The CRO Spotlight Podcast

Sriharsha Guduguntla Podcast Transcript

Warren Zenna: So hello, and welcome to this episode of the CRO Spotlight Podcast.
I'm Warren Zenna. I am the founder of [00:01:00] CRO Collective, and what's going to be happening, just a little update, is my partner, Derek Sather, who you might have heard of. He was the CRO of Winning By Design. He's an incredible person. We are going to be co-hosting this podcast going forward, so we're going to do our first episode together, just the two of us.
It should be in the can soon. Going forward, he and I are going to do a dual hosting stint on this show. He brings a ridiculous amount of perspective, and it's good to have that chemistry of the two of us talking to people. So I'm really looking forward to that. It'll be a really good addition to the show and bring another perspective, and you'll get to not listen to me banter all day.
So anyway, we had a really amazing conversation, one of the best conversations I've had in a while. A young man by the name of Sai Guduguntla, he's the founder and CEO of Hyperbound. You might have heard of Hyperbound. It's an amazing platform. It's like a sales coach. It travels with you across the entire journey if you're a sales rep, and it's just skyrocketing. [00:02:00]
This company's just blowing up, and it's an amazing platform. I met them a while back when the platform first came out, and I was like, "Wow, this is really, really exciting." We had this really amazing philosophical conversation about AI, from his perspective, and it made me think a lot.
So I'm eager to get your perspective on it. Again, if you like this podcast, please recommend it to people. If there is a ratings thing in any of your platforms, please give it five stars. I just want to get as many people to listen to this as possible, and I can't thank all of you enough for listening and writing me these great notes on LinkedIn about how much you like it.
It really means a lot to me, and it makes me feel like I'm serving the community, which is what I want to do. So enjoy, and thanks so much for being here. Sai, good to see you, man.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Good to see you, man. How are [00:03:00] you doing?
Warren Zenna: Yeah, really good. I'm glad you're here. I know we talked about you doing this for a while, and thank you for coming. I know you're busy. You're probably, like, hammered, you know? As a matter of fact, you probably just opened your laptop because you were working, you know?
and you,
you,
Sriharsha Guduguntla: been busy, busy. Yeah.
Warren Zenna: Great, it's great. I've just watched Hyperbound grow, you know, and it's such a cool story. It really is one of those really great products. You just look at it and go, "Okay, this is great," you know?
I'd love to hear a bit, if you don't mind. Tell everybody who you are, what Hyperbound is, and then we're going to talk a bit about the business, how you grew it, how you started it, and we'll get into some conversation around your go-to-market strategies and leadership. So all that, okay?
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Absolutely. Well, thank you for having me. I know this has been a long time coming. I appreciate it, and I'm glad we could make it happen. My name is Sriharsha. I go by Sai, co-founder and CEO here at Hyperbound. I've been building the business for about almost three years now. That's how long the technology we're building has even been possible. [00:04:00]
So,
Warren Zenna: That's right.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: It's been a fun couple of years. For folks who don't know what Hyperbound does, I think the simplest way to describe it is it's your AI sales coach, or your thought partner, if you will. It follows you as you run your deal everywhere, everything from pre-call prep to joining you on the call live, coaching you, giving you battle cards, nudging you in the right direction, to giving you feedback after the call, debriefing what just happened, and strategizing with you.
So it's like your AI deal thought partner. It's been exciting. The platform has evolved significantly since we launched it in 2024, and we're seeing a lot of interest across the board.
Warren Zenna: Amazing. So let's talk about that, because I know how this stuff goes. You have to add features, or you respond to the market and product changes. I'm really interested in this. When you first launched the product initially, [00:05:00]
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Sure.
Warren Zenna: What was the problem you were solving at the time you launched it?
Sriharsha Guduguntla: That's a good question. It kind of comes back to our backgrounds. My co-founder and I are both engineers by background, so we've never sold a thing in our lives. We've been coding and developing large language models for a while. My co-founder did machine learning research at Carnegie Mellon. I did some machine learning research over at UC Berkeley before this. I was also at Salesforce for a while. He was on the Meta Ads core ML team. So that's our background, and we started by building an entirely different product from Hyperbound. It has nothing to do with what we're doing today.
I remember we were at a conference in New York, and I was sitting at a roundtable with a bunch of CROs, and one of the CROs turns to me and says, "So let me get this straight. You're an engineer. [00:06:00] You've only been selling this product for like three months, and you guys have 10 customers and $250K in revenue already.
