Co-Founder/COO Varun Anand

Auren Hoffman (00:00.86) Hello, fellow data nerds my guest today is Varun Anand. Varun is the co-founder of Clay, a GTM platform that helps over 5,000 companies with data enrichment and sales outreach. 10,000? Holy mackerel. Okay. Like I'm completely out of date. Whoa. Okay. I love it. I know that you guys recently raised a hundred million dollars. Seriously financing valued over 3.1 billion valuation.

Varun Anand (00:11.278) 10,000, 10,000, we're at 10,000, 10,000 plus, 10,000, opening eye, Google, Canva, let's go, it's got a control.

Auren Hoffman (00:28.05) Varun, welcome to World of DaaS with your 10,000 customers.

Varun Anand (00:32.386) Thank you. I'm excited to be here. That was crazy. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (00:36.698) I'm excited as well. Now, like a lot of GTMs, like they're, they're coming together, like, you know, dozens of tools to run all their campaigns and they've got like maybe all these apps in the backend that are moving data around and stuff. Like how do you expect that to change over time?

Varun Anand (00:48.983) Yeah.

Varun Anand (00:54.542) I think it'll change quite a bit, right? Because maybe it might be helpful to just take a zoom out for a second on what the market is like, right? Because I think it's an interesting market where you have Salesforce and HubSpot taking up a lot of the value of systems of record, right? And massive companies. But then you kind of don't have other real major businesses yet. There's a lot of point solutions and go to market, right? So that's contributing to what you're saying, which is everyone has something for everything.

Why is that? think a big reason is a lot of these companies are founded by salespeople who are, who are, who found something that really worked for them and then productize it, which makes sense. Right. The thing is, and go to market, you kind of need to keep changing. because if you find something that works and other people copy it, then you have to change again. And then when you change, you can't use that product anymore. You have to do something else. So what we think the market actually needs is this place we call it like an IDE.

where you can come up with new ideas and iterate really quickly, experiment really quickly and execute them really quickly. We think that's clay that plays for people to do that. But we also think that's what the market is pushing for people to actually need. And the problem of stitching together all these things, stitching out all of these data sources, that can be solved with something like clay. And that's kind of where we think the market is going.

Auren Hoffman (02:15.366) And, but there's still an opportunity, like there's still going to be all these great point solutions to do something like really amazing. Again, it might not only work for like nine months or something. And then the idea is that you have this kind of idea and it kind of hooks into this other solution. Or do you think like the idea itself is going to be creating each of these things every, every few months.

Varun Anand (02:24.94) Yeah.

Varun Anand (02:32.47) No, no, well, I don't think those...

Yeah, I don't think that the point solutions will last, right? Like you can see companies like Champafy and UserGems and other point solutions like that, which are just telling you, hey, someone changes their jobs or hey, like someone came to your website. I don't think point solutions like that are going to endure in this transformation. But I do think, and I think they'll become features of some larger platform, maybe Clay, whatever. But...

So yeah, so I don't think point solutions like that will endure, but what I do think will endure are like individual data providers, right? There's going to be lots of niche data points that someone's going to like, that someone's going to spend the time on to go find and get. So there are a lot of things like that, that will kind of endure, but I don't think the tactical point solutions that we were just talking about will kind of endure in the long run.

Auren Hoffman (03:26.758) A lot of these data providers are built on LinkedIn, know, some sort of way of crawling it or whatever, like, Hey, how does that work? then like, why is not like, why hasn't LinkedIn helped with some of these solutions?

Varun Anand (03:30.392) Yeah.

Varun Anand (03:43.79) Well, I think they're trying. You know, I think they're trying.

Auren Hoffman (03:46.246) I mean, terribly, like their products are just like not really very good.

Varun Anand (03:50.56) Yeah, yeah. So look, I mean, I think they have the they have an extraordinary trove of data that they're sitting on top of. They have probably by their own admission would tell you they have not taken the best advantage of that from product perspective. And in that absence, hundreds of thousands of companies have popped up to try to do something in that space. And LinkedIn has been very litigious with that. Right. So that's and that's the right way they have these they have these terms of service. And they're saying that certain companies are not compliant with that.

My understanding is there's been some rulings on this topic in federal courts and that says that basically if you're scraping public data, that's okay, know, that's allowed. Now maybe LinkedIn probably still has an issue with it, but that's kind of what the, that's what the legal standing is.

Auren Hoffman (04:39.09) Yeah. So if, if, if it's obviously, if it's like indexed by Google, it's okay. Uh, but we're also moving to a world now, like where everybody has an agent, right? So right now, if I want my like assistant to, or my BDR to log into LinkedIn and do some research and everything like that, like that is allowed by LinkedIn in terms of service. But if I have my agent, um, on my behalf, log in as me and do some things as me, which

Varun Anand (04:43.8) Yeah.

Varun Anand (04:48.366) Yeah.

Varun Anand (04:54.787) Yeah.

Varun Anand (05:03.362) Yeah. Right. Right. Right.

Auren Hoffman (05:08.434) Which we're going to be doing for everything. I'm to be doing that to like make my travel reservation. I'm to be doing that. Like, why can't I do that on LinkedIn? But then LinkedIn says, no, that's not allowed under your terms of service. It has to actually be a human. Go do it, which is kind of crazy, right?

Varun Anand (05:20.992) Yeah, I mean, it is confusing. And I think that they are trying to figure out how to make sense of all this in this new world. I think that you're seeing, right, we've seen ample market Apollo, different companies that have been kicked off LinkedIn, actually, right. And I think maybe that's because they have products that, you know, automate stuff on LinkedIn or something. And that could that that might be encroaching on LinkedIn's terrain. I don't know. But I think it's a a it's a it's very messy. It's not clear what's

Auren Hoffman (05:49.724) Cause once you have like the, the, the browser AI, right. Which is like definitely on its way. I'm already using comment, which is part of perplexity. Right. but one, all these things are definitely on its way. Like I don't even know how LinkedIn even doesn't know it's me. Cause it's like, it's an agent. Maybe it's me, maybe I'm doing with an agent.

Varun Anand (05:56.418) Yeah. Yeah, me too.

Varun Anand (06:04.514) Right, right. Well, think they're tracking, like, I think there are ways that you could, like, let's say you're trying to do it in mass, right? And they're tracking that. Like, let's say Phantom Buster, great product.

Auren Hoffman (06:13.83) Yeah. Then you just, but then the agent's smart and he just says, we're not going to do more than 40 searches per day or something. And, know, less than a few per hour. Of course, like it'd be a little bit weird that I'm always doing these searches like three per hour at 3 a.m. or something, but like, whatever. Yeah.

Varun Anand (06:19.0) Or, yeah. Yeah.

Varun Anand (06:28.758) Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's not clear and it's a messy area and you know, we're watching it closely, obviously, you we're not trying to...

Auren Hoffman (06:37.916) But ultimately like they're going to lose those things. like you have to be able to allow your agent, like your agent is you. So you have to allow your agent to be able to go in and do it again. It has to be respectful so they can put a limit on your searches. So they can say, Verun, you're only allowed to search, you know, 50 times per day at this tier. And if you want to search more, you have to get, you know, a higher tier and that's fine.

They can't say like, hey, you know, where, where, if you have an assistant on your behalf, like he can't search for you. Like that's kind of insane.

Varun Anand (07:07.704) Right. Yeah, I think that's reasonable.

Auren Hoffman (07:12.24) What other data sources do you think like we need today? Like what, what data sources do you wish we have that we don't yet have or that are coming or that you're excited about?

