All right. Hey everybody. It is my absolute privilege to welcome our next two guests. Kareem Amin is the co-founder and CEO of Clay. This is a company that has captured the imagination and has inspired the next wave of founders and go-to-market builders. They have achieved a level of word-of-mouth virality that is very, very unique, and they are a favorite tool of our team at Primary and many of the founders we work with building their go-to-market motion. And we also have Alex Conrad, who is a founder in his own right, the founder of Upstart Media, a new tech publication that launched earlier this year. And prior to that, he was a senior editor at Forbes, where he spent 12 years covering startups and venture capital, including editing the Midas and Cloud 100 lists. So, please join me in a warm welcome for both of our next guests and come on up to the stage.
Well, Kareem, this is extra exciting for me to do because the last time we did a talk was at the Upstart's launch party in April, and then you raised a huge funding round at a big valuation. So, I'm excited to see what kind of valuation you're going to achieve after this talk. No, but seriously, it's been a pleasure to get to know the Clay business since I wrote about it a year ago and Clay was valued at 1.5 billion and I think some people knew what it was. But you guys were still kind of developing maybe the public brand a bit outside of this go-to-market world. Now valued at 3.1 billion, one of the leading AI software businesses, not just in New York, but in the entire ecosystem. How does it feel to be running this runaway train now? And do you feel like people know what Clay is at this point?
Oh, that's a great start. It feels great. I think someone was asking me like, 'Am I having fun?' And I'm like, 'Now I'm having fun.' Yeah, for sure. I think, you know, people are like, 'Oh, it's such a great time to be building from zero to one.' I think those people are masochists, but you know, I think that the thing with Clay that's been challenging the whole time is because it's open-ended, it's hard to package it into like one line, but really what we do is we try to help businesses grow by implementing kind of any idea that they have for how to grow their business. So kind of like Figma is to designers as Clay is to go-to-market teams. You have an idea, you can... actually my latest thing that I've been enjoying saying is like engineers turn code into product. We turn code into revenue.
Nice. The branding is amazing. It literally looks like fun putty to play with. But has Clay's kind of vibe and sort of brand tone always been the same or has this been sort of a circuitous path to get to what I feel like is a very clear brand and sort of ethos at Clay today?
I think we've always had that. I mean, just from the word 'clay' that we picked at the beginning, the whole ambition when we first started was how do we give the power of programming to more people? And so, hence the concept of clay, it's malleable. You can kind of... and it always was meant to be fun and I think that actually shows in the product. Some of these things are undervalued by people in the market like people are always asking like what changed or what was the thing that made the product work? And it really was from the beginning meant to feel fun. And so the best moments for me are when people actually say hey this was fun. I enjoyed using it in a space that people typically don't think about that. They typically think about like how do we automate this task. But we, you know, actually in our mission statement I put 'creative tools to grow businesses' and anytime I showed it to someone who was working on positioning they'd be like why creative? Like what does this word add? You know, and they kept removing it, I kept putting it back in. And I think like I'm inspired by tools like Ableton for making music. And the thing is like what does... in if you're making music it's like hey you have these sound files and you can mess with them in different ways and create sounds and in Clay it's like really company and people data that you can change in different ways to run tactics. So that's the thing that's common across everything. But just before I came today actually someone on LinkedIn posted a song that they made about Clay. Oh gosh. And people are like, 'What?' They were like, 'You know, other than needing...
Why are you only mentioning this now? We could have played the song if you'd given me a heads up.
I know. He was like, 'Other than needing vocal lessons, what other feedback do you have about this?' But I feel like people like who makes a song about a go-to-market tool, right? I think that the ethos of the company is what drives everything. Okay, I'll just tell you one short story. We went to Stanford. They had like a one-month kind of mini MBA thing. And they kept talking about alignment. A lot of the founders that were with me were like super bored by this. They were like, what are they talking about? But actually, that's the thing that stuck with me the most is like everything in the business has to be aligned. So, we are a company that is about giving you creativity and space. And so, the brand feels like that. The people that we hire feel like that, our support feels like that. Everything needs to actually match. Otherwise, you kind of get stuck.
