Mutiny’s Jaleh Rezaei: Walking Away From Millions In Software To Grow Even Faster With Sales AI

0:00Jaleh Rezaei:Salespeople only spend 21 % of their time actually selling to customers. But a startup called Mutiny is trying to change all that. What's it using? AI agents. Our guest today on the show is the co-founder and CEO of Mutiny, Jaleh Rezaei. Jaleh technically co-founded this startup way back in 2018. But she kind of co-founded it in November 2025 when she burned the ships and refounded the company to be much smaller and move much faster. In my eyes, it's a six-month-old company, seven-month-old company now. We are 15 people. We completely built the product from the ground up. It's a brand new foundation.

0:39And also AI, it's just a very different type of product to build than the SaaS business that we were building.

0:45Jaleh Rezaei:This episode is brought to you by Rippling AI, the only AI built to give you full visibility into your startup and the ability to take action across every department. Today on the podcast, we're going to talk about why salespeople do get backed up in busy work, how AI has upended SaaS as we know it, and how Jala has overcome what she calls Claude's spookies. Plus, we talk about why she believes founders shouldn't worry about optics. I'm Alex Conrad, founder and editor of Upstarts Media, and this is the Upstarts Podcast, our weekly show where we talk to startup founders who are punching above their weight to take on the status quo.

1:20Jaleh Rezaei:Jala, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. So what is Mutiny? We help go-to-market teams, do all of the manual work that it takes to take a customer from cold, doesn't know who you are, all the way to closed and expanding. So one way I was thinking about this, you can tell me if I'm right, is in a way kind of helping those salespeople focus on the actual sales and a lot less of maybe the prep or sort of the other stuff that they have to do when they're not selling. Yeah, exactly. So Salesforce releases this annual report using all of their data and talks through the amount of time that sellers are spending.

2:00And it's about 21 % of their time is spent with customers in selling activities. and then 80 % of their time is spent on all of the other things that you need to do in between meetings. Following up with customers, getting things ready, personalizing everything to their pain points, doing your forecasting, internal reporting, CRM updates, all of that stuff. So our goal is to make it so that they're spending all of their time working with customers and very little time on the non-selling activities.

2:31Jaleh Rezaei:What is the right balance that you're trying to outsource versus have these salespeople still actually know and get ready for to be prepared to do well? Absolutely. So it's very important that they understand the customer's pain points and they are reflecting their deal instinct in all of the things that goes to the customer. So I'm a really big fan of keeping the rep in the loop, but eliminating the unnecessary work. So, for example, when a rep is trying to do follow-ups with customers, they might have had three calls that day and one of the customers asked them for some custom pricing thing and there was just a long discussion that they had about what the ideal pricing proposal would look like for them.

3:17Maybe another customer was an early stage one and they wanted examples of other companies like them and how they're using the product. All of these things, if you add them up, at the end of the day, the sales rep has to sit at their desk and create all of this stuff, go search in the content repository and find the right case studies and figure out if these are the right ones to share with the customer. They have to go manually create all of that proposal and all of these things. They have to go look up their pricing and tailor it, et cetera. The nice thing with Mutiny is that our agent centrally accesses all of this stuff.

3:55And then every time it executes, it just has that information. It's able to create things for them that follows their brand. And it just makes it really easy. The rep gets a one-shot generation of something that's actually ready to send to the customer. But we make it super easy for them to edit it and give feedback and make changes to it so that it is exactly what they believe is going to have the highest engagement rate when it hits the customer.

4:23Jaleh Rezaei:I think that's an important distinction because one shot, the idea that, you know, you're basically just making one prompt and then there's a finished product, that can sometimes be synonymous with lower quality or a less, you know, tailored, less customized answer. Maybe it's a more generic one. God forbid it's AI slop. So how do you make sure that that quality really is high enough that if I'm fine tuning it, it's not redoing the whole thing? Yes, totally. So I have one of the highest bars on quality of customer experience because I think that having led growth teams and sales teams and marketing teams in the past, I think if you don't prioritize the customer, you end up losing in the long run.

5:07And so the only sustainable growth practices are the ones where you are putting the customer first. And that means that the customer is seeing something that hits the nail on the head that immediately resonates with them and their pain points. And so the way that we balance that is, number one, we spend a lot of time on correct brand and context extraction. were the best product, I would say, in the world at applying a company's brand correctly to a wide range of different assets. That piece alone takes forever to edit in a general purpose tool that has some basic brand guidelines and is trying to create something.