Varun Anand (07:22.254) Yeah, good question. think...

Varun Anand (07:28.728) You know, one area that's actually like pretty under, under resourced right now is like, people, basically there's, I think it's still a staggering number of businesses that are not really online yet. things that are online have really good capture, anything offline, local businesses, small businesses outside of the U S, still doesn't have like remotely as the kind of data that I think that we're used to when we're, when you're working with like tech companies.

And so I think there's a huge amount of potential there. And I think a huge push just to get, I think we're almost taking it for granted still that like, when we see Facebook's numbers of how many billions of people are online, maybe like individually, but the businesses themselves haven't caught up to the standard of consumer yet.

Auren Hoffman (08:10.716) Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. I mean, so, I mean, obviously if you're in the US, like you need to add your business, you kind of need to advertise somehow. And so you're, you need to be found. So you want, if you're a mechanic, car mechanic shop or something like that, you want to be found on Google or Apple maps or something like that. So there's, have some sort of presence somewhere online to be found, but that's not true everywhere.

Varun Anand (08:19.757) Yeah.

Varun Anand (08:28.044) Yeah.

Varun Anand (08:35.97) Maybe. I mean, even in the US, I don't think it's true. Like, I think we still take it for granted. That's why all these HBS grads are starting these search funds to try to roll up car washes and car mechanics and bring them online. So I don't know if that would be happening if that was if that was really up to par.

Auren Hoffman (08:40.123) Yeah, that's right.

Auren Hoffman (08:45.904) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (08:53.042) So what other data types of data do you think like we need or is coming?

Varun Anand (08:59.717) Um, mean, it just depends on the audience, right? Of who needs the data. Uh, there's still a lot of closed ecosystems, you know, that are hard to parse, right? Like meta is a fairly closed ecosystem. Uh, it's hard to get data from there. Um, I'm trying to think.

Auren Hoffman (09:16.21) It's still like remarkably hard to like create a custom audience and, and, and, advertise against, you know, a small number of people. Let's say you have 5,000 people you really want to advertise to. It's like remarkably difficult. Okay. Good. Okay. Amazing.

Varun Anand (09:27.093) Yeah. Yeah. Well, we're working on that. We're working on that. We're trying to, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to make it very easy to get to develop like a custom audience and you can do anything with maybe that's advertising. Maybe that's sending them personalized cookie jars or something in between, but we're, that's what we're working on.

Auren Hoffman (09:44.538) Now, you know, we all know LinkedIn is like super slow. It's really hard to use takes forever. The company that's even like worse than LinkedIn is Salesforce. Like the UI is absolutely horrible. It's like, it's literally terrible. It's like embarrassing that like we could have such. Yeah. I mean, it's like, is literally like, like, can't believe like, like all like the engineers haven't been fired at that company.

Varun Anand (09:55.191) Okay.

Varun Anand (10:00.586) I feel like this podcast is just trying to get me in trouble with all the companies we work with.

Auren Hoffman (10:11.602) Like it's just so terrible. why do we all still use it?

Varun Anand (10:21.932) Look, think that like we talked about briefly at the beginning, which is I think that Salesforce and HubSpot have like these entrenched ecosystems and these entrenched modes on like, and have captured so much value because of they're becoming these systems of record. But I do think that that's shifting a little bit. And so what I actually

Auren Hoffman (10:41.542) By the way, like I use, I use HubSpot and Salesforce and from like a UI user perspective, HubSpot is like, is like 30 times easier to use than Salesforce.

Varun Anand (10:44.877) Yeah.

Varun Anand (10:53.078) Yeah. But I guess my point is I'm seeing this change basically. basically I'm seeing the most cutting edge teams actually not rely on those like CRMs. I see them rely on like snowflake or Databricks and have, have it as like a flexible store of data and then maybe use a clay, maybe use something else to like orchestrate it. And then the data just finds the rep at the moment that they need it. Right. Maybe they get a text message before they meet someone. Maybe they get a notion doc with a briefing before they meet a prospect, whatever.

Auren Hoffman (11:02.478) on either. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (11:16.156) Yeah. Yep.

Varun Anand (11:23.102) and maybe they get a ping in Slack, right? So I think we're moving to a world where people are using UIs less as reps and the data is just coming to where you're doing your work.

Auren Hoffman (11:32.88) make sense because no one likes to go in and like enter stuff. just like they want it just to be there. And maybe they want to like a quick look up so they want to know like what happened with this customer or something or did we talk to them before? But maybe that maybe that's just get pushed your inbox like you have maybe you don't have to go and go find it somewhere.

Varun Anand (11:53.922) Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Auren Hoffman (11:56.476) What we've seen. Yeah.

Varun Anand (11:57.71) By the way, just on that note, by the way, we have, we've built automations for our own sales team that do exactly that. So like, like, let's say this was a prospect meeting and I was telling you after this, uh, uh, this meeting, I would get like a Slack message or email that says, Hey, great meeting with Orin. You here's like a follow-up that you can send, uh, is it good to send? Do you want to edit it? Do you want to change it? And then like automatically get sent. Um, and like things like that, like I'll wake up tomorrow morning and get like a briefing of like all the signals that happened the night before, like, Hey, who went to the website?

Auren Hoffman (12:19.292) That's awesome.

Varun Anand (12:27.31) And then do you want to act on it? Do you want to do this? Do you want to do that? But it's not coming in a new platform. It's just operating where I already am. They can Slack or Gmail. Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (12:31.986) Yeah, wherever you are. So if you're in Slack, your email, like wherever you are, that's, that's great. I love that. Um, we, we've seen with a lot of our companies that the, the number of people in marketing broadly and include, let's include SDRs in that the number of people in marketing is going down. Um, and many cases we're seeing companies where, you know, they used to have 40 people in marketing and now they have 10.

Varun Anand (12:46.723) Yeah.

Varun Anand (13:00.002) Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (13:01.36) or something and they're using vendors, they're using AI, they're using tools, they're using APIs, they're coordinating, they're not spending less money, but they're, are you seeing something similar?

Varun Anand (13:09.475) Right.

Varun Anand (13:13.102) I think we're, yeah, I think we're seeing like a shift in how the structures change basically, because I think if you look at a traditional sales org, you have SDRs who are prospecting, have AEs who are closing deals, you have rev-ups who are managing systems, you have marketing who's kind of trying to create pipeline. And they basically operate like an assembly line. But the issue with assembly lines is they're standardized and they're not built for sharing learnings and insights. And if you're not doing that, you're not going to win. And so what we see instead is like...

We've invented this role called GTM engineer, where they're kind of like building revenue systems using AI and automation. But basically we see people like those in the center of this using tools like clay or whatever to build systems. And then they're doing the work, they're doing the work on behalf of all the reps. So all the manual research, all the manual work that's happening with reps, that gets centralized to one person, two person, three people. And they're doing all this work on behalf of everyone else and building systems that can kind of scale their creative ideas.

Auren Hoffman (14:07.28) Now, five years ago, I would say 100 % of good marketers were Zapier masters. And today, maybe they're using like a pipe dream or an N8N or one of those types of things to kind of put these tools together. These are like, at least relatively technical people have transformed in some ways, like marketing is more of a science than engineering. Are you seeing something similar?

Varun Anand (14:14.21) Yeah.

Varun Anand (14:26.349) Yeah.

Varun Anand (14:35.194) I mean, I agree with you that marketers are becoming way more technical, but, I might disagree on the like science versus engineering point because, I think we actually do see the engineering discipline being brought to marketing, on the growth side. because I think it's more just like the systematic mindset is all, you know, and the system's mindset and how you can kind of like build a repeatable system that can keep like driving pipeline.

