Clay’s Kareem Amin on Building the Sales ‘System of Action’ with AI

Contents

Introduction

Kareem Amin: There’s a bunch of things. So let me go back to kind of like the mission that you said at the beginning, right? We are a creative tool for growth. And so ‘creative’ here means that we give a lot of flexibility and lots of degrees of freedom to people, which means that we give them lots of different building blocks that they could put together. And one key thing that AI is going to help us do is to pre-configure some of these building blocks so you don’t have to tweak everything beforehand. So it just lets you get started more easily, and it lets you get to kind of your solution faster.

Alfred Lin: Hello, everyone. Today, we’re excited to welcome Kareem Amin, co-founder and CEO of Clay, which is leveraging AI to help go-to-market teams unleash creativity and be more effective in their work. Clay is one of the fastest growing AI native applications for business. So we wanted to ask Kareem, what makes it so magical? Kareem doesn’t see human sales reps going away anytime soon.  unique approach is about balancing the opposing forces of imagination and automation.  We’ll hear about how Kareem applies ideas from physics and philosophy to sales and where he sees AI tools heading.

Alfred Lin: Welcome to Training Data. I’m Alfred Lin. I’m a partner at Sequoia Capital and your guest host for today. We’re here with Karim from Clay. And Kareem was a physicist. He then started his career in product at Microsoft and at the Wall Street Journal, and then he started Clay in 2017. And Clay is a creative tool to help you grow your business, and it’s redefining the way we go to market. So welcome.

Kareem Amin: Yeah, thanks for having me, Alfred.

The Role of AI in Sales and Marketing

Alfred Lin: All right, let’s start with a controversial question. Is AI going to completely automate away the jobs of the SDR?

Kareem Amin: I don’t think so.

Alfred Lin: Ooh!

Kareem Amin: I think that the way we’re approaching it, there’s maybe three ways to kind of look at this. Well, let’s actually step back a little bit to kind of help people understand what the role of the SDR is in the business, and why everybody’s focusing on it. So if you’re in a traditional B2B company and you’re selling to other businesses, you have to have an organization of lots of SDRs that do account research, and they figure out who you’re selling to and do they have the right properties. And you augment that with data that you usually buy from other data providers. And so a lot of the cost is having SDRs. A lot of the things that make you less efficient is just having lots of people doing this research. And that’s why a lot of companies are focusing on improving SDR efficiency.

So one thing you could do is improve efficiency by giving them tools or copilots. Another thing is to try to fully automate them, automate the work that SDRs do. And that’s kind of the magic wand solution. Connect all your data, connect third-party data, first-party data. We’ll figure it out, we’ll send the messages, we’ll do the follow up. And then we at Clay believe there’s a third way, or kind of like the—it’s not quite the middle way, but it is a third approach, which is take the job to be done and give it to someone who’s more technical, such as a rev ops person or a growth marketer who can then use all of the tools that AI gives you to find creative ways to reach out to people, rather than automate all the work and magically have that happen for you.

And the reason I don’t think it’s possible to fully automate it with today’s technology is that you need to stand out from the crowd. And AI can automate a lot of the work and maybe even be creative in instances, but it can’t continuously do that. At the end of the day, you’re selling to people, and you need to figure out how to reach them and how to stand out from others in the market.

Alfred Lin: So what is your vision for what the future holds for sales? What does it mean for sales? What’s the complete stack that Clay’s going to build versus what other people are going to build? And what does the sales organization look like in the future?

Kareem Amin: So I think we’re trying to run this in our own company. It’s very meta, right? So we think there will be a go-to market organization that combines sales, marketing and customer success. And you’re already seeing this happen in the market. At the end of the day, you need a go-to market ops organization that provides data and supports the go-to market teams. We want to be the system of action in that. So the system of record could be your CRM, it could be data in your warehouse. And that’s all the information you have around customers, how they’ve interacted with you. That’s where the data lives. But then how you act on the data is going to be in Clay.

Customer Success Stories

Alfred Lin: Got it. So we’ve described it in a very sort of theoretical way in some sense. Like, put it in context. Who are some of your customers, what are they using Clay for, and what are some of the results that they’re getting?