So, you can all tell already that Kareem is a very sort of renaissance thinker, cares about art, cares about... we're going to get into magic, a bunch of things. But how does all this creativity and sort of that passion you have for creative tools, how does that translate to go-to-market? Because I think if we took away Clay and we just said to everyone, hey, would you like to hear a talk about growth and go-to-market, they might say, yeah, you know, that's probably tactically helpful. But I don't think anyone would be like, that's fun and creative and that's going to really make my day. So how do we reconcile this artistic and creative side and mission of you and Clay with an end product that might be usually considered kind of picks and shovels?
Well, I mean, some people might know, but the company is like eight years old and I spent the four years kind of answering that question. So, I think that...
So answer it one more time. Yeah. Sorry.
For myself, I think what I came to is like we actually... the story of Clay is that we wanted to give the power of programming to more people. We quickly were like, oh, spreadsheets are the world's most popular programming environment, but like don't have data in it. And then we realized, oh, we can help go-to-market teams, they're spending time in spreadsheets. We recognized that within the first year. And then we spent a bunch of time kind of reconciling like what is our ambition with what the company wants and what the market wants. Eventually like the creative tools for kind of like go-to-market resonated with me and that's when the company started to work because we... we really are tying it back to... actually I studied physics by the way and so I have like come up with the three laws of go-to-market just as a little preview I'll test it out on you. So the first one is you need to stand out anytime you send a message and then like these are pretty obvious things but actually they're connected. So you need like there's a baseline and you need to do something that's different than the baseline. That's the creative part but paradoxically as you scale that it has to... you actually are shifting the baseline back up. So you saturate the market either people copy you or the channel gets saturated or whatever it is. And so that's a corollary actually to scaling it. And so then you have to change what you're doing. So those are like the three things like you have to be unique. As you scale it saturates so you have to change and so you need a tool that allows you to do something different than anybody else. And you need to take the top person and make them better and not move the average. Actually every other tool tries to move the average up. It tries to give every salesperson the same thing when actually you want to take the top people and make them do something unique and then speed that up. So the product is built for that which is the opposite of what every other tool in the market does. So every other tool like when I first built this and would show it to people in particular investors, they would be like oh no this needs to be like three buttons. I don't want to think too hard. I just want to click like three things. And it's like everybody does that right? The problem is actually how do you get that last 20%. And now that we... and by the way even our customers said that. So they would be like, 'Hey, I want to, you know, wave a magic wand and find the answer.' And I'm like, 'Me too, like I want to fly to LA in 1 hour. There's no technology.'
But you did consciously. I mean, you've used in the past, you've used the word like sophisticated or flexible for the customer. Like you guys decided to build something that had more options to it, but was maybe more complicated, right?
So yeah, I think that we decided that it was powerful and flexible and when those kind of like we always aim for power and flexibility for the top user and then if we... that shouldn't come at the expense of like simplicity but if it does then we do it first and then we go back and make it simple. So we call it like you know make it work then make it great.
Okay. Does anyone here know what the word 'clayency' means? I see a few people nodding and smiling which is a little disturbing but also helpful. So competitors, people who dated Clay like obviously to our last point would say oh this is too hard to use or companies will sign up and pay for a contract and not get value out of Clay. Obviously, you know, you guys have somewhat disputed that notion but then there has been a cottage industry that developed around getting the most out of Clay. Could you tell everyone about what a clayency is and sort of how you guys approach building the community to really get value out of the tool?
Yeah, for sure. And I think the community... I mean we have like a really big community in our Slack forum. We have like 60 different clubs around the world where people meet and they talk about how to do things in Clay. It's like almost 20,000 people in the Slack channel or something.
30,000. Yeah. And I think the thing is the reason... I mean this is back to the alignment, right? It's because the tool is so open-ended. And by the way, remember the Ableton Live thing like I was trying to learn how to make music and there's so many tutorials online and it's because the tool itself is giving you space and what your output... like with agencies that have come around Clay similar to like around HubSpot. I think a lot of people think it's to help people use Clay, but really it's to help people think about how to grow your business. That's the hard part. And then you have to translate that. So, first you need to understand your own business, which is not as simple as it sounds. Like it's not always obvious why what you're doing is working, right? And a big part of like actually having a sustainable business is knowing, hey, here are the inputs and here are the outputs and you're in control of them or somewhat aware of them and it's not happening randomly.