How the hell did you guys learn how to sell? You don't sound like an engineer to me." I said, "Well, first of all, thank you for the backhanded compliment, I guess." And he said, "Well, do you guys have a coach? Who taught you how to sell?" I said, "Well, I guess we don't really have a coach, but we practice with this AI chatbot that we built." He said, "What do you mean you practice with an AI chatbot?" So I pulled out my laptop and showed him this chatbot we used before calls. We used to practice objections with it, run through some talk tracks with it, and he was just so mesmerized by what he saw, jaw dropped, eyes wide, and he said, "I've been in sales for 15 years and I've never seen anyone learn how to run a sales process by chatting with an AI chatbot." It just blew his mind. Eventually, after talking to some more people, we learned that it was basically role-playing. [00:07:00] That's what we were doing. We were role-playing with an AI bot and practicing before calls. So we launched this product a month and a half later, publicly pivoted the entire company, and it just took off.
It went viral on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, every channel you can possibly imagine, and it just blew up. It grew like crazy.
Warren Zenna: Okay. That's when I saw it. Not the earliest, but one of the earlier iterations. It was sort of like a test pilot, you know? What I loved about it was how you could go into it and create the character of the person you're going to be speaking to.
Not only their title, but also their circumstances, their budget, right? Their personality, some of their disposition or biases, things you might predict are likely to be the case with the person you're talking to, so you can simulate the exact type of situation you're going to be speaking into. [00:08:00]
Or, if I may, if you're managing a bunch of people, you can create a whole bunch of scenarios that you know your people are going to have to encounter, so they can get used to it. It's sort of like a sparring partner. You already got some bruises, so it's okay when you get in the ring, because you've given them a hit before and you're not that intimidated by it anymore.
I thought that was brilliant, right? I agree. I'm an old dude. You're younger than my kids, okay? I think it's cool, because I grew up selling. I was a salesperson at your age. I was just selling stuff. The only way you learned was either you did it, right?
Or you watched your peers do it. You were shadowing people. The person who showed me how to sell, I just followed him around and listened to him, and I mimicked him. It's the same thing, but this is obviously much more scalable and faster. [00:09:00]
So where has the product evolved? Is it the same thing, or explain.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Yeah, it's interesting, because we got a little lucky from a timing perspective. When we launched this product, we started out with a cold call use case. It was the primary use case, mostly BDRs or AEs, full-cycle AEs, practicing prospecting.
At the time, email response rates were on a major decline. People were worried that outbound might be dead, and it was like this big wave of "We need to get back on the phones." And you look at the workforce and you realize 70% of the people you're hiring straight out of college have never even made a freaking phone call in their lives. [00:10:00]
They're what I call the iPhone generation. They've spent their entire lives texting, sending emojis, and they're afraid to just give their friend a call. They'd rather just text them, and now you're asking them to call a chief information security officer and sell them on a product they have no idea about.
It's very difficult to build that level of confidence in a short period of time, especially during ramp, if they're a younger rep. That's where it all started. Now, you asked how the product has evolved and where it's headed. The simplest way to put it, Warren, is that role-play is great, and we love practicing, and practice makes perfect. But at the end of the day, if the practice isn't translated to what's actually happening in the field, it doesn't matter, right? So the focus has been, how do we translate that practice into revenue and show that a rep who practices can actually do better in the field? Part of this realization came from actually hiring a real sales coach.
So at the time, we hired a guy named Bilal. He's our head of key accounts now, so he joined us full-time. But he started out as a sales coach, [00:11:00] and he would shadow us on calls. He would listen in, we'd jump off the calls, and he'd spend two hours lecturing us about every single thing we screwed up. Then he'd jump on the next one and show us how he would do it, and it was just the best and fastest way to learn, and that's how we got better quicker than we ever thought. My thought was, "Why not just build something that could be the Bilal for every rep?" Wouldn't it be amazing if every rep had a mentor riding alongside them every single day, giving them exactly what they need, strategizing with them, coaching them? That's what we're looking to build now at Hyperbound. The tech wasn't quite ready three years ago to build it, but today I think it really is there. We believe that every rep can have their own Bilal.
That's where we're
Warren Zenna: Yeah. Look, it's a great idea. No question. I had one. I sat next to the person who trained me, and he's still a good friend of mine.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Mm-hmm.
Warren Zenna: He [00:12:00] was amazing, you know? He would listen to my calls, and I knew he was listening. Then when we were over, he'd walk over and give me the whole rundown of what I said and what happened, and there's no question that I got a lot better very fast.
After a while I sort of figured it all out. Then, modestly, I got better than him. He said so. He said, "You're better than me now," you know? It should be that way. You should want that, you know?
So that's interesting. It really is more full-cycle than just coaching pre-call.
It's like, let's have someone travel with you on your shoulder, almost like a Sherpa, as it were, you know?
