The pre-product-market fit days are, for some, a bit like wandering around in the desert — each promising customer conversation is a mirage that beckons you forward, only to dissolve upon closer inspection. Your champion leaves their company and suddenly no one’s picking up your calls. A big fish customer will only sign if you agree to build a complicated feature that no one else is asking for. Every deal looks different from the last, leaving you with no clear path forward and no way to predict where the next watering hole might appear.
As we previously chronicled in our "Paths to PMF" interview with founder Kareem Amin, Clay's “7-year overnight success” came from focus. After years of building a horizontal productivity tool, it took complete commitment to an incredibly narrow wedge — data enrichment for cold email agencies — to finally burst through the pre-PMF desert to greener pastures.
It was a move that turned the tide, unleashing the sort of explosive growth that startup legends are made of. In 2022, Clay 10x’d revenue — a remarkable achievement. Not to be outdone, they came back and did it again in 2023, followed by 6x revenue in 2024. Today, Clay counts category leaders like OpenAI, Canva, Anthropic, Ramp and Rippling among their 5,000+ customers. And on the heels of last year’s $46M Series B, they’ve just announced a $40M Series B expansion and a whopping $1.25B valuation.
As investors since the very first round, we've had the privilege of partnering closely with this team as their GTM machine evolved from early experiments to a well-oiled engine — and we thought the exact moves that powered their growth were worth sharing with the broader startup community.
So while Amin previously traced Clay's product evolution here on The Review, today we’re sitting down with Varun Anand, who joined in 2021 and quickly earned the co-founder title by helping to architect the go-to-market moves that bent Clay’s growth curve.
The real work isn't in the initial growth spurt — it's in building the machine that can sustain and repeat it.
In this comprehensive guide, Anand breaks down the seven key decisions that, in retrospect, proved to be foundational. While some elements might sound familiar, like finding a narrow ICP, the exact "how" is incredibly granular. Many moves defied conventional wisdom, from creating a new type of sales role instead of hiring traditional AEs, keeping their waitlist gate up for 15 months after launch through millions of ARR, and making multiple attempts at cracking enterprise pricing before finding their formula.
Whether you're trying to make a PLG motion work, get content to take off, or land those lighthouse logos, there’s a lesson for just about every GTM conundrum your startup might be facing.
Inflection Point 1: Starting from scratch with customers
Let’s set the scene: At the time Anand joined, the product was a spreadsheet connected to a handful of APIs — a few of which were data enrichment providers, but there were a bunch of others to support a wide range of horizontal use cases. As for the customer base, there were roughly 20 customers, paying anywhere from $30-$200 a month.
But that was all about to change. As we covered with co-founder Kareem Amin, the team had made the gutsy decision to laser in on the outbound sales use case. That meant the slate was about to be wiped clean. “We had few true customers because almost none of the existing ones fit our new ICP. Nearly all of our original customers churned once we narrowed our focus to outbound sales,” says Anand.
So Clay was starting from scratch at the potter’s wheel (this is the last clay metaphor, promise) and needed to find more folks in this new outbound sales ICP bucket — and fast.
Step 1: Find your crew
“The very first thing I did was join a group called Modern Sales Pros,” says Anand (at the helm of this community is Pete Kazanjy, who’s shared sales advice with us on the Review for many years). “I looked through the archive for words like ‘enrichment,’ ‘data,’ and ‘outbound.’ And I winnowed it down to 30 people who had said something interesting about the topic in the last few years,” he says.
The group of 30 was a mixed bag — some folks were SDRs, some were agency owners, and some were VPs. But nearly all of them agreed to talk to Anand. Tuning into the chorus of these few dozen conversations, it was the cold email agency owners who began to sing the loudest. “In retrospect, it makes sense, because these are the people who feel the pain most acutely,” says Anand.
He explains a few of the key reasons why agency owners ended up being a perfect fit for Clay 2.0:
- They have many clients that all have the same needs
- They’re often trying to duct-tape together systems across several tools
- They’re technical and speak Clay’s language
- They’re scrappy entrepreneurs
- They’re price-sensitive, so they wanted to be able to automate repetitive tasks
Would there be enough cold email agencies to sustain business growth in the long term? No. Would the revenue be enough? Also no. But Clay didn’t care about that — at least not yet. “Everything is about getting to the next step and earning the right to keep going,” says Anand. “In the beginning, it wasn’t about thinking 10x. It was about helping the right people as quickly as possible.”