Kareem Amin: Yeah, most of our customers are SMBs that can just sign up and use the product, and they find companies and people, and find very unique data points about them and then use that to craft personalized outreach. The key thing with Clay is that you can craft personalized outreach for new customers or for your existing customers. And so for a lot of the smaller businesses, they’re using it to find new customers. A lot of our bigger customers, like let’s say Verkada, is using us to create personalized landing pages for people when they come to their website that are customized to them. And so you can see that it’s a creative approach to go-to market. So they have a lot of inbound, and they want to make sure that people see the right value prop when they get there. You can do that with Clay. Other people are using Clay in more creative ways. So actually we have a customer that sells dev tools, and they use this technique with us actually, where they monitor our status page to see when the website is down.

Alfred Lin: Wow, that’s so cool.

Kareem Amin: And the reason why it’s down. And then they messaged us saying, “Hey, you could have avoided this if you used our product.” Which caught our attention, of course.

Alfred Lin: [laughs] Yeah, the ecosystem figures out, the developer ecosystem figures out way more interesting things to do with your product than you might.

Kareem Amin: Yeah, of course. And just to add a couple more examples, but companies like Anthropic use us to improve their data enrichment. So we’ve tripled kind of the data coverage that they have at a fraction of the cost. The reality is there’s a lot of data providers out there that have information around other companies that are better and cheaper than the dominant kind of market players. But people just don’t know about them, and they don’t know how to use them because they don’t have great UIs.

Alfred Lin: Anthropic using it. I would think that they would know how to use AI to cleanse their data and normalize and do all the things that they need to do.

Kareem Amin: They do. So they do know how to do all these things. They’re using their own models within Clay.

Alfred Lin: Wow!

Kareem Amin: Right. And so what Clay does is it allows you to—and I think this is generally going to happen in kind of like various fields with AI. So I think of the foundation model companies as providing kind of that layer of intelligence, but then if you want to use it in a particular vertical, you want all the—there’s a lot of things that you need in addition to the models in order to actually act on the data, right? So what we can do is, like, pull the data from their various data stores, be able to run the model iteratively, and also enrich it with lots of other data providers, not just using the foundation models. And then, you know, you have to pass it back and generate messages from it. So we’re about making that workflow easy to do, and so using their technology, but then making it possible to do the workflow more easily.

The Future of Go-to-Market Strategies

Alfred Lin: So how do you envision the go-to market stack, and specifically the Clay stack changing with AI over time?

Kareem Amin: There’s a bunch of things. So let me go back to kind of like the mission that you said at the beginning, right? We are a creative tool for growth. And so ‘creative’ here means that we give a lot of flexibility and lots of degrees of freedom to people, which means that we give them lots of different building blocks that they could put together. And one key thing that AI is going to help us do is to pre-configure some of these building blocks so you don’t have to tweak everything beforehand. So it just lets you get started more easily, and it lets you get to kind of your solution faster.

So a couple of things that we’re working on is let’s say you sign up to Clay. We look at your website, we can see who your customers are from any logos or case studies that you have. We can see what you’re writing about what you do and then figure out who are you targeting, how do we find lookalike customers to that? Let’s pre-set up all of the searches and the data that you would need for those types of customers. If you connect some of your first party-data, maybe you connect your wiki or Notion, or you connect your emails that you’ve sent, we can then analyze that and use that same language when we’re sending out messages.

And so that does sound a lot like a fully automated solution, but what we do is actually set up all of our building blocks using AI and then let you tweak it from there. Other things along those lines are imagine you connect your CRM, and we take a look at who is a good customer who maybe you’ve lost in the past and look at what features you’re releasing in the future and then message them. Maybe you lost someone because you didn’t have SOC 2 compliance and now you do, so that’s a good person to reactivate. So we should help you come up with these campaigns as well as do them faster using AI.

The Clay Community and Ecosystem

Alfred Lin: In some sense, the old world of growing, go-to market is going to be very different from the new world. And so, you know, talk a little bit about how Clay fits into the new world and maybe, you know, what are the jobs that are most at risk and what are we going to do in go-to market in the future with Clay?

Kareem Amin: Yeah, I think what’s really exciting is the community that’s coming up around Clay. You know, we have over 17,000 people in our Slack channel. There’s a number of boot camps as you know that have come up to teach people how to do Clay. And I think the thing that Clay is doing is allowing people to try out more ideas for how to grow their companies. And our mission is really anytime you think of an idea of how to grow your company, you should be able to translate it to Clay quickly.

