Hightouch: Revolutionizing Personalized Marketing With The First Agentic Marketer

1. 0:00 – 0:55

   Intro

   1. GAGustaf Alströmer0:00

      Today I'm joined by the founders of Hightouch, uh, Kashish, Josh, and Tejas. Um, they're building, uh, an agentic marketer. The company's been around since twenty nineteen, twenty twenty. I've got to know them through two different YC batches, and we'll tell you more about that story in a second. Uh, the company's on a tear right now. By the time that this video will be out, they will have announced that they are a billion-dollar company, and the last twelve months has been, uh, an incredible run for this company, and I'm excited to tell you more. What does Hightouch do, and what is the best way for, like, a person who's not familiar with the world that you're in to explain what you guys do?

   2. SPSpeaker0:33

      Yeah. So the most recent iteration of Hightouch is outcome-driven marketing. Marketers tell us what goal they want to achieve, and the AI agent, in this case, our agentic marketer, will help you achieve that goal. So for example, a typical B2C brand, let's say you've purchased a pair of leggings from an athleisure brand. They wanna now upsell you on water bottles, tops, and other, uh, products. So the agentic marketer

2. 0:55 – 3:10

   AI marketer

   1. SPSpeaker0:55

      will look at all activities you've ever done with that brand, online and offline, and come up with propensities and campaigns that best serve that individual customer. So imagine if you had one marketer, a human being marketer, for every customer within your customer database.

   2. GAGustaf Alströmer1:09

      So when I was at Airbnb, this is something that we were actually dreaming about and hoping that we at one point get to, but at, at least in my time there, we never got to. So I'm excited you guys are building it for everybody else. Um, we're gonna get into the details of what you're building right now in a second. Maybe talk about the beginning of this company. So, um, um, you applied to YC, then you met Tejas, and you kinda like applied together as a team or, or started a company right together as a team. But initially it was just you, and you had a different idea, and then you were in a batch after. Can you just talk about what was the time, uh, or what was the foundation story of this company? How did you all start together?

   3. SPSpeaker1:43

      We were all going through pivot hell.

   4. SPSpeaker1:44

      Yeah.

   5. SPSpeaker1:44

      It was like March twenty twenty. Uh, we were living in, again, this ten-bedroom house together in the Mission, and it was quarantine, so no one could really leave the house. Um, all three of us were looking for new business ideas every day, just waking up, thinking, "What are we gonna work on today?" And then we thought, "Well, actually, it would be nicer to work together on this," because we trust each other to work hard and, like, figure things out. So it was like, we don't actually have a thesis at the moment for what we should build, but we have a thesis that these three individuals are gonna, like, make it and figure something out. And YC mentioned this, like, way back in twenty nineteen. It was that companies die because founders give up, not because of, like, external factors like market risk or product risk. And that really stuck with us. It's like, yeah, we just have to not give up until we finally figure something out.

   6. GAGustaf Alströmer2:23

      Oh, and what was the moment like? Like, like, you're like, "There's moment, like, we're gonna work together." Does-- Did you decide to work together and the idea the same day, or how did that happen?

   7. SPSpeaker2:31

      I don't think it was, like, a single moment.

   8. SPSpeaker2:32

      Yeah.

   9. SPSpeaker2:32

      We were all pivoting our companies at the same time.

   10. GAGustaf Alströmer2:34

       Yeah.

   11. SPSpeaker2:35

       And we would all work in this one living room in the house, which before COVID was, like, you know, the startup co-working space where Josh, Kashish, and I work and pretty much no one else because everyone else is going to their offices.

   12. GAGustaf Alströmer2:45

       Mm-hmm.

   13. SPSpeaker2:45

       But post-COVID became this, like, super fun environment where everyone was working from home now. Um, and since we are both pivoting our ideas and just looking for completely left field things, right? We were in travel. Twenty twenty.

   14. GAGustaf Alströmer2:56

       Yeah.

   15. SPSpeaker2:56

       No more travel. Um, we, we were just jamming on ideas together, and we're like, "Wait, maybe it'd be more efficient to just all work together."

   16. GAGustaf Alströmer3:03

       Got it. And, and the initial idea was Reverse ETL. Where did that came from?