But there are these folks who make tens of thousands of dollars like run healthy businesses basically showing people cool new ways to use Clay.
Yeah. And so I think that first what they... so I think back to the complexity thing the real reason I think sometimes people approach Clay and say oh this is sophisticated is I actually like this term from Andre that they called market annealing, you know so it's like what we're doing is new for this market we're approaching things as if it's an engineering problem it's a systems problem and so what's hard is actually modeling like the work. So you're like, 'Okay, first we need to find this type of person that we're going to reach out to.' And by the way, Clay is for finding new customers or expanding your own existing customers. So first you have to make a guess at what makes a good customer, what properties, right? Maybe it's a company. So for example, one of our customers, they use Google Maps to find a bunch of warehouses. Then they look at the number of parking spots outside the warehouse and then that indicates it's a good customer. They were doing this manually. We can automate that for them, right? But having that guess at what makes a good customer, then you implement it, then you see if it works or not and being very specific about what makes a good customer, that part is the hard part. Then of course we can make it much easier to translate an idea into Clay, but actually agencies help with that first part the most. And that's why there's a long-term place for them rather than it's like, oh, we're just helping you use a complex product. And the reason people think it's complex is it depends who you're talking to, right? A lot of products what they miss is who is the actual user. So for us we have a role that we call a go-to-market engineer because remember our thing was how do we give the power of programming to more people and so the power is being given to the go-to-market engineer first who is the evolution of a revops person or a growth marketer that person knows how to use Clay and it's super obvious to them. Now an SDR who just graduated and is just trying to get leads can't use Clay except if they train a little bit but the training is a few days right like you watch a few videos and you understand the model it's not rocket science.
So there are a bunch of startups that have popped up trying to kind of fit in alongside you guys. If you guys are like the big ship sailing along, they're kind of like trying to go in your wake now, saying, for example, oh, we'll sell to that entry-level salesperson who maybe a business doesn't trust with their Clay access, like their boss has Clay, right? Or like, oh, we're going to do marketing, growth marketing using Clay, and they all say, 'Oh, we love Clay. We can sell alongside Clay.' Is that a good sign for you that like basically it's validating that businesses are trying to build next to Clay or is that a challenge that basically you guys should be doing those things too?
I think the market is so big that there's room for all of these companies at the moment. The question is what is the biggest outcome? So I mean I think if you're building a VC-backed company, you're trying to understand in this market what's the entry point and then what's the path that gets you the biggest outcome. And it's also what's the path that gives the most value to customers at the end of the day. That's why you want the biggest outcomes. Like the more success we get, the more resources we have to build better things for people. And so I think that there's a... I actually tell you the story that I really personally like this. It's like I can't even remember who broke the 100-meter barrier first, but I think a lot of people know the story where it's like people didn't think you could do 100 meters in under 10 seconds. After one person did it, literally months later, so many people did it, right? And I think the hard part actually about entrepreneurship is taking the risk with your time and knowing that there might be a dead end and you might be the person who discovered the dead end, you know, and so we discovered not a dead end and so now a lot of people are like oh this is a good market and so there's all these gaps around us and we're happy to integrate with things. So for example, we have... another thing that's really important when you're building a company is to say what is not you because everything could become you. You know, you have to be like what's the boundary? And for us, it's like we don't build outreach tools, for example. We don't build a tool that actually sends email. There are good tools that send email. We'll build UIs around them, but we won't build the actual infrastructure. We don't build what we call tools for reps because we focus on go-to-market engineers. We don't build tools for account managers or sales reps at the moment. And so you constantly need to know what you're not building right now and you need to have the courage to allow people to kind of build alongside you there and some of them will become partners, some of them will be acquisition targets and some of them will be competitors.
Well, you... I like how you couldn't help you caveated 'at the moment' in the middle of that like we're not building that at the moment, right? Okay. So how often do you reassess what is the roadmap at the moment?
