How Gong Built a $7B+ Company in the Age of Vibe Coding | Amit Bendov

1. 0:00 – 1:38

   Intro

   1. ABAmit Bendov0:00

      A lot of companies stall, not because of external conditions. It's because maybe the market, like, isn't large enough. If your market is too small, very little else matters. There's like, uh, in math, this thing of Local Optimum, right? You're climbing a hill and you reach the top, but you're not getting to the mountain. You can get to, like, 50 million, 100 million, right? You're not gonna reach, like, a billion. Which market do you play in? That's, like, more than anything else. We've built the system over 10 years. There's a lot of complexity. You know, you can't vibe code it, even, like, with 100 engineers. Otherwise, why are we not seeing one right now? Why are we not seeing, like, a competitor? If you're in an early market, which we are right now in AI, there are so many possibilities. Why would you, like, try to, like, one-up a competitor, right? There, there are more. Just, just go and keep looking. Why... Don't go where all the other kids are going. Competition should be more like, like an Easter Egg Hunt than like a football match that you're... You, you gotta match, like, every play that the other opponent is doing. It's not a zero-sum game, like, in, in the early stages. Hi, I'm Amit Bendov, co-founder and CEO of Gong. Gong is the leader in Revenue AI, which help company maximize their revenue potential. We saw an opportunity in automating revenue with AI. That was, like, in 2016, before AI was, like, uh, all the rage. And, uh, today, we're one of the fastest-growing company. Our growth rate is over 50%. Every quarter, we're actually growing faster than the previous quarter for almost, like, 12 consecutive quarters now, so pretty incredible times.

2. 1:38 – 2:35

   Design Product Like a Music Producer

   1. ABAmit Bendov1:39

      [upbeat music] I grew, like, in a very humble background. I mean, great family, loving family, but most of my family, like, did not even, like, go to college or university. So from my family's perspective, if I was, like, seller at a retail store, it'll be just fine. They'll love me still the same because it's a job, and that's what you do. So my original dream as a teenager, I wanted to be a guitar player at a rock band. I was pretty good, to be honest, but not, like, not top 1%. And I was, like, in a small country, Israel, it's not... You can't... Even if you're big, like, it's not all that big. That's a miss. But I started my career actually selling professional audio equipment at a retail store, like, like a guitar center. I was hoping to, uh, get close to the, uh, the, the show biz. But I realized, "Okay, maybe, like, you know, I don't wanna play in weddings when I'm 40 [laughs] to pay the bills." And I was really intrigued by computer science, so I signed up. That was a fork in the road for me.

3. 2:35 – 4:05

   Gong’s Origin: CRM Had Nothing in It

   1. ABAmit Bendov2:35

      My first job was an engineer. I wrote code. Uh, many people don't know that. Then I, I led an R&D team. Then I moved from Tel Aviv to the US to start, uh, my first company, Click Software. It's now part of Salesforce. And I became the CEO of a company called Sisense in business intelligence. We're growing pretty fast, and then all of a sudden, we had a quarter that wasn't great at all. I have no idea what was going on. We're analyzing a lot of data from the CRM that everybody says, "Ah, this is the way to manage customers, a single source of truth." There was nothing there. It actually relies on people telling it what happened, and that didn't make sense. So only 1% of the information ever actually makes its way to the CRM. It's all in people's heads. Uh, now what happens is the companies, only half the sales people are making their numbers. 9 out of 10 opportunities are not won without the company ever knowing why. And I thought, "Wow, this just totally doesn't make sense." Like, uh, that was the year that AI was already beating the world champion in Go. Remember, like, AlphaGo and DeepMind? And the thought was, can we create, like, a system that will relieve people from the needs to update CRM? That was the idea that when I left Sisense, I thought, "Hey, maybe we could build a company around that." The idea was, like, an autonomous system, uh, that automatically captures context from conversations and uses AI to turn it both to insight and, and action. Are you using, uh, like, a