This may seem counterintuitive. After all, to build a generational company, one that can go the distance, founders must try to cast themselves many years into the future, envisioning the chessboard ahead. But as Clay investor and First Round Partner Brett Berson told Anand (and shared here in Lenny Rachitsky’s guide for angel investors), “No company has ever made it to the summit without successfully passing through basecamp first. Focus on the next 18 months — not the next 18 years. Start assessing the opportunity to get to a more near-term milestone, versus fixating on the fuzzier question of ‘Can this be a $10B company?’”
Step 2: Join their hangout spots
But Anand needed to meet a heck of a lot more of these agency owners. Rather than hang out a shingle for Clay, he decided to go straight to the town square. “The next tactical step is where do these people live? And I found out that they actually live in WhatsApp and Slack groups, like SaaS Yacht Club or another one called Sales Technicians started by Eric Nowoskawski.” (Remember that name — he’s going to come back up very shortly).
“I joined all of these WhatsApp groups and at least a dozen sales and marketing Slack communities and basically just waited for people to talk about problems related to data enrichment. And I would respond immediately to ask if I could help (ideally with Clay),” says Anand. To keep track of all the chatter, he set up notifications for keyword mentions in Slack and also used Syften.
This commitment to generating online word-of-mouth is something of a full-circle moment. As it turns out, before even joining the company, Anand had first heard of Clay through a Slack channel for no-code software enthusiasts. “I saw a post about a webinar on Clay — and I was the only one who showed up,” he says.
Step 3: Befriend the popular kids
Anand was starting to make inroads, but he also brought in an early superfan — one with heaps of cache in the space. “We hired Eric Nowoslawski and brought him in-house as a certified expert. He’s the king of the WhatsApp groups and is one of the most respected agency owners out there. He gave us a huge amount of credibility with the agency audience,” says Anand.
It may seem like an offbeat hire (he was only the third business hire and one of the first 10 employees) for a company that was still trying to find its footing. But it actually reminded us of two similar early startup stories: Notion hired one of its earliest superfans as its first community hire, while Figma brought on an in-house designer advocate to be the face of Figma to the wider designer community. Sometimes, you need a bit of street cred to grease the wheels.
“Hiring Eric made a huge impact. He was constantly posting on LinkedIn, getting us credibility in the community groups and his own WhatsApp groups. It became a huge part of getting more of these agency owners on board with Clay,” says Anand.
He also ran point with Anand on showcasing the product. “It was like having the best expert in the world helping our customers with their problems. Even startup folks who didn't know who Eric was could see that he knew everything about cold email and outbound. So, in turn, they trusted Clay, too,” says Anand.
Inflection Point 2: Reversing the demo
As Clay started chumming up more interest from agency owners, Anand and Nowoslawski were constantly hopping on the phone to show them the product — usually powering through at least eight of these calls a day.
But this was no ordinary product demo. Here’s how Clay’s “reverse demo” flow worked:
“Let’s say you signed up for the waitlist. I would review the list in Clay every morning, and if you fit our ICP I would trigger an email that said, ‘Hey, book some time with me and come prepared for this conversation with a dataset you want enriched or a problem that you wanted solved in this 30-minute slot,’” says Anand.
If they showed up empty-handed, for the first five minutes of the call Anand and the potential customer would come up with a personalized use case.
Here’s where, if this was an ordinary demo flow, you might expect Anand to take over the steering wheel and walk them through the product and the key features with a canned script. But instead, Anand acted more like a GPS, with the customer’s hands still firmly planted on the wheel.
If you’re learning how to drive a car, you don’t sit in the passenger seat while the instructor lectures you. You take the wheel while the instructor safely guides you.
The customer would share their screen, Anand would give them a Clay signup link, and then use Zoom’s annotation features to guide them through which buttons to click to help solve the problem at hand.
Here’s an example in action: “I spoke to one small private equity firm in Kansas City that was trying to find plumbers in Oklahoma and Missouri that they could acquire. They wanted to scrape Google Maps for these types of businesses,” says Anand. “To enrich the data, they wanted to know what year the plumbing business was founded, which ones were well reviewed, the owner of the company and their contact info. Over the course of 30 minutes, with me guiding them through the product, the customer was able to do it.”