Auren Hoffman (14:52.454) Yes, yeah, yeah.

Varun Anand (15:04.455) And maybe you can even call that science because it is in some way, but it's not like, yeah, yeah. I think, I think we see that like, that like systems building approach and mindset way more.

Auren Hoffman (15:15.922) Now we're already starting to see when the salesperson's on a call with a client, we're already starting to see like AI as a, as a helper. You may have an AI note taker, you may have different like points that come up live to help that client navigate, help the salesperson navigate certain things. You may have like an AI sales engineer on the call as well. When you think it will become more common where the actual salesperson is in an AI.

Varun Anand (15:27.661) Yeah.

Varun Anand (15:46.698) Varun Anand (15:50.338) I think we're already seeing it. You know, actually, like I've had lots of, I've had lots of not personal experiences, but I know lots of people who have that experience. Like I'll just give you a few examples, right? I know, I know like in so many other industries, home services, property management, whatever, people are already using voice AI, maybe not as a sales person, but to solve other problems that's happening right now.

Auren Hoffman (16:14.662) Yeah, when you call them for sure. might not be video, but when you call them. Yep. Yep.

Varun Anand (16:20.43) I think that, you I just learned a fun story about Coinbase the other day, which is they have like a voice AI avatar that screens all early career candidates that are coming through the top of funnel. And if you get past that, then you finally get to a human. And I wouldn't be surprised if someone has built and is using like a SDR type.

Auren Hoffman (16:36.05) That's so cool.

Auren Hoffman (16:47.27) By the way, if I'm a candidate, I've got my own voice, AI avatar that screens all the companies too, the first one.

Varun Anand (16:52.398) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it's a fair. I think it's good. Yeah. So, um, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's already happening in sales in some way, but I'm also just, so I'm not surprised about the technology or when that's happening. I think I would just question whether that's right for the company and actually like make sense for them or what, what trade-offs they're going to face with, with that approach, you know, like, um, and, uh, and, and cause I think like,

Basically, think the thing is, when you're in voice AI for home services or plumbing or whatever, the answer is it's deterministic. You know there's a right answer and a wrong answer. Did you solve the problem or not?

Auren Hoffman (17:28.71) Yeah, yeah. then it's like often it's just like scheduling to or something, right?

Varun Anand (17:32.118) Yeah, yeah, it's just like a deterministic path, right? That's not true in candidates and that's not true in sales. There's way more art in knowing the fit, both in candidates and sales. And I would question whether that whether technology can do that now or in the near future.

Auren Hoffman (17:50.428) How is the SDR function changing? Like how have we seen it change to date and how do you expect it to change over time?

Varun Anand (17:55.788) Yeah. I mean, we're actually launching SDRs at Clay for the first time. We're creating our own function. And basically they are, we're seeing like the best SDRs, all their manual work, all their manual research, completely automated, like completely automated. So they're mostly spending their time on very high quality targeted individual outreach to like the most, like the biggest enterprises and like multi-threading and very specialist way. Say it again.

Auren Hoffman (18:22.246) Very custom. Very custom.

Varun Anand (18:26.124) Very custom, very human touch or cold calling, right? Or they're using clay and other tools to build their own systems to build pipeline. But they're not like doing a lot of the normal SDR type work. A lot of that gets automated away. And so you can be way leaner, but at the moment you still need a human touch. I've heard lots of companies, like a lot of blue chip uniprint companies that built internal systems or use clay or whatever.

And then when they added the SDR team, saw dramatic improvements with the human element, but then they can actually take away a lot of that work and automate it, and then just keep the parts that are uniquely human, that are uniquely creative.

Auren Hoffman (19:07.974) How do you, I'm super interested in like pricing and how that changes people's use of the product. And you guys opted to do some sort of usage based rather than like a seat based pricing, which I generally like, like, you know, I've said this before, like I love air table, but because they have a seat based pricing and it's like super expensive per seat.

Varun Anand (19:16.355) Yeah.

Varun Anand (19:23.203) Yeah.

Varun Anand (19:35.01) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (19:35.75) Basically almost no one at our company uses it. And so basically all of our stuff is still on Google Sheets. Whereas if they did a usage based pricing, like we would use it for everyone would be using it all the time. We'd be paying them more.

Varun Anand (19:38.722) Yeah.

Varun Anand (19:48.108) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we started doing usage based pricing like 2021 or early 2022. And it was very early in go to market. We may have been the first ones in go to market to do it because every time I met someone or prospect, they were shocked that it was in seat based. And they almost didn't believe me. They thought they were getting the deal of the century. They were like, everyone could just use this.

Auren Hoffman (20:07.314) Uh-huh.

Varun Anand (20:14.178) But I think for us, the insight was we don't actually want everyone to use it. Our product is a product made for more technical audiences who, and by technical I mean, GTM operations or systems people or growth marketers that you're talking about to build systems on behalf of lot of people. We explicitly are not building for salespeople actually. And so that's the intention. And so that wasn't a trade-off in our minds. It was just like we actually...

We actually want just a handful of people to build on behalf of other people. And it was the value metric for us because at the beginning we were more transacting data. so usage-based was a better corollary for that than seat-based, especially to cover our cogs. And obviously AI has made them way more standard in the year since. And so it felt really natural and authentic to us, even though at the time it was unusual in our market.

Auren Hoffman (21:09.938) Now, what are the things in data? You've got a ton of different data providers. It's just like, in some ways, like the most important thing about data is that the fact is true. And often with data, especially with marketing data, most of the facts in many cases are very high precision facts are not true or they're out of date or whatever. How do you ensure or how do you...

Varun Anand (21:21.923) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (21:36.816) test which data be, I'm sure with some data providers you realize, they're really good at this or they're not good at this or they're good in this geography, but not good in this geography, or they're really good on cell phone numbers, but they're really bad on titles or how do you, how do you kind of think about.

Varun Anand (21:47.426) Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's not clear cut and we spend a lot of time and energy on this. We try to publish these data tests that try to give more transparency to it to everyone else. But basically we do a lot of testing, right? And there's match rates and fill rates and then there's like accuracy. And we do our best and we run like large statistically significant data tests on all of it.

Auren Hoffman (22:12.112) so you have some sort of truth set somehow. Like, okay, you know that Varun's cell phone number is X or something. Yeah.

Varun Anand (22:19.34) Yeah, and there's a lot of sampling. There's a lot of sampling as well to like to really triple check the data. Then by the way, we also have checks and balances, right? So we have actually a way in product for you to give feedback on the data to determine if it was right or wrong. And then we can

Auren Hoffman (22:33.286) Okay, so in the product, obviously the email bounces, you'll know, but there might be other, like other things within the product where people could just like, could actually just like put in this is wrong. And that was, that's like a feedback cycle.

Varun Anand (22:39.34) Yeah, that's wrong.

Varun Anand (22:44.844) That's a feedback cycle to the provider. So there's always a continuous loop of improvement. And then by the way, for like phone numbers and other contact providers, we have like lots of verifications. So we have like, like 10 plus contact verification sources that we partner with as well to track it and check that in real time.

Auren Hoffman (23:03.1) Got it. When you're evaluating, so in some ways when you have, you're buying data from all these different providers, let's say about the contact information about engineers or something. And so what you're saying is that you may use, it could even be like 5 % of the data is amazing.

