#028: Zach Hamed - Clay’s Million-Dollar Vision for the Future of Networks

If I'm sitting down with someone and they're like, here's a real problem that we're having, let's think through it. I'm headfirst. I'm excited. Let's think through this. What have you tried already? I realize that I'm coming in cold to this problem. You guys have thought about it much deeper than I have, but here's what I would do. Here's like step one. You take a little time alone to reflect, think about it, come back with your thoughts. Let's have a conversation.

Zach Hamed is the founder and co-CEO at Clay, a venture-backed startup that enables folks to manage all of their personal and professional relationships all from a single dashboard. Since launching officially in 2021, the team has raised over $8 million from leading investors to fuel growth. In this episode, we cover how Zach approaches his personal relationship building in both business and life, the outsized ROI on maintaining connections as careers progress, and how entrepreneurs and founders can improve their ability to identify and foster key relationships. Welcome back to episode 28 of the Turning Pro Podcast. Today we have Zach Hamed, the founder and co-CEO of Clay. I got to be honest, for everyone who's listening, even if you're a past guest, I've been looking forward to this episode more than any we've done since we started this podcast.

Wow.

Thanks for joining us today, Zach.

I'm honored. Thank you so much.

So we're going to make this very simple. You can start by giving everyone the 30-second overview of what Clay is, and then I will jump into the story of how you even ended up sitting on this couch with us.

Okay. The story is going to be very fun. So Clay, I like to describe as a home for your personal and professional relationships. We let you connect your calendar, email, LinkedIn, iMessage, all those things. Bring all of your people together, build a Rolodex of everybody you know. We help you remember how you know them. We tell you everything about them. And then we help you keep in touch and be more thoughtful with them over time. So whether that's a job change, news, updates about them, what we want to do is make sure that you never forget a person that's important to you or important to your career. And we do that for everybody from MBAs, college students, people just starting their job all the way to Fortune 500 CEOs, family offices, crazy like veterinarians. Like there's a whole sort of group of people who need to do that and get their next opportunity from somebody in their network. So that's play.

So the way that we ended up where we are today, I was— and I actually wish I remembered. I think the journal is probably sitting under my bed somewhere when I was 17 or 18, I think 17 years old. I wrote— I have like a journal of just like business ideas. And I wrote an idea in there and I actually said it would be called Rolodex if I ever did it. And the one sentence that I wrote is a software tool to help me manage my relationships because I was that kid when I was younger who had Google Sheets on Google Sheets where you think you would have when you didn't even know what the word scalability meant. When you're like, I'd sit there and like manually update the last time I met someone, like what my relationship is to them, how they can maybe be helpful in the future, so on and so forth. And so I was so frustrated by that because it was never sustainable for me. But I always knew that my network was my superpower. And if I wanted to be successful in business, it was going to be something I needed to lean into based on my personality and my skill set. And fast forward a couple of years, I don't even— I think I was just scrolling through the internet and I came across my friend Amar, Amar Amdani, who I think I introduced you to from Adapt.

Oh yeah.

He had posted about this company who had just closed around funding, which was Clay. I clicked on Clay just because I was curious and I looked at it and I was like, holy fuck, I've been looking for this my entire life. And I downloaded it, was just playing with it. And I was so mind blown for a couple of reasons. The first one is that I realized so many people in my life have dealt with the same problem. The second one is Zach has been able to take, in my opinion, one of the most complicated problems and distill it down into a very simplistic UI for someone to actually understand how they could use it. And I actually just got to the point where I messaged Zach on LinkedIn, nothing other than letting him know that I am obsessed with what he built because it's a problem that I felt so deeply through my childhood and growing up into my professional career. And I can honestly say that I've never done that in my life.

That was the first, by the way. FYI.

Yeah, I know.

I was for sure learning.

I would say up until that was the first time I ever did that where I messaged him just to let him know that I was an absolute fanboy of what he built. And we ended up meeting up in person because from his perspective, as the smart founder, he is like, I want to learn from my super users and understand like why and how. And now we're sitting here a couple of years later talking about it.

Yeah.

Have you tried to get rolodex.com or have you looked at who—

I've looked at a lot of them because that's a crazy domain. Trademarks and like a lot of good stuff. But I am deep in the domain name search. I like cool domain names related to contacts, Rolodex, all that stuff. we're going to get something good.

