The Exchanges

Q 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?

A 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.

AI assessment note: “This guy named Nick Merrill, who was, I worked for Hillary Clinton”

Q 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?

A 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 who's building imagery and, and art with Clay. 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 SaaS event at Dreamforce. And the intention was, how can you like relax and wind up for a really depleting few days at conference? And so how can you bring this energy and creativity in 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 thing, is when you look at other B to B software, no one invests in it. And so when you have something that no one invests in, And everyth…

AI assessment note: “tactically it means we hired a claymation artist who we worked with”

Q What else were you doing in early customer reverse demos?

A 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 1:05 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 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 they'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 content 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 th…

AI assessment note: “Well, let's do one together right now. So let's say you signed up”

Q 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 in enterprise with enrichment to other use cases to ultimately sort of expand?

A 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 used us to automate all their inbound at scale and triple their enrichment rates on that and finding way more leads through that. Verkata 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 consequences 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.

AI assessment note: “start with enrichment, make sure the data quality is high, and then build use cases”

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

A So I think the honest answer is that now we go about them, I think, 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 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 they, 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…

AI assessment note: “At the time, it was more brute force... Now we have turned that into a machine”

Q 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?

A 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, 20, 22 to January, 20, 23, 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 believe 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 Kazanji has called Modern Sales Pros? I'd been a member of that group for four years, and-

AI assessment note: “Kareem and I were very intent on making a PLG motion happen.”