   17. SPSpeaker3:08

       Yeah. So honestly, the initial

3. 3:10 – 6:06

   Reverse ETL

   1. SPSpeaker3:10

      idea, there was a lot of pivots to finally get to it.

   2. GAGustaf Alströmer3:12

      Yeah.

   3. SPSpeaker3:12

      As you can imagine, like, you're working on a travel company, COVID happens, your bookings go to zero in a week when the US announces quarantines.

   4. GAGustaf Alströmer3:18

      Yeah.

   5. SPSpeaker3:18

      Um, we were initially working on some stuff in things like customer support and just, like... The main thing we emphasized though was talking to as many and many and many customers as possible. And we just found this just really big trend across all the companies we talked to, which was that no matter what role people were in, marketing, sales, et cetera, they all had a problem around getting access to all the data in the business. And then we saw this other trend, which is that, um, companies are all accumulating all their data in data warehouses-

   6. GAGustaf Alströmer3:43

      Mm.

   7. SPSpeaker3:43

      -like Snowflake, Databricks, Google, BigQuery, et cetera. Um, so that's where the idea where Reverse ETL came, which is how do you take all the data from these warehouses and get them into the hands of business teams, like marketing teams, which became a really big use case-

   8. GAGustaf Alströmer3:55

      Yeah.

   9. SPSpeaker3:56

      -um, for us, and that's why we decided to go deeper there.

   10. GAGustaf Alströmer3:58

       And who ended up becoming the first customer? How did you get the first one or two customers?

   11. SPSpeaker4:03

       So Retool was one of the first customers.

   12. GAGustaf Alströmer4:05

       Oh, really?

   13. SPSpeaker4:05

       Uh, we had, like, three kind of at the same time.

   14. SPSpeaker4:07

       Yeah, I think Retool was, I think, from, like, some intro, you know, with our network from Segment and stuff like that. And then the other company was just, like, we were just looking for people who are searching for what we were building, a way to use all the data in the warehouse for marketing. Um, and we found them in, like, some sort of Slack community.

   15. GAGustaf Alströmer4:23

       Oh, wow.

   16. SPSpeaker4:23

       And we just reached out to them and we're like, "Hey, we're building a product that can solve this."

   17. GAGustaf Alströmer4:27

       And how quickly did, did you able to launch or, or?

   18. SPSpeaker4:31

       We pretty much sold.

   19. GAGustaf Alströmer4:32

       You sold first before you launched?

   20. SPSpeaker4:33

       As we were launching.

   21. GAGustaf Alströmer4:34

       Oh, smart.

   22. SPSpeaker4:34

       Yeah. So I would say, you know, while we were selling those first customers, we were building the product at the same time, and we always made it work.

   23. SPSpeaker4:40

       I mean, to paint a picture, like, there was a point in time where the product was running off of Josh's laptop. Um, but people thought it was in the cloud. And obviously now it is completely different, like very horizontally scalable in the cloud and secure. But in twenty nineteen, very different story.

   24. GAGustaf Alströmer4:56

       Got it. Got it. Okay. And at some point, um, founders get the feeling that this is working. Um, is there a way that you... A, a moment you remember when you said, "Okay, I think this is working"? Um, like, was there a number? Was there, like, a customer got really excited?

   25. SPSpeaker5:10

       There were probably, like, two moments.

   26. SPSpeaker5:12

       Yeah.

   27. SPSpeaker5:12

       Um, I think the first moment for me at least was when, um, I just realized that we're talking to so many different companies in so many different industries, right? From, like, this newspaper in Norway, it's like a very traditional company that wants to figure out how to use data and all that stuff for marketing, um, this, like, healthcare D2C company, this Retool, um, the company in Brazil, which we can't even remember what they quite do at this point. Um, and I was just like, "Wow, if all of these companies in so many different industries in so many different parts of the world all have the same use case, feels like there's something here." And then there was another one.

   28. SPSpeaker5:44

       Yeah, I think February of twenty twenty-one.

   29. SPSpeaker5:47

       Probably four or five months later.

   30. SPSpeaker5:48

       So this is after our Series A. So we've, like, already raised, like, a round and, like, told the world we're gonna work on this for sure.
4. 6:06 – 8:48

   Self-service

   1. GAGustaf Alströmer6:06

      you figure out where they came from?

