Recall Sessions: AI-Native CRMs and What It Takes to Replace Salesforce | Doug Camplejohn & Patrick Thompson

16:12Patrick Thompson:Do you think that the – I mean, having worked at – working on Siebel 25 years ago.

16:19Doug Camplejohn:I didn't work on Siebel. I'm not that old. Yeah, yeah.

16:21Patrick Thompson:I mean, actually, I was referring to myself, actually, in that context. But then if you looked at Siebel and then looked at Salesforce, I mean, it really wasn't that much of a UI change. Business model change. It was a business model change. It was the same like tabs just access sort of differently one through a browser. How are we going to be interfacing with this data set? Like, I mean, is just, are we just chatting? Is that the primary interface or, because, you know, when I look at a lot of CRMs for the most part, even the newer players, they still look the same. There's some tables, there's some, you know, tabs, maybe it's moves.

16:53Patrick Thompson:You know, so what is the future interface? I think there's a couple of things that you're highlighting. One is like, was there a business model disruption opportunity with the existing pricing model with existing CRMs, Salesforce namely? The second being, what are the things that need to hold true in this kind of AI first or six, 12, 24 months from now? I think one thing that we care a lot about is, yes, we've spent a lot of time focusing on design, backgrounds in design and product management. What does the customer experience look like? But then you see people now connecting Clarify to Cloud Code via MCP.

17:27Patrick Thompson:And a lot of the workflows are actually happening outside of the platform. So we know that, again, that goes back into the headless CRM argument. That's definitely important. and something that we need to support. The other is really around AI being really good at generating code, right? So when you think about generative UI, it's something that I talk a lot about with the team, which is, yeah, there's UI that we maintain, but it's also really easy to actually feed a design system into our agent and have it actually then generate UI and experiences that then customers aren't interacting with. And so I think that is actually something that we'll transition to over the next, like, 6 to 12 months, where a lot of applications are actually being built by the agent for when humans need to interface with it, but the agent's actually controlling a lot of that versus us purposefully building a lot of those experiences.

18:09Patrick Thompson:And you see that even today with Claude and Claude Artifacts and a bunch of people adopting that even within the go-to-market motion. And then the business model side for us is we don't charge based off seats, right? Like if you think about Salesforce being the most expensive database that organizations use, right, and effectively is the most expensive database, you're now regulated to buying seats for that database and getting access to that. My biggest frustration I had was primarily at Alassane because I didn't have a Salesforce license. They wouldn't pay for one for me. Is that we actually had to take all that data, dump it in Redshift, and I had to query it via SQL.

18:43Patrick Thompson:Which is not my favorite job to be done there. And then even at Amplitude, about half the company didn't have access to it. And this is primarily a pricing issue. So for us, we'd give the CRM away for free and we'd charge for the work that's done on top of it primarily by agents or AI.

18:58Doug Camplejohn:I think that is the right business model disruption. I think you and I have both posted about this recently, though, that I don't think any of us have gotten it right yet. No, no. And I think that like any new tectonic shift, right, we're in the early innings of AI. We're all just like the blind, you know, it's the fable of the blind man and the elephant kind of like trying to describe what this beast looks like. But I do think work output is the right model. And I do think effectively SaaS will be free, right? I think the core components are free and should be free because you should be able to say, hey, so-and-so as a product manager doesn't need an expensive per-seat license but still wants access to see what the customers are doing when they're thinking about new product features, et cetera.

19:38Doug Camplejohn:I do think that – I'm not of the belief that we will just have an LLM prompt interface and that will be your CRM because I think it's also people don't know what to ask, right? So I think that it's a very important part of that component. And as you said, we were the second CRM, I think, that went live with an MCP interface after HubSpot. Having that experience and that testbed is great. But people want to be able to be fed stuff as well as be able to pull it.

20:06Patrick Thompson:I think the interesting thing is the AI is going to get good enough at knowing and inferring what it thinks you should know and then push the information to you. So I do agree in the sense that, and this is even from my time at Amplitude, we built an analytics product where we expected people to know what to go ask. And we realized that people are just really bad at asking questions or understanding what questions to ask of their data. And then we try to figure out how to build more of an intelligent system that would push information to you. It would run analysis on top of your data set and actually give you insights, what we were considering at the time.

20:39Patrick Thompson:I think AI is going to get really good in what you're going to have. And this is the challenge that businesses are going to have is there's a signal-to-noise ratio. Whereas if you have these systems just pushing you information, like what do you actually listen to? But I do think that you will get much more into a push-based model than a pull-based model where I'm extracting information.

