Rebuilding Customer Support for the AI Era

1. HTHarj Taggar0:00

   [upbeat music] Hi, everyone. Uh, I'm excited to be joined here today by Marty, Robert, and Advith, the co-founders of Pylon. Pylon went through YC in the Winter '23 batch, and is one of our fastest-growing companies over the last few years. Uh, I think what's especially exciting about their story is they took a while to find the idea and pivoted through several ideas, so we're gonna chat about that today. Uh, guys, thanks so much for joining us.

2. ADAdvith0:27

   Thanks, Harj.

3. HTHarj Taggar0:28

   Why don't we kick this off by just telling us, what does Pylon do? What's the problem it solves?

4. MAMarty0:32

   Yeah. So Pylon is an AI customer support platform specifically built for B2B companies. We replace products like Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce Service Cloud, but very AI-native and built for a B2B persona.

5. HTHarj Taggar0:43

   Could you give us a, uh... Share anything, um, to give us a sense of the scale that Pylon operates at today?

6. MAMarty0:48

   Yeah, so I think we're 79 people as of this week. Um, we're three years old, uh, three years since, uh, we spoke to and met you, Harj, um-

7. HTHarj Taggar0:56

   The Winter '23 YC batch.

8. MAMarty0:57

   Winter '23, and yeah, I mean, back then, it was just the three of us. Um, we actually pivoted through many ideas, as, as we'll talk about. But, uh, yeah, 79 people today, three years old, um, eight digits in ARR, uh, and last year we grew 5.35X.

9. ADAdvith1:12

   Over 1,000 customers now.

10. HTHarj Taggar1:13

    Nice. Can you mention any of the biggest customers you have?

11. ADAdvith1:16

    Yeah, folks like Honeycomb, Linear, Incident IO, Applied Intuition-

12. MAMarty1:21

    Deel. Yeah.

13. HTHarj Taggar1:22

    And how many rounds of funding have you raised?

14. MAMarty1:24

    Um, so we're Series B now. We've raised 51 million total from, of course, YC, General Catalyst for our seed, Andreessen for our Series A, and Bain Capital Ventures for B.

15. HTHarj Taggar1:33

    Cool. I wanna come back to sort of Pylon as it is today in a little bit, but I actually think what's really interesting about your story is it took you a while to arrive at this idea. Um, so why don't we kind of actually go all the way back, and maybe just tell about- tell us a little bit about each of you individually, so of your, your backgrounds, um, why you got interested in doing startups, and then maybe we can talk a little bit about how you started thinking about startup ideas.

16. MAMarty1:56

    Yeah. Advith, you wanna start?

17. ADAdvith1:57

    Yeah, I can start. So I think... Uh, so Robert and I went to Caltech, and I think in college at least was when I first started getting interested in startups. I was considering being, like, a math major, and then when I went to college, I was like: "Oh, I guess I... Computer science is some applied version of math." And then met Robert freshman year doing, like, a puzzle competition. Um, we're both super into puzzles, and then we ended up running our school hackathon to- together for a couple of years, which ended up being basically like running a company, minus building a product. It's a lot of, like, organizing tons of people, raising money, just, like, holding an event, essentially. So like, building a team that does something, minus building a product. And so, uh, through that, uh, like, I guess, built the muscle of how to work together, with Robert especially, and then that-

18. RORobert2:37

    Yeah. I think the funny thing is, we were, uh, work colleagues in college. Like, we weren't really friends. [chuckles]

19. ADAdvith2:42

    Yeah, yeah. So we, like, had a great working relationship where we'd work on stuff. Like, Robert would take the night shift of, like, midnight to 8:00 a.m., and then I would take, like, the rest of the day shift, like answering emails and, like, doing all these, like, company logistics stuff. And then that summer of sophomore, Robert's sophomore year, he did this program called KP Fellows, which is this, like, entrepreneurial, like, internship program, and, uh, he was at DoorDash that summer, and I, I was interning in the Bay as well, but I just... That program has a lot of f- ex-fou- or, like, people who become founders later, and so got to see what was going on through that. And then the next summer, I did it, which is when I met Marty. I was interning at Slack. Marty was at Airbnb. And I guess the TLDR about why starting a company is just wanted to do it even in college, just didn't have a thing to do it about. And so, um, uh, like, a couple of years after, um, graduating, w- we were all at startups, and then I messaged Robert, like, right after the pandemic, being like: "I feel like I'm wasting my life." So my... It was on my 23rd birthday. It was like a existential crisis of a sort. Just felt like I wasn't really doing anything. I was getting bored, and messaged Robert and asked him-

20. RORobert3:40

    That was on your birthday? [chuckles]

21. ADAdvith3:42

    Yeah, yeah. We actually started our first meeting, like, on, on my birth- like, 6:00 a.m. on my birthday. Yeah.

22. HTHarj Taggar3:47

    One thing I'm actually curious about, um, quickly is, so you both- you... Remind us, where were you doing the internships?

23. ADAdvith3:52

    I was at Slack.

24. RORobert3:53

    I was at DoorDash.

25. HTHarj Taggar3:54

    Yeah, so those are both great companies. And Marty, you were-

26. MAMarty3:56

    I was at Airbnb. Yeah.

27. HTHarj Taggar3:57

    Airbnb. Okay, so all three of you were at, like, fantastic companies. I'm just curious, like, um, why did you decide to start your own thing versus joining one of those companies?

28. ADAdvith4:06

    I, I, I just felt like at ev- every internship I was trying to work at a smaller and smaller company. I actually just felt like I was wasting my time, for lack of a better word. Like, my main... Not to insult Slack, 'cause our- a lot of our [chuckles] products today-

29. HTHarj Taggar4:18

    [laughing]

30. ADAdvith4:18

    ... are based off of Slack. But at that scale, it was maybe a couple hundred people, and, like, my core internship project was they were doing a rename from, like, calling stuff teams to calling stuff workspaces, and most of my project was literally rename [chuckles] like renaming, and I just thought it was-

Episode duration: 1:00:21