Our goal with every reverse demo was simple: Solve the customer’s stated problem within 30 minutes — and try to blow their minds in the process.
This reverse demo structure worked for a few key reasons:
- Customers gained the confidence to come back. “Now they were equipped to do all sorts of other things in Clay. In the beginning, we had to do probably seven demos to convince someone to pay us $200-300 a month. But eventually, we got it down to one call or even none.”
- He got a UX masterclass. “I got to see up close what was wrong with the product because I was seeing exactly where new users were going wrong and I could pass that feedback along to Eric Engoron and other engineers to fix.”
- New ideas unlocked. “Occasionally someone would have an idea for a use case that we would immediately act on that would unlock the next stepping stone,” says Anand. Take his previous example of enriching Google Maps data to find plumbers. “It opened up a whole series of use cases for us of vertical SaaS companies that cater to small businesses on Google Maps. That one integration basically helped us win the business of 50-60 companies in short order.”
- Folks joined the community: Anand ended every single reverse demo the same way: “I wouldn’t end the call until this person had joined our Slack group. We removed Intercom support from our product, so you had to join Slack to get help. I would literally have them type in clay.com/slack, join it, send me a DM and only then would I hang up the Zoom call.” (More on the thinking behind this decision here)
Instead of running a scripted demo, imagine the insane amount of feedback you get seeing how new users interact with your product. Imagine how 8 calls a day compound over 7 months.
There’s one downside with the reverse demo approach, Anand admits: You’ve got to assemble the right folks to pull it off. “You need early hires who are creative enough and nimble on their feet enough to do basically any use case at the drop of the hat,” he says. “But if you can pull it off, the customer gets their problem solved in a 30-minute call, they believe that Clay is their solution going forward, and they know how to use it.”
In this case, Clay found two incredibly high-agency folks to help with Yash Tekriwal and Matthew Quan joining the squad. “They were technical enough to do anything short of feature development, and super resourceful — which is necessary in such an early-stage environment. And, most importantly, they were really passionate about Clay and the problems we’re solving for customers,” says Anand.
Inflection Point 3: Unlocking the power of compounding content
A non-obvious sign of traction came from an unexpected place: their customers' LinkedIn feeds.
“We started to see these agency owners posting on LinkedIn about Clay,” says Anand.
To be clear — this was completely organic, Clay hadn’t nudged these folks to post. “Their incentive was that they wanted to win more business and position themselves as an expert in this nascent technology,” he says.
But while Clay hadn’t directly planted this seed themselves, they weren’t going to let this wither on the vine. “We immediately pounced on it — how can we enable more people to do this? So Eric and I started posting content every day, as well as partnering with customers behind the scenes by telling them about new features and helping them make content. That became how we generated a lot of demand,” he says.
While today Clay has a much more robust and methodical content strategy, in the early days it was admittedly a volume game. “At the time it was more brute force of will, just regularly and diligently putting out content and getting other people to do it as well. The central mantra of our content was to show people how to do things that are really valuable to them — that’s all you have to do.”
There are many ways of growing your business and generating traffic — you can do email outbound, paid ads, SEO. But at the time, LinkedIn and content were working, so we went all in on those two things.
Fast forward to today, and there’s much more of a method to the madness. “So much of our business is a loop. Every conversation turns into product feedback, every conversation turns into content.” Here are three examples:
- Community. “We have 60 different Clay Clubs hosting community events all around the world, from Bangalore to Sydney to Toronto, where they share Clay tables. There’s content that comes from the events that we can put in a LinkedIn post. We can combine those LinkedIn posts and make a blog post, and then those blog posts become a guide. You have this loop where you keep repurposing the content that compounds over time.”
- Incentive. “We are constantly thinking about how we can encourage people to post about Clay. Now we have Clay Creator programs to incentivize that behavior.”
- Enablement. “We spend a considerable amount of time supporting our experts with their own marketing campaigns, from promoting new business lines, to webinars, to one-off promotions, etc. We’re also now using software internally to programmatically help creators post videos online about Clay features that are personalized to them and their own voice. At the end of the day, we want to help them look legit because if they grow, we grow.”
Inflection Point 4: Cracking the 4 elements of PLG before layering on traditional sales
Clay's hands-on reverse demos might make it seem like they were building a traditional sales motion. But the co-founders had a different vision in mind. “Kareem and I were very intent on making a PLG motion happen. At minimum, you need a $5K-10K annual contract to make a sales-led motion work. Clay was only getting $200-$300 a month. At our price point, self-serve had to work and then we eventually could turn that into a sales-led motion,” says Anand. “We were going to give it our all before we tried something dramatically different.”