Varun Anand (23:18.455) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (23:26.77) Um, and like 50 % is okay. And the other 45 % is junk. And then you'll just use that 5%. That's amazing.

Varun Anand (23:32.428) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like for example, like, there are lots of providers that, that give you a hundred data points, but maybe only two data points, like website traffic and revenue are really, really good. We'll just take the API calls for that and cut everything else.

Auren Hoffman (23:43.269) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (23:47.314) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or they're good for that, but just for, you know, France or something or whatever, they try to have it globally or whatever it might be. OK, that that makes a lot of that makes a lot of sense. We will we will we fell for some of so many of these companies that sell data is it's very hard to get a premium on price when you're more accurate because people don't either they don't believe it or they don't have a way of testing it.

Varun Anand (23:55.234) Yeah. Yeah.

Varun Anand (24:14.668) Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (24:16.146) Or whatever. And so there's just like price degradation. So you can get, you know, you can have more coverage. That's a way to get premium. That's very hard to get, to actually prove that you're a better product. How would you advise data companies to help them prove they have a better product somehow?

Varun Anand (24:22.094) Yeah.

Varun Anand (24:36.962) Honestly, you could, we'll just do a data test with you. Like if you were like, if you want to prove that you have a better product, just, I mean, seriously, just tell us. Cause if you do, it's fully in our incentive to figure that out with you, you know? And then by the way, yes, yes. And then it's in our incentive to tell the world that it's really good, you know? And so we're the distribution partner for all these data providers. And if you actually think your data is better, just tell us, tell me, email is verunaclay.com.

Auren Hoffman (24:44.754) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (24:49.19) Yeah. And would you like then like publish a blog on it? Like, hey, we chose. Yeah. Okay.

Varun Anand (25:06.336) It's fully in my incentive to double check that and make sure that's true. Because if it is, you're gonna make a lot of money and more people will come to Clay, so it's a win-win for everyone.

Auren Hoffman (25:14.738) One of the things data is that it has a shelf life. If I have data about you, okay, well, today you worked for Clay, but back in time you didn't, maybe five years from now you might not or something like that, or your title might change or whatever. And it's changing quite a bit. And so it might be good today, but it might not be good in the future. Like how do you...

Varun Anand (25:20.067) Yeah.

Sure.

Yeah.

Varun Anand (25:32.663) Right.

Varun Anand (25:36.908) Right, like you came to my website last night, but then that's useless to me if I wait two months to act on it. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (25:42.556) Correct. Yeah. So you have that too as well. So how do you, how do you know from a data provider's perspective, if they like continue to be good, like, are you like retesting it in some ways? Are you re-getting feedback?

Varun Anand (25:53.038) Yeah, we do retest it. We do get lots of feedback from users. Generally speaking, data decays like I think it's like 2 to 4 % a month or something like that. And so we're tracking that and monitoring it. And then by the way, but there are a bunch of data points that have longer shelf lives, Like mobile numbers.

Auren Hoffman (26:12.112) Right. Like, like the fact that your gender doesn't change as often or something, right?

Varun Anand (26:15.01) Right, Mobile numbers aren't changing. Company addresses don't change that often. Holding rounds, unless you're a hot AI company, don't happen that often. So there are a lot of things that do endure. And then by the way, we obviously also push people to signals, like things that are happening all the time and you're monitoring those, And so, like I'll give you good example. One of Canva's products is they help you keep your brand consistent across lots of different social channels.

they use Clay to monitor LinkedIn and Twitter for posts from brands, and then they use AI to analyze them and be like, hey, is this on-brand or off-brand? And if it's off-brand, they message the head of design and it's like, hey, this doesn't meet your brand guidelines, you should buy Canva. So there's lots of signals. They're like Vantos tracking companies that become SOC 2 compliant.

Auren Hoffman (27:01.98) So it's like a go to market motion or something like that. that's cool. wow. So that's a really, that's a very, very, very great email. Imagine if I got that email from Canva, I would be like very excited to if they told me something very specific about my company.

Varun Anand (27:04.322) Yeah, you have to go to MarkerMotion based on these signals. Or if you're in real estate, like when...

Varun Anand (27:18.316) Yeah, it's very timely. that's, that's what we try to focus on. I'm like, how can you, cause that's the whole thing about go to market. It's like, you need to know when someone has a burning need for your product. and how can you, what is the signal for your business? Like is it, had, updated their support documentation. Is it that they're doing this thing that doesn't make sense online is that they just became software compliant. Did they just buy and get a new office and that's in the news. Let's find that signal because you know, something about your customer that others don't know. And then you could build a system around it.

Auren Hoffman (27:46.118) No more more of our customers are doing research on LMS and we're seeing this kind of like move from SEO to GEO. How do think that like plays out?

Varun Anand (27:49.868) Yeah.

Varun Anand (27:53.932) Yeah.

How do I think that plays out? I'm not sure I have a good answer for this one. I was just sitting next to one of the people at Profound last night at dinner actually.

Varun Anand (28:08.462) I don't feel like I have good insight on this question because it's right now feels very gamified and

Auren Hoffman (28:16.87) Yep. Just like SEO in a way,

Varun Anand (28:21.142) In a way, in a way, but SEO, I don't know about that. In a way, yes, but also in SEO, the cream of the crop typically tends to rise. And are there ways to gamify that? For sure. But typically the higher quality gets to the top. With GEO, I don't know if that's clear yet. I also hear about crazy tactics that people are doing and unclear if any of them work actually. Like I've heard of a tactic where someone is just spinning up lots and lots of bots to ask the same question on these things.

Auren Hoffman (28:30.471) Yeah.

Varun Anand (28:49.814) and answer the questions? Yeah, well,

Auren Hoffman (28:50.691) Yeah, we've all heard those things for sure. We all have friends have tried it and they do think some of them have been working right? Yeah, it's a cat and mouse game. Yeah.

Varun Anand (28:57.034) Some of them work, some of them don't work. It's unclear if any of this is making a difference too, you know?

Auren Hoffman (29:02.598) It's hard to measure the SEO is easier to measure. Like at least traditionally when you and I have searched for, you know, best sushi place in San Francisco, we get the same results. Whereas like when we're on a chat, TBT and ask that question, like we're often getting different results based on a whole bunch of different things that are happening.

Varun Anand (29:18.242) Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, to be honest, my genuine reaction is I wouldn't change behavior too much based on this. generally kind of think maybe this is maybe I'm being irresponsible here, but I generally kind of think these moments happen in marketing all the time. There's always a new hot thing. There's always a new hot tactic, like always. And then in this moment of time, maybe it's GEO. I don't think you're going to solve your problem with that by like getting the right tool for GEO or something. I think if you just

make high quality content that helps people, it'll work itself out and make sure you distribute it in places that make sense. Like don't put it in a, don't, put it in a black, black, hole. But like, think if you just do that, I'm not saying do that and pray, but generally speaking, that's 98 % of the work and these optimizations on the side are necessary. But I think oftentimes people get like really attracted by these, by these like,

fads and the hype and then the FOMO. The FOMO is real because you're like, hey, someone's spinning up 6,000 bots to like do this and you're like, fuck, why am I not doing that? You know? But just like do really good content that helps people and it'll kind of work itself out.

Auren Hoffman (30:20.465) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (30:30.64) Yeah. It's also interesting because these elements are changing so often, like just how they do things is changing every, seems like every few weeks they're changing. So yeah, you don't even know. Like I have a friend, his, was getting a huge amount of traffic from chat GPT for his business. And then they, you know, who knows, they did some like random update and his traffic went down by 40%. Like literally one day had nothing changed.