20:57Doug Camplejohn:Yeah, and I think you're going to basically wrap agents around those entities. So you'll have like a meeting agent. You'll have a deal agent. You'll have a rep agent, things like that. And so you just have these things that are running 24-7.

21:08Patrick Thompson:What does it mean? I mean, so right now, as companies are building their customer facing forces, you know, sales, you know, SDRs, customer success, like, what's going to look what's this going to look like in five years? I mean, are we going to just have, I mean, how do we know when to hire a salesperson versus, you know, have agents do work? I mean, are agents going to start actually communicating autonomously with prospects? I mean, what do we think is this, this world? I mean, I think this is something a lot of people are concerned about, which is maybe the sort of people aspect when you say people process tools.

21:46Patrick Thompson:Like, what do you think is going to happen? Not that we can predict the future, but let's try it. If we talk about, like, core values and principles, like, one thing that I think about is, like, I'm not trying to reduce the number of jobs. I'm trying to basically provide people superpowers. So everyone that I want to use Clarify, like, I want them to actually have a higher quota. Yeah. Instead of them hitting 5X, 4 or 5X quota, which is what we basically been benchmarking in SaaS, how do I create a product that allows them to go crush 10X quota and actually hit their numbers and do it quicker, easier?

22:16Patrick Thompson:But by design, that's less people. Or more companies. Or more companies. And I guess this is a question. I don't go to a founder and be like, hey, I'm going to actually give you a product that requires you to hire less people. And I'll be like, hey, I'm actually giving you a product that actually helps your seller sell more. And for me, that's more of the intrinsic value that I hope to create. Like, everyone's mission-driven at the end of the day. Like, what mission do I want to have? And it's like, I want to help people. I want to help founders. I want to help employees do their job better, right, and crush it.

22:44Patrick Thompson:And I think that's the hard part where, you know, I think a lot of the outcome-based pricing models and primarily the tools in the market today are reducing headcount. And you have a lot of folks right now who are worried about the state of the economy in three or four years because it's like, what's going to happen to all these low-skilled or non-skilled workers that were traditionally in support roles or other roles? Like, you know, I do think AI is going to get to the point where it is replacing tasks that you would have had to use human labor for. Right. And every technological shift that we've had, you know, we've been able to overcome that.

23:17Patrick Thompson:Right. Same thing in farming when we had better process automation and tractors and everything else. Like cities exploded. We moved to we moved from a role to more of a city based environment. Like we'll have another technology shift happening right now. I think we'll see kind of a drastic outcome from that. But, you know, for me, it's I guess I'm an optimist and not a pessimist is the easiest way to equate that.

23:39Doug Camplejohn:Yeah, I mean, if you look at I think Mark Andreessen did this on a podcast recently where he's talking about like, you know, we've gone from the madman era where the secretary would come in and like, you know, prep you for your meetings. Like, here's your calls and let me take notes of this stuff. We've now, you know, then they would when email came around, they would print out the emails and bring them to you to now. Actually, the work has shifted back to the individual, the manager or the executive. And effectively, we're taking some of those roles and they become agents for us. We now have agents that sit in on meetings and take better meeting notes than we could ourselves.

24:13Doug Camplejohn:We have better follow-ups, better prep than we ever could ourselves. But those are tasks that have been shifted to something else and those people have been deployed in different ways. So whether you 5x or 10x a company's revenue because you've made the reps more productive or suddenly you just have a lot more smaller companies spawning, I think there's going to be an explosion in both of those ways.

24:36Patrick Thompson:One of the things that I've observed, I mean, there's a lot of new companies that just announced their CRM company, Monaco. I know Revo announced kind of last three, six months. It's the scope of I don't even know what CRM is anymore because it seems like it's like an Uber app. Like it just does 5 ,000 things. Like what is the category and where does it stop and where does it end? I mean, is it just like one app that does everything? or because it seems from the outside it's like you know even on the websites of everybody's companies it's like it does everything yeah yeah i think you had this explosion of cambrian sas over the last decade right where uh you know 10 000 plus in the martech stack right and like you had even amplitude with 32 different tools spent 10 million a year and go to market tooling or average quota carrying rep was 16k fully loaded in tool cost or that's a massive spend and what we've seen is that, you know, bundling, unbundling, we're going back into this bundling phase.