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Exactly. It's pre-call, on-call, post-call, so they're traveling with you everywhere you go.
Warren Zenna: Mm-hmm. Great. So now you're more enterprise, right? You're focusing on the larger customers, correct?
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Exactly. We've primarily been upmarket most of the time, so [00:13:00] upper mid-market and enterprise is our primary focus.
Warren Zenna: Mm-hmm. Great. So how are you guys doing? Where are you at right now? What's
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Yeah. I
Warren Zenna: I know you've said, "I got some funding." I know you've got some partners and whatnot. I saw some of that activity, but whatever you're allowed to talk about, I'd love to hear it.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Yeah, things are going well. We raised our Series A last year, last September. We raised a $15 million Series A. This year we started the year with 17 employees, and today we're a little over 50. So in just under seven months, we grew like crazy. We're at a point where the customer base has more than quadrupled in the last year. We've closed some seven-figure deals. We're expanding our existing clientele into the new products we've launched. So it's been great, man. I think the market has also been evolving. People are realizing that build versus buy is a conversation we're hearing more and more. Consolidation is something we're hearing all the time. Budget scrutiny exists across the board. There's a lot of questions and things up in the air, but being a startup, you've got to weather the storm, and that's the only way to get through it. [00:14:00]
Warren Zenna: Yeah, so let's talk about that.
I don't know if this is true. There are probably a lot of people as smart as you out there who might say, "I can whip this up. I've got a Grok bot account, and I can build an agent that follows me along and gives me coaching." I know it's not that easy, but it is easier.
It certainly is easier, right? We're building stuff. Nothing as sophisticated as that, but stuff I would never even be able to build, and yet I can do it, right? So what is the point at which, from your viewpoint, being in this now, software sort of dies, and it's going to be hard to build out a market, because someone can say, "You know what? [00:15:00]
I'm just going to have my repo absorb this thing, ingest it, rebuild it for me, and I'll do it myself." What are the barriers to that? What's the reality of that, and what are your thoughts on how the market is moving in that direction?
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Yeah. I'll say this as an AI engineer. I think most of the market, particularly the revenue leaders we talk to day to day, especially in the enterprise, doesn't know what's coming for them. Even two years ago, nobody believed AI could write code and build software. Here we are, AI is actually starting to replace software engineers, and that's crazy, because that's me. It's definitely crazy to see that my own job is starting [00:16:00] to get replaced by AI. I'll be honest, when we started the company, we were very skeptical that AI could move so quickly, as were a lot of other people, but that's
changed a lot.
Warren Zenna: Yep, for sure.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: It's gotten to a point where you have to accept that it's real, that it's here, and that it can probably outsell you in some ways. So the question is, if I have to get to a point where I can trust AI like that, what do I have to do?
That's where I feel like a lot of people building things are. Sure, you can whip up a ChatGPT and a Claude, put a bunch of context into it, build a quick harness, and make it work. But do you trust what the AI says? How do you know you can trust it? How do you know that whatever it's coaching you on, the feedback it's coming up with, the strategy it's telling you, is rooted in something, right? I think that's what Hyperbound has been very focused on, engineering that context [00:17:00] layer so it understands what your top performers do that's different from everyone else, and then translates that top-performer behavior to everyone else. That is a much harder problem. I'm happy to go into it, but you
Warren Zenna: I would like to. Let's do it. It's totally fine. It's a great conversation to have, because I agree with you. I've been doing this now... there's a benefit I have, and it's weird, I didn't plan it this way.
I've just been doing this a long time. Like six years I've been doing this.
I created an immense amount of content, just ridiculous. The first year, all I did was make videos and write stuff. Then I wrote a book, and then I do the podcast. I have all my phone calls, so I had a massive library. I built out an entire thesis. My partner Derek and I built a course, which is on the shoulders of the other one.
I say this mainly because it gave us the foundation of a really amazing, proprietary IP library that can inform a brain. We can do things with that now. Like you said, I talk to my platforms and they know exactly what I'm saying, and they're speaking the language. [00:18:00]
They also... I can ask it to push the boundaries on things. Where are we wrong? Where should we be going next?
Instead of us being sycophants and just telling me what I already know. What is next, you know?
Or how could this be applied to this situation uniquely?