   2. SPSpeaker6:07

      Um, marketing. Like, it was, like, SEO, like, content marketing, and that kind of stuff. Um, and I think that was the day where we... Like, we, we believed in the business. We believed in it bottoms up without necessarily very, very clear evidence. Um, but our, like, principles for ma- what made a good business to us back then in twenty twenty-one was it should be something that people come to us for, so it's pull, not push. Um, it should be something that people can set up by themselves, which we don't really believe in anymore, but at the time we did. Um, and then it should be something that, as Tejas said, the same abstraction should apply to many different use cases. So the abstraction was a very simple SQL to SaaS. Give me your SQL query, I'll pipe it to your SaaS tool. Um, but with that same abstraction applied to so many different use cases that we said, "Great," like, even if, for example, there's a market crash and SaaS tools are not so spendy anymore, we can still go to B2C, which is exactly what we did.

   3. SPSpeaker6:52

      Yeah, we were really wary of, like, building a startup that just sold to-

   4. SPSpeaker6:55

      Other startups

   5. SPSpeaker6:56

      ... other YC companies or other startups or B2B [chuckles] SaaS companies. I think that was a common thing to do in the batch-

   6. SPSpeaker7:00

      Mm-hmm

   7. SPSpeaker7:00

      ... but we wanted to really make sure that what we were working on would be able to s- especially a business SaaS, would be able to sell to the broader market of companies out there.

   8. GAGustaf Alströmer7:07

      Yeah. And then, uh, c-can you describe, like, so this is twenty twenty, then there's, like, three more years go by, and then last year. What, what happened in those years? Like, like, what-- how would you describe for, like, the timeline, um, of the next couple of years?

   9. SPSpeaker7:19

      Maybe here's... I would describe it as oscillating or, like, ebbing and flowing. Um, and so you can think of the company as, like, three phases, right? One is we created a new category called Reverse ETL.

   10. SPSpeaker7:29

       Yeah.

   11. SPSpeaker7:30

       ETL and end-to-end ETL, it doesn't really matter which direction you go. But calling it Reverse ETL helped people find us on a map, which was, "I want to get data from a database into a SaaS tool." That really worked well for inbound for a while, and so we were getting a ton of logos. They were not paying us a lot of ACV, but they were coming inbound, so that was a really good phase. Hired a lot, like, did a lot of marketing, like, things were working. Then we realized, wait, we need something for business users. Um, and we have all these business users that wanna log into the product, and they wanna self-serve without SQL queries, use the product. And maybe they wanna do more vertical use cases like sales or marketing. We chose marketing. Um, that was the second phase. Now we have to step back, re-innovate, hire more engineers, like, figure out, like, what is the strategy here.

   12. GAGustaf Alströmer8:09

       Mm.

   13. SPSpeaker8:09

       Maybe this is more top-down sale, maybe more m- maybe we need more sellers, different strategy. Uh, so that's like phase two. Uh, and then s-same thing again, like, I think two and a half years later, we entered that space, which was called the customer data platform space. We started competing with Salesforce and Adobe, companies with way more budget and brand than us. Um, and then we said, "Let's go innovate a third time," and that's when we built the agentic marketer.

   14. GAGustaf Alströmer8:31

       And, and this, this idea of, like, never being satisfied with the product or always feeling like you have to innovate, so, like, where does that come from? I feel like it's, it's been part of you from the very beginning.

   15. SPSpeaker8:40

       I think that we know that the market we're in is inherently, um, such a big market that it's gonna be competitive, right?

   16. SPSpeaker8:46

       Mm.