So people who are having a lot of these creative ideas or are capable of that, I think belong in the new world. I think the old world where you are just really good at putting together a bunch of tools to do go-to market or you’re going through the drudgery of kind of like building a spreadsheet and enriching it with a bunch of tools, that work is going to go away and it belongs kind of in automation. The new world is around how do you figure out how to pinpoint that someone is going to be a good customer for you? And then using Clay to do that.

Alfred Lin: That’s fascinating. You want to talk a little bit about these ‘claygencies’ that have set up shop, and work on Clay and help other companies with growth? I mean, it’s such a fascinating ecosystem that has been created.

Kareem Amin: Yeah, totally. I think this comes back again to—this is something that I say to the company all the time. When we’re building the product, you can think of building a microwave. And you go and you put how much time you want on the microwave, press start, and it works. Super simple, does what it needs to do. And then you can think of something like a guitar where it has six strings, so it looks very simple. But you can spend a whole lifetime figuring out all the things you could do. You could play different types of music. And while you’re playing the guitar, you’re also learning music.

And I think it’s a similar thing in Clay. Really what we’re doing is figuring out how to help businesses grow. And it happens to be that using Clay should be the best way to help your business grow. Every single idea for how to grow your business should be doable in Clay. That’s kind of our mission. And I think the agencies or ‘claygencies’ that have come up around, like, our product is because they are finding new ways to reach customers. And really, it’s really about connecting customers. You know, you don’t want to receive something that you don’t care about. And the more research you do beforehand, the more likely you are to reach someone who actually wants what you have. Because no one wants to send messages that you don’t respond to or don’t look at or that are unwanted.

And the only way to do that is to do this research and to come up with new clever ways to stand out from the crowd. And claygencies are really small teams, usually two to four people, sometimes they’re bigger, that are using Clay to help other companies grow. The reason they’ve come up is that they found this to be an incredible opportunity to make money. There’s a number of ’claygencies’ that are making over a million in run rate and that have started six months ago.

Alfred Lin: That’s fascinating.

Kareem Amin: Yeah. And so they’re—yeah, they’re just finding that this—and a lot of other people, SDRs are upskilling, learning kind of the techniques of growth and using Clay to do it because they know that they can make a lot of money because there’s a big gap in the market.

Clay's Product Innovations

Alfred Lin: I want to move on to product a little bit. And you have a Clay research agent or a ’claygent.’ What is that, and how does that incorporate AI to help with the sales process?

Kareem Amin: Yeah, so claygent is an implementation of the react paper. So it’s essentially, you know, an AI agent that can make a plan and then execute it using all the tools that we have. It is incredibly useful to find real-time information that normally humans were needed to do it because it’s very nuanced. So you might want to, say, go to a company’s website and see how many pricing plans they have, or see if they have an enterprise plan and a pro plan, or see if the difference between the pro plan and the basic plan is $500. And these can all be indicators to you that this is a good company.

And what our agent does is it has access to a number of different tools. So being able to scrape a website, being able to summarize the information, or using LLMs kind of understand the context. And it also has access to a number of Clay-specific tools. So data around companies and people that we get from other sources. And it uses that to give you the answer to your question.

Alfred Lin: Got it. Many of the people I’ve talked to that use Clay call it magic because it’s a magical experience. And in some sense the question we always have is like, where is the magic? Is it in the models? Is it on something that you do on top? Is it the workflow, the user experience? Describe where the magic happens.

Kareem Amin: Yeah, that’s a great question. Maybe this is an unorthodox response, but …

Alfred Lin: We love those.

Kareem Amin: Yeah. I think the magic and our competitive advantage is not in one single thing that we do, but it is in the approach that we’re taking. So we have a belief that sales and go-to market is a creative act. I think everybody else has treated it much more in a how-do-we-process-this funnel as quickly as possible? How do we automate as many of these tasks as possible, and how do we grow the top of funnel and, you know, every step in the funnel?

And I think that that’s obviously necessary, but I don’t think it’s sufficient. And we’ll be talking more about this in the future, but actually it’s much better to think about this in terms of moments. So you’re creating these different moments for people that after a certain threshold become a way of going through the funnel, right? But actually—and you mentioned that I studied physics and electrical engineering, but a lot of these metaphors, at least in the company, are pretty nerdy. But, you know, in physics, there’s activation energy, right? So if you’re boiling water, you’re boiling it, and it starts bubbling, but only when it reaches 100 degrees Celsius does it start to phase shift to gas.