It's remarkable, frankly, how well it does this now, you
know? But that took time. No one can just come into the marketplace and do that without having that library. So I'm curious, talk me through how you solved that.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Yeah. There are two ways I like to think about it. Number one, everyone thinks call data, email data, and CRM data are enough to give you the full picture of what's going on. That's far from true. It's one of the big reasons why, even when you plug in all of that data, AI still can't be trusted to give you the right recommendations. It only tells you what happened, it doesn't tell you the why. [00:19:00] A simple example: I just finished a call and I know I need to write a really strategic follow-up email, summarizing exactly what they care about. AI can write a quick early draft, and then I refine it, make it better, and send it. Now, AI doesn't know why I made it better. It just knows that I did. It can infer things, but it doesn't know the why. That's the part that's missing. If the AI doesn't know why I made that email better, how does it know to make it better next time? So what we've built is that the AI is starting to actually learn from your top performers.
For example, take that situation. I'm a rep, I just wrote that email. The AI will actually call me and interview me. It says, "Hey, I saw you sent this email and made a bunch of changes to it. Why? Explain your reasoning to me." Then it talks it through with you, strategizes with you, and then it learns, right?
This is the same thing you do with a coach, right? [00:20:00]
You do something, they correct you, and you're like, "But why? Why do we have to do that?" Then they explain it. "Oh, I get it," and you learn it and do better next time. That's what we're trying to do with the AI. If you do that enough with enough reps, you're suddenly building a brain where no matter who's coming in and out of the door, you have a brain that understands why deals are won here and why deals are lost here. That's more powerful than anything.
So
Warren Zenna: now,
okay, go ahead. Continue. I don't want to interrupt you.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: I'll give you the other framework to think about as well,
Warren Zenna: Sure. Yeah.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: One is learning the why behind the actions a rep takes. Then there's a difference between a tier one action and a tier two action. Tier one actions, in my eyes, are things like, "Oh, the call just finished. Let's send a follow-up email. [00:21:00] The call just finished. Let's fill out an RFP for them." Those are tier one actions. Tier two is the strategic question: what's the next strategic thing we need to do? Do we have to multi-thread right now? Should we bring in RevOps now? Should we go find out who the budget holder is? Should we ask these hard-hitting questions?
What is the next best strategic thing to do in this deal? That's the type of thing the AI cannot do until it has that why. So anyway, that's my long-winded explanation.
Warren Zenna: That's great. I love it. So here's the thing. I totally get it. It all makes sense. I use the word, and I don't know if it's the right word. There's no other word we have right now in our lexicon, but is it the programming? Is that it? It knows to...
I understand the business rules, however you want to call it. It's designed to notice that there was an augmentation to its message, and that it now needs to figure out why that message was changed, and then it gains that knowledge, right? The thing is, like I say, it keeps that knowledge. [00:22:00]
That's the point. It doesn't just acknowledge it, "Oh, I get it." It actually becomes smarter.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Mm-hmm.
Warren Zenna: Then how does your platform know how to transpose that learning to a different situation? How does it make the inference that, oh, that would be applied in this situation too?
I think that would be a difficult leap to make. How did you solve that one?
Sriharsha Guduguntla: That's a great question, and that's what the context layer is all about underneath the hood. We have a context graph underneath the hood that's updating itself every time one of these situations happens. So the next time the AI recognizes a similar situation, it can directly correlate. [00:23:00]
It can say, "Oh, yeah, I've seen this before. I've seen it at least 40 times in the last week from these three top reps." Then it suggests it to the rep right then, in the flow of work. Imagine reps in Gmail, about to shoot off the email, and the AI comes in: "Wait, wait, wait, hold up. You're missing this line. This is going to be the big hitter line." And why? Here's the proof. This worked for Bilal, this worked for Isaac, this worked for X other rep in the last week. If you want, click into it, and I'll give you a full summary of what happened and why. The proof points are what's important.
The AI can't just say, "Hey, do this." It needs to tell you why and be able to explain itself credibly.
Warren Zenna: That's amazing. I love it. [00:24:00] So cool. I can see how the complexity of that is not something someone can build in their garage, at least not today anyway. I mean, who knows?
Sriharsha Guduguntla: That one's a tough one. I
Warren Zenna: Yeah, and I get it.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: We have a team of machine learning engineers literally designing that context layer every single day. There's millions of dollars of investment going into just that.
Warren Zenna: Yeah, I can imagine. It's amazing. I don't know how to say it, but are we at the point yet, with what you're doing, where this is the kernel of thinking machines?
Sriharsha Guduguntla: You know, where is this all headed? I'll, uh
Warren Zenna: What is thinking, you know?
I
mean, are we just doing the same thing in a way? Are our brains doing it faster? Is that all we're trying to do? Or is it mimicking thinking, or has it become thinking? I'm being philosophical intentionally here. I'm just curious what you think.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: You know, I don't know if this is the architecture that [00:25:00] will lead to AGI. When I think of thinking, that reminds me of true AGI. That's like, okay, the AI has a mind of its
Warren Zenna: Yeah, I'd say it's maybe not there yet, because you're still training. However, it could be sort of,
you know, let's say the future has already happened and we're living in just a space and time
that we're at a point where this is where thinking began, right? We're sort of recreating thinking by figuring this stuff out, right?