With their hearts set on PLG, Clay needed four specific elements to click into place.
Here are the four steps of PLG: 1) You need demand coming in, 2) you need to convert them on the website, 3) you need them to get quick value from the product, and 4) you need them to pay you money.
Demand
“Emily Kramer has some good frameworks on this, but you have to fit the marketing motion to your product. For us, we noticed that LinkedIn and content were going really well. And we knew that those levers dovetailed quite nicely with word of mouth,” says Anand.
“With our own content efforts as well as with our partners, we were able to go all-in on those two things, and that’s what drove our early acquisition.”
Conversion
“We always enjoyed very high website conversion rates. Part of that can be attributed to these visitors being high-intent coming from word of mouth and evangelists,” says Anand. But he says Clay’s early commitment to brand also helped tip the scales. “We’ve always overinvested in brand way more so than other early-stage B2B software companies.”
This started with a gap that the Clay team pounced on.
When you look at other early-stage B2B startups, few invest in brand, so everything ends up looking the same. When no one else is investing in something, that’s a way to have alpha and stand out in a meaningful way.
For starters, what’s in a name? “First of all, we benefit from the fact that the company’s name, Clay, lends itself to brand building,” he says. You can see these fingerprints all over the website — from the logo to the artwork for each blog post. After all, how many SaaS companies do you know with an in-house claymation artist? Clay even hired a Head of Brand as one of their first 25 employees. “Brand is not a short-term investment by any means — we think it pays long-term dividends.”
Getting into the product
Clay had leaned on the reverse demos to get folks’ hands on the product. But for true PLG, this step wouldn’t cut it. Users would need to get immediate value using the product, without Anand’s guiding hand.
Eventually, with enough product feedback to make the tool simpler to use, Clay was able to cut out the reverse demo step altogether. But Anand learned quickly that at this stage, a mass influx of users would prove challenging.
While Clay had a waitlist for the product when they were initially talking to the growth agency folks (to make sure they were paying closest attention to those who fit their narrow ICP), when Clay publicly launched on Product Hunt in February 2022, anyone could create a free account. “We debated on whether or not to include a waitlist at launch, but we decided to remove it for the Product Hunt launch,” says Anand.
There was a massive influx of new users, but the volume grew too staticky too quickly. “We had a lot of feedback, but it was all unfiltered and we were talking to all sorts of people who weren’t the right fit. It was hard to find signal versus noise. We made the decision about two months later, in May 2022, to turn the waitlist back on. That was one of the best decisions we made in the early days,” he says.
And the waitlist stayed on for another 15 months, much longer than the typical startup gate. But it gave the Clay team time to fine-tune the GTM machine without an influx of users. It wasn’t until Clay was in the millions of ARR that they dropped the waitlist and felt ready to let in the masses.
Monetization
To complete the PLG flow, Clay needed customers to pull out their credit cards. But this was far from elegant in the early days. “As recently as January 2023, we didn’t have billing in the product. I was just sending Stripe invoices to people, which is crazy for a self-serve product for $200/month,” says Anand.
It wasn’t until Clay was past $1M in ARR that they finally turned on billing. Why wait so long? “The most important thing at this point was to land on the right value metric. After that, we could fiddle with the feature gates and the exact unit costs, but we had to get that right first,” he says.
So building a billing feature was always floating near the bottom of the product priority stack. “If you can get to $1M ARR with so much billing friction in a self-serve motion, you likely have something you can scale,” says Anand. Today, Clay is ultra-transparent with its pricing and publishes detailed memos for any big pricing change.
Inflection Point 5: Figuring out the right pricing for self-serve and enterprise
Clay made an unconventional bet with their pricing: usage-based credits instead of the standard per-seat model that dominated sales tech. Fast-forward to 2025 and AI has made usage-based more in vogue. “But back in 2022, our customers were shocked that we weren’t a per-seat company and investors thought we were leaving so much money on the table,” he says.
So what gave Clay the conviction to swim upstream? It goes back to the product, essentially a spreadsheet of columns and rows. “We realized that all the value is in the columns because every column you add is a new enrichment. So the pricing lever should be an equation: Columns X Rows. And that comes back to credits,” says Anand.