25:33Patrick Thompson:And we also were big believers in the compound startup area as well, where it's like we wanted to bundle a lot of this back into like kind of an all-in-one solution. That's what I think you're seeing in market right now, even amongst companies like Revo, and as well as like everyone's trying to build an all-in-one. Now, the question of that is like, you have to have something that's core, that you're best in class at. And that's the hard part, right? So for us, like we're trying to build the best CRM in market. And it is a lot harder than I think we originally thought it was going to be. I think most founders, if they knew how hard something was going to be, they never would do it.

26:04Patrick Thompson:This is definitely one of those categories where I think there was some assumptions on how easy it was going to get to get it right. We're probably wrong. And so for us, we want to build the best CRM and then we want to have this hub-in-spoke model where we have all the different spokes around the CRM as the hub. And for us, that is building a great platform and a great user experience around that platform and then adding on things like sourcing and sending emails or doing more outbound capabilities on top of that.

26:31Doug Camplejohn:But it really starts with the CRM. Well, I mean, CRM has been a lie from the beginning, right? It is not about customers. It's not about relationships, right? It's really about management. It really should just be called M, right? It has been a forced data entry march for reps. It is mostly to help the manager, have some visibility as to what everybody's doing. I mean, if you go back to the Tom Siebel days, which you mentioned, he would basically use the CRM as a stick to go to rep. I knew you had this meeting. How come you didn't log this? That is not an enjoyable rep productivity experience.

27:08Doug Camplejohn:So I think what our generation of CRMs are doing is kind of flipping that model and saying, let's put the rep at the center. How do we make you crazy productive? And in that process, How do we give a lot more visibility to executives along the way? But if you really – we're all kind of co-opting the term CRM just because if somebody Googles it, it's kind of where we need to be found. But it's really not the right term of what this category is. Yeah. You know, we had a long talk about like play bigger and category design and category creation.

27:40Patrick Thompson:And, you know, I do build a CRM or do the things that we're doing right now as far as the amount of technical depth and breadth and work required there. And then also to invest in category design and creation. That was, I think, a little bit too much to choose. So, you know, same thing. We very much co-opted the CRM category because that was the it was easier for us to be placed in that box and actually go do a lot of work. If you look at the Salesforce ecosystem as like a comparable here, I mean, there was Marketo, which became an independent company kind of, and there was a lot that happened around marketing automation.

28:12Patrick Thompson:And then there was companies like Gainsight. I mean, is this going to just all merge into one big, big, massive unified platform? I mean, obviously Salesforce was trying to do something, but there's all these ecosystems that sit around it. I mean, that's what I'm kind of curious about. Like, where is the start and where is the end? I mean, if you look at HubSpot, like HubSpot started out as a map solution, right? Marketing automation platform and then moved back into the CRM. I think they're probably the only successful company that's been able to do that. And Salesforce has all the capabilities.

28:43Patrick Thompson:They have the entire suite. It just doesn't work well together. It's not non-integrated. You got to buy a company like MuleSoft to get things to talk to each other. So for us, like, yeah, I think we are building an all-in-one, the unified customer. We call it the unified customer platform, right? It has all your customer data and it's meant for sales, marketing, support, success long term. But we're really starting earlier on. And this is, I think, if you look at companies who have tried to build CRMs, right? Look at Zendesk is a great example, right? It was a solution built for support that then tried to go after sales.

29:13Patrick Thompson:They bought a company. They bought Base. Yeah, yeah. Base 10. What happened? I don't know. They closed it.

29:17Doug Camplejohn:They closed it. Yeah. I don't think that happened. Just a focus thing. All right. I think, and again, I mean, like it's back to the, to me, the gong outreach, clary kind of thing. Like they all started in their own swim lane and were doing great. And then they started to slow down. They said, what should we do next? And they were like, let's do what they're doing, right? And like some, I think Gong did it best because they built and they had a, you know, kind of more unified approach. You know, love the guys at Clary and Outreach and Manny and all those. But like I think they did a lot of acquisitions, tried to glue stuff together.

29:47Doug Camplejohn:And that was less successful. That was kind of like the Zendesk approach.

29:50Patrick Thompson:There's a lot of other like, you know, I know we're referencing Salesforce because it's the most familiar. But there's like Pipe Drive. There's Clothes. I mean, clothes, I mean, there's, you know, fresh works or something. I mean, there's a lot. Like when you actually are talking to prospects that you're kind of that are kind of thinking about, you know, whether it's Greenfield Plus or someone who's willing to, like, make the leap of faith and say, hey, you guys are the next next thing we want to bet on in terms of CRM. Like, are you getting compared to those legacy players or is it like we are?