And I think it’s kind of similar. Like, these analogies make sense in other places. So if you’re interacting with a brand, you might have a few moments of delight, but only after you cross a certain threshold do you then become a customer. So that way of thinking about it allows us to build a tool that’s made for turning any of your ideas into reality quickly so that you can test these different ideas to create these different moments. And we treat—we have fun building the product. We literally use kind of the word ‘creative—’ I’ve probably used it so many times already in this podcast to enshrine kind of that idea that you’re playing with it. The company is called Clay because you’re also putting together things. You’re building, you’re manufacturing. You want to have that feeling of creation. And I think that we’ve been able to communicate that feeling through the product. And that’s why people love it and want to use it, because they feel like they’re building something new.

Alfred Lin: I don’t know if this is a contradiction or you’re holding things in tension, but you’re a physicist, so you’re a scientist, but you’re also creative. You’re producing and making music. You talk about Clay as a creative tool, but you also talk about the people who use it are go-to market engineers or developers. So how do you think about Clay? Is it two opposing forces held in tension or unifying two opposing forces? How do you think about that?

Kareem Amin: I think it is two opposing forces held in tension, and I think that’s where—that’s where the most interesting things happen.

Alfred Lin: We agree.

Kareem Amin: Yeah. And I think you want to be a creative tool, but also you need to allow people to do the workflow or the process in volume, right? So you need kind of the automation, but before the automation, you have to figure out what is it that you’re actually doing, and then you need to be able to do it quickly. But we have a lot of values at Clay that kind of hold that tension.

And maybe a small digression here, but there’s a famous philosopher, Hegel, who thought that the movement of history was about things being intentioned. So you have the thesis and then the antithesis, and then they create the synthesis, and that’s how things move forward. For him, it was kind of like a very mystical thing, so it’s moving towards God. But I think that that general kind of like, theme is one that we kind of like, believe in at Clay.

Company Culture and Philosophy

Alfred Lin: So describe the company culture then. How do you hold things in tension? I’ve walked through your offices. It definitely has a very cool vibe, and yet people are very serious and working very hard at the same time. But that’s my surface view. How would you describe the culture?

Kareem Amin: We tend to describe it as chill high achievers.

Alfred Lin: [laughs]

Kareem Amin: And so what that means is we minimize. Like, we can acknowledge things like anxiety or fear or frustration, but we don’t necessarily react to it in the moment. And we focus kind of on having a clear mind so that we can do great work. And I think you can do great work when you’re not constantly feeling in a rush or—I think the clarity of mind is really the key thing. So you can see all the different pieces of what’s happening and then use that information to commit.

So we do it in our interviews, right? One of the key things that we do in our interviews is you collect information and you share information. We’re not necessarily trying to judge you in the moment. We’re trying to understand who you are, we’re trying to communicate what is available and who we are. And then we can use all of that information at the end to make a decision. And so that’s kind of like a common theme is collect information first, and then have the clarity of mind to be able to make a good decision after that. Another thing that might be interesting is we have a culture—actually, the value that we use for this is called negative maintenance.

Alfred Lin: [laughs] Because some people are high maintenance. You want it to be the opposite?

Kareem Amin: Some people are high maintenance, some people are no maintenance. And what we want is negative maintenance. So you remove work from people around you, whether it is because you are kind of in a place of, like, bringing down the tension so that we can actually have that clarity of thought.

The other thing that we do is we—I call it “There’s always a way.” Other people call it, like, “Make it work and make it great.” And in some ways that is a tension because you want to ship something quickly. You want to make it possible for people to do new things, and you also want to do amazing, great work that you spend time—which requires time. And so the balance there, we leave that up to people’s judgment.

I think one of the important things actually in a company is making sure that you’re aligned. The people, the market, what you’re building needs to be aligned. If you’re building a rocket ship, you can’t make it work, then make it great. It needs to be great from the beginning, otherwise something really bad happens. If you’re building a go-to market tool where people need to be able to do their tactic now and actually doing it first before other people is super key. We ship things as soon as we are able to, and then we continue to craft them until they are meeting our standard of great.

Alfred Lin: That is really great to hear, and I think it’s great advice for many founders to just know where you are on tension attention scale.

Kareem Amin: Yeah, totally.

Vision and Future Plans

Alfred Lin: Your vision is very broad and very expansive. So one way to ask it in open ended is where does it end? And maybe you’re an ambitious founder and it doesn’t end. But tactically, would you ever build an AI SDR yourself?

