The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 22 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Zhang: Competitor Sierra relies on heavy, Salesforce-style configuration
“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…”
Lemkin: Disruption in AI software is occurring every five weeks
“And then these spaces, it's not once a decade disruption or once every five years. Now it's once every five weeks, literally every five week disruption, right? So this lack of stability is where I think that the DecaCon revenue growth justifies a hundred X. It…”
Business model shifts are the primary driver of AI software disruption
“If I were to rank order the level of disruption that is coming for these companies, business model shift is number one. And so, you know, we can talk about examples where that's most in practice today. You know, Sarah and Kimberly from our side led investment,…”
Zhang: Enterprise AI buyers demand fast ROI proofs over vision sales
“You can't just go in and sell the vision because no one needs to buy into the vision. I think everyone already believes the vision. And so then it's more about showing the results quickly and being able to demonstrate that, hey, there is ROI here and that, you…”
Reyna: ElevenLabs powers customer support AI competitors like Sierra and Decagon
“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.”
O'Driscoll: Scale passed on direct competitors to Sierra and Decagon
“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.”
Zhang: Approximately 50% of Decagon's new code is AI generated
“Yeah, roughly there. The lines get blurred because oftentimes what will happen is like, hey, I'm sitting down to do this project. Let me just have the agent Take a stab at it first, and then you go in and like edit things and move things around. So there's a b…”
Zhang: Decagon clients spend more on AI agents than CRM software
“And so if you look at a lot of our customers, for example, they're spending more on the AI agent Than the previous CRM software for support.”
Zhang: Enterprise AI customer experience market will have multiple winners
“I think our space probably will have multiple winners, hopefully not too many, and hopefully we're one of them. I think it's just hard to say, like, why there would be a huge single winner here. The reason is that there's not that many network effects from bet…”
Decagon raised seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz before having an idea
“The seed round we raised before we had any ideas. So we raised from Andreessen Horowitz.”
Zhang: AI customer service resolution will reach 80% to 90% soon
“I think in three to five years, it'll probably creep towards like just consistently 80 to 90, right? Because you're able to just so easily allow the end users to capture more logic and teach you new things.”
Zhang: Very few enterprises build AI customer support fully in-house
“I would say from our experience so far, very few people will build it themselves.”
Zhang: Product-first approaches outperform forward-deployed engineering in consistent enterprise software
“And so, I think our mistake was we over-indexed on that a little bit. Because I don't think that concept necessarily makes sense in all use cases. And in our use case, the types of things that people care about across different customers is generally pretty co…”
Zhang: Decagon prioritizes raw clock speed over experience across all roles
“Technically we really value just like clock speed really, really highly. And clock speed, I just mean like how fast your brain works and how fast you can learn. And this is across all functions, right? Obviously it's important for engineering, but for Sales an…”
Decagon rejected funding offers up to 2x higher than $1.5B
“I will say we could have raised at a much higher valuation up to like 1.5 to two X.”
Zhang: Decagon and Sierra will out-execute Salesforce on AI products
“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.”
O'Driscoll: Scale Venture Partners debated and passed on Decagon's $1.5B round
“And in a way, and you know, look, we had some internal discussions. Should we be one of the hundred people pleading to put money into Decagon at one and a half? And we had some interesting discussions.”
Zhang: Combining math Olympiad reasoning with sales skills is underrated
“If you can really unlock that level of, you know, reasoning capability and just like smartness and combine it with folks that can, you know, teach them how to sell or how to build a company, I think that's a pretty good combination. So that's something I think…”
Decagon found enterprise CX buyers willing to pay six figures upfront
“When we started talking about, you know, the CX space and actually deploying conversational AI agents to actually talk with customers, people were able to justify that way more, right? They're like, oh, wow. Yeah, this would be useful because I have, you know,…”
Decagon grew from zero to eight-figure ARR in one year
“Last year we went from roughly zero to eight figures ARR and we raised towards the end of that.”
Zhang: Fully deployed AI customer service achieves 60% to 80% resolution
“But I would say that, like, a good bar when you're fully up and running is, like, 6070, 80, in that range. And it just depends on, like, what sort of things the AI has access to. Like, if it's able to take a lot of actions and resolve a lot of things, then, of…”