30:22Doug Camplejohn:But I mean like I always call it BC. There's like before chat GPT and after, right? So all of those players I just say, yeah, if you want a BC CRM, like you can do that. And some of them like Adio or, again, a great platform. We've obviously all taken design cues off of them. But I think that trying to then glom and not having the right underlying architecture, which is really hard to kind of convince customers in the short term. Like you're buying in the architecture. But like that's the difference between slapping a LLM on the side of a relational database CRM that's BC is very different than what platforms like us have built.

31:00Patrick Thompson:One of the things that I've also observed just there's just been a lot of these point solutions that have taken off. You know, I'll use Granola as just the one that I feel is very well discussed in the ecosystem, at least from like a note taking perspective. I've seen Fixer kind of being discussed around as an email kind of this magical email kind of experience that sits in your inbox that sort of responds or at least drafts things for you. How do you think about these platforms, these capabilities that are being built that are just taking off that, you know, and even in the case of Grinnell, I mean, it could be perceived as an act, if you will.

31:39Patrick Thompson:For those that are not familiar, Act was a very old school CRM company 30 years ago. But it was like a big deal for sort of a personal CRM. But it seems like that could be a new entrant in this category.

31:53Doug Camplejohn:Well, I mean Google Sheets is a CRM, right? Let's be clear. In fact, Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel are the two most popular CRMs in the world right now. So you can make tools do different things. I think that the challenge is like if you string together a bunch of individual tools like that, you're creating a bunch of data silos, right? And so if you're not bringing that context together into one place, that's the challenge. So that's why we've both talked and I think we have similar mindsets on this is you've got to bring in the ecosystem. So we have our own cloud recorder. We've now got a desktop recorder.

32:27Doug Camplejohn:We're rolling out bring your own recorder. Like we don't care where you get your data from. You love Granola? Fantastic. But let's make sure it all comes back into one place. And I think if you take Granola or Fixer that say, I just have one slice of the visibility into what the full spectrum of customer interactions are, I think you're going to be limited in what you can do.

32:47Patrick Thompson:Yeah, I mean, I would agree. I mean, we launched the call recorder as early as we can. And we had a bunch of people who were using Fathom and Otter and other call recorders and migrating that data to Clarify was pretty essential to get them onboarded. Now it's the question of why pay for yet another solution if we can do it. So I think a lot of people like that all-in-one strategy. It's harder for us to execute. I think the thing about Granola, they built a delightful experience. Amazing. It was a magical moment for many people to be able to record a call without having a bot join. Now it's a question of how defensible is that as a business as well because you launched yours.

33:22Patrick Thompson:We have ours as well. Every company now has an offline call recorder. And now for them, it's like where do they go from here? I think it was magical. It was also free. Now they're trying to do pricing and packaging on top of it. But yeah, they built an amazingly well-designed product, and I have to give them kudos for that. Obviously, we can't ignore what the bigger players are doing. I mean, clearly, Salesforce launched this Agent 4 stuff, which quite frankly, I still don't fully understand, but it gets some good marketing around it. But I followed Dharmesh on HubSpot. I mean, clearly very bright.

33:58Patrick Thompson:I think I saw a post yesterday. He's going into founder mode right now. What do you think these larger companies like are going to be able to do? Have you been impressed with anything that's come out of them or you're like, nah, you know, you know, what do you think is going on?

34:10Doug Camplejohn:Well, I've been in the room where it happens. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I was the GM of Sales Cloud for a while. And so I think that, listen, never discount Mark Benioff, right? He is, I think, the most brilliant marketer in software land, right? And so Mark is very good at spotting trends and jumping on things. Now, the reality behind the scenes is often different. So Agent Force, they've got a distribution monster in Salesforce and they've just thrown the weight of all of that behind Agent Force. And as a result, they've got several hundred million dollars in revenue and customers and things like that.

34:48Doug Camplejohn:But oftentimes there's bundling and if you really peel the onion apart about what's really working, what's really working in Agent Force is the support thing and that's about it, right? And I think AgentForce as a platform feels a lot like the old force.com piece. So I don't think you're going to get a lot of people who are going to build on top of AgentForce and doing their – we're not going to build our applications on top of AgentForce. And I think that they're still trying to figure out what's their sales and marketing play. They just bought Qualify. They just bought Momentum. So they're trying to – in classic Salesforce fashion, one of the best acquirers in the world, they're trying to glue all the pieces together to say we've got the solution for you.