   17. SPSpeaker8:46

       It's an, it's an obvious thing. Marketing

5. 8:48 – 11:08

   Agentic marketer

   1. SPSpeaker8:48

      teams wanna figure out how to use data and AI and stuff like that to do-give the best experience to their customers. It's something that's been talked about for a long time, but as you mentioned Airbnb, the dream's really never been satisfied. Um, so it's kind of interesting. Um, even though at each time that we decided to pursue the next direction, we were still, like, growing the business pretty fast. Everyone at the company, our investors, would always be like, "Are you sure we should pursue something else-

   2. GAGustaf Alströmer9:09

      Mm

   3. SPSpeaker9:09

      ... or should we just focus," right? That's the kind of startup mantra, just focus on what you're doing, just keep doing that for a long time. And, um, we really had a perspective that if we don't innovate, we're gonna eventually die. Um, so it's, like, really innovate or die mindset. Um, you know, we believe that, like, you can be happy for some amount of time doing the same thing and just keep scaling that up. But if you're in markets like this, eventually someone's gonna rethink it and figure out that next tranche of innovation and, like, what disrupts what people are doing today. And we just wanted to make sure that we're always that company. So we're always trying to, like, search for an opportunity-

   4. GAGustaf Alströmer9:40

      Mm

   5. SPSpeaker9:40

      ... not just wait to spot one, if that makes sense.

   6. GAGustaf Alströmer9:43

      Uh, let's talk about the early team. So you have a, um... Maybe you could just talk about, um, what is your approach to building a team and hiring and, and the specific person that you weren't mentioning, I think, here as well, that had, had played a unique role in the history of the company.

   7. SPSpeaker9:57

      I'd say in the early days, we actually got pretty lucky. We had a lot of great people in our network who were interested in what we were building, so we were able to get a lot of engineers, and at the time, we actually didn't even know how to interview. So some of our earliest-

   8. SPSpeaker10:05

      We didn't have the typical resumes though.

   9. SPSpeaker10:07

      Mm-hmm.

   10. GAGustaf Alströmer10:07

       Yeah.

   11. SPSpeaker10:07

       Yeah. [chuckles]

   12. GAGustaf Alströmer10:08

       Were these people from your network at Segment, or these were people from somewhere else?

   13. SPSpeaker10:12

       More personal, I'd say.

   14. GAGustaf Alströmer10:13

       Yeah.

   15. SPSpeaker10:13

       Like, a lot, lot like personal connections.

   16. SPSpeaker10:14

       Yeah.

   17. SPSpeaker10:14

       Like, people who we just know or people who were right for a startup. They were very smart, like, they would figure it out with us.

   18. GAGustaf Alströmer10:19

       High aptitude people.

   19. SPSpeaker10:20

       Very high aptitude.

   20. GAGustaf Alströmer10:21

       How did you know that they would be good, good employees or good, good coworkers?

   21. SPSpeaker10:27

       At some point, we'd seen them grind really hard.

   22. SPSpeaker10:30

       Yeah.

   23. SPSpeaker10:30

       Or we knew they really wanted to. I think that's, that's pretty fair.

   24. GAGustaf Alströmer10:33

       I mean, there's this thing that's been, like, sticking in my head recently, which is people that don't sleep until the job is done. Um, and I think those people can get, like, outstanding amounts done regardless of their skill set because of the aptitude and just the grind. What is interviewing at Hightouch like?

   25. SPSpeaker10:49

       I think it's something where even when we're hiring for engineers, most people think about coding interviews, like, very, like, tactical skills. And, like, we, we wanna hire people who are very, very, like, open-ended about what their skill set is. So they're very powerful, generous. So the people who actually understand, like, product management, good business sense.

   26. SPSpeaker11:03

       Strong communication.

   27. SPSpeaker11:04

       Very strong communication. I think these are things that people don't always index on, specifically

6. 11:08 – 13:30

   Hiring

   1. SPSpeaker11:08

      for engineers. So a lot of our interviews here, like, they focus a lot on communication skills, like, just open-ended problem solving. Um, but for engineering in particular, we actually have one main interview. It's ninety minutes, so it's on the longer side. It's something like systems design, but it has a lot more open-endedness to it. So we give you a problem. We say, like, "This is what the customer is trying to do. What's the right solution to it?" And it's, it goes broader than just your general systems design.

   2. SPSpeaker11:28

      Doesn't require any coding, though. So it's all architecture and just, like, how do you think from a systems perspective?

   3. GAGustaf Alströmer11:33

      No prep.

   4. SPSpeaker11:34

      Um, no prep, ninety minutes, and if someone passes that interview, Josh can basically hire them on the spot because it tests design and communication, you know.

   5. SPSpeaker11:43

      It tests everything. It's, it's pretty hard.

