guys grow the fuck up. Yeah, sure. I think that is a bit of it as well. Yeah, I think my take is like if people are just like kind of over indexing all this stuff, right?

46:42It's like if you invest so much into the else well and this stuff it actually makes the stress worse because now There's this huge juxtaposition between like relaxing and stress Well instead just like embrace it. We've got to toughen up and it's like it's almost like a privilege to that We're in the situation where we can compete for all these big customers and we're in such a fast moving industry It's quite exciting also the more you talk about things the more you amplify them in your mind get on with it My favorite is Nick at Ravallute. I don't know if you know Ravallute the business. That's one of my favorite businesses.

47:12He's also one of my favorite founders. On a subject, Jesse, I've interviewed a thousand of the biggest founders of our time. Nick is the best of all them. Period hands down. Unbelievable when it comes to culture. You're like, what does it take to build the culture you have? I wouldn't say a good culture. He's like, it's very simple. We win. people want to be on a winning team is very rare that you have unhappiness when people are winning, learning and getting richer, which all fucking happens when you win. Exactly. The reason I like that, I mean we've taken a lot of inspiration from them but that's basically what I'm saying, right?

47:47It's that managing stress not the thing that's important, it's like hey is what I'm doing meaningful and do I get joy out of these milestones and the flip side of that is that at Dekker we try really hard to celebrate wins for us our wins typically are related to growth milestones, but then we make sure that everyone that's of all the super celebrated at big milestones, the whole company comes together and we were not afraid to invest in that. Jesse, what do you do that you know is bad but continue to do? I have a tendency to, basically, it's very difficult for me to escape the low -level details.

48:21It's definitely not a very responsible use of my time at this point because the lead the work that you generally have to make sure you're spending enough time thinking about the high I will stretch a lot of things, but I cannot avoid just like going each deal that is coming up. Like I care a lot about this deal. I have to go like super in the weeds and the refs sometimes don't like that either because it's like, oh man, I'm getting screwed nice so much. That is probably the main thing and you're not trying to be a little bit more balanced there, but it's just hard. You start a new company tomorrow and you can only take one investor with you, which investors with you.

48:54Oh man, that is going to be tough. And then our investors will be happy. I think our investors right now are good at very different things. But if I had this shout out one person, she's a relatively small investor in Decagon. But we've been or I personally and our team have been very, very impressed with Anu Hariharan from Abra, especially on the good market side. So yeah, definitely shout out to Anu. That's awesome. Totally agree with you. I think she's fantastic and and love the new film that she's building. Tell me, what question are you never asked that you should be asked? And also, actually, what question are you like fucking bored of being asked?

49:27I feel so bad for the job displacement question, by the way. I apologize for that. I'm sure there's not one interview or a site or are we not gonna lose everyone's jobs? That is true. I was thinking. But no, what I'm seeking to be asked, I think, is just, I think the super broad questions are just like, It's like, okay, where's the company you're going to be in five years? That sort of stuff is way too broad. It's very tough to answer this question. Of course, I can give our vision and roadmap. But what specific function within the company do you think will be most changed in how it operates in the next few years?

50:01For us, it's probably sales because going to market is such a big part of organizations like ours. But none of the AISDR's fucking work. I know I invested in 11X. Oh no. Yes, but that's part of the reason, right? Like right now it doesn't work, but I do think a three to five years people will figure out some things that were AI can be really useful. I think we're still not using AI as much as we could on the sales side. And I don't think fundamentally there should be a reason why companies like us are making such a big impact on the CX side, but sales for what are reasons is just like a constant thing that cannot AI can I help with.

50:33I do think people will find more creative ways there and they'll really change the way that work is done. But even now, well, our sales team relies a lot on chat GPT to do research and stuff like that. So that's like one simple use case, of course, but that's like not that impacting on the grass scheme of things. So I do think in three to five years, there'll be some big changes there. I totally agree. Hence my investment. Maybe I just picked the wrong fucking horse. Dude, I want to do a quick fight with you. So I say short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound OK? You're welcome.

50:58Let's do it. You have open AI at 300, or you have anthropic at 60, which one do you invest in? Anthropic. Wow, why? So, why? I don't think that market is a winner -take -all market, so I do think there will be many big players. Opening eyes advantage is that it's just on the consumer side, it's just so dominant. Anthropic, I think there's a lot of interesting things that it's doing that could surpass. So what I think they're work on coding agents has been really impressive, and they're definitely the ones farther as long there. I mean, that's why cursor uses Anthropics models. And also, they just, I think they have a good team.

51:33there's marching forward and I don't think that long term necessarily will always see a 5x difference between open air and thromping. So I guess yeah maybe maybe if the question is more like what is spread trade I think like that that multiple will shrink over time. I'm not necessarily that like anthropic will for sure exceed open air. No dude I added those numbers in the prices for a reason so things are very smart. Additionally what's the most overhiked element of AI today where you like, what the fuck? The fact that there's this narrative that AI is just going to transform everything in the use case.