5:52It just doesn't look like something that your team made. And I think that visual experience is what contributes a lot to the AI slop. The other things that we do is we deeply integrate with their context, call transcripts, the way they do pricing, the way they talk about their products, how they do security reviews. All of that stuff is captured inside of Mutiny. And we also have memory around how they have adjusted things in the past. And so because of that, we're able to combine those things into something that is really high quality and relevant for the customer. And then on top of that, we let them build playbooks and templates that codify their own specific ways of how they like to do things.

6:40And so then the AI can just use those playbooks to generate for them something that fits exactly the way they approach go-to-market situations. And so it requires a lot less ongoing editing and back and forth because they're able to get what they need a lot more quickly.

6:58Jaleh Rezaei:Are these customers mostly at other tech companies or who is sort of the typical user right now of Mutant News Tools? We work with companies like Snowflake, Uber, Rippling, Figma. So lots of folks in other tech companies, but we're also growing within industries that aren't typically tech. So for example, healthcare companies. We're starting to see some insurance companies. you know, DHL, those types of folks who are not considered traditional tech, but they have people inside the company who want to move faster, who want to get rid of these dependencies, and they want to arm their sales team to run circles around their competition.

7:44You know, those are the types of folks that are starting to come in. And I love customers like that, because one of the things that we've really focused on is ease of use. I think a lot of the first generation of AI products, you actually had to know a lot about AI. You had to understand how it works. You had to be able to figure out how to take human activities and turn it into an AI system. Like this is a skill. This is a routine. These are the things we need to, oh, we should extract these eight things so that our AI can work well on a recurring basis. And a position that we've taken is that we're building for reps and for marketers who are not necessarily AI savvy.

8:27And we want them to just start using Mutiny to automate the repetitive work that keeps them away from their customers. And in the process of doing that, the AI system starts to get populated for them. They start to understand understand how AI works. We start to extract and codify the playbooks. It's like, oh, you just made this thing. Do you want to never do that thing again? Great. We'll save that for you. Versus coming in and being like, okay, here's your blank canvas. What system do you want to build? Most people don't know how to do that.

9:01Jaleh Rezaei:And I know that that was something that you guys had to learn maybe the hard way a little bit, or at least see the user's experience to figure out. And we'll go into that in more depth. But first, I'm curious, do you consider this company more of a eight-ish year company because you started in 2018? Or given how much the product has changed in recent months, is this more like a year one company in your mind? We reset the whole business in November of 2025. So in my eyes, it's a six-month-old company, seven-month-old company now. It really, I mean, we are 15 people. We completely built the product from the ground up.

9:43It's a brand new foundation. We're based in New York and we used to be based in San Francisco and for a long period remote in post-COVID. And also AI, it's just a very different type of product to build than the SaaS business that we were building. So a lot of the way we work, our practices. It just feels very different. And, you know, my co-founder and I joke too, that we also ourselves, we feel like second time founders. Like we feel like when we build Mutiny 1.0, we learned a ton about the market, about how do you hire executives? How do you build the team, the culture? What's the right way to build traction and all of those things.

10:25And I feel like a lot of those fundamentals are now, you know, now that we're building the new mutiny, we're able to just apply them and pull from those learnings a lot more quickly than we were the first time around.

10:38Jaleh Rezaei:You were born in Iran and then you moved to California growing up. Were you dreaming, oh, someday I'm going to make software for salespeople? Was that something that you were always passionate about? Or where do you start your entrepreneurial journey? Ever since I was a little girl. No, I didn't know what sales was at the time. But I am an engineer and both of my parents are engineers. They actually met in engineering school in college. And so I always liked building things. I don't think I shied away from that. And I couldn't tell you where this came from. Maybe my dad was an entrepreneur. Perhaps that was a part of it.

11:18But post-college, I always wanted to start a company. So even when I was working at companies, I was like, oh, like, I really want to start my own thing one day.

11:28Jaleh Rezaei:What made it appealing? I think I like the fact that the buck stops with you and you get to go and build a whole organization and team around something that you really believe in. And I like the creativity involved in every aspect of it. So the creativity of understanding your customers, translating that into a product, building the brand. And it's very multidimensional and it keeps my brain engaged. So I like that. I don't know if I had those words at the time. I think I'm mostly reflecting back on that experience. I think at the time I was just like, I want to start my own thing. And I actually went to business school to do that.