Varun Anand (30:36.066) Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. So how could you plan your business around that?

Varun Anand (30:55.458) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (30:59.942) Whereas Google, like that, that those updates happen like way more slowly over time. Cause it's just a more mature product.

Varun Anand (31:06.477) Yeah, for sure.

Auren Hoffman (31:09.094) What, what else do you think is like changing on B2B data?

Varun Anand (31:14.894) Changing on B2B data.

Auren Hoffman (31:21.158) mean, these intense signals are so important, right? It's like what, like, you know, I am not in the market for most B2B things very often, but when I am in the market or I'm getting close to the market, like I'm, it's, it's that, that cold email no longer is, is is spam. That cold email is actually very valuable content that I want to see.

Varun Anand (31:23.692) Yeah.

Varun Anand (31:30.36) Yeah.

Varun Anand (31:35.81) Yeah.

Varun Anand (31:42.198) Yeah. Yeah. Look, I think generally speaking, your ability, the basic answer to your question of what's changing is your ability to ask certain questions about your business and get answers to those questions is better than it's ever been before. So I'll give you an example of this, of what I mean. We have a customer as a logistic staffing company and they can only serve warehouses of a very specific size. But

Auren Hoffman (32:00.348) Yes.

Varun Anand (32:11.906) There's no good data on warehouses. And so how do they do this? Well, they'd be screwed if this was three years ago. But right now what they can do is they use clay to get Google Maps to show up all the warehouse locations. Then they use AI and then they pull up the satellite images, right? Through Google Maps. Then they use AI to analyze the satellite images. And then with AI, they count the number of parking spots around the warehouse. And then they count the cars in the parking spots.

And it turns out that that's the best predictor of warehouse size and employee count than anything else.

Auren Hoffman (32:44.54) By the way, there are, I can send you later, but there are great companies that have like square footage of warehouses. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Varun Anand (32:52.16) Great, great. I'm just saying that for this company, I mean, I'll send, she sent it to me and I'll send it to this company, by the way, but they didn't, they weren't able to find the data source that worked for them. And so they were able to use AI to, in this clever and creative way. I mean, I know companies that use AI to count chimneys, you know, or, right. Or like, you know, I know a company that does music licensing and does licensing for venues.

Auren Hoffman (33:01.382) That's what they, yeah. So they had to go manufacture it themselves, essentially. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that's cool.

Yep, solar panels and you know.

Varun Anand (33:20.396) But they now, instead of having humans go and inspect all of them in person, they have AI analyze the internet and reviews and Yelp to understand what genre music they're playing, how loud the music gets, all these things to determine if they actually need the license or not in a way they could have never done before. And so the ability to ask crazy questions about you and your customers and whatever, and then answer them is better than ever before.

Auren Hoffman (33:33.65) So cool.

Varun Anand (33:47.35) And I think that's really what's changing the market.

Auren Hoffman (33:51.41) No, you guys did a 10 year offer, $20 million, 10 year offer to let. Yeah. Um, you know, I don't mess around here. Our world of DAS, uh, uh, and you let employees sell some of their shares, like walk us through the logistics of like kind of how that worked and what you learned from it.

Varun Anand (33:56.034) Man, we're moving. We're moving from topic to topic. We're going tender off of pricing. GTM data is changing. Yeah.

Varun Anand (34:10.636) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, we try this. This is the time we publicized it, but generally we try to offer employees the chance to sell whenever we do a fundraise. the logistics are painful, I would say. Tender offers like I'll just give you the logistics. Like we agreed to the terms with Sequoia, I think in January, maybe it was early February. And I don't think we did it. We were able to do it until like late April or May or something. Like it was an unbelievable amount of time with lawyers and stuff to set this all up.

Auren Hoffman (34:22.983) Yeah.

Varun Anand (34:40.366) And by the way, it wasn't even $20 million. People didn't want to sell. So was actually way less than that in terms of what actually got sold. And so I would actually recommend, I would recommend, basically my philosophy is give employees the ability to sell stock as often as you can, right? And there are legal constraints and whatever, but just as often as you can. But then also I think the legal burden of a tender is quite high. And so I would try to just like,

do like one offs with like 10 employees at a time or something. And that's like super fast. uh, and that

Auren Hoffman (35:12.338) Sorry, what do you mean by the one-offs of how would that work or how does it work?

Varun Anand (35:16.396) I I think if it's under 20 people or under 15 people, you don't need it to be a tender. You can just be like, hey, Orin wants to buy stock. Let's have the board approve it. Here are 15 people who want to sell stock. Go for it.

Auren Hoffman (35:28.402) And then you don't feel like as a company, you're like picking favorites as to who those people are and stuff. Yeah. Or do you just like randomly pick them out of a hat or something? Yeah. Yeah.

Varun Anand (35:33.602) I mean, you'd have to logistically figure that out. I'm not trying to like...

No, no, no, I'm just saying I think you have to get interest in some way and do this in some fair way. I'm just saying the logistical burden of doing a tender took us three months and I'm like hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills and all these things. Like it's a lot. And so if there is like a more informal way of doing it.

Auren Hoffman (35:49.584) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (35:54.598) Now, you did it like when you did the tender, you said you did it more than once. So when you did the second time, like, was it easier? And if so, like, did you was there some sort of learning from the first time to make it easier? Yeah.

Varun Anand (36:04.206) Well, think it's more just when people want to sell and they tell us and then we're able to try to facilitate it if there's a way that we can do that. But the tender, the formal tender, we've only done once. But yeah, I look, I generally speaking, when like it's like 10, 15, five people who are trying to sell or interested, you can do that in a way that's not as logistically and legally burdensome.

Auren Hoffman (36:13.509) Okay.

Auren Hoffman (36:24.978) Yeah, because you could just say to the investor, hey, just go contact these eight people or something or whatever. Okay.

Varun Anand (36:29.602) No, no, think the company can coordinate it. don't know all the details, but I'm pretty sure the company can coordinate it in a way that like helps make it happen. then you get the board approval and then it just kind of happens.

Auren Hoffman (36:40.722) So let's say you're doing a tender, you just raised money at a $3 billion valuation, you're doing a $50 million tender or something like that to your employees, but you don't want that to affect the 499A price of the stock. Like, how does that work? it like, if it's small enough, it's de minimis and it doesn't affect, or how does it work?

Varun Anand (37:01.206) Yeah, yeah, we've we've that's generally the guidance we got when we talk to our lawyers that it that it does that it shouldn't affect the foreign NA. Yeah, yeah. And generally, you can make arguments with the foreign NA providers that feel compelling and reasonable and they can work with you on that.

Auren Hoffman (37:09.138) So has to be small enough to do it, okay.

Auren Hoffman (37:20.812) Then if Sequoia is investing at a $3 billion valuation, but they're getting this preferred stock, the preferred stock does have a lot more value than common stock, are you doing the tender at some sort of discount to that or something?

Varun Anand (37:37.538) Well, I think if you're a really good company.

Auren Hoffman (37:39.322) Or do you convert it into common when Sequoia buys it or something or whatever?

Varun Anand (37:42.862) No, we don't we don't convert. It's just all common if it's a tender. look, I think basically just depends on the market demand for your stock. If you are a really good company that's doing really well, investors will pay the same as they would for preferred. If you are not a good company, they're going to ask for a discount. I think that's just like the market realities.

Auren Hoffman (37:45.403) Okay.

Auren Hoffman (37:50.054) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (38:00.668) But mean, preferred does have preferred rights. Like it should have some premium over if it's the same investor now, but there might just be a limit to what they can buy. then maybe.