One quick side note.

Yeah.

What you mentioned right there of when you first reach out to him of, hey, I'm just a fan, like keep doing your thing. I think Zach mentioned this on his podcast. That is by far the best way versus, hey, big fan. What are you doing next week? Do you have time to chat? Very different asks. And every time, every time I read something or especially after that episode with Zach, where I'm just a genuine fan, I'm like, hey, this is really cool. Congrats. Hey, let me know if I can help in any way. Yeah, that always leads to the other person saying, hey, would love to learn more. Like, you're doing cool stuff too. Versus anytime I say, hey, I would love to hop on a call.

That's a great point.

No response.

That's a great point.

If you see something, say something.

Yeah.

If you see—

shout out to your— just put that energy into the world and it will come back to you.

And if you're not, don't lean into relationships with an expectation of a transaction happening. And odds are you'll get to the transaction you probably wanted. But like, that's not how you lead building rela— I mean, we could sit here and tell you, you'll tell everyone about relationship building because you spend your life doing that. You've learned a lot about it.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think my first question for you is understanding, like, what was your experience with this problem that ultimately made you decide to jump into building what you are today?

Yeah, I mean, how much time do you got? There's— it goes way back. So very similar to you, actually. I, in high school, had— at the time, I don't know if you remember Highrise. It was from 37signals. They had a contact— like, a CRM, lightweight CRM tool. And you would create— it was made for— like SMBs, whatever, but I signed up for that because I had also just loved the company, Jason Fried and all of them. So I had signed up for that, I put in all of my people from internships. Every time I had an internship, I get like a bunch of business cards, all the mentors and people that talked, and I was like, I'm gonna keep track of those, cool. So I had that. Then I go to college, similar vibe where you have professors, you have, you go your first summer internship, second summer internship, you've met hundreds of people at that point, and you just constantly feel like you're forgetting them. And I remember then, Signing up for LinkedIn, and LinkedIn actually used to make this a lot easier. So you would go in, you would friend all the people, um, and then you could— there was a notes field and you could add notes to each contact. And so I was like, oh, I'm gonna use LinkedIn for this. Like, I'm gonna like type in the notes, how I met them, things about them. And then after a conversation, after I talked to somebody, I'd put it in and I'd be like, okay, um, this is what I wanna remember for next time. This is what the kids' names and, and, and spouses' names and things like that. Then, uh, fast forward, I think like junior, senior year, I have this like very distinct memory of somebody emailing me. Somebody I knew well, and they were like, hey, by the way, I saw that you're connected with this person on LinkedIn, like any chance you could intro me? And I was like, who the fuck is that? And so I go in and I'm like, okay, let me like try to remember who this person is, and I couldn't. And I had 500+ connections, and they like try to get you to do that. And at that point I was like, okay, this is again not working, I need to find something else. I put it, pulled out everything, put it in Evernote. I was like, Evernote's gonna be the thing. They had business card scanning, I was like, I'm gonna like scan business cards. And it sort of felt like a weird, I didn't know anybody else doing that in a way, but I also knew that I had written a few, like I had read some books and I knew that like super connectors or people that are like high in business, they keep the business cards, they write on the back of the business cards, they follow up on time. Like I knew all of the hygiene, but I didn't know anybody who was as religious about it as I was. Then fast forward to, I went to, I had started a company out of college. I was a Thiel Fellow. Went to Goldman after that to build a startup internally there. And while I was there, we wanted to bring in startup people to Goldman to like share thoughts and like show like what, you know, the best in class of fintech was. And I had known and met a bunch of those people. And so I was like, okay, let me figure out how I can do that. And I'm feeling this like two sides of me while I'm at Goldman. I have all these like, like Goldman is 30,000 people. You're meeting people constantly. Like, so I have that Rolodex. And then there are startup people who wanna meet those people and then vice versa. And I was like, I don't, this same shit every time. Like, I know, I know I know somebody. I have a terrible memory and I know that, but I can't, I'm not gonna do so much, like all of the work around organizing and jotting things down. And the minute you make that spreadsheet, I remember sitting in McNally Jackson with my laptop. I had a spreadsheet. I entered every, I spent a whole afternoon. I was like putting in the, like, I was like, this is great. My mentor, my friend, my college roommate, whatever. And then it was like, I don't know, a couple hundred rows, 1,000 rows. And then you bucket everybody, and then you get to the end, and you're like, now what? And then you're like, okay, this is good. It's out of date immediately. And at some point I imported that into one of these like personal CRM tools, and it sent me a notification every day of like 500 people I needed to meet. And I was like, I'm not, that's not how this works, right? Like I need to know at the right time, and I need to find a person. It needs to be more like, me pulling instead of, uh, well, there's a time for pull and push, but it needs to be a lot more intelligent and I shouldn't have to be entering all this information. And so, uh, fast forward, I was thinking of leaving Goldman. Um, I, I reconnected with my co-founder, my now co-founder Matt, um, who is an incredible design mind and engineering mind. And we were similarly like, okay, let's sit down and let's brainstorm. He did the exact same thing, but in Apple Notes. And he was like, I'm gonna make notes for each person, do all that stuff. And so we just, at that point, and I'll stop there, but we did a couple hundred user interviews, talked to every person. And we were intentionally like, we are not going to just do salespeople, recruiters, people in tech. We're going to go broad. We're going to talk to— we talked to this congressperson in South Carolina. We talked to doctors, real estate agents, people in college, just all across the board, trying to understand How would you describe— do you have this problem today? How would you describe it? What have you tried? Why did it fail? Like, all of those questions, hour-long conversations. And from there, we took that and said, okay, how do we build a product out of these insights?