Is there really anything new, or is it stuff that's already there and we're just discovering it? There's a difference between that, you know?
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Yeah.
Warren Zenna: There's a part of that, and to be honest with you, this is just my opinion: discovery is a false thing. I think we have this notion that we're so smart that we discovered things. I think they always were there. We were just suddenly able to distinguish them, you know? Once they become distinguished, they're new, and so it feels like a discovery.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: It feels like a discovery, but it's always been there. I mean, yeah. [00:26:00] I think that's how the world works, right? Until you don't know what you don't know, and then when you find it, it feels like a discovery, but it was always there.
Warren Zenna: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you could say it's a discovery, like, oh, I didn't know that was there, so there's a discovery there, but not in the way we're talking about. Maybe the better word would be true creation, right?
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Warren Zenna: I don't know. I think it's just a combination of things differently than they were before.
It's all the same stuff. There's nothing different, everything's the same.
So anyway,
I,
Sriharsha Guduguntla: I
will say it is getting to a point where it's unclear, to a certain degree, where all this is headed, right? I personally think that the way people buy will just change as a result of all of this. Because the reality is, Warren, if the AI gets to a point where it can actually think on its own, why even coach a rep if the AI can just run the deal?
Warren Zenna: I, I, that's my... Exactly.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: If the AI can just [00:27:00] run the deal and be the rep, then the question is, okay, great, we've figured out the seller side, but is the buyer willing to buy from an AI rep?
Warren Zenna: Gonna be a buyer either.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: There's not going to be a buyer
either. Exactly.
Warren Zenna: No. It's the same thing happening on the other side. They're both sets of decisions.
One is my motivation to persuade you of something so you make a commitment to it. The other is I have a need, and I have to make a decision about making a commitment to fulfilling that need, right?
Based on the options. They're both the same. They're just the opposite sides of the same dynamic, right? So if we can postulate, and it's pretty easy to think, that you don't need a salesperson in the world, then you don't need a buyer either. I could see what's happening, like, okay, I've got this thing on right now, like everything, right?
So if this is on all day, which it is, over time it's going to start to... It's not there yet, but it theoretically could start to know a pattern recognition around [00:28:00] the way I make decisions and my needs and stuff.
It could independently go out and come back to me and say, "Oh yeah, by the way, I heard you talking to your wife today about the washing machine dryer.
I found one for you. It's this price. It's over here. You said you wanted to get a new one. Here are the options." I didn't have to do any search at all. It just listened to the dialogue, went off independently, and said, "Hey, I'm going to fulfill this person's inquiries based on what I'm hearing, and I'm going to fill in the gaps.
And I bought you more cat food, because I noticed you said to your wife that you're running out. And I know the temperature changed outside and your heater probably hasn't been turned on, so we had somebody come over and..." Why does this stuff need me to make phone calls anymore?
I think that's essentially what's probably going to happen.
Um, I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's probably going to
Sriharsha Guduguntla: That's the thing, right? It almost feels like it's not even in anyone's control.
The world is headed in that [00:29:00] direction, and people are going to have to evolve with whatever happens at the end of the day. I do think that when it comes to buying, too, think about Amazon, right?
I go on Amazon, I put in my filters, check some reviews, look at the prices, and make a purchase. I could totally see people doing that, and this time, instead of clicking a bunch of buttons, you're just
talking with an... It doesn't even have to be a voice agent. It could
be just a chat agent that
Warren Zenna: It doesn't have to be at all.
I agree.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: There's no empathy, there's no relationship.
It's really just a transaction,
Warren Zenna: Exactly, and there's so much transactional stuff that goes on, right?
So I think there are two sides to it. One is the transactional stuff that we probably, well, not probably, I'd say definitely, waste a lot of time on because we have no choice right now,
won't be taking up any bandwidth [00:30:00] because it'll happen in the background
with high fidelity, right?
The right things will come, and
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Yep.
Like, any sort of low ACV product, anything under $25,000, is truly at risk of being replaced by AI.
Warren Zenna: Yeah, I get it. Totally. It's a weird thing. You're at this interesting stage, because one thing we can't solve is living longer, at least not yet. We'll get there, I suspect.
But historically, even with all modern medicine, and thank God how healthy I am, I probably have another 30, 40 years if I'm lucky.
You could have 100. Okay? That puts you in a really different place in this whole journey, because you're even more at the beginning of it.
Imagine 50 years from now, right? I know you know better than me, but I'm just reflecting on this as we talk about it.
