Inside Clay's unconventional path to $1.25B: Rethinking GTM, pricing, and enterprise sales | Varun Anand (Co-founder and Head of Operations)

Brett: All right. Well, thank you for joining.

Varun: Thanks, Brett. Excited to be here. Let's go.

Brett: Let's start by talking about how you approached go to market in the very, very early days when you joined and how did you think about, building a PLG motion versus more traditional top down sales?

Varun: At the time, for whatever reason, Kareem and I were very intent on making a PLG motion happen. arguably it was a little irrational and actually in many all hands meetings with the team, from the months of May, 2022 to January, 2023, People were asking, why are we doing this? Why don't we just sell?

But, at least for me, I thought it was very clear that we could make this happen because I could see how this could be a self serve product and I think Kareem believed that as well and we had early evidence of it and we believed that with enough loops we could kind of make that happen. So maybe I can kind of walk through the journey to answer your first question of like how we approached it in the earliest days.

The first thing was, actually the very first thing I did in a very tactical way is, you know that, that, that group that Pete Kazanjy has called Modern Sales Pros, I'd been a member of that group for four years and,

Brett: funnily enough was inspired by a lot of the early first round community building. Yeah. And we spent a bunch of time talking about it, but yeah, yeah,

Varun: Amazing. So I like looked through the archive for the previous like three, four years, um, for the words enrichment and data and outbound and things like that. And basically, I windowed it down to 30 people who had said something, um, somewhat intelligent about this topic, uh, in the last three or four years.

And I emailed them all. And some were SDRs, some were agency owners, some were VPs of marketing and sales. Most of them agreed to talk to me, 

Brett: of the product when you were doing this?

Varun: it was a spreadsheet connected to a handful of APIs that, a few of which were data enrichment providers and it, but also there were a bunch of others that were more horizontal in their use cases.

And so it was a very horizontal kind of thing, but we had decided we're focusing on the go to market kind of use case and figuring out where to start.

Brett: And you had how many customers using it at that point?

Varun: maybe 10, 25 paying customers, any of whom were paying somewhere between 30 a month to 200 a month.

The true answer is really zero because all of those people were not ICP and all of them, or maybe all of them with the exception of two or three churned within the year when we really focused.

Brett: Oh, cause you had recruiting use case. You had All sorts

Varun: of things. Yeah, there was like an E. A. Person in there. There was all sorts of random people using it in different ways. yeah, technically there was 30 K of revenue or something, but they were all not using the product the way we wanted to focus. So they were not really our customers in that sense.

So we were kind of scratching starting zero from this focus area. So So anyways, we talked, I talked to these 30 people and the only ones who kind of, um, really understood this were these agency owners, these like cold email agency owners. And, you know, I think Kareem had known that pull from them for a while.

Um, but that's when it like really stood out to me at least. And, In retrospect, it makes sense because these are people who have, they feel the pain point really acutely because they have so many clients that all have the same needs. They're also technical. They are scrappy because they're entrepreneurs and they're like price sensitive.

So they want to do things in automated ways. and so that's why we kind of started with that because we felt immediate pull from them. And then the next tactical step is like, where do these people live? So, they actually live in WhatsApp groups. Uh, there's some really funny ones. Uh, there's one great one started by this guy, Jesse Ouellette, who's awesome.

and it's called the SaaS Yacht Club. there's one started by Eric Nowoslawski. It's called Sales Technicians. There's, there's a few more of these. So I would just join all of these WhatsApp groups and, um, basically would just wait for people to talk about problems related to data enrichment, which we kind of suspected was going to be the first preliminary use case.

Brett: You figured this out through the Modern Sales Pros conversations?

Varun: When I talk to these people from Modern Sales Pros, yes, yes. That's, and then, and then we'd have more conversations. They'll be like, well, where are you talking about this? And then eventually these WhatsApp groups kind of emerged. I'd use tools like sift in for social listening to like track these conversations on Reddit.

You know, pretend to be different people and like reach these people on reddit when they're talking about these problems, but the whatsapp groups were definitely the most effective. Um, and. And so we would use that as ways to, like, get these conversations and get into this ecosystem and get people they're really, solving their problems with Clay.

And then when we started to do that, that's how we'd get some of these meetings. We would start, we would have these, like, reverse demo conversations where I wouldn't traditionally demo the software. Basically, they would demo, like, they would demo it, themselves. Like, they would sign up, share their screen, do the flow.

I would help them do the individual steps through zoom annotations and they would learn the product that way. And so, because once they feel like they've done it once, they feel like they can do it again in a self serve way later.

Brett: So this is before they're a customer? It's a normal sort of first demo conversation?

Varun: And that is what actually helped us do a lot of things.

So that helped them have the confidence to come back to the product by themselves. It helped me get. Like a UX masterclass in what was wrong with the product, because, you know, they would make all these mistakes and clicking this button or clicking that button. And so I would have a litany of like product, feedback that I could share with Eric and our engineering team to fix.

would also have like, I would have like eight of these calls a day. So it was an insane amount of feedback to get. And then I broke with Eric and other engineers to fix all of these things. And you can imagine that compounded over seven months is kind of how we went from these initial sales calls, we're taking like seven demos to get someone to pay two, 300 a month to January, February of 2023, where it was taking one call or even none.

Brett: When you started to focus in on growth agencies, did you think at all about like, are there enough of them? Uh, the quality of the revenue from them, any of those types of things?

Varun: No, no. It's all about getting to the next step. You're just trying to get to the next step and that earns you the right to keep going and getting you to the step after that. And you know, they're kind of like stepping stones and stepping stones to help you find something great. 'cause you're, when you're building something new, there isn't a playbook for it.

And so you're just trying to get to the next stepping stone and you're kind of following novelty and interestingness along the way. And what I mean by that is. I would have eight of these calls a day, and occasionally someone would say something or have an idea for something that we would act on immediately that would unlock the next stepping stone.

So, just as a small example of that, you know, I'm on one of these calls. It's a random small private equity firm in Kansas City. They're trying to find plumbers in Oklahoma and Missouri that they want to buy and acquire, and they're like, you know, I wish I could scrape Google Maps for this. And I was like, we can make that happen, actually.

And that happened in a day, thanks to Eric on our team. And that opened up a whole series of use cases actually to be even more like practical about that. There's this entire venture firm, called fractal. It's a, it's a incubator and it's filled with vertical software companies. Every single one of those vertical SaaS companies, they cater to audiences that are on Google Maps.

the small businesses on Google Maps. That one integration basically helped us win the business of those like 50 or 60 companies that we would methodically go through. And so that's like a stepping stone to a use case that we would have never had if we weren't listening to that and like being open to that.