4. 4:05 – 5:48

   How Gong Invented the Meeting Assistant

   1. ABAmit Bendov4:05

      Meeting Assistant today? We invented this. This was from my background in the music industries. First, if we capture a meeting, meetings that we have usually would have, like, multiple people, but we didn't want people to listen to, like, 45-minute meetings, right? We wanna know, like, here are, like, the interesting points out there, so things like markers, topics. Today, it's pretty standard, but that did not exist. So we have, uh, first drew and I plagiarized a little bit from, uh, SoundCloud. There was the, the play buttons and, uh, where we put in, and you have those, like, tracks. If you use, like, GarageBand or something, you'll see, like, there's a drum, guitar, bass, right? So if you look at Gong, you'll see those tracks. All the concept, like listen-to-talk ratio, this is the first application. It was, like, measuring how much you're listening versus talking, how it tracks competitors. We invented this thing. That was, uh, pretty, pretty innovative. And we went to raise money. I said, "Let's start a company." I was pretty sure it's gonna be a walk in the park, but it was a far cry from that. It was, like, very frustrating, and almost nobody wanted to invest in us. They obviously took a meeting, and, like, another meeting, and, uh, what about this and what about that? And people thought that sellers are gonna hate Gong because they're gonna see it as a Big Brother. Google and Amazon are gonna own this space, that the technology is not there. Like, when we started, like, AI was nowhere near, uh, where it is right now, so it was, it was a hard job. So we struggled to raise money. But finally, we found, like, a couple investors. They gave us the money, and that allowed us to, uh, start the company, and it was pretty smooth from that point on.

5. 5:48 – 6:44

   EO Partner Highlight: Meet Attio

   1. ABAmit Bendov5:48

      [upbeat music]

   2. EHEO Studio Host5:50

      What if your CRM kept up with the conversations that matter for you? Meet Attio, the AI CRM for modern businesses. Connect your email, calls and product data, and Attio instantly builds your CRM with complete context. Then ask Attio anything. Spot a deal at risk, draft outreach, uncover new prospects. Spend less time in your CRM and more time building relationships. Whether you're running product-led growth or enterprise sales, Attio adapts to how your team sells and grows. And if you're building with AI agents, plug any MCP client straight into your CRM so your agents always have the context they need to act. Nine thousand companies build with Attio, including Granola, Modal and Whisperflow. Try Attio free at attio.com/eo.

   3. ABAmit Bendov6:39

      [upbeat music]

6. 6:44 – 6:52

   How to Build a Cult and Pull Ahead

   1. ABAmit Bendov6:47

      At Gong, we have our number one operating principles, like raving fans. We're not happy with

7. 6:52 – 8:10

   Make Raving Fans, Not Just Happy Customers

   1. ABAmit Bendov6:52

      just happy customers. Happy is like, yeah, I could be happy with a, with a chair, right? That's not... We want something people talk about that is a level above, right? What if I sit on a chair, like here in the kitchen, and all of a sudden it start to give me like a back rub, and it adjusts the temperature. I say, "Oh, oh, what just happened here," right? I mean, that's you get people to talk about it, and it surprises you for the better. It does something that you don't, uh, don't expect. You gotta understand your mission is not feature or AI or all of that. That's like why people buy, that's what they ultimately wanna accomplish. First, we focus on value, not just features. So we said, "What does it do?" So we have like two things that, at Gong, we try to do. First, like seventy-five percent of a seller's time is non-productive, right? It's like updating CRM, it's like doing forecasts, doing training, doing like sifting through lists. So what can we remove out of that? Second, when they're with talking with customers, how do we help them be better on their job? So these are the two North Star metric. People move from like somewhat reluctant to use it. Like, "Uh, is it like invasive?" To go, "Oh, wow. Like, you just did that," right? So you get that, that wow all the time, and the product surprises you in what it does, and it needs to work well and needs to be above what you expect. We did have like a rough patch in 2023

8. 8:10 – 9:22

   How Gong Pushed Through a Crisis

   1. ABAmit Bendov8:10

      because that was the post-COVID growth, right? The hangover. A lot of our customers have, uh, over-hired people and got into, uh, financial stress, so we saw like a higher churn. We also had competition that went in and, and bought like a, a bunch of competing products, and they're going to our customers and consolidating. They say, "Oh, we're gonna do like all three or four products in one." The products were not very good, but at that time, customers were just looking at a spreadsheet and say, "Okay, like, yeah, one, two, three." And so our growth slowed down substantially '23. I wouldn't say existential, but it was definitely like, uh, not, not fun days. So we raised a lot of money, but we barely touched it. We just saved it for if and when we're gonna need that. So that gave us a lot of confidence and, and the ability to execute, and we knew that if we struggle right now, all of our competition is struggling. If you're in an early market, which we are right now in AI, there are so many possibilities. Why would you like try to like one-up a competitor, right? Just try to go like in a different direction, and there are so many option. It could be like way better. I'm

9. 9:22 – 10:57

   Are You Truly Customer-Obsessed?