Kareem Amin: So yes. The way we would do something like that though, would need to be similar or be aligned with the Clay approach. And so an AI SDR built by our company would have all the different components of an AI SDR, and give you complete control over each piece so that it doesn’t become commoditized, right? It does everything that every other AI SDR does.

So what does that mean in practice? It means that you need to have a piece that can take in your company data and figure out which industry you’re in and who you’re targeting. So let’s call that an AI ICP identifier. And we’ve already built that part. Then you need a second part that finds lookalikes. And it might connect to your CRM to see who are your best customers, use what company you’re like and who you tend to reach out to and then find lookalikes. And it needs to do that on a regular cadence. And then we need to connect to your own internal systems to see what your style is and how you communicate with customers. And each one of those can work together and can be configured and tweaked so that you can have all the components of what an SDR does, but with full control and with full ability to mix and match different parts of it, otherwise it wouldn’t be a Clay AI SDR.

Alfred Lin: What about an AI CRM?

Kareem Amin: I like where you’re going with this. Yeah.

Alfred Lin: [laughs]

Kareem Amin: So an AI CRM, I think the way to think about it is what is the role of a CRM in a place where there is the ability to use all of this data to, you know, take actions? And CRMs have been set up for SDRs and AEs to enter data into them and for people to pull information and have that be centralized there. But if people don’t need to be doing that manually, I think the role of the CRM changes and it potentially becomes a less important piece of the stack.

In fact, lots of CRMs try to stop you from pulling data out because they recognize that they’re the system of record and they want to keep the data in there, so they have, like, low rate limits, various kind of things that just get in the way. And I think a lot of companies have started to move their data into data warehouses so that they have full control. So I guess the short answer is I think an AI CRM will look very different than CRMs look today. And we are—Clay’s starting kind of—in a way, the CRM isn’t very useful if it doesn’t have data in it.

Alfred Lin: Yes.

Kareem Amin: And we’re focused on finding the data, finding the customers, and then connecting to wherever you store your data about customers today to make that more actionable.

Alfred Lin: And also taking action. You’re like, in some sense, you’re a system of action.

Kareem Amin: Yes.

Customer Success Stories

Alfred Lin: And so when we talk to some customers of yours, they brag about that aspect and the results that they’re able to generate, but I’m going to let you brag about some of the results. And do AI sales outreach perform as well as humans, even though you kind of know that it’s kind of a bot doing it, or an email doing it, or a campaign doing it, versus a human outreach?

Kareem Amin: So well you actually—let me reframe that for you. So I think outreach does better when you have better data around who you’re targeting, and when you have a clever idea of how to get people’s attention. So the example I gave you before of looking at the status page, that got my attention because I knew that the product was down. So it’s about the timing. I knew that there was an issue, and they were offering me a solution. And that got my attention. And they were using Clay to do that. So that was extra interesting. But I think what we found from our customers is that people who are—so SDRs who have data and automation that is powered by Clay are getting twice as much kind of like results opens and responses as people who aren’t using it.

Alfred Lin: Twice as much.

Kareem Amin: Twice as much? Yeah.

Alfred Lin: That’s huge.

Kareem Amin: It’s a huge, huge difference multiplied across the number of SDRs that you have. And so everybody who ends up using it, then sometimes they kind of have some SDRs, get some of the data and the centralized automation through Clay and others don’t. And so they’re overperforming by quite a big margin. And I think this is just the beginning. As the market kind of understands the full range of things that we do, at the moment I think a lot of people think of us as really amazing data enrichment and really good for outbound, but really our ambition and a lot of our customers, our more sophisticated customers are using us for inbound and for expansion as well. And those are the—that’s kind of the range of things that you need to do to grow your company.

And it’s a full loop. So let me give you an example. If—let’s say that you are a company like Figma, and you have a design tool and you’re going to release kind of a dev mode for developers. Well, you can take a look at how many of the companies that you have have, like, five designers or more. Let’s target them, and then let’s then go and do outbound to the head of engineering and, and let them know, “Hey, your design team is using Figma and you should also be using the dev mode for your engineering team so that you decrease the back and forth.” So here you’re combining inbound and outbound in order to expand a customer. And I think that’s what’s really interesting about Clay is being able to have an idea like this and action it really quickly.

Surprising Uses of Clay

Alfred Lin: That’s great. On the—you know, you’ve given a lot of examples. What’s been something that’s surprising about Clay that people don’t quite understand about Clay yet?