So one addendum to what you were talking about was, you know, you were asking like, Hey, our growth agency is too small of a market. How much are they going to pay us? Remember the use case was data enrichment. Right. And so we knew that like that has a massive market.

A zoom info has a several billion dollar market cap and minimum. And we, we knew that's just the first step. And so it's more like, okay. Growth agencies are the first customers who are. I have the skill set needed and the pain needed to use the product in the current state. And then we will improve it, take all their feedback and add more and more data partners.

That was my sole focus. My core top priority for 2022 was how can we get, how can we make this the best data enrichment product in the world by adding as many data partners in here as possible? And then we knew we could expand. And there was actually like a seminal moment when, When we closed Rippling, in March of 2023.

So We got connected to Rippling through, um, one of our investors. And, what was really cool about it is once we got talking to the actual users, they started using it themselves.

And obviously they had lots of problems that we helped with, but they started using themselves and they started expanding really quickly. Started using credits. And, um, And they went from a self serve customer paying a few hundred a month to, paying several thousand dollars a month in like an eight week times period.

And this was really meaningful for us because it was one of the first examples of a real company, of, of a significant, size and scale with our core ICP being able to self serve almost completely, with some basic support, uh, into a real contract. And so. That was a really significant sign for us and how we knew we could expand this from just growth agencies to regular startups, but also to major enterprises like a 10 billion company like Rippling.

Brett: Why did you think that PLG was important? Because it's slightly antithetical, like one of the benefits of, of doing a more sales led motion is, is you're interacting with customers in real time. You're then able to take that feedback back to your team. And so there's a diversion in terms of just, you know, go use the product yourself.

What was sort of the origin story of you went from the sales led motion, talking to lots of customers every day, getting some early traction, and then

Varun: But they're only paying us two, 300 a month. at minimum, it has to be a 5k, 10k annual contract to make a sales led motion work. So at this price point, um, and a credit based model like self serve has to work, and we can talk about how we eventually turn that into a sales led motion, charging six figures and more, but yeah.

So that's why the self serve motion had to work. I think to be honest. It was a more emotional reason than a purely business driven one. I think we just wanted a PLG business and wanted a self serve business. And I think we knew we could make that happen with Clay. I think it's a, it's certainly a better business model in many respects. and it's a more elegant one in many respects.

And, and, and at certain scales, you obviously need sales and that's an important element of it. But I think the honest answer is that we wanted it and we knew we could, we, there was, there was light at the end of the tunnel and we could get there. Um, and. At this price point and this type of product, the sales motion was not a sales that motion was not going to work.

We wanted to really give it our all on this before we tried to try something else dramatically different. 

 I think a couple of thoughts on your earlier points in the growth agencies, like they are also how we helped, right? That, that's how we learned about LinkedIn as the main growth lever for us. And I think we were open to that. We started to see the early signs of them posting on LinkedIn about Clay and the use cases and their incentive to do that wasn't like an affiliate fee from us.

Their incentive was that they wanted to position themselves as the expert of this nascent technology. We saw that and immediately pounced on it. Right. And it's like, okay, how can we enable more people to do this? And going all in on that, I would post content every day. Our team would post content every day that became how we generated a lot of demand.

And even to this day, we are still all in on LinkedIn as a main driver of growth for us. And, and, and, and we have a whole ecosystem that's not posting about us all the time. And so like those growth ages, like seeded the first elements of the growth motion on the marketing side as well.

Brett: A minute ago you were talking about how LinkedIn was kind of an early growth driver, but you didn't, you didn't share as much about, um, how you went about getting PLG going. where you were transitioning from actually doing a more sales led consultative sale that was driven by some of the WhatsApp conversations over to something that was more PLG

like.

Varun: So what are the elements of PLG? You need, um, you need demand that's coming in. You need to, um, convert them on the website. And then you need them to get into the product by themselves and get value and, and pay you money. Right. So those are the four steps. And so you have to kind of break it down into each of those elements.

So on the, on the acquisition side, how are you getting customers for us? You kind of have to fit the, and Emily Kramer has some good frameworks on this, but like you kind of have to fit the, the. The marketing style, the marketing motion to your product, and there has to be a good fit between the two. And so for us, we noticed that linkedin was really going well and content was really going well And we knew that both of those levers dovetailed really nicely with word of mouth And so for us, we were able to go all in on those two things, both through ourselves and through our partners.

And that's what drove the, the acquisition. Then it's like, okay, now you have to convert them on your website. we always enjoyed very high website conversion rates.

And part of the reason we did that was because we were able to Part of that can be attributed to these people being high intent coming from word of mouth or content and things like that. And part of it, I think we've always had a really high emphasis on brand and always overinvested in brand way more so than any other B2B software company that I'm aware of.

And I think that was always a strong intentional decision from the very beginning. Then they have to come into the product and get value on their own. So that was the entire purpose of the reverse demo and like having confidence in that. And so being able to take the seven sales calls into one to zero, that's how we got confidence.

And then people being able to come in, by themselves and get value. And then the last piece of that is monetization. So how are you going to charge? And so, um, in January of 2023, it'll be interesting to share that. Like we didn't have billing in the product. You couldn't pay for Clayton, the product until past a million in ARR.

until a million in ARR I was just sending Stripe invoices to people, which was crazy for a self serve product for like 200 a month. And so ultimately I think we made the right decision and landed on the right value metric. And that's like the most important thing, which was we landed on credits. And then we fiddled with the feature gates and the exact unit costs and all the pricing from there, like every month we would iterate on that, but we had the right value metric.

And so we felt confident in the pricing. So I'd say those are the four elements to building a self serve motion and kind of how we, at a surface level, did each one.

Brett: How did you think or land on the idea of credits?

Varun: Clay at the time was a spreadsheet and a spreadsheet has columns and rows. We basically realized that all the value is in the columns because every column you add is a new enrichment and that's what really matters and really the, the pricing lever should be, an equation, which is, Multiplying the columns by the rows.

And that comes back to credits basically. And we actually, this was actually fairly controversial at the time. We were a usage based pricing model in 2022. at the time it was fairly controversial because everything in sales tech was, per seat. Now it's obviously changed with AI. So it's, it's, so it's changed, but I think we were at the vanguard of that.

And constantly our customers would be shocked that we weren't a per seat company. People thought we were leaving so much money on the table, but ultimately There were many things here, but it's like, okay, we're first counter positioning against all the other sales tech companies that are per seat, but it's also,

it's about our value prop. We are a product of efficiency. We are a product that is aligned with your interests and we are not trying to charge you to have so many people using Clay because we want you to have fewer people using Clay. We just want you to have a few people using Clay to drive crazy ROI for your whole company.