35:24Patrick Thompson:What do you think about HubSpot or – actually I have not. I mean, I know we've used the word Microsoft in this conversation, which is kind of crazy. Yeah. Are they doing anything? I've not been following. I mean, it seems like it's a lot of the newer players. But, you know, clearly Microsoft is. Microsoft was early on primarily when it came to like the agent experience where they had early access with Copilot. And so Copilot was built into Dynamics before any other CRM actually had an agent-like experience inside of their product. and you know you know as funny as it as easy as it is to say on microsoft and salesforce like it's a giant revenue run rate business it's just small in comparison to the rest of the company that they have there um and so yeah we've talked to people who use dynamics and uh you know they're they're definitely innovating there as well and i'd say hubspot's not asleep at the wheel as well like you know i think they're going through a kind of a re-platforming at the moment and trying to think about what how would they rebuild it in this kind of post ai world you know what we what We'd say like post-LLM.

36:21And yeah, so like, you know,

36:23Patrick Thompson:we have good competition in this space. And, you know, I think the nice thing about working with great competition is it hopefully brings the best out of everybody together and customers benefit from it.

36:32Doug Camplejohn:Yeah, I mean, we've taken investment from both Salesforce Ventures and HubSpot Ventures. And I think that, you know, so Dharmesh and Brian Halligan are two of the sharpest guys I've met, right? The two founders of HubSpot are not asleep at the wheel. They are very much have their fingers on the pulse, even more so than the folks at Salesforce in terms of what every startup is doing and where's there. And to your point, Dharmesh has never had a direct report in his entire life. He basically is just a hacker at heart, and I love him for that. And he is digging in full time, which I admire his energy.

37:07Doug Camplejohn:I don't know if I would be 20 plus years into the journey worth billions plus and being like, OK, I'm coding until 3 in the morning. I think if you enjoy building, you enjoy building.

37:18Patrick Thompson:Right. Regardless of the scale in the company. I'm spending a lot of time with the tools and the team. It's like, what's your role as a co-founder CEO? I'm like, what's your role? I'm like, I love building. I imagine this is the same for Darmesh and anybody else who's really product-oriented. This is the best time to be a builder that I've ever been in as far as tech. That's amazing. It seems hard as though if I'm a founder and I'm like, I need to go. you know i'm using my spreadsheet which is where everybody starts and they're like okay i probably should get off the spreadsheet like how do you i mean it's like so many options they obviously say oh i know i know hubspot can do it but like is everybody just like trying everything right now i mean it's like it seems like doubt it seems like really hard to make a decision around where they want to commit their time we find that there's there's really two categories and this is primarily based off segment you have like the digital native businesses right for us where it's like C to Series B that we target.

38:14Patrick Thompson:And, you know, they're familiar with some of the players, but not all of the players as far as, like, the new entrances in this space. And their point of reference is Salesforce and HubSpot. Right. So for them, they're, like, they're trying to get off of those tools or they're trying not to ever get back on them. And then you have the, I'd say, your non-digital native businesses. You know, like, let's think about, like, the breadbasket of the U.S., right? Like Midwest, East Coast, where they're not as plugged in, I'd say, to where we are here in Silicon Valley. And for them, like when they see a product like Clarify or CoffeeNet, it's like, oh, this is amazing.

38:47Patrick Thompson:This is the best thing since life's spread. And so for them, I'd say like the expectations and also just the amount of delight that they have is very, very different. And it's less competitive, I'd say, for those types of businesses than it would be for your digital native companies. What's crazy about this conversation is like I remember when we were selling Salesforce back in 2003, the security was a big issue. Like, is that even, I mean, are people even caring about it? Like people are just like uploading everything, connect to email and calendar, just dump it, the whole world.

39:18Doug Camplejohn:It's still an issue, right? I mean, we've taken it very seriously. We've completed our second SOC 2 certification recently, all that kind of stuff. But you're right. Like I watched, you know, with Open Claw, right? I was like, you're doing what? You're connecting what? So, you know, there is a sense of just like, well, let me go try this out. And I do think that some people will get burned in that process.

39:41Patrick Thompson:Yeah. Yeah, we, I mean, the amount of, it was a bit insane to me when we launched with, you know, both Google and Microsoft integration and the amount of people that would just connect their account. And we, you know, create all the people and companies for them. It was a magic moment, but it was also like, okay, like people were, you know, people are trusting us and like putting their trust in us as a company. And so like, it makes sure that you have to like rise to that challenge on the security side for sure. And then now with things like MCP connectors, we're connected in all the different tools that teams are using as well.

40:12Patrick Thompson:So it hasn't come up. We definitely have a lot more conversations as we're working with bigger companies now. But at the earliest stages, there was a lot less fear and uncertainty and doubt that I would have expected.