   6. GAGustaf Alströmer11:44

      What a candidate's reaction to this process?

   7. SPSpeaker11:47

      Very positive, actually. Like-

   8. GAGustaf Alströmer11:48

      Do they find out in advance that there's one interview, ninety minutes?

   9. SPSpeaker11:50

      Yeah. That's, like, one of the best selling points. It's, like, easy to get the best candidates who oftentimes don't wanna go through long-

   10. GAGustaf Alströmer11:54

       Mm-hmm

   11. SPSpeaker11:54

       ... series of sequences. Um, it's just, like, one and done, and I think they really respect the fact that it's, like, what the job is, you know, day to day.

   12. SPSpeaker12:01

       I remember when we were interviewing, like, VP of Engineerings. Um, no one believed that this was possible.

   13. SPSpeaker12:06

       Yeah. [chuckles]

   14. SPSpeaker12:06

       When we're deploy-- when Josh was interviewing them about interviewing. Um, and even our current VP of Engineering was like, "Really? Like, one interview?" But we haven't changed it since the beginning of the company, and, and he believes in it now too, and it's just, like, it's, we call it the core interview, and it works b-pretty damn well.

   15. GAGustaf Alströmer12:21

       How, how big is the team right now?

   16. SPSpeaker12:23

       170

   17. GAGustaf Alströmer12:25

       How many are technical engineers?

   18. SPSpeaker12:26

       We have, like, 45 engineers, and then another six designers and around five or six PMs.

   19. SPSpeaker12:33

       Probably a lot more technical, though, if you describe it that way.

   20. GAGustaf Alströmer12:35

       Yeah.

   21. SPSpeaker12:35

       A lot more.

   22. GAGustaf Alströmer12:36

       How do you convince someone to join a company? Like, like once some- once someone passed the bar, um, great talent often has amazing other opportunities.

   23. SPSpeaker12:45

       Um, I mean, we wanna build a company where everyone has really high ownership and agency to get shit done. So, like, there should be very high... Like, if I wanna make this happen, I can make it happen at the company, and I don't have to follow instruction, um, precisely in order to achieve the outcome. So, like, our whole thing is, like, we grade people on impact. You can get promoted for impact. You can get, like, higher compensation for impact. And even if you don't do the thing your manager says, but you create way more impact than whatever it was supposed to be, then you will get rewarded for that. Um, and so we think of everyone as, like, if you can index on, like, what matters for the business and make impact, then this is the place you wanna work. And I think people also just really wanna work with other people that are highly motivated and smart. Um, everyone you meet at Hightouch ideally teaches you something and makes you a better person the next day.

7. 13:30 – 16:40

   Promotions

   1. GAGustaf Alströmer13:30

      One of the questions that we sometimes ask in group office hours for founders are, "Why are you working on this company?" Like, when things are really hard, what's the thing that keeps you motivated and keep going?

   2. SPSpeaker13:41

      I think the challenges of startups in general are just very fun. Our problem space is particularly technical, particularly challenging, so I think the fact that it's been different every year and, like, always changing, that continual challenge, I think, is the thing that's just the most fun for me.

   3. SPSpeaker13:53

      Yeah. I really care about just creating an amazing outcome for everyone that's trusted us with their career. Like, every single day, I think about all the people that I work with at Hightouch that inspire me. Like, for example, this year, we set a pretty crazy revenue goal. Multiple people told me that I wasn't ambitious enough, and I should set a higher one. And they're like, "Dude, come on. That's not even a round number. Let's go for the higher one." And guess what? They were right. We're gonna hit that and even more. So, like, they're just, like, continuously telling us that we should work harder, we should innovate more, we should, like, be, like, more ambitious. And that-- When else in your career do you get to, like, work in an environment where people push you in that way, and they succeed, and you actually can achieve? So that makes me wanna work even harder 'cause momentum is something that you can't, like, earn back. Once you have it, you wanna keep it going. Once you lose it, it's kinda just gone.

   4. GAGustaf Alströmer14:39

      Yeah.

   5. SPSpeaker14:40

      And so it's a responsibility.