Kareem Amin: I think at the end, the output from Clay isn’t necessarily an email or just updating your CRM, but some of our customers have sent physical mail, right? So you can connect to any API. And we have a bunch of mail APIs, so you can create personalized messages and send physical mail, which has had really great results. But that our ambition is really you should be able to create any kind of message, whether it’s a personalized website or even an ad, and create it through Clay. And that’s just a channel. So the message needs to be created through Clay, and it’s personalized because of all the research that you’ve done and all the data that we’ve provided you, but then you can send it across any channel.

Alfred Lin: That’s really cool. And in terms of, like, where do you see—what are the areas of improvement that you’re working on the product, and specifically that’s in your control? And what would you like to see from some of the foundation models and how they can help you do even better with some of the work that you’re doing?

Kareem Amin: Yeah, what’s next for us is so you could think of us as starting from third-party data, So that’s data that you can find on the web around companies. And what we’re moving towards next—and that obviously powers outbound because you don’t know much about these people, they’re not yet your customers. But what we’re moving towards next and what we’re doing for next year is first-party data. So we want to connect to—you know, we’re about to release something where you can connect a segment. So we can take kind of all of your product analytics, we’ll connect to your billing data, we’ll connect to your marketing website visits, we’ll connect to your Gong calls, your emails. So that’s all the information that you have as a company, and then help you use that information to reach out to the right people and say the right things, the value prop that you’re offering. That’s going to be a very big task, and there’s so many ways in which this can manifest.

So you were talking earlier about our ambition. Our ambition is to be the singular place that you come to for any growth idea. And what that could look like is imagine that you’re building a new product onboarding experience. Well, why shouldn’t that be personalized using Clay? Why shouldn’t there be a bot on your website that’s helping your customers book even some of the meetings using Clay and having a personalized experience around that? So we are very much thinking about the full spectrum of things that can be done to help you grow your company, and we will be building products in each of those categories.

Alfred Lin: Are you comfortable talking about how big the company is, how many employees, how many customers you have, how much revenue you have and how you charge?

Kareem Amin: We’ve posted a couple of things publicly around this, so I’ll talk about some of the public things.

Alfred Lin: [laughs]

Kareem Amin: But the company is about 75 full-time people now. We have over 4,500 customers. We have, you know, probably around 100,000 users from those customers. And our—we’ve never really talked about our ARR directly, but I think the information had a, like, list of top 50 startups where we were there and they kind of estimated our ARR, and I think they said it was above $20 million. And that’s kind of in the range of truth. [laughs]

Alfred Lin: We launched into this, and I like to take it all the way back to the beginning when you start the company in 2017. Did you expect to be where you are today?

Kareem Amin: Well, it took us a lot longer than I expected.

Alfred Lin: Take us through the circuitous route to get here, because the vision did change.

Kareem Amin: Right, it was quite circuitous, but there were kind of—so we started off with the ambition. It was a very broad ambition, and abstract, of giving the power of programming to an order of magnitude more people. And we thought about the different metaphors that people would understand to do programming. One obvious one is kind of like a workflow editor. Another one is a spreadsheet. We realized quickly that a spreadsheet is the world’s most popular programming environment. And as soon as we kind of built the spreadsheet, we realized that one of the things that people do in spreadsheets quite often in businesses is build lists of people and companies that they are trying to reach out to.

So we actually had the idea for what Clay would become pretty early on, and so it wasn’t something that we stumbled upon or that we discovered. We kind of reached it through analysis. And then my co-founder started doing some prospecting to find us customers, and he was like, “This is very complicated. There’s so many steps. We can definitely help with what we’ve built here.”

And so all of that was actually something that we came to quite early. The process of committing to building that was more circuitous, and is actually where we stayed for a long time. I almost think of it as, you know, if you’ve ever played a video game and there’s the fog of war and the map wasn’t kind of fully visualized and we kind of walked around the whole map, saw all the different kind of things that we could do, and then returned to the right location.

So for us, the decision to commit to building for go-to market people was really around figuring out why are we the people to do this, right? I did not start in sales or marketing and I think a lot of go-to market tech is started by people who saw the problem firsthand. We came about it as a way of removing kind of repetitive work. And you mentioned before that I like producing music, but I really like tools like Ableton Live that are components that you connect together to produce music. And I really like the idea of giving that power to more people. And so that’s kind of how we came about with the kind of the idea of being creative and giving the power of programming so that you can be creative within the field of go-to market.

Alfred Lin: That’s awesome.