40:24Doug Camplejohn:It was always amazing to me about how many folks had admin access to Salesforce and how many people were like, oh, yeah, I'll try that out and click. There's my entire pipeline and you're a public company. Right, right. Yeah. Wow.

40:35Patrick Thompson:Yeah, I would have thought that people would be a little bit more nervous about just giving more data. I mean, even at Clary, connecting to email and calendar was like such a hard thing to do back in 2013, 2014. But now is – I guess everyone's just like, yeah, no problem. Authenticate. Let's go.

40:52Doug Camplejohn:People are just blind to all the messages on the Google off screen. They just –

40:56Patrick Thompson:But what about all the private files and stuff like that? Because now it's not just about email and calendar. It's like all this unstructured data and it's like all this stuff that's super sensitive. It's the thing, the down forecast. I mean, it's all types of stuff. The downside of GDPR and CCPA is it basically made people blind to hitting accept on everything that they see. And so I actually think we're probably in a worse state than where we were as far as consumer protection and privacy than we were eight years ago, honestly. Because everyone just hits accept, accept, accept, accept. And it's not, I think it's not good for generally builders.

41:29Patrick Thompson:It's not good for consumers because everyone is kind of just the bar has gone downhill when it comes to actually ensuring like, hey, you have data everywhere now. And actually understanding where that is and how to revoke access is much, much harder. One of the things that we didn't talk about is that this was the Microsoft era and the SaaS era, but just from client server to cloud is just the amount of consulting that goes into keeping this ecosystem strong and alive, at least in the Salesforce. And I'm less familiar with the HubSpot, but I imagine HubSpot has agencies and so forth. But like what is going on with – I mean what's the future of system integrators, which is – is that even the appropriate term anymore?

42:10Patrick Thompson:Or like CRM consulting, no one's system integrating anything for the most part now within a world of AI. Like are we going to have consultants like implement software still? Or I mean I saw – at least in the ERP land, I just saw Campfire announce implementation partners. So do we think the same thing is going to happen on the CRM category? I mean, I think it's interesting. So HubSpot, I think this was a couple of quarters ago, announced that like over 50 % of the revenue was like partner-led and sourced revenue, which is, and it's amazing. I mean, honestly, like from a business perspective, you're like, this is great.

42:44Patrick Thompson:And Salesforce, as far as the ecosystem, makes as much revenue outside of Salesforce as they do inside of Salesforce. Our limitless task for what we're building is we want it to be so easy that anybody can use it. So where you don't have to necessarily have a ton of education and onboarding, we just want it to just work, essentially. We want it to be more of an Apple product than a Microsoft product when it comes to just ease of use. Now, that being said, I think when I talk to customers using Clarify, a lot of it's them trying to understand, like, what does the future of the world look like? And they're not just buying your product.

43:15Patrick Thompson:They're buying a way of working that didn't exist previously. So, yes, it's a CRM, but we've tried to reimagine what workflows look like, not the core Salesforce workflows, but with the job to be done of a seller or a rep that's using the tool. And so for them, there is education that's needed. Whether or not we're educating, whether or not we're putting out content, whether or not we rely on a partner there, I still think it's a little bit TBD. We do have a lot of partners now that we're working with that are pushing Clarify into companies.

43:43Doug Camplejohn:I think it also depends on what segment of the market you're talking about. I mean, the reality is, let's be clear, Salesforce and HubSpot are not going away. They're still people using Act, right, in the back door originally. And also if you look at the enterprise, the amount of integration and security and training and process that goes on, that's going to – the amount of bodies needed and the amount of time needed may go down. But there are still people who say, this is scary. This is confusing. Please come in and tell me what I should do. And I think that's not going away. A lot of obviously what we're doing is in the kind of smaller and mid-market companies.

44:19Doug Camplejohn:And so it's less of an issue.

44:20Patrick Thompson:The last CRM company that got acquired was RelateIQ. I mean, when I talk to VCs about the CRM category, they're always like, oh, you know, it's going to get bought by, you know, one of the large players, right? Like five years from now, if you had to define success for you, what would success look like for both of you? I mean, I go back to Jim Collins' built the last year. I want to build a company that this is the last company I ever want to work for. And hopefully 15, 20 years, I'm doing what I love doing, which is building this product and working with customers. So for me, it's like every decision I make is like, how do I make sure that the culture and the team and the product that we're building is going to be around 10, 15, 20 years from now?

45:02Patrick Thompson:And so that's priority number one, right, is to build this company that way. Now, you know, I think RelayIQ was a tragedy in many ways because I think it was one of the better products on market that then got killed off, became Salesforce Intelligence and got killed off really quickly. And, you know, I think there's a lot of inspiration that we took even when we were building this company to make sure that, like, hey, how do we not get to that point? And, yeah, I'm curious, actually, Doug, what your answer is.