52:06I think what we've seen is that most use cases have not been transformed by AI, especially if you think about enterprise use cases and things like that, is that it's just not quite good enough yet or the shape of the problem actually doesn't really let itself to AI. And that is, we do overhike to right now, I would say. If you could poach one thing from a capacitor, what would it be? The distribution of Salesforce for sure. You guys, 3000 reps just instantly just going out there, of course, that would be huge. That would be one or the black book of Brett Taylor would be another. Yeah. It's got a good fucking black book.

52:41It's not a hard competition like just in terms of like the black book, like he can call anyone up and be like it's Brett Taylor and they're like, hello, Brett. Like that's a tough competition in that way. For the product aside, engineering side. Yeah, I mean, hopefully we'll get there one day. That is a big advantage of that, but I mean. They have very different customer base to you though, because when I look at them in that traditional retail heavy customer base, it strikes me as different to yours, which is bluntly a lot more high growth tax focused. They'll merge over time, so like we now we haven't announced a lot of our big customers, but there's a lot of, you know, four to five hundred customers and I think they're trying to expand beyond retail as well.

53:19The approaches are just very different because of their leadership all coming from Salesforce, for us, they've taken a very sales force -esque approach where it's the heavy configuration and sort of this longer lift to get going. And we're more of the product forward approach. And so I think those appeal to different types of customers. I think customers that want to own stuff themselves and want to iterate. So I think grab a more towards our approach. But it's also very early in this base. I do think that they have a ton of big advantages, and they're also a smart team. And so they'll make adjustments.

53:48They will make adjustments, and just keep going. Do what's the biggest internal debate you have at DekuGon today? There's a constant push pull of we have so many customers coming in. Okay, we have to like service those customers and maybe push out work that is more like longer lasting But then it's like, okay, yeah, but we have to do that work too So there's I think that's like the constant like okay at what point do we invest and that's all kind of under the umbrella But right we hire hire hire hire a lot of people I think it's a constant dynamic is it's a it's one obviously we're fortunate to have because we're growing really fast but like most companies in our position, there's this constant tug -of -war between, all right, optimizing for the near -term growth of getting these folks super successful, and then, more of the long -term, making sure the product continues to improve, and so on.

54:32And we're lucky to have a lot of really great customers, and so we just naturally tend towards like, okay, we're all in, we need to make sure all of our customers are really successful, and they get up and running, and then we have our product folks are like, oh, but we need, you know, we need engineering resources to do this other stuff. Would you rather have exclusive access to a latest model for a year before anyone else, or would you rather have a year where you could hire any engineer without losing? Oh, the latter four sure, no question. I actually don't think there's that much advantage in a lot of application layer solutions from having a better model.

55:09There is some advantage for sure. Just because we've gone to a quality level where it's so good that actually we're at incremental So there's some element of that. Like I think the models are good enough for our use case. Yes, but I think most of the games, though, other way to put it, most of the games in what we do are from building around the models. Can you get it to be really accurate and orchestrate well? Can you have this platform around it that makes it really easy to tell when stuff's not so good and can be improved and automatically improves and so on? So I would choose having just unlimited access to the great engineers over probably most things right now.

55:42I love the visceral response to that. That's why you're like, oh, hell no. That is like not even the thing. Final one for you. If you do a reflection on your own leadership, where do you need to improve that you haven't yet worked on? My style is just naturally very intense, same with Ashwin's. And what that leads to is, I think we have very much of this culture of, it's really geared towards winning for what we talked about before. And so far we have been winning, and so the team is quite happy and so on. I would say that there is, I think the best leaders have a bit of nuance there, whereas you kind of combine intensity with a bit more of the softness, I would say.

56:21And that's something I've observed from some of the top founders out there. Right now, we're just so in the weeds, like every day is so packed that we definitely lean much more on the intensity side. But I think over time, we would like to, or I would like to, be a bit more just why is about that sort of dynamic. Jesse, as I said before, and a huge marvel you've built in such a short space of time, I really wanted to do this. I really wanted to reach out to you and make this happen. So thank you so much for agreeing to do it, and I've loved having you on. Yeah, thank you so much for hosting me, a big fan of your podcast, and really glad we got the chat.

56:59I so hope you enjoyed that episode. If you want to leave a comment, it would make a massive difference on Spotify. Likewise, a five -star review would go a long way. I love doing this show, And it means the world to me to see your feedback, let me know what you think, and if you want me to do anything differently with the show, let me know at harryat20vc .com. But before we leave you today, Secureframe empowers businesses to build trust with customers by simplifying information security and compliance through AI and automation. Thousands of fast -grown businesses including Nasdaq, Angel List, Doodle and Coda trust secureframe to expedite their compliance journey for global security and privacy standards, such as Sok2 and ISO 27001.

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