Varun Anand (38:05.868) Well, sure, but if the company's really hot.

No, no, but if, yeah, that's the thing. Like, look, hey, like just let's say Clay, for example, we're really efficient as a business. We don't burn that much money at all. We don't need to raise that much money. And so, hey, let's just say we raised like a hundred million dollars, but there's a lot more demand, right? People want to invest more in the company. We're like, hey, we just don't need more primary. In fact, we didn't even need the hundred million for the record. But they're like, hey, you can buy secondary if you want. And the market demand is so high that they're happy to pay the same price because that's just the market realities.

Auren Hoffman (38:26.033) Right.

Auren Hoffman (38:38.802) But that, that, that, that it either means that the, either means that the, that the preferred is too cheap or it means the common is too expensive. Like there's one, one of those two is cause the preferred is better. So it does mean like, if you're getting them at the exact same price at roughly the same time, the preferred is, is potentially too cheap then. Right.

Varun Anand (38:54.55) Well, well hold on.

I don't think the preferred has to be too cheap, but I also think that the rights of preferred shareholders gets less valuable as the company gets more de-risked. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (39:07.196) For sure. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But it still has some value, right? Yeah.

Varun Anand (39:10.924) It has some value, but maybe you say, hey, I can't get access to this company that I'm trying to invest in. And so I don't care about that access. I don't care about those rights.

Auren Hoffman (39:18.738) Right. Right. Yeah. So I said, wouldn't pay some sort of premium or something to get more access. Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. Obviously, like you see rounds done at 3 billion and then all of a sudden someone can't get in and they're like, well, I'll give you 4 billion to get in. So the same thing happens all the time. Right. So this is just kind of a version of that. Now you guys also did like a community round. What is that?

Varun Anand (39:24.502) Yeah. Yeah.

Varun Anand (39:33.742) Sure. Yeah, yeah.

Varun Anand (39:41.932) Yes. A community round is basically a fundraising round, but for your community. And so our customers and we have a big community. we have like 70 clay clubs all around the world. have agency partners that are making millions of dollars a year built on clay. We have a lot of like clay supporters. And I mean, honestly, we are a community driven company. Like we are, we are building for the community and they are why we've been successful. And so we just wanted to help them.

Auren Hoffman (39:48.902) like your customers and those types of things. Yeah. Yeah.

Varun Anand (40:10.018) We wanted to find a way to have them be a part of our story and feel like financially and economically bought into the company because they're the ones helping build it. They're ones getting economic benefit too from it. And so this was an opportunity for us to do that.

Auren Hoffman (40:23.61) Okay. Cool. And how does like, is it, how does it work when people are investing community? Okay. Yeah. Cause like some of these might not be qualified investors and other.

Varun Anand (40:28.746) Another logistical mess, would say. Another logistical mess. So yeah, so the thing with this is you have a few options. we're really getting to the details of, of, of, Yeah. Okay. So, so basically you have, you have a few options. There are a few providers that do this. We used a company called Republic. There's another, you could maybe consider AngelList.

Auren Hoffman (40:41.82) We have a nerdy audience here. They love this stuff.

Varun Anand (40:56.876) there's WeFunder as an option and I'll just be in full detail.

Auren Hoffman (41:00.242) And you're creating essentially like a RUV type of instrument. Yeah.

Varun Anand (41:03.598) So, okay, so there are trade-offs with all of these things, right? with AngelList, everyone has to be an accredited investor, which is like a high bar for people in our communities. They're not really set up for this. They're not really set up for like hundreds, if not thousands of people to participate in this. We funder, again, the details are little hazy, because this was like a year ago, but generally I'll just try to do this at a high level. Like we funder...

Auren Hoffman (41:14.343) Yes.

Varun Anand (41:30.574) had this flow that didn't make sense. Like they kind of been like, hey, it's kind of ops, like it kind of works like a GoFundMe where they're like, hey, put up this page, first come first serve. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. What I want is a setup where you say, hey, we're doing this. You should apply. And then we select the people, right? Cause obviously I want to know who's going to that. Sure. Exactly.

Auren Hoffman (41:45.126) Yeah. Or you might want to change their allocation. They want, they want 30 grand of allocation. You're like, sorry, you can only get 15 in the end or something. Yeah.

Varun Anand (41:51.904) Exactly. So we want all that kind of flexibility. And then the other thing that we fund or asked is they were like, Hey, you usually need to reserve some of your allocation for, like we fund or VIPs, like random people who we don't know. And I'm like, I don't care about them. Like, you know, I want only to clay community. So that's why we didn't do we funder. Third option was Republic was mostly okay. But the logistics of, maybe they've improved this since then, but the logistics of actually, doing the funding, like we had a big drop off of people who like got accepted.

Auren Hoffman (42:02.45) Varun Anand (42:21.74) And then actually invested because the logistics of doing it were very, very cumbersome using the Republic platform. Yeah. Well, like feeling of the forms, was like a very cumbersome, confusing process on the Republic site. Yeah, it was a lot. It was way more complex than that. took hours for people actually. I'm not talking about optimizing a little onboarding process. I'm talking about hours.

Auren Hoffman (42:26.002) It was just, just like actually wiring the money or get like that type of thing. Yeah.

And it was like 15 clicks to, yeah, okay. Yeah. my gosh. Wow. Yeah. One reason I love Ageless is like, if you're on it, it's just like, you literally press a button and like the money just goes, right? Yeah. Okay.

Varun Anand (42:47.468) Yes. No, no, no. It was way more complex than that. And so we had a big, a real drop off, which was unexpected because we didn't, we didn't diligence that part of the process that

Auren Hoffman (42:53.339) wow.

I always wonder like why, why more people don't do it. And it sounds like more people don't do it. Cause it's just like, it's just freaking annoying. Are a few personal questions you cold emailed your way to a job with Hillary Clinton. First of all, like walk us through that story. And then I have a couple of questions about cold emails.

Varun Anand (43:01.568) It's really annoying. Yeah, it's really annoying.

Varun Anand (43:14.348) Yeah. I mean, you know, I'll tell you the story, but you know, I also cold emailed away into my job at Google after that. And I cold emailed Kareem, my co-founder at Clay, which is how we met.

Auren Hoffman (43:24.58) Okay, all right, so I love this. By the way, I've met many friends through cold emails. So many of my enduring friendships have been through cold emails. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, that was a real email. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A real email that was templatized. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Varun Anand (43:29.678) I see. And by the way, you called email me. Do you know that? Was that a real email or was that someone like was an automated email? I wasn't sure. It was hard to tell.

Okay, was templatized. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wouldn't seem that tailored, you know, but I was like, okay, I'll respond to this. So Hillary, yeah, it's a good story. And I'll tell the story with Kareem too, because that's also really good. Basically, I was 18 years old, I was obsessed with politics, I thought I would do that for the rest of my life. I was a freshman at Penn. And I really want to work for Hillary Clinton in particular, this was like 2012, early 2013 or something. She had just left the State Department and

I was trying to find a way to get in touch with her and like work with her in some way. I eventually found that you

Auren Hoffman (44:14.866) why why why was why was you know

Varun Anand (44:17.646) I was actually just really passionate about her. had admired her for a long time and I had like, and I just wanted to be a part of working with her in some way, shape or form. And at the time she was just a private citizen actually, but I was just like, I want to be involved. And it turns out that she had a small personal office of like six people. And so I hunted down the senior advisor to her, his personal email. when you're a student, you have access to alumni databases. The email tools back then weren't as good as they are now, but.