And so it's very aligned with the customer. And I think we were early to that. But, uh, ultimately I think it was the right decision. 

Brett: What gave you the conviction to do that versus do the conventional thing?

Varun: It's obviously the better, uh, choice. Like, it's obviously aligned with, uh, what customers want. And I think with pricing, generally aligning your interests with the, the customer interests is what's going to work. I mean, I think, like, I don't, like, we knew that it was that we didn't want lots of people to use it because it's not a collaborative tool like Figma is, you know, Figma is a collaborative product.

So it even makes sense for them to have per seat

pricing, but we're not that right. We are a tool where you do one thing to orchestrate the actions of many. And so it had kind of intuitively made sense. And I think when in doubt, you go on the side of what's better for the customer, because you want to engender that long term loyalty and knowing, and even since then, by the way, I've Every decision we've made on pricing, we publish a memo every year on like our pricing updates and we're pretty transparent about why we make certain changes because when we make changes, we want it.

We want our users to know that we are aligned with them. And that's why we're making these changes.

Brett: What's some of the other things that got the growth engine of Clay working in the early days? And I think for folks that are less familiar with the company, one of the most unique parts, ironically, is for multiple years, you've had this incredible inbound machine that you've built. So building on what you were talking about with LinkedIn, what are the other things that you did?

Varun: Honestly, I think to keep it simple, if you just blow people's minds, people will come. I don't really think you need to overcomplicate it beyond that.

And that was basically the central mantra of our content just do things and show people how to do things that are really, really valuable to them. And that's all you have to do. Because if you do that, and you actually solve people's problems, you are clearing so much of a higher bar. Then what 99 percent of business software actually does.

And I think if you can do that and communicate it well and have a good brand that that reflects what you're trying to do, people will come. And we were really just focused on content and delivering that content and blogs and and on LinkedIn. There are many other ways of growing your business, right?

You could obviously do email outbound. You could do email outbound. paid ads, you could do SEO, there's many ways of generating traffic. We now have billboards all in San Francisco. For us at the time, these were the things that are working. And we were basically going all in on these two things.

Brett: And did you go about them in any particularly interesting ways?

Varun: So I think the honest answer is that now we go about the mining in particularly interesting ways. And we can talk about those. At the time, it was more brute force and it was more just regularly putting out the content and diligently doing that with some discipline and getting other people to do it as well.

and, and these would be the, the agency owners or customers and things like that. Now we have turned that into a machine that I think is actually pretty interesting. and what I mean by that is I think that so much of our business is a loop and there are so many feedback loops and we have now tried to create feedback loops in many parts of the business.

And so from a content perspective, it's like, as an example, we have, you know, 50 different Clay clubs hosting community events all around the world, from Bangalore to Sydney to Toronto and things that these amazing people do is, they like share play tables and there's content that comes from that.

We take that content and we can like put that in a LinkedIn post and we can combine those LinkedIn posts and put them into a blog post and combine the blog posts and put them into a guide. And you can have this loop where you can keep repurposing the content that I think is super powerful and can compound over time.

our growth marketing team led by Bruno has done an amazing job at enabling the rest of our community to, uh, to power content, and that can mean, like, how do we enable people to post something to now? And how do we incentivize them to do it? And how do we have Clay creator programs and Clay expert programs to incentivize that behavior?

But it could also mean, you know, we're using software internally. to help our creators post videos online that are personalized to them about Clay features, uh, in their own voice and doing that programmatically. And so I think there was actually a bunch of things that we're now doing that's very interesting and unique, but at the time it was more force of will.

Brett: And were you asking early customers to post, or this was just all organic and then you would try to amplify it, or thank them, or

Varun: It was a mix of both. I mean there was obviously something organic there happening and the reason it was organic was because Clay as a product enables that and it was in their incentive to do it because their agency owners, they're trying to win business and so they want to post on LinkedIn to position themselves in a certain way, but there was also a lot that we were doing to enable that.

And so we were telling them about new features, helping them make content, partnering with them to write things. So there was a lot that we were doing behind the scenes to help them with this. But there was a huge undercurrent of organic things that were happening that we couldn't just pull out of thin air.

Brett: What was the team structure in terms of generating and getting this stuff going? Obviously you have a large team now that does a bunch of this stuff. 

It 

Varun: was mostly a couple of people DIYing it. So early people were like Matthew Kwan and Yash and Eric Nowoslawski. I mean, I'll actually call out Eric in particular because I think hiring him was a huge accelerant to a lot of this because he is the king of the WhatsApp groups. He is one of the most, if not the most respected, agency owner there is.

And so us hiring him and bringing him in house gave us a huge amount of credibility within the audience. And it's one of those hires where I'm not thinking four years in advance. I'm thinking like, how do we get to the next step? Cause as First Round likes to say in the early days, it's all about getting to base camp.

And so we are just trying to get to base camp there. Right. And Eric really helps us get to base camp and he was with us for a year and made a huge impact in that year. And that's posting on LinkedIn. That's getting us the credibility in the, community groups on WhatsApp that he's already creating.

And he's already a huge part of that's getting all these agency owners on board. that's working with some of our top customers because he's the most creative outbound person there is. So we were having almost like an in house agency person doing these calls. remember that it's all a feedback loop.

So the people, myself, Matthew, Yash, Eric, who are working with customers. you know, we all have different skills. And so. We are very versatile. And so what that means is we can have these these reverse demo calls with customers. And then each one of those reverse demo calls is an idea for content.

It's not only an idea for content, but it's also product feedback.

Brett: Because you're seeing what they're trying to do with the product?

Varun: Yes. And then you can post about that. And obviously, I'm not going to say that this company is doing that, but you can just post about it, generally speaking. And so every conversation we have turns into content. uh, anonymized content.

Um, uh, every conversation we have turns into product feedback. And so there's a loop keeps on building when you're doing that.

Brett: As you were sort of building the early PLG motion, you were still doing a lot of sales conversations and reverse demo conversations all along the way?

Varun: Right. And remember that all of this was actually still what we were on a waitlist. We actually, launched our product in February 2022, removed the waitlist, two months later, put the waitlist back on, and then we didn't remove the waitlist until multiple millions of ARR in, you know, July of 2023.

Brett: What was the thinking behind the wait list?

And why did you remove it and then add it back? 

Varun: Well, when we removed it, we was like, Oh, we should be general access and then it was overwhelming. And we were talking to all sorts of people who are the right fit. And we wanted to like, make sure people were bought in to have some barrier. We actually use Clay to manage the wait list internally.