   6. SPSpeaker14:41

      Yeah. What Kujou said about, um, trying to make the best outcome for everyone at the company really resonates with me. But I think in addition to that, as founders, like, we agreed at the beginning of the company that we really just wanna make this humongous business. And if we expand it into a bunch of different ways, that's cool too. But we feel like we have an op-- As long as we feel like we have an opportunity, we put our best into it to create that humongous business, like one of the biggest SaaS companies around, hopefully.

   7. GAGustaf Alströmer15:03

      Yeah.

   8. SPSpeaker15:04

      Um, then I feel like we're, we've all, you know, set a rule that we're gonna d- go after that together.

   9. GAGustaf Alströmer15:09

      So, uh, you're three co-founders. Um, what are the benefit of having a co-founder? Like, you've experienced being a solo founder and, like, all merged your companies. Like, talk about... Well, just talk about why you think it's, like, beneficial to have more than a f- m- being more than a solo founder.

   10. SPSpeaker15:26

       Should probably start with Josh. [laughs]

   11. SPSpeaker15:27

       Yeah.

   12. GAGustaf Alströmer15:27

       [laughs]

   13. SPSpeaker15:27

       I should start here as the only person who's been a solo founder here. I think when I was, like, winding down Deviceplane, I was thinking, "I need to do a hard pivot." I still wanted to be a founder, and I wanted to do something new. But then I realized being a solo founder was pretty tough at going through those harder pivots. Like, if you're set on a direction and you feel pretty about that direction, I think it's one thing to be a solo founder. But when there's a lot of thrash, it really helps to have other people to brainstorm more open-endedly with and be able to divide and conquer. So I think there are paths where being a solo founder can work, but it's just, it's quite uphill. Um, it... So I think having others to go through that hard, like, emotional journey with was, like, just pretty important in the pre-product market fit days, um, back then. But then even as we scale too, like, having multiple co-founders has just been very, very central to our growth.

   14. GAGustaf Alströmer16:08

       What does the emotional journey look like? Is it like s- some days some- somebody's really excited, and somebody's really down? Or how does, how does it work?

   15. SPSpeaker16:14

       I think ev- at any given time, there's always one person that's going through existential dread.

   16. GAGustaf Alströmer16:18

       [laughs]

   17. SPSpeaker16:19

       And that's the benefit of having three co-founders.

   18. GAGustaf Alströmer16:21

       Yeah.

   19. SPSpeaker16:22

       'Cause the other two are always like, "Let's go. We got this," or, "Dude, why aren't you working? Come on. Let's go. Let's get back to work." Um, and I think, like, just being able to look over and be like, "All right. They're still motivated and excited. Like, we'll get through this together. We'll figure it out," is really nice. Um, if you're a solo founder, you wake up, and you're in bed. Well, no work is happening while

8. 16:40 – 19:34

   Handling stress.

   1. SPSpeaker16:40

      you're in bed.

   2. SPSpeaker16:41

      It's really easy to spiral when you're working alone on something.

   3. GAGustaf Alströmer16:44

      Yeah.

   4. SPSpeaker16:44

      I think I've seen it in so many friends.

   5. GAGustaf Alströmer16:46

      Mm-hmm.

   6. SPSpeaker16:46

      Um, so just having co-founders and people to bounce stuff off and people to call you out is just very, very helpful.

   7. GAGustaf Alströmer16:52

      Um, one thing I've learned founders getting used to as the company is scaling is that all of these dramatic moments that seem like, oh, this customer's leaving, or this employee is leaving, or something that is emotionally kinda dramatic, they just kind of keep happening at an increasing rate, and founder get used to them and actually don't stress up anymore.

   8. SPSpeaker17:10

      Yeah.

   9. GAGustaf Alströmer17:10

      Does this resonate?

   10. SPSpeaker17:11

       Yeah, you get desensitized.

   11. GAGustaf Alströmer17:12

       Yeah.

   12. SPSpeaker17:13

       And I hate saying that, especially, like, publicly.

   13. GAGustaf Alströmer17:15

       Mm-hmm.

   14. SPSpeaker17:15

       But I think, like, a founder experiences so much emo- wide range of emotion that because you experience that variability all the time, that variability becomes quite normal. Um, it's like huge win, huge loss, huge win, huge loss. And so every year you'll have 100 wins and losses.