You have access to alumni databases. And so I was a Penn, but this guy went to Columbia. And so I had friends at Columbia and they gave me, they went through their alumni database and got me his email. So I got his email that way. And then I cold emailed him 10 times and he didn't respond. And then the 10th time he's like, okay, fine, I'll meet you, but just let me know the next time you're in DC. So obviously the next week I invented an excuse to come to DC. I'm in Philadelphia, very easy.

Auren Hoffman (44:54.074) Aha. Perfect.

Auren Hoffman (45:13.158) Right. Yeah.

Varun Anand (45:16.212) and BoltBus for the win. And he was like, okay, fine, meet me at the Starbucks below my office, right? So I'm like, okay, I come to the Starbucks. What I didn't know at the time is he tells his assistant, who I'm now friends with, hey, this crazy person has emailed me 10 times and has asked for a meeting, just interrupt the meeting in five minutes and get me out of this. So I meet with him for five minutes, the woman comes down, interrupts the meeting, says, Philippe, you have to go. But the first five minutes went so well,

that she ends up just staying for the next hour. And then he more or less offers me a job at the end to be like the seventh person, the intern, the junior person of this personal office. So that was that story. And then I worked for her throughout college. I would basically commute from Philadelphia to New York and DC, very convenient again, during the year, then spend all my summers working with her. And then graduated a year early in 2015 to kind of work for a campaign full-time and then did a variety of roles with her there.

Auren Hoffman (45:56.828) That's awesome, I love that.

Varun Anand (46:15.666) that's one story. then with Kareem, so Kareem originally started clay with his best friend from college, Nikolai 2017. they didn't find like a product they were excited about. So there was a lot of rotating and pivoting for like three or four years, and they didn't really commit to a particular vision. I was starting another company at the time and was in the no code space. And so I was in a Slack group where someone mentioned the webinar about clay.

But at the time, didn't have any revenue, no customers, no users or anything, just like a very early product and they were trying to do a webinar. So I signed up for this webinar, but no one else shows up. I'm the only one who shows up. And it's not even Kareem, it's someone else. And so I'm like, I started using the product, playing with it. And I'm like, whoa, this is really crazy. Like I'm really into this. I couldn't stop thinking about it. So I cold email Kareem, but he doesn't respond to me because he's on a silent meditation retreat. So I cold emailed Nikolai and he does respond to me and we hit it off.

And I'd like to think, actually, I told Kareem since this, I think if Kareem responded, none of this would have happened because Nikolai and I have very similar personalities, but Kareem and I don't. So I don't think we would have hit it off in the same way. And Kareem is like inherently suspicious of things like this. whereas Nikolai embraces it. So anyways, I hit it off with Nikolai. We spend more time together. We start working together. But then Nikolai decides to leave the company to pursue his own things, like another company and a few other people in the company leave, which is very bizarre. So the company resets in a lot of ways. It was just Kareem like.

one or two engineers. And then I kind of joined as a late co-founder for whatever reason. And we're like, let's just commit to this new vision. Let's reset the business. Let's launch the product in this new way and focus on go to market. And we kind of went from there.

Auren Hoffman (47:54.93) That's awesome. I love that. How would you, if you're advising people to write a good cold email, like how would you advise them?

Varun Anand (47:56.461) Yeah.

Varun Anand (48:04.643) I get a lot of cold emails. Most are bad. I think there's probably a couple things you're trying to do.

Varun Anand (48:16.538) And actually there's a lot of advice where people are like, be as brief as possible. But I've actually gotten cold emails that are unbelievably long. fact, like crazy long, but also worked. So I don't think that advice on just like write super short emails that are to the point. People always mention that Snapchat email, know, to Evan Spiegel. That was like four sentences and to the point. I've actually had emails come to me that are unlike paragraphs upon paragraphs, like essays.

but are so good and compelling that I'm like, okay, someone took all this effort to write this, let's talk. Basically, you're trying to convince someone that you can do the job before you've done the job. You're trying to solve problems they have, and so you're trying to communicate something that they should give you a shot, right? And so what could that be? There are many options, right? There's not a script or a template for this.

Auren Hoffman (48:47.73) Yeah. Yeah.

Varun Anand (49:11.438) There's a lot of options. you could have some insight about their product, about their company. You could do a lot of research and be like, hey, here are five problems that I found and here are fixes for all of them. That's me doing my job before I get there, before you've even met me. Like, that's cool. Like I would meet with someone who did that, Maybe you have something.

Auren Hoffman (49:25.5) Yep. Yep.

Yep. Yeah. Here's some, here's some, here's a, like I've used your product and here's how the product could be better or here's what I liked and here's, yeah. Yeah.

Varun Anand (49:34.7) Yeah. Yeah. Or just here's on your website. Here are five issues, right? Like I just got a cold email. This was yesterday, by the way. I just got a cold email yesterday from a team in India that makes claymation videos. And they made a custom claymation video for clay that was handmade with all they made all the clay themselves. And they showed a lot of effort in doing it. So I watched the video. I'm like, wow, this is a lot of effort that they've gone to. And I'm now I'm engaging. Now I'm introducing them to our brand, you know.

Auren Hoffman (49:58.704) Yeah, yeah.

Of course. Yeah.

Varun Anand (50:04.332) And they went to a lot of effort just for a cold email that they have no idea what's going to happen with, you know?

Auren Hoffman (50:08.85) Yeah. Yeah. But you might as well like, those are the ones that are going to convert well. And actually, and if you're passionate about it, it's, you know, all these other things that go through it.

Varun Anand (50:17.836) Yeah. So I think you're just trying to communicate something like that, that, and that's what's worked when people called email me basically.

Auren Hoffman (50:25.168) Now, how are you personally using like AI tools like outside of clay? How are you personally using them?

Varun Anand (50:31.139) Yeah.

There's a lot of ways. I think I'll just focus on two that are more like often like more like a, that are more ingrained in my day to day. So one is whisper flow. I use whisper flow all the time. This is like a voice to text product. all the time I'm using whisper flow. It's fair. It may helps me be more efficient. The other thing is a friend of mine.

Auren Hoffman (50:44.998) Yep. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (50:51.546) It's sorry. And I use whisper flow on my desktop, but is there a mobile version? Okay. I should start using it. And you, and you like it just cause like, just, it just works better than like the Apple version of it. Yeah.

Varun Anand (50:55.17) No, there's mobile too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I use it on mobile.

Varun Anand (51:04.619) Yeah, it just works. It just works. And I do a lot of text through that. I'm a big audio note guy. yeah, it just works. The other thing is a friend of mine built a product, which he then pivoted to something else in property management AI. But he built a product for me, basically just me, because I think I'm the only customer that auto sorts my inbox into different categories using AI. And it's amazing. So there's just three categories now, and it's just action.

just read or archive this and it saves me unbelievable amounts of time because I get hundreds of emails a day and and I and it just

Auren Hoffman (51:39.248) Yeah. Instead of like having it, cause I have like 400 filters that put them into the read folder and this, so this is like automatically does it. So don't have to, you do all those filters and stuff and yeah. Yeah. That's awesome.

Varun Anand (51:46.701) Yeah.

Varun Anand (51:50.86) Yeah, just three things and it's almost always right. Yeah, it saves me an unbelievable amount of time.

Auren Hoffman (51:58.332) That's so cool. All right, two questions. We ask all of our guests. What conspiracy theory do you believe?