12:12So I'd been working for three years. And then I was like, oh, business school, it's going to be so easy. I'll just go have a great time and start a company. And while I was in business school, you know, I dabbled with all sorts of different things. And then I did an internship at Sequoia and talked to real founders building real businesses. And I was like, oh, that's different than what I'm doing.

12:38Jaleh Rezaei:So you were one of the first dozen or so employees at Gusto, which has become a very large, you know, established software unicorn, working with a ton of companies and customers. being part of a sort of really hyper growth or at least very consistently growing business like that, having that early seat along the way, what lesson do you think that prepared you the most for with being a startup founder later? I would say a couple of things. One, Gusto has incredible founders. I think Josh, Tomer, and Eddie are all wonderful. And one of the things I learned from them was the importance of thinking about your customer and working backwards, especially in moments of uncertainty where you don't know where the market's going and what's happening.

13:26You can always find your feet on the ground if you think about who's the customer, what are their pain points, what is their ideal situation, what do they want to happen. And then the execution and the sausage making of how you do that, that's the technology piece. And those are the things that can really shift. But you can give yourself a lot of conviction if you like deeply understand the biggest, darkest problems of your customer and can see a solution for how you might solve that. So I got to see us apply that to a lot of things at Gusto. And that's something that, you know, that I've been using.

14:04And then the other thing was I ran sales teams, marketing teams, support CX. And across all of it, the common thread for me as a leader was when I hired good people and then I figured out how to help them move as fast as possible, that's when we grew the fastest. So if I were to simplify everything around growth, like channels and all these different things. It really just comes down to speed. And the reason, you know, I learned that was by initially not having it. So I would set really aggressive goals. I'm a big fan of aggressive goals, ideally with goals every week. So everyone can see, you don't want to get to the end of the quarter and realize that you're going to miss.

14:52So every quarter you can see, every week you can see I'm missing my number. And so when we would miss those aggressive goals, I would ask the team, well, why did you miss the goal? What happened? And every time I would get answers that was like, well, we had this idea, but we couldn't do it. Like the web team needed to do this, the design team that we were waiting for marketing or sales did. And it was just the answer was always dependencies, handoffs, you know, other teams that we were waiting on. And so the way we solved that was we started, you know, we brought design into the marketing team.

15:29We built out a growth engineering team with engineers, PMs, product designers fully dedicated to our revenue goals. We made a lot of process optimizations to help people move faster. And every time I made one of those changes, my team would get much better at growth.

15:47Jaleh Rezaei:These days, you can chat with AI about almost any business problems. Rippling AI is built to actually solve them. That's because Rippling AI is built on your live workforce data. That gives you full visibility into your startup and the ability to take action across every department. Say you have a new hire starting Monday. Just ask Rippling AI to get them set up and it will provision their laptop, grant them access to your systems, assign their onboarding tasks, and loop in their manager. But it doesn't stop there. Rippling AI can flag missing paperwork, set up their first one-on-ones, and make sure they're ready to ship on day one.

16:22Jaleh Rezaei:All you have to do is tap confirm and get back to building. Don't settle for AI that's all talk. Head to rippling.ai slash upstarts and get AI that turns insights into action. That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G dot AI slash upstarts. Sign up for exclusive access today. Your co-founder, Nikhil, you meet at Gusto. You guys go through Y Combinator in 2018. You're tackling this problem. speeding up everyone's lives, removing these blockers through software, right? Why was there a market opportunity there? Why wasn't one of those big companies like Salesforce already offering this kind of tool? So, I mean, a lot of this comes back to having a unique insight as an entrepreneur, right?

17:07And when we were building Gusto, it was just so clear to me that speed was the growth advantage. and my co-founder, he was, you know, he was like one of the rising stars on the engineering leadership side. And as most good engineers, he's very commercial, right? Good engineers always want to know what's happening with the money inside of a company. And so he was, you know, he started talking to me about why are you guys always needing engineers? Why do you guys come in on Saturdays and try to help us recruit engineers? Why can't you just do your job without our department. Because as an engineer, you can do whatever you need all by yourself, right?