And we, every morning, actually, I would go through the list of people who would sign up for the wait list. And some people I would let off directly into the product who I kind of didn't prioritize. And a bunch of other people, I would say, I want to talk to them. And effectively the ratio of that, from spring of 2022 to spring of 2023, over time dramatically shifted.

I didn't have data or metrics to track how this cohort was doing. It was more anecdotal and listening to that. But that's what we did. And at some point in the spring, summer of 2023, we felt, hey, I think we can let everyone in.

and we're ready for that. So let's do it.

Brett: What else were you doing in early customer reverse demos? 

Varun: Well, let's do one together right now. So let's say you signed up for the waitlist. I would click a checkbox in Clay. That checkbox would trigger a workflow in Clay that would send you an email. That email would say, hey, book some time with me and actually come prepared for this conversation with a data set you want enriched or a problem you want solved in this.

You would show up to the call, and ideally you would have a CSV or some data you want enriched. Alternatively, you might not, but we'd spend the first five minutes coming up with something. We'd come up with a problem for you. So that, I'll just, let's. Let's spitball an example. So you could say, you know, to pull from our earlier one about Kansas City, it's like, okay, let me get a list of all the plumbers in Kansas City.

I want to know what year they were founded. I want to know, and that I want that because I only want to sell into, you know, plumbers who are founded more recently because there'll be, there'll be more amenable to buying software than much older plumbers. I want to know which ones are well reviewed.

I want to get the owner of the plumbing company and I want to get their contact information. , remember, my goal is to blow their mind, right? So my goal is to solve that problem in 30 minutes. And I think that is a bar that most software companies cannot achieve, can you solve someone's entire problem in 30 minutes and have them do it?

And basically. You would say, let's do this. And you would click the buttons. I would tell you which ones to click. You know, in order to do this, you need someone who's able to, and our, all our early hires embody this creative enough and on their nimble on their feet enough to basically do any use case at the moment of a, uh, the drop of a hat, right?

But it's a great thing for the customer because they solve their problem in a 30 minute calendar invite. They believe that Clay is their solution going forward as well. They know how to use it and I get a ton of product feedback, and content ideas to work with.

Brett: in the 30 minutes you want to solve one use case themselves and then hopefully then they have, then they're equipped to go and do all sorts of other things with Clay.

Varun: That's right. And I think as Kareem shared in one of his podcasts with you is, we removed intercom from the the product, so you had to join our Slack community to get help at the very end of the call, I would force them to join the Slack community. I'd be like, literally go into your bar, type in Clay dot com slash Slack, join it and then send me a dm when you're there.

And I would only hang up the Zoom call when they had sent me a DM. And that way I had a point of touch with them where I could manually keep up with them and make sure they were doing things and there for help if they need it. 

Brett: I want to go back to something we're talking about a little while ago, which is, you uh, started to develop a PLG motion. You generally had agencies and then smaller businesses who were customers that got you to call it your first X hundreds of thousands in ARR. And then you started, with Rippling to move upmarket.

And I want you to sort of share the story of like how those two things work together and ultimately how you started to build the enterprise motion of the last 12 to 18 months. 

And I think you all have made this pretty elegant, transition. And so we'd love to hear the story behind it. it

Varun: Rippling was one of the first, another, one of the first, that was still kind of self serve. And again, we were helping of course, was like Verkada comes to mind. And around the summer, fall of 2023, we were like, let's, we should build a sales motion.

Brett: And like in the case of  Verkada, do they start in a PLG fashion?

Varun: it was a similar story to Rippling where we like got connected through mutual people and then, started trying to enable them and then work with them more on self serve and started getting them to use the product. And so then there were a couple of companies like Rippling and Verkata and a few others that were starting to do this with but we still weren't able to charge a significant amount of money. 

Brett: Did you just use your normal credit pricing with them? Or you started to think about enterprise

Varun: so this was still like normal self serve pricing just scaled up. So nothing changed at all,

Brett: you didn't change the product for them? 

Varun: Didn't change the product for them. So we're now in the fall of 2023.

basically it became clear that if we want to become a generational company, we need the best company that is in the world to use our product. And it became clear after these experiences with Rippling and Verkada and a couple others that if we want the best companies in the world, we need to spend way more time with them and we need to like properly enable them.

And that means a sales motion of some kind that feels authentic to us. And that was the first like, okay, let's try and do this. our first attempt at this, which was not the right one, was how are we going to get people, first question was, how are we going to get people to pay, enough money to warrant all the time we're going to spend with them?

And so it's like, you know, how are we going to get someone to pay 50 to 100k? And to us at the time, remember our ACV was just a few hundred a month. That's an insane amount of money.

Brett: But also why at that moment, did you want to do it? You could wait six months, a year.

Varun: The reason at that moment was we, I felt that, the self serve motion was working, that we had those four elements, acquisition, website conversion, activation of the product, and monetization. Not amazingly, of course, but it felt like it was more of a machine and we just made the hire to hire Bruno, from Webflow to, to lead our growth marketing.

And so I felt personally, like I could hand that to him. He could run with it and I could spend more time focusing on sales. and so that was kind of why at that moment. Our first question was like, how do we get people to pay this much money? And our first answer to that was incorrect. And it was, what if we do it for you?

Because our customers were telling us, Hey, I would pay you this much money, but. You should just build all this for me. And so basically they were asking for professional services. And so we did this with two customers and they, we actually closed them and they charge, we charged them one was like 84 K and one was like 60 K.

what we quickly learned was this was not the right approach. And this wasn't the right approach for a few different reasons. First of all, it was an insane amount of work. It was actually way more work than 84 K and 60 K was to fully service these customers end to end. Second of all, and maybe more importantly, we were actually competing with our Clay experts.

We had this ecosystem of Clay experts that wanted to service customers and charge them for that. And by us offering a, a service that our sale was to do the exact same thing. We were competing head to head to them and we want them to thrive. So we don't want that either, right? And so then we had to learn, okay, how do we sell this just as the software, and not as, and how do we price that in a way that we can actually make enough money to make this motion work? And how do we differentiate that from the self serve motion, which by the way, these people could sign up for at any time. And so that was the next question. And so this probably brings us to early 2024.

January ish. And it's like, okay, how do we think about this? So the first thing is like, we kind of needed. a pricing model to actually support this kind of, uh, sale. And so we came up with a platform fee and we had to justify that platform fee. And then we had credits that were priced similarly to the cheapest credits on the pro plan.