Did you raise capital before doing those user interviews?

No, so that was us after quitting our jobs. And we did all of those sort of user interviews. We prototyped a bunch, we showed it back to them. But it was a lot of sort of, it was a pretty fast sprint of like, we need to figure out if there's something here. We were trying to de-risk and talk ourselves out of starting this company because we like, we knew it was like a very deeply personal pain point, but we were like, we gotta make sure that this is like a real business problem and not just like, you know, a side project.

Yeah. I think there's also varying degrees of pain points.

Yeah.

Like a student wanting to get an internship. Yeah. That's probably stressful for them.

Exactly.

And they need to know. And then there's, you're running a company and if you don't, build the right relationship with the right people at the right time, you're losing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars or even investing. Maybe you're raising a huge round and you forget to catch up with the right person at the right time.

Exactly.

So question for context, I run a marketing agency. And so the minute you mentioned all those ICPs, I was like, that's a messaging nightmare. So across all those ICPs, how did you refine messaging and positioning that would resonate with everyone without pushing anyone out of your funnel?

Yeah, that's a great question. So the first thing we did, there were a few sort of core insights that we were trying to differentiate ourselves with. Um, the first one was we're only doing this for people who feel a willingness to pay and feel the pain so deeply that they would put down money on this. 'Cause there's a lot of free social apps that do the, like, parts of this, contacts, whatever. We're not that. Like, you know that you will make money from unlocking something in your network, so you will be willing to pay for a product like So that was number 1. Number 2 is there were more apps like that, like productivity apps. I think the willingness to pay for work products had changed by then. But the thing that we were trying to do is differentiate and tell that story and talk to those ICPs via brand and storytelling. And so the thing that we launched with was this— is basically a manifesto about David Rockefeller, which I think you had also cited in your email, which was basically— that was our first landing page, was, a story about David Rockefeller, who was John Rockefeller's, like, quiet younger brother. And it was pretty short. I mean, it was well-written, but it was short. And it was basically how he always felt jealous of how his brother always, you know, had success in business and had, like, relationships came very naturally to him. David saved every person that he met on an index card. And so he would write down the name of the person and, like, a few notes about them. And by the time he died, he became CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank and like very successful. He had 100,000 index cards. And I think that the Wall Street Journal had done a story about it and they had taken photos of it after he died. And they had, it's like, you know, Bill Gates' index card. It's like all of these very successful people all the way down to like his neighbor. And he writes in his memoir, that was the only reason he believes he got to where he was, was remembering things about people that they actually forgot that they had told him, and that he could pick up the conversation where he left off. And that story, and that sort of framing, and those photos of index cards universally hit every ICP. It was like, a real estate agent looked at that, and they were like, "Yeah, I do that for my clients. Like, what are you talking about?" So we actually like totally, it wasn't talking about, "You are a real estate agent, here's what you need." It was more, "Here's a story about," Somebody's problem, do you want to be like this person? And that really did resonate. And so from there we were like, okay, if you are a power user, if you are at the top of your game in any industry, here is the tool that you need to do that. And the names we show in the mockups and the design we choose and the marketing collateral is very different, but that story was the original sort of uniting factor around all of that. And even today our landing page, like we still have the story there, but the language you use is very sort of broad. Like, we agonize over every tagline, every word there. We don't use the word personal CRM. We don't use the word— we don't even really talk about business cards. We don't like— there are very specific words that we call out to being thoughtful around cultivating relationships and being meaningful and intentional with the people that are in your network. You don't need to be the sort of networking guy at the conference. That's not what— you can be. We have a ton of those users, but it's not— Uh, it's much more broad than that. And so to found a company with that in mind is hard, but you can eventually get there. And then your market is much larger than any sort of CRM company even.