17:47You don't need marketing to be able to build your product, right? And so we started talking about it and all of the limitations and examples that I shared with you. And, you know, he became equally fascinated from the other end of it of, oh, I want to build a product that enables, you know, everybody in go-to-market to be able to move at the speed of their ideas and have a huge impact on their company. That's how it all started. And in terms of the opportunity at the time, so this was pre-LLMs, website felt like the biggest market that we could go after with the technology available. We had figured out a way to make it so that you didn't need any code, any engineers.

18:29You could just do whatever you wanted to your website and optimize it for all the different types of customers that were coming in. There was a lot of really interesting new data sources that were becoming available, that were making it more possible to understand every single customer and tailor for them, et cetera. And our plan was to expand beyond the website to all of the different parts of the buyer's journey. So that's how we got started.

18:55Jaleh Rezaei:So Sequoia, where you had done your cup of coffee, they invest. Seemingly, things go very well. You hit eight figures in ARR, which could be anything north of 10 million, I guess. But sounds good. good and vague, and you start working with these exciting companies, right, like Snowflake, DoorDash, et cetera, did it feel like things were generally going pretty easily? Was there a part that was really hard that you had sort of figured out in that first phase of the company? I saw this meme that basically says the founder life, and maybe you'll identify with this now that you're a founder, is you oscillate between I'm a genius to, oh my God, I'm an idiot.

19:35Every decision ever made was wrong. And then you go to another meeting and it flips you back and forth. And a big part of it is just, you know, having fun with that journey.

19:45Jaleh Rezaei:In this phase where you get venture backed, you guys are growing the revenue, things look like they're great. We're setting up this shocking moment in November 2025 that we've been dancing around where you burn all the ships. But as you're building these ships, did it feel like, hey, we have product market fit, things are great, this is going to be a huge company. What was the vibe like inside Mutiny? The vibe was really good. And you go off of the market signal, right? And so customers were growing. NDR was good. Retention was really, really good. I think retention in our market is normally 70 % or below.

20:21And we had 90 % logo retention. And then NDR was significantly higher than that. And so all of those signs were really great. And the team was growing all of that. Since AI was introduced is when I started to have questions about the business. Initially, it was exciting because we were doing a lot of AI. We called it machine learning at the time for a throwback term. And we were using AI and that was great. And we had these big plans that once we served lots of people, we would be able to learn across all of them and do all of those things. And so initially, it was really exciting. There was all these bottlenecks for our customers, especially around copywriting for the website that just felt immediately much easier with an AI tool.

21:14And then once we were about a year in, it started to become clear that AI was a reasoning engine. I want to say it was around 2024, sometime then. And once it started to become a reasoning engine, the SaaS business felt, it didn't feel like wind in our sails. It actually felt like it was holding us back because you would have all these ideas for how to automate things for customers, which was always our vision, right? Eliminating all these dependencies, letting them move fast. But then you had to somehow mush it with the existing business and be like, oh, okay. I wasn't allowed to think about how can we use AI to solve the customer's most important problems?

22:01Instead, we had to think about how can we use AI to accelerate the business that we have today? And I could see the incredible opportunity if we could just not have any blockers and constraints and be able to just build from scratch to solve our customers' problems, the problems that I experienced when I was leading these teams at Gusto. And so that's when, you know, I would say beyond that point is when I started to feel a little bit of, hey, like, I don't think what we're working on makes sense.

22:34Jaleh Rezaei:We talk about on the show this upstart moment where a founder maybe feels really back to the walls or like they have to really punch above their weight or go against consensus to make a decisive action that in hindsight has a huge impact on the business or their global impact as a company. Tell me about this November 2025 upstart moment where you're walking with your co-founder. I went on a walk with Nikhil, my co-founder, on the Hudson River, and I had come to the conclusion that we needed to make all these changes. and I knew that he had also been thinking a lot about it, but he wasn't there yet.

23:14And so this talk was really about, hey, like we got to go make this change. And we both care a lot about people. And so I knew this would be hard for him. You know, I think the other thing that's hard about it is when you start a company, the expectation is failure, right? Everyone tells you, you can't build a great product. Oh, you probably can't hire great people. You can't get good investors. You'll never get your A. You'll never get your B. You'll never build a brand. And we had done all of that. And so it's really hard to accept that you're going to burn that to the ground for the possibility of a better future.