Kareem Amin: Yeah.

Alfred Lin: Would you have done anything different? Looking back now that you understand it was a bit circuitous, could you have changed any of the things along the way, or was it a process that you needed to go through?

Kareem Amin: I think it was a process that I needed to go through specifically. So I don’t think that it couldn’t be done faster by someone else. I think it took me and the team time to see the power of what we’ve built, to hear from a lot of the agencies that you talked about were actually power users initially. And we didn’t focus on them. We kept the tool very broad. And I also needed to develop the muscle of how to focus. And I think a lot of people talk about focusing, but then the embodied kind of understanding of what focusing means, and how often you have to say no, and how many times you see distractions and think that they’re the right path, but they are distractions. And so going through a couple of cycles of those helped me understand how to focus.

And so when we committed, we really committed. And as soon as we launched the product, it immediately resonated with customers, because we removed all the language around it being broad and focused it just on go-to market, which is still a huge kind of area. We’re talking about sales, marketing and customer success. That’s half of a company.

Alfred Lin: Yeah.

Kareem Amin: And so that was enough. And I think …

Alfred Lin: [laughs] That was enough. Half the company is enough.

Kareem Amin: Half the company is enough for now. But once I learned how to focus, and once I committed to the mission of helping companies grow, we then kind of used the underlying intention of giving the power of programming to be very, very different than every other tool in the market. So we’ve made a lot of choices that are unorthodox, right? A lot of go to market tools are built to be, you know, press one button and get leads and then maybe AI SDRs, press—you know, connect a few things. Don’t worry about it. It’s working in the background. Whereas we ask people to invest time, and we ask them to learn how to use our product and to learn how to do growth.

Now of course, some of that could be simplified, but really we’re asking for you to kind of be a partner with us and we’ve designed the tool to have a very, very high ceiling. So, you know, like Photoshop or Figma or, you know, Ableton Live, you can continue to improve your craft in Clay, and learn things and do things that no one has done before. And so that’s what I think makes us different in the market. And that was part of the path. It’s basically the remnants of the path that brought us to this point.

Alfred Lin: You mentioned something that I find interesting, because you had this process that you had to go through. And I think when you started the company, you were a perfect founder problem fit, founder market fit for bringing the power of programming to the masses. So go through that process. What was the turning point where you said, “Hey, I’m the right founder for building a creative tool for go to market?”

Kareem Amin: I think, yeah, there’s a—I held on to the initial intention, and you can see it throughout. So there’s no product that looks like Clay because of that initial intention. And what I realized is I—and you can kind of argue whether this is mental jiu jitsu or the truth, but I held onto that initial intention. And through that, I believe that actually go-to market teams are doing a lot of work that could be done programmatically if you only knew how to program. And that there was a large number of people who wanted to do things, that their mind could be open to the things that they could do if only they knew what was possible. And that giving them and this group of people the power of programming is actually kind of a realization of that initial vision. And keeping that word creative, really, you could think of it as creativity or you could think of it as maximum flexibility, which is what I wanted to empower people with so that they can turn any idea they have into reality. And so this is a good starting point for that very, very large vision.

Alfred Lin: Thank you for taking us through your journey, and congratulations on all the recent success. And I think when we sort of look at all the sort of landscape and AI, there’s a lot of talk around technology and foundation models and what’s next in that space, but I think you’ve built one of the most interesting AI applications that the world has seen and you’re revolutionizing the way that sales is done. So thank you for sharing your journey with us, and also for allowing Sequoia to be an early shareholder of the company.

Kareem Amin: Yeah, I’m very happy that we partnered early and I really appreciate this, Alfred.

Rapid Fire Questions

Alfred Lin: Let’s wrap up with a few of our standard questions. What’s your favorite startup other than your own?

Kareem Amin: That’s a really great question. I think …

Alfred Lin: It’s our sourcing list.

Kareem Amin: [laughs] I really like Suno, actually. That makes sense because I’ve met the founder and I really like being able to generate music. It’s very much aligned with the creativity. So yeah.

Alfred Lin: Any others or just that one?

Kareem Amin: Another company that maybe I admire because I really like the approach that they’re taking is Linear. They’re just very thoughtful about how they approach building products.

Alfred Lin: Creative Tools.

Kareem Amin: Creative Tools.

Alfred Lin: All right. What’s your favorite AI app that’s on your phone?

Kareem Amin: Oh, AI app on my phone?