This approach carried us for about six, seven, eight months where we would have a platform fee. And, and really, I would say most of this happened, there was still a lot of experimentation and not many sales that were closing in Q1 and even Q2 of 2024, just like one or two. The other big unlock was positioning and how we were positioning the value. At the beginning, we were positioning it as like, Hey, you can move all this work from. SDRs and whatever, and just do it in RevOps and save all this time, save all this money, things like that. We basically ran into a huge amount of skepticism. Effectively, people didn't believe us. The, the bar to clear and getting them to believe us and pay money for it was just too significant. And it was too hard to prove that on a POC. What we then found is that actually, we should start with something much more narrow and build up to that.

And what we should start with is data enrichment. Remember, that was our first use case in self serve. And that remains our first use case with enterprise. And we say, hey, we will solve your data enrichment problems. you are paying for too many data vendors. It's too expensive. It's too many to manage and your data quality still isn't very good.

The great thing about this is it is, an existing budget line item. Everyone has the same problem. Everyone is paying for the same set of vendors. And by the way, there is a POC we can run that is very numeric driven. And we win every data test we're in. And we will, we have the highest data quality.

And so we can prove to you we are better. And so that turned into the motion and it became much more like rinse and repeat and something that we can actually do. So it was the positioning change. Then it was the, the, the pricing change, but that pricing change only took us to the summer of this year, maybe early fall.

Then we changed it again, actually. And the key learning there was two things. First, platform fees are inherently challenged. They are not great, pricing mechanisms. And the reason for this is, first, it doesn't scale. After the first year, you want to keep raising the price because you want to, you know, you want to create more margin.

It's very hard to increase a platform fee. Procurement teams will eat it apart because it's like, why are you charging me this amount of money for this nebulous set of services? then you're left with the credits which are on the low margin that you had on the cheapest plan on the self serve product.

And so we needed to figure out a way to meet our margin goals. Remain usage driven and also keep a much higher price point to warrant all the investment we're making with these customers on the enterprise side. And then, by the way, the challenge we had as an undercurrent through this whole thing is differentiating it from self serve, because why, at any point in time, would these customers not just pay on the website in a self serve way and get access to the product way cheaper?

And ultimately, the answer to that question is to be super transparent about it and just be like, Hey, It's your choice. You can go self serve and do this. Or you can work with us on this higher price point. But you and I both know that you're not going to do that. And maybe it's because your company doesn't allow you to do those things, but maybe it's because you need our features, many of which we didn't have at the time, but we were building in the, in the moment and in the year of 2024 to warrant the platform being warrant the enterprise offering.

Maybe it's because you need our support. Maybe it's a mix of those two things. Maybe it's because this is just how you buy. and it's just embracing that and being really candid and honest with The customers and giving them that choice and then letting people go in whatever direction they want to go in. Honestly, some, amazing logos ended up going self serve and we would probably, of course, give them more attention and love and than we would normally, because we would hope to over time, put them into the center price bucket.

And that brings us to the fall of 2024, where we basically bundled all of this. I took a lot of inspiration from Snowflake's pricing model, and we basically bundled all of this into, the credits and bundled the, platform fee and the support and all these things into credits to dramatically simplify the pricing and they come with more features, and they come with more support, and all these things, and that warrants the higher price point, and it simplifies the pricing dramatically, aligns customer interests, and then we're entirely usage based, and so it can scale much better as well.

Brett: Are there any other things that you have figured out in this path to crack enterprise that might be useful for other folks that have a PLG or down market motion that's working as their approaching going after enterprise for the first time?

Varun: It first depends on, on your pricing model, right? So it's like, are you a usage based company or a seat based company? And so that kind of dictates how you would go about it. I think we had a more challenging approach because we were usage based, and translating that, translating that to enterprise.

I think that companies like Notion and Figma, have a clear path to going from self serve to enterprise because it's seat based, you're, you're expanding from team to team, you can go to IT, and you can make an easy, compelling case, and it's, and there's a lot of precedent for it, and it's more straightforward, and it's less about a sell on the value, and more about, hey, this is already happening, bottom's up, and, uh, you just need to formalize it, get these security features, pay a premium for that, and go, right?

With us, it was more challenging because We didn't have that many complimentary effects from the self serve motion. We don't have that many examples of self serve customers turning into enterprise customers. A lot of these enterprise customers are coming in cold. and so you don't have that many complimentary effects from it.

You're almost doing a sale from scratch and you are doing a value based sale. But I think what's interesting is that when you're not doing seed based, you're doing a value based sale and you are pricing in this usage way, you can, you can price more aggressively and that probably enables you to go way higher over time as you generate more value in a way that most seat based pricing models don't enable as much.

Brett: What about, how you approach relationship building and enterprise selling? 

Varun: I would encourage people to be on a texting basis immediately. I talk to people on the first call and I say, let's just, let's get on text now. Like, let's, uh, share your number. Let's, let's go for it, right? So, that just immediately makes it a much more human connection. This is also, by the way, where the events play a big role. Because what you're really trying to do is you're trying to stand out again. You're right. You're trying to be different. and the events are yet another arbitrage moment of where people are doing one thing and we can do another to be stand out and be different.

You know, a lot of people say that enterprise buyers don't respond to certain types of content that like, Hey, it's not in, Forrester or Gartner. And like, it's not like professional enough for enterprise rights, but remember that enterprise buyers are just human and they're just humans like everyone else.

And they respond to the same things that we do. And so being human with them and approaching them in like unique and creative ways is probably going to work because if it would work with you, it will work with them. And so that might mean figuring out ways to sit next to them at a dinner and, talk to them, uh, about how you can help and like connecting with them in that way, that could mean putting on unique events for them.

That could mean like being on a texting basis with them and helping them. And it could also mean like just understanding their own personal goals and how you can help them. Right? So as an example of that, we had, you know, Oyster was one of our customers and Petra was our champion there. her goal, she wanted to get promoted and, and, and we through Clay enabled her to do that.

And she also wanted to, over time realized that she wanted to start her own agency and it's like, let's help her do that. we weren't like concerned with what about our champion leaving or this and that. So let's help her start that and let's help her do that. She ended up having Oyster as her like main client.

And, this is a huge one for everyone because Oyster is now saving 40 hours per rep, per month. Uh, Petra is thrilled and having a successful agency, and we're supporting both them. And that's great for all of us.

Brett: You mentioned that one of the unlocks was positioning, was repositioning the product for enterprise and landing with sort of the insertion point, which is enrichment. How are you thinking about then going from landing an enterprise with enrichment to, other use cases to ultimately sort of expand?

Varun: I would say for us, that model is so success, basically customer success is almost as important, if not more important than the sale itself because we're usage based and because we have a very methodical plan led by Jess on our team to start with enrichment, make sure the data quality is high, and then build use cases on top of that, on that strong data foundation.