   1. ABAmit Bendov9:22

      stealing from Jeff Bezos, right, who said it like, "Most people say they're obsessed with customer, they're not. They're really competitor-driven." They look, "Oh, they did this, I'm gonna do that too, and I'm gonna do better," right? That's the wrong thing. So what do you do? We step on the gas pedal, right? So we know that everybody's gonna struggle. We have the cash, and we're gonna invest in engineering. I'd much rather invest in people and engineering than, than in office space. 'Cause like I remember like in '99, I was stuck with like an office that was like all like steel and plastic bags, all the area and chairs and like, you know, millions of dollars. It was like giving goosebumps even to watch it and say like, "Why did we do that?" I mean, we, we, we spent money on real estate and not on people, right? Is there anything that I could have done, right, that would've like changed the outcome? So we only do like two to three-year leases, right? I think for now, for the first time, we have like a four-year lease in an office, but generally we've been in WeWork, at WeWork like since day one, and we still are. Offices, like either they're too small, you grow so fast that you need to move out, or if you don't grow, then you're stuck now with a lot of space. So we built like two more products, now we added our fourth. Then we started like, uh, consulting, and now they're, they're behind. I'm an amateur cyclist. When you're climbing, right, you know everybody's exhausted, then you attack, right? You just give it like all you in, and it just psychologically it breaks, uh, your... If you're good, right? If you're able to accelerate, the, everybody just gives up because they know that they're barely breathing and now you're charging ahead, and that's exactly what we did. Competition

10. 10:57 – 11:13

    Competition Should Be an Easter Egg Hunt

    1. ABAmit Bendov10:57

       should be more like, like an Easter Egg Hunt than like a football match that you're, you, you gotta match like every play that the other opponent is doing. It's not a zero-sum game, like in, in the early stages. Just there, there are more. Just, just go and keep looking. Why-- Don't go where all the other kids are going.

11. 11:13 – 11:39

    Local Optimum: The Trap Founders Miss

    1. ABAmit Bendov11:16

       A lot of companies stall not because of external conditions, it's because maybe their market, like, isn't large enough, right? So there's like a, in math there's, you know, everybody suddenly knows there's this thing of local optimum, right? You're climbing a hill, and you're, you're climbing and at first it looks like very, very exciting and you reach the top, but now you're, you're not getting to the mountain. The most

12. 11:39 – 13:49

    Why Your Market Matters Most

    1. ABAmit Bendov11:39

       important thing is the market, like which market you're in, like which market do you play in, that's like more than anything else. If you get it right, then you could be okay in the others. There are two choices. It's either you join an existing category, let's say the advantage, it's already established, people are buying, and you just need to explain why you're better. There's already budget for this. Starting a category is like, uh, is very compelling. People, "Oh, I'm gonna start like a whole new category of, of music or whatever," right? It's also hard, because people don't have budget, they don't know how to think about it, so there's a lot of education. And if you wanna be precise, you can start a category. Category is by definition like a number of companies doing the same thing. If it's just you, you're not a category, you're a unique product. So you start by creating a unique product. If you're s- if you're not successful, then nothing happens. If you're successful, it's guaranteed that other will try to, like, either copy or do something better than you or, like, something different. That's when you start to have a category. It does take time. Today Gong is considered, or something like Gong, revenue AI, most companies say we need that. But it wasn't like a must-have when we started. Like, people had to find budget for it that didn't exist, right? It wasn't like a CRM or a contact database. So creating a category sounds very exciting and I'm, I've no regrets, but if you're entrepreneur, don't just think that, "Oh, I need to start, like, a new category." So first understand if you're stuck, understand if this is like, uh, intrinsic to your business or something that's happening right now. There are a lot of companies that are, for example, "Oh, we develop solution for SDRs," right? I tell them that, "Don't do that." If you live in the Bay Area, you're, you think, like, everybody has SDR. Companies in Wisconsin don't have, so this is example of a small market. I mean, you can get to, like, 50 million, 100 million, right? You're not gonna reach, like, a billion. So understand if you're stuck, uh, because you've reached a local optimum of your market. Uh, also if, if it's a small market and it's very competitive, that, that's, that's the worst thing. It's like five hungry dogs, like, fighting for a very small piece of meat, right? For us, we understood, listen, we have, like, a trillion dollar opportunity. Like, if we don't succeed, like, it's not the market, it's us.