45:26Doug Camplejohn:Yeah, I mean, listen, I know some of the founders of RealIQ, you know, they were early on in their journey, 2 million ARR getting an offer for 390 million. Like, there's a lot of entrepreneurs that would jump at that, right? Yeah. So I think that, yeah, there will probably be some folks that get snapped up. But I think, to Patrick's point, I think that the opportunity here is to remain independent, become a sustainable company. And it really becomes about, it's back to kind of this underlying platforms that we're building that, again, I've been inside the belly of the beast of Salesforce. They can't turn that ship, right?

46:07Doug Camplejohn:They can continue to glue things onto the Frankenstack that they've delivered, but to fundamentally change that, we're just at a very different inflection point in this market.

46:19Patrick Thompson:Just going on that thread, I mean, there's a lot of companies that have raised like 100 plus millions around the ecosystem, around the go-to-market stack, not building a CRM from the ground up. But when you squint at it a little bit, I'll use like Apollo as an example. It's like, you know, they kind of have the same kind of concepts of people and companies. And it wouldn't surprise me if, and I'm not like, you know, I have no knowledge of this whatsoever. They have a deals tab. They have a CRM. Okay. So then what is the difference between, is Apollo a CRM or, I mean. It's really hard when you picked a category and you picked a positioning to change that positioning over time.

46:54Patrick Thompson:Right. So like Apollo is a demand generation solution for many people there. They're put into like the, hey, it's a low end outreach experience where I can like go generate demand for my business. Now, they added deals, which is just another primitive, right? But for deals to work, you have to have relationship fields, and you have to have custom fields, and you have to have a lot of things that traditionally you look for in a more mature CRM that they just don't have yet. And custom objects is a great example of this as well. And so if you squint, everyone kind of looks the same. And this happens whether or not you're Clary Outreach and Gong on kind of the top end or whether or not you're on the bottom end as well.

47:33Patrick Thompson:I wouldn't be surprised if lower end players start trying to build this all in one solution. And it's hard because everyone in GoToMarket is kind of frenemies. You might want to partner with somebody, but at the end of the day, you don't know what they're going to launch. You don't know if Clay is going to launch a CRM. It's really hard to control your own destiny unless you are the system of record at the end of the day.

47:53Doug Camplejohn:I think I take a slightly different view. I think it's hard to – kind of butchering an Alice in Wonderland quote. It's hard to get to the place that you want to get to if you didn't have an idea that you want to get there in the beginning. So suddenly like Clary waking up, which you know well, and saying, oh, we want to be a CRM. You're basically going to rebuild the plane mid-flight. You're going to like the fuselage, the engines, everything. The reason why I think we've used the rippling analogy is that they didn't just set out to say, let's go build a payroll system. They were like, OK, let's go think about what are all the – again, this could be founder lore.

48:30Doug Camplejohn:Right, right, right. Take it with a grain of salt. But in theory, they set out and said, what are all the applications you want to wrap around an employee record? Yeah. Can't build that all at once. Let's start with this collection of two or three things. do very deep integrations with a lot of stuff so you can bring all your best to class. And then just over time, we're just going to keep knocking that stuff down. So, I mean, like we're a Rippling customer. We're using Deal. When it came time for renewal on Deal, we're like, oh, I can get that from Rippling now. And it kind of checks enough of the boxes where I can kind of bring those things together.

49:00Doug Camplejohn:Same thing, you know, they have credit card processing and like all these things.

49:04Patrick Thompson:Talk to compliance now as well.

49:05Doug Camplejohn:Yeah, all the things that you want to do. So I think that is, if you start in that position, you can get there if you suddenly said, oh, we're a outbound email platform or I think of Apollo more like a Zoom Info kind of competitor. They were the first to do data. PLG motion for data. If you look at their user interface, you look at their architecture, for them to really be a modern AI for CRM, they're going to have to blow it up and start all over again. Same thing with Clay or pick your pick.

49:36Patrick Thompson:We have lots of founders that are listening in that may be considering this category. Maybe they're thinking about building a CRM. There's probably someone out there that's saying, I'm going to go and see if I can build a clarifier or coffee. There's probably someone building around the go-to-market stack. For folks that are listening and you wanted to give advice to them, what would your advice be? Don't do it or like, all right, I'll see you on the field? I mean, welcome to the arena. I think it's a challenge. It's a lot of fun, but it's a challenge. and I think if you're going to do it, you have to give it your all.

