The Exchanges

Q team and a lot of energy, right? Whether that'll work in the enterprise, we'll find out, right? You may have, you may have to cave, right? When they, when they give you eight figures, but they need integrations with 20 systems and want you to have an external API and some other stuff, right? We'll see, but, uh, What's, what's coming the rest of the year that you're excited about?

A Uh, let's see. Well, one, like, event coming up, and then maybe I'll actually leverage something that you had described Amelia does every morning and sort of apply that to Monaco. Um, so the, the event that's coming up, we're going to GA. We think of ourselves right now in public beta. We did this in, uh, February, so we're now, you know, four to five months in this sort of, like, um, uh, public availability. Um, but we will move to general availability here in the next, let's call it, like, four to six weeks. Uh, and, and so there's, um, Really cool technical advancements that are coming alongside that specifically in this world of agents. Jason, you talked about like inbound agent. It's just like agent overload, uh, that comes with, uh, GA. We have been during this public beta process. We've really been training a lot of agents on the activities that, um, our customers are taking in their accounts, but also our FTEs are taking. Um, and so then truly agentic. There's one really cool one. You, you said that, um, Amelia wakes up every morning and, and starts talking to Tenke, um, and like learns things about your business from the agent that Amelia wouldn't otherwise know about the business. It's like, these are my words, not yours, but, uh, or certainly my interpretation. Um, the like insights and actions agent is really cool where.

AI assessment note: “we will move to general availability here in the next, let's call it, like, four to six weeks”

Q Picking up the phone is the one that drives me nuts. You got to pick up the phone, right?

A You do. And if you're picking up the phone and paying somebody, you know, 10 dollars to pick up that phone, they can only do so much to pick up that phone. There are certain activities that they can do with that. If you make, if you make it five, they can actually do a lot of different activities. And so what we're finding as we expand outside into the United States, there's actually more things that we can put people on. And then that, that even becomes more exaggerated. Um, and one of the things that we're thinking about doing this year is something like, uh, uh, expansion into Brazil, where we have a lot of, uh, uh, you know, our founders from Brazil, lots of employees are from Brazil. And so if we can get a, um, office in Brazil that allows us to, um, pay people based off of cost of living there, the activities that those people can do to drive additional business, it just opens up a lot more to us.

AI assessment note: “You do. And if you're picking up the phone and paying somebody”

Q bias, but the more bias was just to use it. It set Abelia up. I wasn't even involved with a great potential customer in Anthropic its first day. Yeah. Day one. Day one. As raw as the product probably was as a design partner. Hard to get a better testimony than that, is it? Set up an appointment with Anthropic. I mean, those guys are doing pretty good, aren't they?

A Well, first of all, um, you're, you're too gracious in the intro. So hopefully I can try and live up to even just some small part of like entrance that you provided for me, Jason. Thank you for having me. Awesome to see you both. And I do sort of remember that this does not happen for every customer to be very clear, but I do sort of remember one of the, one of the questions that we ask when we onboard a customer is if you can have a meeting with anybody in the world, who would that, who would that company be? And I, I sort of remembered Amelia, keep me honest. I think the answer was anthropic.

AI assessment note: “one of the questions that we ask when we onboard a customer is”

Q this fall apart, and I saw top folks that we knew start to take jobs with companies in Europe in particular, because I've worked with a lot of Europeans. I'm like, what? What? You're joining as CMO for a company based in Norway or London? Um, is this temporary? Can, can, if I'm a CEO based in wherever in the, in the world, can I hire a Sam Blond today?

A I'll, I'll give my, uh, sort of like biased and personal experience perspective on this one. So I, I suppose it's a strong opinion. It's loosely held. Um, so I, I think it depends on the stage of the company. And, and what I mean by that is, uh, there is so much value to having the early team be in an office together. I think not just developing relationships, but also the, like, You know, eight o'clock at night, everybody's still in the office. Oh, this thing came up. Let's all jump in the room and, and whiteboard out. Like how we can accelerate, you know, next month's revenue twice as much as we think we, we could before. Like what would we do differently? And I don't think those types of conversations happen in a remote world where the executive team or whatever is, is fully distributed at an early stage. I think as companies get larger, that becomes less relevant. Those types of things don't happen as much anymore. And so, um, uh, to answer your question directly, I, I, I, I do work for, um, CEOs that are in different locations and may or may not be in different locations, uh, once, once we're done with COVID. And, uh, I would, depending on the company of, uh, a company size, um, sort of like removing myself from the, the situation. I, I, I think people The expectation is they will. I, I think, um, we're in sort of a new world here. And for larger companies, they're going t…

AI assessment note: “I do work for, um, CEOs that are in different locations”

Q Um, but have you been able to take bias out of this by, by having a more technologically focused recruiting process? Has it benefited you in terms of overall diversity? Have you found ways to leverage that?

A Yeah. So, so I think where we are continuing to, to, Have done well and continue to do well. And then I'll talk a little bit about maybe a downside of, of what the way that we do this also. So, um, we're becoming far more diverse geographically. And I think as you become more diverse geographically, you inherently become more diverse with sort of like thought, you know, people in different parts of the country, they're different. They are different from one another. So, so I think that adds certainly, um, we've always been, I would say good, not great, um, on, uh, gender diversity, but we have, uh, several really amazing women leaders in the sales organization. We can probably do a little bit better with, uh, our individual contributor hiring. This does open up the, the candidate pool so much wider such that we now can be more thoughtful about like, you know, making sure we've got a, a ratio that we're comfortable with. Um, where I think, um, and this is something that, uh, I've, I've talked with you about, I think, and certainly talked about in, in some of my recruiting conversations. We do a lot of referral based hiring and that remains.

AI assessment note: “This does open up the, the candidate pool so much wider”

Q right? So I would pick Sam, but, so it sounds like one million dollar checks at the seed stage, ten million, you know, you can do a ten million dollar check for an A deal, right, or whatever we're calling to this day, and up to twenty million for bigger deals. You're flexible on those sizes, right? Um, just to give folks where they're at in those different stages, right?

A You nailed it, and thank you for the, um, uh, nice commentary around working with me and those sorts of things. I, I am, um, I think my background is unique, and I am excited to, uh, partner with, uh, uh, amazing founders and try and replicate much of the success that, um, uh, we were able to realize at the different companies that I've worked at, um, and, uh, I think, I think there's a lot There's a, there's, we can talk about it if you want, but, um, there's a lot that I am seeing, um, founders continue to make mistakes on, or at least continue to ask questions on, um, where, uh, I, I think I positively influence the trajectory of the business through, through, through sort of conversations and working together.

AI assessment note: “You nailed it, and thank you for the, um, uh, nice commentary”