   15. SPSpeaker17:31

       It's funny because I think sometimes we react super aggressively to those wins or losses internally.

   16. GAGustaf Alströmer17:36

       [laughs]

   17. SPSpeaker17:36

       But, um, that's just reacting with speed-

   18. GAGustaf Alströmer17:38

       Mm-hmm

   19. SPSpeaker17:39

       ... and aggression and making sure we learn from it. We actually don't care that much. [laughs] People are like, "Oh, are you stressed out? Are you angry?" It's like, "No. Just wanna make sure we learn from it." [laughs]

   20. GAGustaf Alströmer17:46

       So was there ever a moment you've all felt like, "We're failing, and this is not go- this is not going anywhere, nowh- anywhere?"

   21. SPSpeaker17:53

       I think always in the pre-product market fit days, like, that's, like, the most emotional toil, where you don't know, like, the end in sight, like, when that's gonna be. It's, like, it's very open-ended. So I would say that's probably where the most biggest existential dread was, at least for me, was, yeah, before we had product market fit.

   22. SPSpeaker18:06

       There, I think there's something you mentioned before too about, like, how do you, um... Like, our exec team knows this pretty well about us. We always ask the question of, "How do you know you're doing well?" So let's say you doubled your metrics this year. How do you know that's a good thing? And it's what Teja said, like, the opportunity available is what we wanna access. We don't necessarily wanna just double our base or, like, triple our base. We wanna go for the opportunity available. And so I think, like, for us, like, failure is often, like, growing really quickly, but, like, maybe we thought there was an even bigger opportunity to go for. Or maybe we did what we said we would do in one area, but in our new product, like AI decisioning, maybe we wanted to achieve even more.

   23. SPSpeaker18:42

       Yeah, I'd say we always think we're failing.

   24. SPSpeaker18:43

       Yeah. So, like, I think but also, like, fabricating those failures in your head is I think also what keeps the edge-

   25. GAGustaf Alströmer18:48

       Mm-hmm

   26. SPSpeaker18:49

       ... of, like, continued innovation, like hire faster, like make changes faster. Because I think the people that get complacent and they're like, "Oh, we did so well this year," those are the people that stop innovating or, like, stop changing.

   27. GAGustaf Alströmer18:59

       Yeah. You haven't had a, the highest profile of a company of your size. Like-

   28. SPSpeaker19:04

       Mm-hmm.

   29. GAGustaf Alströmer19:04

       Like, it would not surprise me if a lot of people haven't heard of you, even though you're doing extremely well. If I watch this video and I'm like get really inspired by you guys, which is easy, um, what are the kind of folks you're looking for?

   30. SPSpeaker19:17

       Well, I think one thing that we really feel strongly about is that to build this next tranche of innovation with AI, um, decisioning and agentic marketing, um, we really need to have a lot of folks at the company who won't stop working until the job's done. And sometimes it takes a lot of tinkering, trying a lot of different ways to get the job done-
9. 19:34 – 20:06

   Low-profile

   1. SPSpeaker19:34

      Um, so that's a core attribute that we're looking for.

   2. SPSpeaker19:36

      Yeah. So it's engineers, PMs, uh, salespeople, marketing people.

   3. SPSpeaker19:41

      Really across the stack.

   4. SPSpeaker19:41

      Yeah, it's actually-

   5. SPSpeaker19:42

      I don't think you can name a role that we're not hiring for.

   6. SPSpeaker19:44

      I think there's 45 open roles right now with a team size of 170.

   7. GAGustaf Alströmer19:47

      And you are in-person in San Francisco?

   8. SPSpeaker19:49

      Uh, so we are in-person in SF and New York.

   9. GAGustaf Alströmer19:51

      New York. Okay.

   10. SPSpeaker19:52

       Uh, and it's hybrid, so there are people that work across, like, different hybrid locations across the US as well. But SF and New York are where our offices are.

   11. GAGustaf Alströmer20:01

       It's been incredible to follow you guys the last five years, and thank you so much for, um, talking to us at YC.

   12. SPSpeaker20:05

       Thank you, Gustaf.

   13. SPSpeaker20:06

       Thanks, Gustaf.

Episode duration: 20:07