13. 13:49 – 14:25

    Advice for AI Software Builders

    1. ABAmit Bendov13:49

       The noise that's happening right now with AI, I know it's very confusing, just, just make a bet and just keep going, ignore the noise. Right now people are very emotional. It's almost like when, you know, people fall in love with someone, they're, you know, it's more like the hormone thinking versus, like, the brain. The dust will settle. At some point it'll be clear. So if you have a direction, hopefully it's good, just keep going, keep plowing, do your own thing. Uh, look a little bit, like, to what's going on, but don't be enamored with, like, things around you. If I have to distill it to one, this is it. Like, who do you cater to and what do you offer?

14. 14:25 – 16:58

    Why the “SaaSpocalypse” Is Overblown

    1. ABAmit Bendov14:31

       The SaaSpocalypse. There's some truth in that, but it's like a way, like, overreaction of the market right now. It's like, uh, uh, investors are worried, like, if AI is, has this, like, power of God, anybody can do software, so what, what is the moat? It's a natural question, but it's way, way exaggerated, 'cause most companies will probably, like, um, open source their code and it will still be difficult for someone to compete with them. The code is just a part. What about, like, running it? Like, there's like a security vulnerability that you need to patch a package, a library, like, who do you call at, like, 3:00 AM? Just writing the code is one part of a software company, but actually, like, running it, right, and supporting production, driving adoption is extremely hard. So even if, like, Workday or Salesforce's, like, code was out there on the internet, it would still be extremely difficult for anybody to compete with them. CRM and HR are incredibly complex, right? People just underestimate it. They think, you know, you can't vibe code it, like, uh, even, like, with 100 engineers or otherwise why are we not seeing one right now? Why are we not seeing, like, a competitor? We have to understand that sales is asymmetrical engagement, so buyers don't necessarily tell you everything. They might even lie to you. "I don't have a budget," right? Or, "I am the decision maker," even though you're not. "We're looking at a few of your competitors." They might not tell you what they are and they might not be looking at anything. So this is, like, already, like, AI needs to have, like, excellent context or data, right? When you negotiate, like, you want to lower the price, you want to increase the price. So that's, like, uh, one thing. Second, at least for us, like, we help mostly with B2B sales, which is complex. It's like multiple people selling to multiple people. Understanding the power dynamics, the political power structure, all of that, something that AI will struggle. Ambiguity is not where it's good. Reading the room and judgment, creativity, right? AI is very straightforward. It's trained on, uh, being plausible. Sometimes the creative moves aren't the ones that are plausible. It's just doing some things like that seems unreasonable but still, like, um, a winning place. When we were alone, like, nobody cares. Once you're, you're ahead, there's a crosshair on your back, so everybody wants to kill you, right? And that's like we take it as a compliment. We've built the system over 10 years and, and again, it's, there, there's a lot of complexity. Our vision was

15. 16:58 – 19:05

    Gong’s Vision: A Self-Driving Revenue System

    1. ABAmit Bendov16:58

       we thought of it as a self-driving car, right? So when we started Gong, we wanted to build an autonomous system. Our inspiration was a, was a Tesla self-driving car at like five levels. Five is, like, full self-driving and one is getting, like, lane keeping alerts. And we thought if you want to build a self-driving car, and this is a self-managing customer management system, you need three things. First, you need the sensors to capture all the data. In a car it'll be the radars, the lidar cameras. So this is our revenue graph. Second, you need to make sense of all of it, right? So you see, like, a red light blinking. Is it a traffic light or is it a car or a motorcycle? Is it accelerating or decelerating, right? So this is, like, the AI level. And then there is the application layer. So we n- always thought about, like, the five levels and we said, "Okay, today we're like, uh, 2017, we're like at level one," right? "And when can we get to level five?" So we built, uh, even though something like a lidar didn't exist or the AI wasn't strong enough to be full self-driving, so we built the framework so we can plug in, like, the technologies as they mature. If you could vibe code it, like, overnight, then, uh, [laughs] then we have a problem. But it's, it's not, it's not easy. There's a lot of, uh, nuance and details that goes into especially deploying at a, a large scale. So I think it's, like, a underestimation of what it takes to really run a company, right? Far me, not an investment advice, I think it's a good, good buying opportunity for the companies that are real. From the outside when you see a company growing, right, it looks like this. But from the inside, there are multiple revenue sources, right? And you need to layer them in a way that it looks smooth from the outside, but each one is kind of like S shape, right? And at some point it'll hit a glass ceiling. You know, you asked me about the people getting stuck, because you're, you're doing one thing and, and that's it, like, it's not, it's not growing as fast anymore. So you always need to layer those things and you need to think about, like, two or three years in advance, 'cause, uh, when you realize that you need it, like, it's already too late. [outro music]

Episode duration: 19:15