Particularly, I think two things happened when Grok Bot came out. [00:31:00]
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Mhm.
Warren Zenna: I started using it, and it started to dawn on me, because I use these things a lot. I'm really immersed in this stuff now.
All of a sudden I saw a loop I didn't see before.
Okay? I could ask it something, and because it had its own compute, it could go and do the stuff for me. I could send it off to do things, and it would do them and come back. I could leave my computer and it would be working, and I'd come back and it would be done. I was starting to get a feel for the rhythm of how these things work, and all of a sudden my brain went, oh boy, okay.
Now I see how everything is starting to tie together, and how these really smart people are figuring out ways to build a network of technologies that connect all the pieces together seamlessly enough. Then it gets pushed into my world, where I can just do it from my phone.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: I know. [00:32:00] Doing everything on your phone, I think that part is still so underrated. I have friends in software engineering who are coding with their phones now.
We go out to lunch and they're on their phone. I'm like, "What are you doing on your phone?"
"Oh, just coding."
"What?"
Warren Zenna: So it really is crazy. To see people like you building these things is amazing. You're benefiting greatly from the financial opportunities that are available now, and all the amazing ways this stuff can work.
And at the same time, there's still absolutely no [00:33:00] idea what it's going to be like a year from now.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: It is.
Warren Zenna: We're literally flying at the speed of light with no idea what's coming ahead of us.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Last six months, it's completely changed. And the thing is, it's not just the vendors like ourselves, it's also the buyers. The buyers are very confused. Every day I talk to a buyer, and they're all at different maturity stages. There are folks who are very pro-AI.
There are folks who say, "I hate AI, but I'm being told I need to use AI and figure this stuff out." It's a confusing time to be a buyer right now, and I empathize.
Warren Zenna: Yep, we see the same.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Yeah.
Warren Zenna: I'm curious what your thoughts are on this, because again, generationally, right? You're in Silicon Valley, you went to school, you're an engineer, so you know, we both are in a way in our own bubbles. We're immersed in a world where everyone thinks this way and does this stuff.
What percentage of the people in our country right now do you think really are working with these things to the extent that, I don't say you or me, maybe you are, because you're probably at the top of the, you know, because of the way you're doing things. But I'm curious, because I ask the question for this reason. [00:34:00]
I have kids, and they're both in their twenties, and they hate this stuff. They don't want to go near it. They think it's evil. They think it's going to take over the world. They think it's going to destroy creativity. They could be right, I don't know, whatever. But it doesn't matter. What I'm saying is there seems to be an entire chunk of the population that has that attitude, or they're just afraid of it and don't want to deal with it, and they just want to do stuff that's comfortable for them.
I have a tendency to think we have a success bias, where we're in this world and we think, "Oh my God, it's so amazing." But it's really still nascent in many ways. I'm curious what your perspective is, because you hang out with people. Generationally, do you see the same, or are you in a world where everyone's doing the same thing you're doing?
Sriharsha Guduguntla: That's actually, you know, [00:35:00] it's interesting you say that, because you're right. We're definitely in a bubble here in the Bay Area. Thankfully, I have a girlfriend who lives out in Iowa, so I go out to the Midwest every
few months and spend some time there,
Warren Zenna: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: get out of the bubble for a while,
Warren Zenna: Get out of the bubble for a while.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: I can tell you, man, I don't hear the word AI out there at all. It comes up here and there, and people will bring it up, but to your point, it's more in a negative way than a positive one. People are definitely afraid, rightfully so. I think generally it's scary to not know what's about to happen. It's anxiety-inducing for a lot of people, and I think that's the worst part. If I knew, "Hey, in two years this is exactly what's about to happen," I could at least prepare for it mentally, [00:36:00] physically, whatever it is.
But because I don't know, that's the part I think is more scary for people, preparing. I talk to kids in college right now. They don't know what they want to do, and I empathize. I have parents who come to me and say, "What do you think my kid should major in now?" Because everyone's saying everything's going to be
Warren Zenna: What do you tell them? What do you tell them?
Sriharsha Guduguntla: AI.
I tell them, "I don't know." I will say, though, you either follow the pack and become the expert in something, or there's no sitting around anymore. Whatever you do, you could go into music, you have to become the best freaking musician out there.
You go into computer science, you'd better become the best freaking coder out there. You go into, [00:37:00] filmmaking, you want to be an actor, you've got to stand out. I just feel like whatever you do, you have to strive to be the best version of yourself, otherwise you fall behind. Not to say those folks aren't going to have opportunities. I'm sure
Warren Zenna: No question.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: up and new
Warren Zenna: No, I think that's sage wisdom. I have an interesting perspective on this one.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: I just think doing things without passion, the folks who say, "Yeah, I'm just going to do that and we'll see what happens," I'm like, "No.