Varun Anand (52:03.502) Yeah. So we actually had a little conversation about this before the show. So we can talk about a couple. One is the Denver airport, which is bigger than the city of San Francisco and was dramatically over budget and dramatically over timeline. And there's a lot of conspiracy theories about what happened there. And like, is it a secret bunker? Is the government using it? Like, is there this underground town happening there? I know. Yeah. Right. Right.

Auren Hoffman (52:25.338) Why not? Like, why would there not be like a huge underground system if it's that big? Like you could fit a lot of stuff under there. Like it makes sense to go do something there.

Varun Anand (52:33.902) So I think I believe that. And then another one that I asked a friend about is, he was like, shark bites. He was like, there's only 70 to 80 reported shark bites a year, but lots of people know individuals who've gotten bitten by sharks and the numbers don't add up. And so the conspiracy is that people don't, as towns and papers don't report the shark bites because they don't want it to be a disincentive for tourism.

Auren Hoffman (53:00.646) Guys, people won't go to like Miami if they think all these people are getting bit by sharks. But if it's like, you have less likelihood of getting bit by a shark than you do by hitting by lightning or something, then okay, great. Then it's, then it's okay. That makes sense. There's, there's no incentive to like, to, to, advertise that, that, unless you're like the, the, unless you're like competing, maybe if I'm like,

Varun Anand (53:05.229) Yes.

Varun Anand (53:13.644) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but sharks are out there and they're dangerous.

Auren Hoffman (53:29.594) you know, a competing area or something. could advertise that Miami gets all these shark things because no one in my area gets shark stuff or something. Okay. That's, that's super interesting. Our last question. We ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

Varun Anand (53:34.156) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Varun Anand (53:46.894) Honestly, I have like a hundred of these. So we can be talking for hours about this because I feel like at Clay we just do a lot of things somewhat uniquely or authentically to us that always buck conventional wisdom in some way, or form. I'll try to just do a couple so we can stay focused here. One is, and this is kind of a little bit of a comment about 996 culture, but there's conventional wisdom.

Auren Hoffman (53:48.836) Okay, awesome. Let's dive in. Yeah.

Varun Anand (54:14.382) especially in early stage companies, but just generally the people should just always be working crazy hard and working 996 or just like working really hard all the time and grinding. But what I often find, especially in early stage, and then they're like, oh, you don't need to do that in a mid-stage company because you have lots of people, you have product market fit, and you need to optimize burnout. I'm actually thinking of it differently because, and they're like, in an early stage company, you need it the most because you need to stay ahead. But what I find actually, and I got this from, like this insight,

was inspired by Kareem, what we found is that at early stage companies, you're oftentimes constrained not by time, but you're constrained by insight. Because you need an insight to truly find that product market fit. And you're not usually just in this random rat race. That's right, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (55:01.81) That's why he was at that silent meditation retreat when you emailed him.

Varun Anand (55:05.43) Yeah. And so you're really constrained not by time and your ability to just do a million things, you know, you're not building like a packaging business or something usually like, you're, you're, really constrained by an insight that will help you truly differentiate and find unique part of MarketFit that could help you build this extraordinary company. because that's how the best companies are usually made. It's through a different insight, not just like doing the same thing everyone else is doing, but a little bit better. and so I think that's true. and something we share often,

I think another thing is around interviewing. I think there's a lot of pressure and wisdom around, should interview lots of people basically, and you should just meet lots of people. I feel this FOMO all the time when I meet other founders or executives and they're like, I interviewed a hundred candidates for this role. And you know, a lot of the times I hire the first person I meet or the first person I liked, you know? And I feel pressure about that. I feel a lot of insecurity about that.

because I'm like.

Auren Hoffman (56:04.626) Why would you dot hire if you thought someone was good for the job? Why would you dot hire?

Varun Anand (56:09.368) Well, you feel insecurity, you feel insecurity because you're like, am I doing the best job? Did I really do a good job? Did I do a, did I do a good job? Am I doing my fiduciary responsibility to find the best fit for the company? Right. But I think the truth is, I think the truth is you don't actually have to be exhaustive. You just have to be right. It just has to feel right. And, and a lot of times when you're at companies like clay, good people come around, you know, and,

Auren Hoffman (56:20.102) if he just happened to be the first person.

Auren Hoffman (56:27.686) Yeah. Yeah.

Varun Anand (56:37.038) And by the way, this is a pivot to another piece of conventional advice. Like when you're at companies like Clay, VCs, lots of people will inundate you with like experienced hires, you know? And I think if you look at our org and you just remove the EPD side of the company for a moment and you look at the business hires, half of those people at Clay have never done their job before. But I think that's a lot of why, like we have, you know, we have plant store owners and brand designers and people.

Auren Hoffman (57:03.378) I'm surprised it's half, I'm surprised it's not like 90 % or something or whatever.

Varun Anand (57:07.66) Well, yeah, I mean, there are some people who know what they're doing, but like, think that a lot of that, like more than 50 % are never, they're coming from completely different backgrounds. Like it's archeologists being customer success people. It's physicists being events people. And that's what creates the special sauce, the creativity. You know, it's politics people running ops, right? Like, so I, not saying experiences have a place. And certainly if you're hiring a lawyer or an accountant or a data scientist or an engineer, you probably should hire someone who knows what they're doing.

but I think it just comes at the right fit and the stage, like, know, our salespeople aren't salespeople, right? We don't hire salespeople to do sales. We don't pay commission. and only now are we hiring like more seasoned salespeople because that's a better fit for us now. So it's just like thinking about the fit. And a lot of times people feel pressured to just be like, let's hire the person who's done it before. Whereas I know there's always advice like, Hey, don't hire someone at Microsoft to do something at Figma or whatever, but

Even more so, people won't do that. People won't make that obvious mistake. But now people are still making the mistake of hiring someone who's done it at a startup to expect them to do it again at another startup. And even that, I would say, is flawed in many ways. And truly, is that person really the right fit for your state and company and what you need?

Auren Hoffman (58:24.978) You mentioned like, you're on the phone. You think this person's good. You don't have to interview 100 people. You can hire them. You're also married. How did you do that with your spouse? Did you have to go through like 18 people first? Or how did you make the decision to get married there?

Varun Anand (58:46.254) No, think the same thing happened with my wife. My wife was, I don't want to say she's the first relationship I was in, but like the second or the third, you know? Like I met my wife when I was 23. She was actually six years older than me. She was 29 at the time. But I was very young when I met my wife and just committed. It felt good. I was happy. I am happy. You know, it's working. Like I'm not trying to overthink my happiness, you know? Like it's working. I'm happy. Everything's good. And

Auren Hoffman (59:06.0) Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah.

Varun Anand (59:13.098) It's again, easy to feel FOMO or pressure of like, the grass greener? Is this happening? But it's just like, I'm happy. Things feel great. We're very aligned. We're in love. Like don't overthink that. Cause most people aren't even in that state. If you're happy, you're not, you're at 90%.

Auren Hoffman (59:23.462) Yep. Right, right, right, right. If you're happy and love, they like you like that's, that's about all you could ask for. That's pretty amazing. Yeah. this has been amazing. Thank you for joining us at world of DaaS. I follow you at VX and on at on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to get you there. This has been a ton of fun and super interesting.

Varun Anand (59:44.782) LinkedIn. That's where we're pushing the content. LinkedIn.

Auren Hoffman (59:48.23) Okay, LinkedIn. So I also follow you on LinkedIn as well. So yeah, absolutely. This has been amazing. Thank you again.

Varun Anand (59:50.925) Yeah.

Awesome, thanks, Auren.