If you’re wrestling with your own pricing model, re-center it on the value prop, he says. “We are a product of efficiency. We’re not trying to charge you to have so many people using Clay because we want you to have fewer people using Clay who can drive crazy ROI for your whole company.”
Contrast this with other PLG darlings like Notion or Figma who use the more typical per-seat pricing. “These are collaboration products, so it makes sense for them to have per-seat pricing. But we are not that — we are a tool where you do one thing to orchestrate the actions of many. So it intuitively made sense to stick with usage-based,” he says.
When in doubt, go on the side of what’s better for the customer.
But Anand isn’t exclusively tooting the usage-based horn here — there’s a hazard up ahead. “Seat-based creates a clearer path to going from self-serve to enterprise. You’re expanding from team to team, and you can go to IT and make an easy, compelling case. It’s less a sell on the value and more about pointing out what is already happening bottoms-up,” he says. “With us, it was more challenging.”
Moving upmarket
The trees of PLG were starting to bear fruit, and enterprises were beginning to make their way into the self-serve product.
Signing bigger companies was an inflection point that we could expand from growth agencies to not just regular startups, but also $10B enterprises.
But while signing these logos was an internal boost for the team, it wasn’t a monetary one. “We still weren’t able to charge a significant amount of money — it was just the normal self-serve pricing scaled up,” he says.
So in the fall of 2023, the Clay team made up their mind: It was time to build a big-boy sales motion. “Self-serve was working. Not amazingly, but it was becoming more of a machine. We also hired Bruno Estrella from Webflow to lead growth marketing, which gave me the confidence that I could hand off PLG marketing to him to run with and I could spend more time focusing on sales,” says Anand.
If we want to be a generational company, we need the best companies in the world to use our product.
But cracking the enterprise would mean spending way more time with them to properly enable their Clay usage — and, as the cliche goes, time is money. “How do we get enterprises to pay enough money to justify the high-touch, white-glove experience? Plus, we needed to differentiate it enough from self-serve, because they could just sign up for Clay at any time,” says Anand.
As it turned out, it took three at-bats to finally crack Clay’s enterprise pricing model. Anand walks us through each attempt he puzzled through along with Yash Tekriwal and Matthew Quan:
Attempt 1: What if we do the work for you?
“Our customers were telling us, ‘Hey, I would pay you $X, but you should just build this for me.’ Basically, they were asking for professional services,” says Anand. It was worth a shot — so Clay closed two of these types of deals, priced at $60K and $84K.
Not long after the contract ink dried, Clay realized this was the wrong approach. “First of all, it was an insane amount of work — way more than $84K — to fully service these customers end to end,” says Anand.
“Second, and most importantly, we were actually competing with our Clay Experts. We had this ecosystem of professionals who had built businesses helping people use Clay, and by offering our own service, we were competing head-to-head with them when we wanted these Experts to thrive,” says Anand.
Back to the drawing board.
Attempt 2: What if we charge a platform fee?
For take two, Clay was still struggling with finding a happy medium between meeting their margin goals, remaining usage-driven, and keeping a higher price point to warrant the investment in these enterprise customers.
“So we came up with a platform fee, plus credits that were priced similarly to the pro plan,” says Anand.
Admittedly, not too many enterprise customers ended up with this pricing structure. “There was still a lot of experimentation happening and not that many enterprise sales were closing in Q1 and even Q2 of 2024,” he says. Here’s why he found platform fees inherently challenging, and why he’d caution other founders from this approach:
- Doesn’t scale: “After the first year, it’s difficult to increase a platform fee because it’s challenging to defend the value that you’ve added to the platform over that time.”
- Procurement teams will tear it apart. “They’re like, ‘Why are you charging me this amount of money for this nebulous set of services?’”
Attempt 3: What if we simplify?
This brings us to Fall 2024. “I took a lot of inspiration from Snowflake’s pricing model, and we basically bundled the credits, the platform fee, the support, everything into credits to dramatically simplify the pricing. It comes with more support and more features, so that warrants the higher price point,” says Anand.
Here’s why bunding was (finally) the Goldilocks just-right approach:
- Sticking with credits simplifies the pricing dramatically
- It aligns customer interests with Clay’s interests
- It’s usage-based, so it can scale more seamlessly
Inflection Point 6: Fine-tuning the enterprise playbook
When selling to enterprises, founders often forget they're still talking to Sally from RevOps or Martin the VP of Sales. Instead, the company name and potential contract value loom large, adding unnecessary formality to every interaction.