That's not going to fly in this world." Whatever you choose, you've got to go all in and be super passionate about it, otherwise you're not going to be the best at it,
Warren Zenna: Yeah, I look, that's true. I think there's a certain percentage of the population who innately think that way.
They just want to be really good at stuff, or they're born with a recognition of their talents, and they just know they're really good at something, and they have the guts to pursue it regardless of how [00:38:00] weird it might be.
There's a lot of conventional stuff that drives people to make decisions. They want to fit in, or they want to make their parents happy, or they want to satisfy the crowd. That can divert people away from something they know they should be doing because they want to do it, and that's not an easy thing to navigate when you're young.
Not a lot of young people have the self-confidence to say, "You know what? No, I'm going to do this because that's what I want to do." It's a certain kind of person who does that. But I would say, to your point about fear, which I think, look, I get it, I don't think the issue, I think this is an illusion.
I don't think it's an issue of not knowing what's going to happen,
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Hmm.
Warren Zenna: and I say this because we never know what's going to happen.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: That's fair.
Warren Zenna: That's not a new thing. What makes it seem new is the speed. If I'm driving a car five miles an hour and I don't know what's going to happen next, it sort of doesn't matter.
I'm only going five miles an
Sriharsha Guduguntla: That's actually a really
Warren Zenna: I'm going [00:39:00] 125 miles an hour and I don't know what's going to happen. All of a sudden the unknown is really scary. So I think it's the speed. It's not the unknown.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: You're right. Actually, I like the reframe there. It is about the speed at which things are moving, and that's what I was alluding to. I don't have time to prepare for the future. That's the issue. Even the kids going to college are like, "Does my four-year college degree even matter anymore two years from now?"
"Why should I care about my GPA right now?"
Warren Zenna: I don't think they should. I agree. I think it mattered at one point, but unless you want to be an academic or something, or you need to go to school to do... Which again, I can even put my foot in my mouth right now. I was going to say be a doctor. Medicine is going to be destroyed too. I mean, come on, this stuff's going to figure things out in two seconds.
It probably already has, to be honest with you.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Even law, you
Warren Zenna: Exactly. So I'm saying all these professions that require an incredible amount of study and time,
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Yeah.
Warren Zenna: I just think it's a really, it is [00:40:00] wild. So anyway, I want to switch gears a bit, because this is fascinating.
When you said something earlier in the conversation about how you built the business, and all of a sudden you were on YouTube and Instagram and stuff.
How did you do that? What was the way you chose to find these channels?
I want to get into the mechanics of it. Did you hire a bunch of people to do that for you? How did you figure all that out? Is it just because you generationally know how to do it? Or was it a strategy? That's an important part of this that people don't think about, getting out into the ether, right?
So tell me what you guys did to make that happen.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: When I started the company, we had an early advisor, and it's still one of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten, and it's really simple. He told me, "The best founders will find any way to get in front of the right person." At the time I thought, "Yeah, whatever."
Sure. [00:41:00] That might be true. But now it makes so much sense to me, because every step of the way I can point to someone who led to us getting there. It's all about how we get in front of that person. Take Bilal, our sales coach. I emailed him 15 times over the course of six months before he responded. When he jumped on the call with me, I asked, "How come you finally decided to respond?" He said, "Well, I've never been emailed by anyone 15 times in six months, so I'm here. What do you need from me?"
He literally gave me 15 minutes. I gave him the one-minute pitch, gave him a quick demo, and he said, "This is really freaking cool." It just took off from there. Bilal coached us. He taught us how to run a sales process. I'm thankful for that. And there have been all kinds of amazing people throughout our journey who have helped us at every single point, even with these channels.
I can point to at least five or six different people who were key parts of it, who said, "Hey, you guys need to be active on LinkedIn. That's where our salespeople live. You need to build a brand for yourself. You need to be talking about the problem," [00:42:00] and "You need to meet all of these influential people." Then we were like, "Well, how do we get in front of all these people? This person has 300,000 followers on LinkedIn. They're not going to respond to me." So I just did what you could do, which is outbound. Cold outbound. Persistence pays off. And
Warren Zenna: Yeah. So you're making some consistent statements here, which is sort of, think less, do more,
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Think less, do more. Absolutely. That is literally my mantra always.