What are your biggest insights through building this company that you've learned about relationships in general? I know that's a broad question, whether it's like data that you guys have pulled in terms of how people engage with your tool or just through your learnings, like for people listening who are so curious about this, because I think Like, I would say that super connecting is my superpower, and I think Adrian feels the same. And so it's something we lean into. And then I think people who don't have that naturally try to understand how and what that means.

Yeah.

And so I'd be curious to know from your perspective, like, what are the core tenets of relationships or the data points that you've pulled from building Clay?

Yeah. So there are a few sort of quality— I'll start with the qualitative stuff that we've learned, and then I'll go to some, some of the numbers. I think qualitatively, people You— everybody intuitively realizes when somebody is being inauthentic. So when you— a lot of people will try and do this poorly. They will automate it or they will have an EA do it or some third party do it. And you know when that's happening, usually you'll figure it out. And that either acutely or sort of like underneath the hood affects how you view that relationship and you downrank that person. You're not going to recommend them as much. And everybody has that moment, I think. And so that's why we don't automate a lot of stuff. What we're trying to do is get you back in front of a person and surface their name to you and give you the reason to reach back out. We wanna give you the sort of tee up the authentic sort of reconnect as opposed to something that's artificial. That's number one. Number two is I think the ways people, the ways people reach out to each other has like obviously drastically changed, but It's not a lot of these sort of tools and people who come to us, they assume that it's a like schedule a meeting, do a phone call, whatever. A like or an engagement on a social post could be all you need. And again, it's different, you know, if you've known this person for a while versus not. But for every, every individual relationship is different and every user that we have is different. And so we try to really understand what are you trying to achieve in your career or personally? And then how do we help with that? We also have a lot of people who use us for very personal things. So Christmas card lists, like marriage, like wedding, like lists and things like that. That's like a very, that's a use case we did not imagine, but like that does sort of translate a little bit and people then carry that through. Then there's a lot of stuff I think that then is backed by numbers. So, people move around, our generation, but also like everybody recently, millennials move around jobs 3 times more often. So having a backup of your network is actually like one of our core value props. It's like you are going to leave your job likely in the next 1 to 3 years. You don't wanna lose all those contacts. And everybody knows that feeling when you leave your job and you're like, sometime, you know, 3 months later, you're like, oh my God, I messaged that person, I don't have their email anymore. And you'll find it, that's fine, but you lose all of that context that you've built up. And we believe, just like LinkedIn leaves your job with you, and you keep that, that's your account, we believe that that is your data in a lot of ways. And salespeople do that, they keep the business cards and they take it with them. That's why the Rolodex analogy is so impactful for us, it's that there is no modern Rolodex. Contacts doesn't encompass that in CRM Stone. So that's number one. Number two is, The data behind like where you will actually get your next opportunity is pretty stark. So I think 80% of people get their next job from somebody in their network. You meet, and we're starting to have data on this like more holistically, but a few studies have shown like over the course of your career, you meet around 3,500, 4,000 people. So you're meeting lots of people that you actually never reconnect with at all. There's obviously all the research around Dunbar's number. The number of people that you can sort of remember their names or associate a name to a face is around 150. There are different rings around that, right? So, you know, remembering a name is different from remembering things about them. You are the sum of your 5 closest people. There's all of that research. So, you know, there's a lot of social and psychology research that ties what we are doing back to outcomes in the real world. But the one I like to look at is, 80% of people getting jobs from their network, and the vast majority of those are weak ties. So they're not your best friend. They're not the person you worked with, actually. They're people that you have 10— I think the sweet spot is 10 mutual connections on LinkedIn. That's the right amount of, like, association where they have enough in common with you where you know people and you can, like, cite something. You can be like, oh, we went to college with that person, whatever. But it's not enough where, like, you are basically entirely overlapped. And that is where the vast majority of people are getting their next business opportunity, job, sale, recruit, like it's there. And so the weak ties are the most valuable, and yet we do the worst job of keeping up to date with them, and we have no idea where they are. And you have this recency bias where I see you today, in 2 weeks I will be sort of 50, 60%, you know, top of mind, and that just decays over time. And so you're constantly sort of, if you're, a high-functioning professional in any job, you have a few tens of people that you're thinking about in the most recent quarter, and then everybody else has sort of, you know, fallen through the cracks. And so that's what we're trying to solve. And that's the thing that people come back to us and tell us. We have these stories, which we love getting, like we call 'em like love letters. It's like people will email us and be like, I got a job. Like I logged into Clay and I saw a thing and I like reached out to the person and I got a job. And like that is the most magical outcome And, you know, LinkedIn talks about increasing economic sort of opportunity for the world. Like, we are like you. We see that, which is like a really magical feeling.