Anand shares three tactics that helped Clay stay grounded:
1. Start small, then expand
Initially, Clay pitched enterprises on completely transforming their sales operations. "But buyers were hugely skeptical," says Anand. "We set the bar too high to prove in a POC."
Instead, they returned to their roots: data enrichment. "We say: ‘It’s hard for you to find and access quality data providers in one place. We'll solve that first.'" This narrower wedge worked because it had an existing budget line item, was easy to prove, and opened the door for expanding to other use cases later.
2. Be radically transparent with your customers
The elephant in the room with enterprise sales layered on top of PLG? The fact that customers could just sign up for Clay's (much cheaper) self-serve tier. "We address it head-on," says Anand. "'Yes, you could go self-serve. But we both know you probably won't, whether that's because of company policies, feature needs, or support requirements.' Buyers respect that honesty."
3. Keep it human
Anand's most tactical tip? "Get on texting terms immediately. On the first call, I say 'Let's exchange numbers.' It instantly changes the dynamic." These small touches help cut through the typical enterprise formality.
To build an authentic relationship with your buyer, get out of the formality of email and text them instead.
Inflection Point 7: Embracing atypical hiring and compensation
“With our product, we’re taking the engineering discipline and bringing that to go-to-market. So we try to build the whole company in that ethos, bringing in people with new perspectives to their disciplines,” says Anand. “So many of our key hires at Clay are not out of central casting for their roles.” He could rattle off a dozen examples of this, but here’s three:
- Their Head of Sales is an engineer by training, a former founder, and a former head of growth of a growth-stage startup. Notably missing? Sales experience.
- The person running their global community motion is a former founder who studied physics at Yale.
- Clay’s Head of Brand and Head of People is the same leader, “because we want our external brand to be consistent with our internal one,” says Anand.
Meet the go-to-market engineer
It’s not just hiring atypical people for your standard company roles — Clay has also made up completely new ones like their GTM engineers.
The idea originated in their reverse demos, where Clay’s early hires had to think quickly on their feet to solve the customer’s data enrichment problem in just 30 minutes or less. They didn’t need to be stellar salespeople, they just needed to be agile, creative and technical enough to grok any potential use case.
As Clay layered on an enterprise sales motion, it needed salespeople. But over the course of some initial interviews, they were getting nowhere. “We realized that the most fundamental skill set for this role wasn’t sales — it was being amazing at Clay,” says Anand.
I’ve been on too many sales calls where an account executive can’t answer a basic product question and says, “I’ll need to bring a technical resource to our next call.”
So they landed on what they call go-to-market engineering — part AE, part SDR, part sales engineer, full-on Clay expert. That meant high-agency folks with a technical bent. Today, the GTM Engineering team is around 14, filled with former founders, mechanical and structural engineers, and growth experts.
“I wouldn’t recommend this for every company. But for our model with our type of product that’s got good inbound demand, and prioritizing adoption and engagement, it works really well,” says Anand. (Today, Clay is seeing more and more of these GTM engineering roles pop up across the startup ecosystem.) “One person can deliver an amazing customer experience, generate content ideas and demand, and relay product feedback — instead of having it segmented in three different roles.”
Interrupt the typical comp schedule
Clay's unconventional approach extends to compensation. “Sometimes we give someone a raise just months into the role because they're blowing away expectations," says Anand. "I've been on the other end where you ask for more money and hear, 'Wait for the next review cycle.' Why? Because it benefits the company to save money.”
By the time someone comes to you about compensation, you've already lost them – they've been thinking about it for weeks.
They also reject rigid industry benchmarks. "Events and social media roles typically command lower salaries, but these functions are critical growth drivers for us — so we benchmark them against growth marketing instead," says Anand.
While the past few years have been the stuff of startup legend, for Anand it’s about sustaining the pace — and retaining the folks who make these hockey-stick years happen (and those who climb aboard the rocketship).
“We try to build a company that is very people-oriented so that if the music ever stops for our growth, people won’t immediately leave. They’ll stick with us for the long term,” he says. “Maybe for specific periods of time we can turn the volume up, but we’re focused on the long-term sustainability because we’re trying to build an enduring business, and how we treat people is a huge part of that.”