Each of which, by the way, uses credits. And so that could mean keeping your CRM enriched, but that could also mean like using Clay to automate outbound at scale, automate your inbound at scale, like Anthropic use us to automate all their inbound at scale, and triple their enrichment rates on that and finding way more leads through that.

Verkada was using us to. come up with new growth ideas to personalize web pages at scale for ABM efforts you know, doubling their ad targeting rates. And so basically it's like, you have a good data foundation and it's like, how can we work with you to come up with growth ideas across outbound and inbound and you're in, and expanding your existing customers, and we are partnering with you to grow your business.

the consequence of that is they grow their business. They also use more credits, which also leads to a bigger contract. And so it's a win win across the board.

Brett: And so do you do that via sort of consultative CS on the back-end?

Or what does it actually look like? 

Varun: Yes, it's, it's, it's done through, um, Jess's like consultative CS team and it's like working very closely with them to understand, this is what could help them grow their business, helping them understand their growth ideas and helping them put those into practice, in a methodical kind of way, one by one.

And we even goal against that internally of like, how many recurring use cases like that are we unlocking per customer per month? and how does their credit usage track relative to the ramp that they should be on relative to what they bought and things like that? 

Brett: What do you think are like the, the big ideas that are, you think generally useful to other people starting companies?

Varun: So a couple of things that come to mind, and again, some of them still may be more applicable to us than other companies. But I think one thing we did in the early days is you could consider Matthew and Yash, myself and Eric as some of the first salespeople, even though that wasn't really what we were doing, but I can imagine for a lot of products, maybe not enterprise products. Or security products. But for a lot of products, I could imagine for the first couple of customer facing hires to hire people who, you know, are obsessed with your product and love it and, uh, have passion for it. And because I think in the early days you were trying to optimize for customer love and customer adoption.

You're not trying to optimize for maximizing the revenue from any particular customer. And so choosing people who are great with your product and that doesn't necessarily mean poaching your customers, but finding people who can be real lovers of your product is like a good start. 

Brett: There must've been tons of passionate customers that would like to work at Clay. what were you looking for in terms of like the raw material that you would hire?

Varun: Yeah. Well, we can start with the three, those three first people, then we can also draw today where we continue to hire people who aren't classically trained to do things to do new functions. So at the time we can talk about Eric and Yash and Matthew in particular, and all three of them are high slope, unique, wonderful humans.

Actually, I would say that only Eric was truly a Clay power user and passionate user. and he was one of the first users. I think because of that and like how deeply he knew the space and how he was our customer, how we knew how valuable that was going to be. Yash and Matthew actually weren't Clay power users when they joined or like shortly before that, that being said, they were deeply embedded in like the no code space and, were really proficient at tools like this.

So they understood it immediately. And, they started to see the value in it. And, and. they started to get in that direction. But I think like what we saw in them, which is true, is they are extremely high agency. They are, amazing with customers and like our, our builder mentalities, like they owe their, their instinct is to build and like to do the work.

And that's rare. They're all fairly technical. None of them know computer science or maybe like know how to code and maybe a little bit, but they all are technical enough to work. Use Clay to the 99th percentile, and build really unique things with Clay and other no code products. and there's obviously a bunch of soft attributes of what makes them amazing people to work with as well.

And so I think those are kind of some of the attributes, but even to this day. We still have so many people at Clay with, you know, not out of central casting for certain roles. And so, for example, Everett, 

 is our head of sales out of go to market engineering, and he's a great example of this. You know, he's an engineer by training. He's a former founder. He was the head of growth at, um, at a, at a growth stage startup. and now he's doing sales. Right? And, and he's doing an amazing job of it.

But then again, I think the work that we're doing in sales is different than most companies. But I think we see this in lots of different roles. Lilla on our team is, went to Yale and studied physics and started a company, and is now running our events motion and, and leading all the community events that are happening globally.

So we just hired a growth investor to be a go to market engineer. we have Puneeth, our head of brand, who's also a head of people. and he's doing that because we want our, our brand designer, external thing to be consistent with our internal thing. And he's designing both of those experiences and he understands our culture better than anyone.

And we know we can support him on the operation stuff with other people. And so those are just three examples and we have a dozen more. And so those are a few ways that we like bring different people with different perspectives to new, uh, to new disciplines and, and help them bring that. And I think we're also doing that with the product, by the way.

So it's, it's, it's our product that's taking the engineering discipline and bringing that to go to market. And we are trying to do that in our, the way we company build as well. everyone in the company is on the business side is super technical. And so that leads to really tight feedback loops amongst people. And so you can have way fewer people. And so that helps us move a lot faster.

Brett: Maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

Varun: There are many examples of this, but, one thing, right, is like our support team is super technical and this leads, we don't have like an outsourced support team in India or the Philippines, and this leads to the fact that, sure, we're paying a premium for these people, but they're delivering extremely high quality support to our customers and they're technical. So they deeply understand the issues and they are much better at translating those issues to product feedback to our engineers.

And that leads to a much tighter feedback loop, as opposed to having a support engineer and a support person in India, and the communication lags in between. Another example of this is how we do sales. So we do sales through this, you know, we call it go to market engineering. And so this is collapsing three different roles into one.

An AE, an SDR and a sales engineer all into one role. And this is a person who's a bit more technical and background who is good with customers, who has high agency and high slope. again, I wouldn't recommend this for every company, but for us with our model with our, type of product that's, good inbound demand, but needs help getting usage.

And we are focused on adoption and love and engagement as opposed to maximizing revenue. It works really well for us. And as a result, you have really tight feedback loops where that one person can work with customers, generate content, generate product feedback and deliver an amazing customer experience, as opposed to having it segmented out in three different roles to generate demand and help customers have a good experience and close them.

Brett: And when you say technical, do you mean like CS technical?

Varun: No, not necessarily. I mean, if you look at this team, it's like 12 people. It is actually led by Everett, who's a former founder and engineer, but some of these people are structural engineers by background, but some of them are mechanical engineers. Many of them are former founders. some of them do have a couple of them have like CS backgrounds.

but I would say it's just a technical bent and one of them is a growth investor actually. So I would say it's all like a bit of a technical bent and varied backgrounds. But no, they don't need to know how to code or anything like that. And it's ultimately just a proxy. It's not like a requirement.

It's just a proxy that they would probably be good at this job.

Brett: How do you end up running an interview process, for someone who didn't do the thing before?

Varun: It's heavily weighted to work trials and take homes, we, like, give them a chance to focus on that. It's much harder, obviously, to do a behavioral interview where you go in a methodical way through their background and, and kind of identify what they've accomplished and how that translates to the job.

That's not really possible, but I think through work trials and take homes, you can identify high slow people and people who can. make an outsized impact in a new role.