It's like when Hinge gets a message about someone who got married.

Got married. Exactly.

Clay for jobs.

Yeah.

I have a couple other questions, but before we get to those, Gary, you want to grab the door? I just realized it flew open. Before we get to my other questions, I want you to tell Zach what you told me last time we were filming. Yeah, about the Figma, because he'll quite literally just probably take it and build it into Clay if he thinks it's meaningful enough.

I would love for you to.

I think it is though, which is why I wanted to tell him.

All right, so I had my entire network on Google Sheets.

Yep.

And then I realized that that was like, like you said, there's no way to actually keep up with it. And so I moved everything over to HubSpot because I already had like sales pipeline on there. I was like, you know what, it's not my personal relationships, but for my career network, I'm just going to have everyone here and then I'll port it by like how close we are, how actively people are introducing me to people. And then I realized even on there, when I just see Ben Sharf at Platter, I just see his name in a little card, even with details and recency of how recently we caught up, I still have no— even though you're a very close friend of mine, I'm still, I look at your name on a little card and I'm not like, I'm gonna go spend an hour knowing exactly who I should introduce him to. And so what I did, I can show you after this, I had my designer build a basic Figma mockup and I said, hey, take the top 50 people, the most active folks that are referring us business or that I'm really close to, just the headshots blown up as big as possible.

Yeah.

And then a quick little title underneath. When I go on, I go on that every single week and just the face of someone versus in a line item. Now when I look at Ben, it's a tiny little Ben Sharf, but I see his face and I'm like, I want to go help. That's my friend.

I want to go help him.

And then I'll take way more time actually trying to make introductions, trying to help them. And it's led to, I think, a lot deeper relationships and a lot more business sent a ton of ways. I love that. So I'm curious, I'm sure you get this a lot of like, how do you go from just another name on a line item versus some trigger in which I want to go help that person?

Exactly.

They're a friend.

100%. That's a— I love that story. We think a lot about that. I think there are two— we talk about love languages a little bit, both from a how do you show care? There you go.

This is beautiful.

How do you show care for Ben, right? Like, is it that you have to have FaceTime with him? Is it that, you know, it's not like, you know, touch, um, but, uh, words of affirmation, right? Like, is it sending him a nice note, just being like, I'm thinking about you, man? Like, some people will do that, and you'll see that, um, and some people on the receiving end really value that versus like, why the fuck are you texting me?

You're going to stop making customer intros. I'm just going to—

I'm thinking about you.

I'm thinking about you.

You're like, can you start making the intros again?

