Sierra

“Our customers already are using it for revenue generation, sales subscription churn management for subscription services, things like that.”

“So when we started the company, I just called Peter Fenton, who I've worked with twice before. He's the only person I talked to.”

“I think there's probably some short term professional services spend that reflects the lack of the maturity of the AI applications market right now. You know, and I think that when there are solutions like Sierra and others for specific domains available, you …”

“So at Sierra, which is my company, we make a solution. We're not doing pre-training where, you know, we're fine tuning other people's models to build this solution.”

“I still prospect every single day. Our co-founders prospect”

“If you're a serious XM customer, not only can we tell you what station shade 45 hip hop music is playing on, But we can also, if your radio stops working in your car, our agent will call the satellite and resend the encryption keys back to your car to get your…”

“Most companies wait until they get more scale and more maturity. At Sierra, we made the decision to do it early because we know those are the industries where we can make the most impact, and we really want to show up right in those industries by understanding…”

“The investment that you make in the proof of concept becomes a credit towards your long-term contract.”

“It's a little under a year. Because we are doing a proof of concept, which you've got to deploy the technology, build trust. It's AI. So you have to go through the legal compliance governance review. So it's about eight months from first meeting to actually cl…”

“In all of our engagements, we don't just get you in a POC and walk away. It's a full service solution where we provide a dedicated agent product manager. Think of like ex Google MBA from Stanford, and then a dedicated agent engineer that's integrated that beco…”

“We have one customer that actually pays us a commission when we upsell someone's membership, or we get paid when we prevent you from canceling. Some customers, we do a revenue share with them on, you know, preventing from someone from canceling their service.”

“I will knock on wood right now. We're batting a thousand on our proof of concepts.”

“Whether if we're in person, it's an in-person meeting, we'll just huddle right after, or if it's a virtual, we'll just jump on a Slack huddle and do it, but we do it Quick. And we provide each other feedback, good, bad, and ugly. And it's two way.”

“Every Friday we have like a quote unquote old school, like prospecting blitz where the team will block off a couple of hours. They'll do it together as a team to go out and prospect and try new, new strategies.”

“So I consider Brett one of the, I call him the apex predator. He's one of the best salespeople I've ever been around.”

“We don't charge implementation fees or any integration work. We absorb all of that.”

“At Sierra, what we do is everyone comes in as an individual contributor for a certain period, even if you were in leadership, like myself included.”

“Over my, if I look at the statistics of folks that I've taken chances on that didn't work out, I always go back and look. I remember debating in that room, and there was two people that were like, I'm not sure, and we still did it anyways, and it came back to …”

“Now we do have offices that, or people that work from home that don't live in those major cities, but I bring the sales team together once a month.”

“McCaw over a hundred million in ARR. Hey Jen hitting a hundred million in ARR. Fireworks a hundred and forty million in ARR. Sierra with Brett Taylor over a hundred million in ARR.”

“The only way the math works for the Sierra at ten billion is if you eat, you don't just get India, maybe not up front, but over time, you don't just get the service cloud revenue, you get the service cloud revenue plus some slug of the labor.”

“The approaches are just very different because of their leadership all coming from Salesforce. They've taken a very Salesforce-esque approach where it's, you know, the heavy configuration and sort of this longer lift to get going. And we're more of a, you know…”

“I would expect a Decagon and a Sierra to be able to execute faster on a product side than Salesforce, but Salesforce has like so much distribution.”

“The only way this math works is if you eat a huge slug of the labor and because you eat the labor, instead of the, you know, twenty billion dollar software market for services, you eat the two hundred billion dollar a year services market for customer support …”

“And I think the physics of diffusing this technology into the enterprise will be the rate limiter on how fast this company can grow. It won't be raw demand. It won't be the talent Of the CEO. It won't be the product. It will literally be, can you really roll o…”

“I think they've done an amazing job in a way that very few SaaS companies have of transitioning to an AI first world, and the growth rate of their AI product is frankly comparable to Sierra's”

“There is nothing even remotely closed to what is needed when you go to a complex vertical out there. Okay. And it's definitely not in the kind of Sierra level, but even if you take it to the level of the APIs, If I'm kind of taking an anthropic and an open AI,…”

“We looked at a number of companies that were behind Sierra and Decagon and came to the conclusion that a direct head-to-head Against those companies, when you're a smart, it's just a little bit too hard.”

“It's the best thing for OpenAI not to buy Sierra, incorporate that as a customer support product, and have Brett Taylor come in as the day-to-day CEO, and Sam can be fundraiser, Sam can be master of...”

“But I also think, like, you look at, like, all of our competitors, like, you mentioned Sierra, DecGone, and all of the other ones, we power all of them.”