Brett: How do you approach designing a take home?

Varun: A lot of it is trying to simulate what the actual work is as much as possible. actually, uh, I think, uh, I got that aphorism from you. That's what you're trying to do the most. You're trying to simulate the real work as much as possible. And so, you know, for Bruno, who is, uh, who we hired as our head of growth marketing and put together one of the best take homes I've ever seen in my life, It's like, okay, we need to have a growth marketing strategy and then we need to execute it.

And what does that look like? Right? You know, for Osman, who also made an incredible take home. It's like, uh, who leads are a lot of our go to market systems teams. It's like, okay, we don't really know what we need. help build a plan to make it happen. But it also goes into how we hire go to market engineers.

And so for those roles, which is our sales role, we say, Hey, go build something fun and amazing and Clay and blow our minds with it, you know, because that's what the job is actually. Uh, and you need to have the ability to do that. And we've, and our minds have been blown by people who have. built Clay tables that simulate Santa giving Christmas gifts to lots of children around the world to engines that generate, tarot card readings and your astrology signs.

so the creativity in those are really unique and like those give us good signal into whether these people will be able to do this job in real life.

Brett: One of the passing comments you made a little while ago was you invested a lot in brand early on. What does it actually mean to invest in brand early on?

Varun: So first of all, I think we benefit from the fact that the company's name is Clay. And so that lends itself to many things that, make it much easier to, to build a brand around. Right. And so what does this mean tactically? Well, tactically it means we hired a Claymation artist, who we worked with part time for many, many years and is now full time at Clay.

And we have a full time Claymation artist it was building imagery and, and art, with Clay, uh, Uh, online. Right? 

but we also have a lot happening in real life as well. And so, we try to bring a lot of this brand creativity in real life as well, because we, we are trying to stand out from the normal kind of tech audiences.

Right? So for Dreamforce, as an example, our team put on a spa day. And which is pretty atypical for a, a SaaS event at Dreamforce. and the intention was how can you like relax and wind up for a really depleting few days at, at conference. And so how can you bring this energy and creativity and brand, both in your digital presence and in your.

In real life presence. and that is something we invest a lot in. And there are several people at the company just focused on that. we think it pays long term dividends. It's not a short term investment by any means, 

last point on this, on the brand name is when you look at other B2B software. No one invests in it. And so when you have something that no one invests in and everything kind of looks the same, a lot of early stage software is just about standing out because you're trying to make news about something.

You're just trying to stand out from the crowd because it's so crowded in the early stage and brand is a way to do that. And you obviously have to have a point of view on it and you also have to be creative, but when no one else is investing in something and you invest in something. That is a way to have alpha and that is a way to really stand out in a meaningful way.

Brett: I think it's a good point. I think one of the things that I've noticed is that people focus on being better, as opposed to being different. And just being different, Is valuable.

Varun: Yeah, it's enough. And, and you have to look for those areas in company building where there's an arbitrage that you can capitalize on and also feels authentic to who you are.

Brett: what are the other things that come to mind when you think about arbitrage moments for Clay with that idea?

Varun: Um, so in terms of other areas of arbitrage moments, I think one that comes to mind is around how we compensate people, Clay. we are very proactive in giving people, more compensation if they are truly high performers. And, um, sometimes people are, have just been here for a few months when we, when we changed that it's because we noticed that they are defying our expectations that we had when they joined.

And we're not trying to wait for some formal performance review. to make that happen. We are trying to do that immediately when we notice it in a consistent way. And I think that's not super common. but I think it's both the right thing to do. and I think it engenders like longer term, like loyalty too.

I think that I have been personally on the other end where I feel like maybe I was a top performer at a company And, you know, I felt like I was warranted more compensation and the process of getting it is really painful and actually, actually leads to a lot of embitterment and it's like, okay, so you ask for it and they're like, okay, yo, you have to wait till this performance review.

Why do you have to wait for this performance review? Because it benefits the company, Brett. It doesn't benefit them because it benefits the company to save some money to have some arbitrage on the time that the person is higher performing than what you're paying them. And the truth is, if they're actually overpaying them, the company is getting a bargain.

And so you have to wait till this arbitrary time and then you have the arbitrary like performance review conversation and then there's a negotiation and after the end of this, you maybe get what you asked for, you get a fraction of that and you don't feel good and ultimately it's about how do we make people feel good, how do we make people feel whole and full and like excited and all in and feel seen for their contributions and that way is not the right way.

Okay. And so, like, tactically, what does this mean? Tactically, it's like, first, we should separate performance and feedback reviews with compensation. feedback is a gift to you to help you improve. Compensation is fluid because as things change, as you perform, we should reward you and you should, and you should get more.

And the top people will always deserve that. You know, just treating people well and treating people, in the right way and being generous with your best people, pays long term dividends, not only for doing the right thing, but also for the company and for both people involved.

And, um, It feels not standard for how most companies handle compensation.

Brett: Do you do it, according to some sort of leveling system?

Varun: we use benchmarking, right? But with the best performers, not that you throw the benchmarking out the window, but for the top people, like obviously, it's going to be on the higher end and so it may not make sense. And so a natural follow up question is like, you know, how is this fair or how is it equitable?

And so one thing you have to think about is like, I've heard like, some companies that I've talked to actually have, or one company I've talked to has a program where they call them like, like, You know, founder of grants or executive staff grants, and they just have a specific program where they say, okay, here is, you know, this pile of stock, and we will just give it to the top performers at completely at our discretion.

And then if people are like, well, this person has more than me, it's they can, they can point to the fact that, Hey, this person actually got a founder grant. And so that's okay. And that's why. You know, we don't have like a formal structured program like that, but I think that in every case, we can justify actually almost all of these things, even with leveling, because it's, uh, and the benchmarking data, because it is people who are exceeding the expectations of where they were before, therefore, warranting more.

And maybe that's a higher percentile of where they are, or maybe it's a brand new level. And so I think in retrospect, you could look at every single one and justify it in that way. But we are kind of using that as a baseline to understand the ballpark of what we're talking about from a compensation perspective and revisiting it, both at fundraising moments, when the company valuation and we should reassess to make sure everyone's is good.

But also when we feel like, Hey, let's take another review of the people and see who's really performing and do that on some normal cadence, maybe every month or something and, and like notice and like reward people in the moment.

Brett: When did you come across this idea and start to implement it?

Varun: we've been implementing it for the last three years. We've been doing it, since we started really scouting the team in 2022. the core thing is we want to be proactive. We want to be ahead of, our team, uh, as much as possible. because we want them to know that we value them.