Warren Zenna: It's a good one. It's a good one. So what's going on next over there? What are you working on now, as you look at this future coming up on you, so you maintain your competitive advantage in the marketplace? [00:43:00]
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Yeah. Oh man, that's a loaded question. For me, it's simple. We need to help reps close more deals. If we're not doing that, the business is not going to survive. You could say all the stuff you want. You can say you're a system of record, blah, blah, blah. You can have all the best talk tracks in the world, but if you're not driving more business for your customers, you'll ultimately get ripped out. So that is the only focus for me. If that means there have to be slight pivots, new features, new products we didn't anticipate, or we need to invest in an area of the business I never thought we would invest in, well, we've got to do what we've got to do.
One of the things we're doing that I'm really excited about is we're starting to think about a forward-deployed model, where we actually say, "Hey, you're trying to build a bunch of stuff. You don't know what to build." Do you know how many times I hear that every day?
I just got off a call with the head of commercial ops at one of the largest companies in the world. I won't name names. He comes to me and says, "What do I build? How do I build? I..." [00:44:00] "People are telling me all this stuff. You guys are the experts. Teach me." I was like, that is...
And I realize no software is going to solve these people's problems. We can't just be selling software anymore. We have to sell the expertise. We have to sell the services. So we're evolving as well. We're not locked into just selling software now. We're like, "Hey, we will absolutely put a forward-deployed expert in your company who can come in with all our expertise, background, software, everything, and build whatever you want." That's top of mind, and it's going to be a big leg of the business moving forward,
Warren Zenna: That makes a lot of sense, man. That's really good. Just a quick anecdote. My big career breakthrough came when I got hired at a company that did mobile advertising marketing when the iPhone came out. They were too early, but it was cool that they were trying. The App Store opened up, so people were building apps.
The company was bought by a big holding company, and I got this really cool job running their whole sales organization. Long story short, I was selling mobile apps to corporations. It was a big deal.
It cost a couple of million dollars to build an app back then. It was a slog. We had all these developers and project plans. It was awful, building these things. It was just bad business. The profitability was there, but just building software back then was just [00:45:00]
It was like 2008, 2010 or something like that.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Right.
Warren Zenna: I was sort of like you. I'm listening all the time. I'm not just on a machine. I'm thinking, what... And they made the same exact revelation. I was on a call with a really big company, basically the biggest bank in the world.
A guy runs one of the big groups there. I walked away and I thought, "He doesn't want apps. He wants to know how to make his company move into mobility. That's what he wants."
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Yeah.
Warren Zenna: So I went back to my boss and said, "You know, we should help people do that." They were looking for a future they wanted to live into.
We completely changed our business. We became a consulting company to help businesses that were stuck in a desktop mindset mobilize, and we did great, right? So it sounds like the same thing. You've figured out
Sriharsha Guduguntla: It's a similar revelation.
Warren Zenna: 100%. You get a call like that, and you're obviously smart enough to hear the signal, which is, okay, wait a minute [00:46:00] here.
People are looking at what we're doing. They're not looking at our product. They're looking at the way we build something and it's working, and they want to do the same thing. That's a great
Sriharsha Guduguntla: We spent an hour on that call, and I didn't show him a single demo of the product, and he didn't want to see one either.
Warren Zenna: No, he wasn't calling you for that.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Yeah, he wanted to jump on that call just to hear my perspective on where things are going and what he should do. Now we have a call scheduled with his team, and I was like, "So we're going to schedule a demo, right?"
He's like, "No, no, no. We don't need a demo. I just want to bring in my partner."
Warren Zenna: Yeah, yeah. Don't
Sriharsha Guduguntla: I'm like,
Warren Zenna: Definitely make them smarter. But it's great, and I think it's beautiful. I like that a lot. I think that's very, very cool. Look, man, what you're doing is really awesome, and you've had an amazing, fun, cool ride in your career. It's great to watch.
We appreciate you guys. We're rooting for you all the time. We think your product is great, and [00:47:00] now I've got to take another look at it, because I haven't seen it in a while, so we'll have to do that too. Thank you for this great conversation. I really appreciate you being here, and it's good talking to you, man.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Of course. Likewise, man, I appreciate you. Even the way we got in touch was so serendipitous. I feel like I saw you at events over and over and over again
Warren Zenna: There you go.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: until you're like, "Who is this guy? Why
is he
Warren Zenna: I just, I'm like you, I don't shut up. I just keep going, and keep going, and keep going. Know, if you,
you know, if you
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Here we are. We're here.
Warren Zenna: Long enough, people will remember it. That's how it goes, basically.
But yeah, thank you, man. Really great. I'm sure we'll see you around.
I'm sure we'll be seeing each other at a couple of conferences and whatnot, and hopefully we'll do some stuff together. I know you've got to get back to building the world, so go do that. Thank you.
Sriharsha Guduguntla: Thank you. Appreciate it. [00:48:00]
[00:49:00]