“I think customer support is uninvestable today, and I get so much shit on Twitter for this, because everyone shits on them, but I'm like, Sierra and Dakagon, obviously two market leaders in terms of brand, and how much money they've raised, and you've got 16 p…”

“And my guess is their LLM spend is sub-ten percent of revenues. In other words, LLMs are not the dominant portion of the value they deliver. It's the LLM plus the software, plus the whole thing, plus all the domain specific knowledge.”

“If Sierra doesn't grow, let me put it bluntly, if Sierra doesn't grow, then at some point, OpenAI and Entropic will stop growing because their customers today are primarily software companies for coding, right? And selling through software companies to corpora…”

“We have software engineers who are completely AI-pilled and using Cloud Code, Codex, our own internal agent we call Pinecone that we used to run much of the company on, and they estimate they are between three and 20 times more productive in terms of features …”

“We will in short order be in a way, one of the larger B to C companies. We're doing that via our customers, but you know, we'll, we'll, we're serving hundreds of millions of interactions, right? Soon billions of interactions.”

“Our first founding head of research was the Princeton professor who literally wrote the paper on language model based agents, the react paper.”

“As for running the board meetings themselves, we don't have board decks, we have board memos. So Brett and I write a usually six to 10 page memo.”

“Sierra brain is it starts with a 20 or 30 page document that grounds any agent in what we are as a company. What we do, how we're organized, our team structure, the competitive landscape, our strengths and weaknesses, all of these things. And then on top of th…”

“We completely changed our engineering interview process. So it now looks much more like, here's a very here's a kind of prompt think through an application you would like to build. Cool. Okay. Here's a 150 dollars to spend on choose your coding agent. You can …”

“Every one of our rounds, we actually guided to and took a lower price than we could have.”

“You mentioned the six week cadence. We have kind of a tick tock, a three hour meeting and a one and a half hour meeting. We've done this since the beginning of the company”

“When we, in our first Black Friday, Cyber Monday with a set of retailers, one of one of our lead engineers, our head of operations, me or Brett, was in real time personally reading every single conversation that our agents were having, because we wanted to mak…”

“So today we have a set of our own proprietary fine tune models. But these are fine tunes on top of open weights models.”

“I now have a very complex networking setup that combines two cellular networks and a Starlink mini so that I have uninterrupted beautiful connectivity to and from the city every day.”

“And we're not, you know, we're not doing our own pre-training. We'll leave the capital expense there to, you know, the labs and the larger companies.”

“My understanding is, you know, Palantir has kind of low hundreds of customers. We are and intend to be at a lot larger scale than that.”

“We think about rather than dividing up the company, we think about Majors and minors for every part of the company.”

“Brett is actually still an extraordinarily capable software engineer. It's remarkable. So, you know, some of the code that is in production, right, he has written”

“I will be disappointed if in the next no more than two months, not every one of our interviews has some strong AI native component to it.”

“We work with 40% of the fortune 50. We have 50% of our customers doing over a billion in revenue. We have 30% doing over ten billion in revenue.”

“We are at multiple larger multiple larger size than one of our next nearest similar vintage startup competitors growing faster.”

“So I, to date review and approve every single hire we make, and I get some help from pine cone and I've basically taught it.”

“I was on one side. It was like, I think we need better kind of process and structure around this thing. Brett was on the side of people and maybe we need different leaders or a different leader in this space. The answer is with most things like turned out to b…”

“The capital expense the ongoing capital expense to create what is effectively a highly perishable bag of floating point numbers just doesn't work. Just doesn't work for any, but a small number of companies.”

“My hunch is it will be more like an Uber lift market. And we obviously think we're in the pole position to be the bigger of those two.”

“We then enlisted half a dozen design partners that we built the first version of our product and platform with and for. And these are, in the history of the company, legendary, legendary companies. Olokai, great flip-flops, you should buy them. SiriusXM, Sonos…”

“Some of our most effective employees of the entire company are 22 or 23 years old and have been completely AI-pilled.”

“Sierra doesn't have their own model team. They use other people's models, right? Because the value of Sierra is the go to market. It's Brett Taylor.”

“If you use a tool like Sierra, the wedge right now is voice, but the important part is tool calling. 11 Labs lets you do some tool calling, but that's not the bread and butter.”

“I think Brett Taylor's actually trying to recreate the next generation of Salesforce. He is absolutely not playing the customer support game. He's moving into pre-sales.”

“The only way I can justify 15 or twenty billion in market cap for Sierra is not if I build a slightly better next generation service cloud, if I am the entire customer ecosystem for your entire business.”