That we are grateful for all their contributing that they feel that we really see them and we, really appreciate them. And I think that taking the reverse approach or waiting and waiting for them to come to you, If someone on your team comes to you, you've already lost the game. Because they have been thinking about this, I promise you, for weeks if not months.

Because it takes a lot of courage and bravery to like, Go up to your manager or the founder and ask for more money. they've already been thinking about this for a really long time. And so being proactive, is at first the right thing to do. But also, helps you as well in the long term in building a really, strong relationship with this person and having them with the company for a long period of time.

Brett: Are there downsides that you've observed?

Varun: I can name some downsides. I have not personally observed them, but I could, you know, come up with some that I have been concerned about in the past. So the first thing, first thing that comes to mind is, well, if you just keep giving people more money, aren't they just going to keep coming to you for more money all the time?

Brett: Yeah. Or, you know, they join. Eight weeks later, they get a bump, 

and then another nine months goes by and there's no bump. 

Varun: yeah, 

Brett: that feel like

you've set an expectation that right. That's right. Yeah. And, and then it's like, oh, that's messy. And then you don't have a standard time to do all these things. I don't have a great answer to that, except for the fact that we've been doing this for three years, and that hasn't been an issue so far. And so something is working there.

Varun: My guess would be that people get it and they're grateful. They appreciate that this is way more than what happened at other companies. And by the way, it's all defensible. So let's just play out your example where it's like, Hey, someone comes in 12 weeks in, they get, uh, they get a raise and then they come back eight months later and it's like, Hey, I didn't get a raise.

And it's like, why? Well, there was a reason this happened and let's look at the benchmarking data. that I haven't had that conversation yet, but that would be the conversation I'd have.

If the benchmarking data has changed and their performance has changed, actually, Brett, if they get a pay raise in 12 weeks and then they come back eight months later and are still crushing it and are still defying expectations that we had for them at that 12 week mark, let's give them more money because they continue to set new standards.

Brett: I have so many issues with benchmarking data in general. Like I just, it, it is an odd thing that, know, it's, it's a collection of all the data points theoretically in an industry, but your company is its own unique thing. 

Varun: And also we have insider information, right? We have, we are probably valuing someone way more than the market would value someone because of context, because of personal relationship, because of trust, whatever.

Brett: Or it could just be that your business, ultimately compensation in its most idealized version is representative business value, not just the abstract, what is someone could get paid down the street. It also doesn't sort of capture that you may have a specific role that is quote, not highly compensated in another company, but for your company, it's creating extraordinary shareholder

value. 

Varun: So there's two examples to talk about. First of all, let's talk about events. For example, events, if you look at Pave or other benchmarking data sources, events, people will be paid very little social media. If you look at social media, they'll be paid very little, but for our business, events and social media are really important.

This is how we grow. So for us, I don't look to events and social media as a benchmark. I look to growth marketing. Another example, like I said, is we have people who are coming from different backgrounds to do different things. So as an example, I was talking to a a finance person who is interested in doing the, people operations role.

Now, this is a really high caliber, amazing person who's coming from a finance background. I was talking to another person from an operations and legal background, also highly compensated from that field, going into a marketing position. Now I'm getting a really amazing human. To work on a, on a field and a problem that is valuable to us, but it's traditionally undercompensated relative to these people's backgrounds.

So I'm not going to compensate them at the, at this, you know, brand marketing benchmark or this people operations benchmark. I'm going to compensate them as if they were finance and legal people coming into the company because that's who they are. And the things they're working on maybe aren't finance and legal, but are really important to us.

Brett: I want to wrap up, uh, by asking the question that we always do, which is basically, who in your career has had the biggest outsized impact? 

Varun: this guy named Nick Merrill, who was, I worked for Hillary Clinton for almost four years, um, the years of like 2013 to through the campaign in 2016, and he was my mentor and manager actually throughout that entire period of time. He has probably had more impact and influence on me than, almost anyone except my parents.

Uh, because it was a very formative stage of my life. It was like the ages of 19 to 22 or something. and, you know, he, I think he in many ways taught me how to be an adult. He taught me how to contribute. He taught me how to, work in a professional environment and make an impact.

and I learned a lot from his example and, and more specifically, like he was always, you know, on the Hillary Clinton campaign in particular, a lot of ups and downs. A lot of crazy things happening every day, and he was able to be extraordinarily level headed through all of that and taught me a lot about how to do that in my current circumstances, which are frankly way less stress and way lower stakes than a presidential campaign.

Brett: Do you think he is just a level headed human being or did he work at being level headed?

Varun: I think he probably worked at it over time and I think that being in the, the melting pot of chaos that politics and government can be, especially for as long as he was in it, it's a real training ground in that. And I think that when you start with that as your standard, going into startups where the stakes are not about like the future of the country and the stakes are B2B software, it's easy to have things in much greater perspective.

And so for that, and many, many other things that are too many to name, uh, I own like an enormous amount of gratitude.

I feel I'm so fortunate that I now get to work with Kareem at Clay, who is even more of that, who brings a level of calm and thoughtfulness to every, every interaction, And so I think like I'm unbelievably fortunate I am able to work with two people in two of the most formative kind of career experiences of my life that bring this, you know, emotional energy, that I learned from and continue to, do myself.

Brett: And he also has a very good sense of humor. one of the things I was wondering is just, in general, do we just under value humor at work? 

Varun: Yeah. I think so. I mean, it's like, you know, it's like, we don't, we shouldn't take ourselves that seriously. and it's important to remember that and it's important to remember what we are doing in the grand scheme of things, because it's like, you know, we're here to make an impact.

And actually I could argue that like, we are making a huge impact on people's lives at Clay and that's really important and it's meaningful, but we have lives beyond that. And I think that's important by the way. I don't think you actually are going to be, do the best work of your life if you don't have perspective beyond that.

If you give it all to your work and don't have, things beyond that. And having that perspective and having those passions is really important to being, like, successful. A full human and enjoying life for what it is and building the business is one part of that. And for Kareem, it's maybe creating music and, uh, as his passion.

And for me, it's other things, but these are things that are important in our like human identity and like what we need to do the, our best work. And, and I think we believe that we try to bring that ethos into Clay as well. And how we hire people and how we, you know, foster the company culture and our own expectations, by the way, of, oh, how people should be performing?

Like this is a, we try to have a company that is very consistent and very long-term oriented. So that, by the way, like when the music stops or if the music ever stops for the company in our growth, people won't leave. People will be there for the long term and maybe for specific periods of time for a sprint or, or a specific goal, we can, we can turn it up, but we're focused on a long term because we're trying to build an enduring business and how we treat people is a huge part of that.

Great place to end. Thanks for joining.

Thanks, Brett.