Alfred Lin: Yeah. It could be in standard AI app, but it must be on your phone, if you love it that much.

Kareem Amin: That’s a good one. I was going to say Cursor actually, because I’ve been trying to write a little bit of code on some hackathon products.

Alfred Lin: That works. That’s an AI app.

Kareem Amin: Yeah.

Alfred Lin: Anything on your phone that you want to share?

Kareem Amin: On my phone, I’ve just been having lots and lots of conversations with ChatGPT, as everybody else is doing, I think.

Alfred Lin: On other markets you think of that AI can disrupt, whether in the short term, medium term or long term?

Kareem Amin: You know, I’ve been talking to a bunch of friends around, like, expert network kind of interviews, and I’m kind of curious about that because it’s—yeah, I think that you know, people, there’s a lot of work that’s being done where people are trying to collect information. And it’s pretty repetitive, but it’s almost like Gong but not for sales calls for, like, expert networks and collecting information from people like what are the top problems in your company, what are top issues and then being able to analyze that. I think that’s an interesting underserved market with, like, old incumbents.

Alfred Lin: What’s your advice for other startup founders?

Kareem Amin: I think the alignment piece sounds wishy-washy or not very concrete, but I think it’s a key element. So you need to—you know, we talked about knowing where you are on the spectrum of a couple of things, right? Is this a product that is sales led or product led? Is this a product that every feature needs to work perfectly, or you need to ship things as quickly as possible and then perfect them? And tie all of that back to what is your ambition. Why do you care about this product or mission?

When you’re spending so much time working on it, you really need to have that connection. Otherwise you—I guess maybe to say something kind of like new that isn’t often said, I think you need to have your own internal compass. Otherwise you will get lost. And if you are lying to yourself—I think the—this is something that I think about a lot. I think the cost of lying isn’t, you know, anything that will happen bad. Maybe no one will catch you on the lie, maybe you won’t go to hell, but the cost of lying is actually disassociation from yourself. And when you lie about anything in particular to yourself, you lose your ability to navigate through your feelings. And so you don’t have an internal compass. You don’t know what’s good, you don’t know what’s real. You’re just doing things, maybe even things that you think are good, but you won’t actually know if they work or not unless you take real risks and you’re honest about your ambition and why you’re doing things.

Alfred Lin: I love that, having a real internal compass. In the fog of war, sometimes your compass is not clear to you. How do you—you seem like a very thoughtful person every time I’ve talked to you. Like, how do you sort of get the clarity?

Kareem Amin: Yeah, I think the clarity is through being honest, and then taking real risks. And so what I found is that in the past I’ve taken risks that have been hedged or, you know, you might think it’s a risk. Let’s say I’m building a feature, or even like taking a direction of the company where I’m like, “Let’s do go-to market tools,” right? But if I don’t actually—if I think, well, I’m kind of doing it because a couple of people have told me that this makes sense and here’s how it works and I should do this, as soon as you hear the word “I should,” you know that it’s not really what you’re thinking. And then if it fails, you don’t really know. You don’t have a felt sense of, like, whether this might be not your honest opinion. So you’re like, “Well, it failed. It wasn’t my honest opinion. I didn’t take a real risk. Let’s do something else.” And if it succeeds, you don’t really know why it succeeded.

But for me, what I’ve done is take real risks where I don’t know what the results are going to be. That’s how I know it’s a real risk, is that I actually don’t know. And I’m okay with failing. And you have to be okay with failing publicly and acknowledging that. That’s when you know it’s a real risk, and that’s how you kind of build up that internal compass and navigate like a fog of war.

Alfred Lin: That’s great. That’s really great advice. One final question, and very open ended, long-term focused, enduring focused. What do you think is the best possible thing that can happen with AI in the coming decade?

Kareem Amin: I think the best possible thing would be—there’s obviously an amazing set of applications that could be done with AI, but I’d have to say that it would be recursive AI, right? So, like, AI that can improve itself. That would be the dream, an AI that actually can help improve itself and accelerate itself. And that should lead to lots of other developments across the board. Otherwise we’ll get stuck in whatever local maxima we get to with the current set of techniques.

Alfred Lin: Thank you so much. Hopefully we don’t end up in a local maxima. It doesn’t look like you’re in a local maxima today. And so congratulations on all your success, and thank you for being so generous with your time and coming on to Training Data.

Kareem Amin: Appreciate it. Thanks, Alfred.

Alfred Lin: Thank you.