50:12Patrick Thompson:And that's what it's going to take to win.

50:14Doug Camplejohn:I would generally, unless you're up for, as you said, building a company for the next 15 years, really thinking about a very large problem space, I would say go focus on something small and focused and then iterate from there. There's a lot more companies that I think have success from that. But to your point, we're not the first CRM companies. We won't be the last Sierra. There's at least one, if not multiple Sierra.

50:41Patrick Thompson:I'm companies every YC batch at this point. I think the way that I talk about this category is the opportunity of success is low. But if you're successful, it's a big business. Now, you can go build a better point solution where the opportunity of success is higher. But if you're successful, it's a smaller business. You have to rise to the challenge of that and just understand this is a lot of work.

51:02Doug Camplejohn:And it's also a question of what kind of business you want to build. I mean, like my understanding of Close is like they took YC funding and nothing else. So that's a great tens of millions of dollars a year lifestyle business. So you want to call it that, right? It seems more than just that. But if you want to go the venture route, you've got to go think about building a really big company. Yeah, and you have the base camp model of building companies, 37 Signals as well.

51:27Patrick Thompson:And there's a bunch of, I think, low-end CRM players that are going to do really, really well building these lifestyle businesses that can spit off cash to folks, but I don't necessarily it's venture backed as well.

51:37Doug Camplejohn:And we're still talking mostly here about horizontal CRMs. If you really start to take a look and you look at, there's CRMs for real estate agents, there's CRMs for building contractors. There's an infinite number of things that you can go do there.

51:50Patrick Thompson:Carter just announced their CRM. That one doesn't make sense to me, but maybe it makes sense to you guys. Oh, they have the ERP and they want to connect the ERP with the CRM data. It would be remiss not to ask you for the listeners that are listening in that are thinking about a CRM. Maybe you both can share a little about if they're looking at Clarify or want to look at what does Clarify do in coffee and we'll end there.

52:13Doug Camplejohn:I think there's a lot of similarities you'll find here, right? Try both, try both. The general premises, try both. Yeah, exactly. You know, we're going to automate most of the busy work that you've had in CRMs. We're going to use a lot of AI to make your productivity of getting ready for meetings, follow up for meetings, automatically creating and updating deals, all of that stuff. So there's really a lot about just taking the manual work away from you in both systems. I think that there is also, I think unlike a lot of other players in the space, I think one of the things that we also have in common seems to be this kind of data lake house style architecture where we're like, hey, listen, this is not about a CDP or a snowflake over here.

52:54Doug Camplejohn:It's all coming together. So you're never losing data. One of my favorite features in coffee is you go into the pipeline, you hit a compare button, and you say, what does my pipeline look like a week ago versus today, which you're very familiar from. That used to be a large Clary purchase. Now it's just a feature inside of the CRM. And then I think finally what I'd say for us is that if you are already on HubSpot or Salesforce or imagine you might go to that in the future, we've got both the path to basically synchronize those two and make that transition easier. Yeah, I mean, very similar pitch.

53:27Patrick Thompson:We try to automate all the repetitive work that you don't want to do so you can spend more time doing the work that you actually want to do. We're thinking of it more of a push-based system, so we integrate with a lot of different tools. So, like, I actually think you have this as well, which is we have the Slack app as well, so you can interface with Clarify directly inside of Slack. We have all the connectors, MCP, and API support for building agents on top of Clarify, so they're not using Cloud Code or Dust or other agent frameworks. We're also launching our background agents experience as well, so you can automate a lot of the repetitive work outside of traditional code-based deterministic workflows.

53:59Patrick Thompson:But yeah, I think the company that we're best suited for is early stage founders who want to go from zero to one, one to 10. And that's kind of where our ICP is and what we're sticking to at the moment. Well, I think the category is large as is. We've mentioned lots of very big companies in this space. And so I think there's definitely room for both of you guys and others as well. And so first, if you're a founder looking at a CRM, Try both. I know both of you care about getting feedback from them and listening to them from customers. So please reach out to Doug and Pat. Really grateful for your time.

54:32Patrick Thompson:I'm sure there's a lot more we can talk about here today, but thanks for your time today.

54:36Doug Camplejohn:Thank you.

54:39Doug Camplejohn:Hey, this is Ben Casnoka, co-founder of Village Global. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Village Global podcast, where we go deep on all of the biggest topics in tech. If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. You can check us out on Spotify, Apple, wherever you get your podcasts.

54:53Patrick Thompson:We'd love to see you for the next one.