There you go. So is it intros? Is it, um, Yeah, mutual intros is a big one. Let's catch up, video call, like depending on where, GIFs, right? Like there are all sorts of, handwritten cards. There are all sorts of ways that you can show that you're thinking about someone, and that's gonna be different personal and professional. It's gonna be different if you're friends versus not. That's one side of it. The second is, how do people remember people throughout their day? So some people are very visual, it's faces, it's like I can instantly remember and think about everything I know about you and what I need to help you with. for other people to name, for other people they need to see like a work output. They need to be like, oh, Ben, here's what Ben is working on right now and how I can help him. Um, and so that, I don't know of really any other sort of like domain where there's so much emotion behind how people use the product and how they want to visualize things. Um, and I think like maybe Trello is similar, like, like GTD and sort of to-do things are similar where lists of things versus, you know, some people want to schedule it on their calendar. Like, the way you think about being productive is different. But at the end of the day, we think about relationships and we think about they're people, and it affects how you frame people in the UI. When we— I had never thought about this. We had our first user probably a year in. They were like, you've suggested somebody to me who's passed away. And like, how do I think about that as like a UI problem? 'You sent me a reminder,' right? Like, and statistically, it's like happening a lot. Same thing with an ex, like girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever. So there's a lot of stigma associated with people in a product, especially when you're bringing it in, it's your contacts, and it's people that you haven't thought about in a while. So if I blew up your faces of those people, you'd be very distraught. And so a lot of what we think about is, I need to be able to either intuit or get feedback from you on who those 50 people are, so that I don't mess that up. And those 50 people change a lot, and so how do I get you to change that and learn with you? And that's what we think about. We are a bank for your relationships. We are like housing that information. We take it really seriously. Trust is important. But also the way we surface it to you is different per user and should change over time.

The thought that I have, because I know one of the— I would say the feature I use the most within the tool is the tagging one where you can make groups.

Yeah.

But the way that I think about it is when you look at any sort of tool, whether it's Asana or Trello, the ones you mentioned where they give you different options for visual, how you want to visually look at it.

Exactly.

So it's like a filter. So I think it would be as simple as him making his own group. That's like my top 20.

Yeah.

And then you just allow him to like make it a grid image of all their faces instead of just like stacking their names.

Exactly.

One above the other.

Yeah. Yeah.

You guys have that?

No, we, we've heard it a decent amount. Particularly for— that was the big— actually, politicians are actually big on that. So the Congress— was it a Congress? He may have been in a cabinet position, actually. But he would have printouts. They do printouts, like special printouts, big face, big name, big title. And that's prep before big meetings or big conferences or things. And somebody's just doing that manually and printing it out. So we've heard it a ton, actually.

Yeah. Interesting.

Another question I have for you is around data privacy.

Yeah.

So when I first heard about the tool, I mean, my personal perspective is Apple and all these other companies have all my information anyways. So like, whatever. Yeah, I know not everyone feels that way. They think they're smarter than technology, for better or for worse. You guys have a very invasive tool in the sense that like your tool is only as good as a user's willingness to share the information to make the tool smarter, to serve you the way that it needs to. But I'm curious how you think about that, both from the perspective of objections that I'm sure you're getting and also just security, because you guys are objectively taking interactions and messages from every medium of communication that someone's willing to give you?

Yeah. So there's a bunch of things. So first, I'm a security nut. Like, I use 1Password. I use all the— like, I really care about privacy. And so we started with that, and I think we imbued that into the team and the product. So that's number 1. Number 2 is, at the end of the day, I think a lot of these things come down to trust. I think if you look at, you know, there are email, calendar, things, software where they claim to be open source or they claim to be private and then they're not, or they like, they're on device but then you like look at the logs and then they're sending all the information everywhere. So at the end of the day, it comes down to, do you trust the brand? Do you trust who we are? Can you get ahold of somebody? And is that person gonna be accountable if something goes wrong? That's like how I think about it. We have 1.5 billion email, emails, calendar events, and text messages at this point. And a lot of, that is from people that are either hyper-security conscious or very senior, very, like, you know, high up. What we found is number one, the people with the family office and, like, the big, like, Rolodexes actually, like, it's almost like an inverse relationship between, like, how much they care about privacy and then how much, like, valuable information they have. So that's number one. Number two is our philosophy is we don't even want to touch the data. As much as possible, we don't even want to have it. We don't want to have access to it. A lot of the times that's not possible. So what we're trying to strike on every integration, it's different, and that's why we wrote a security and privacy policy that's like human-readable. Like we wrote it, we sat down, we wrote it. And every integration tells you exactly what we take, what we have access to, what we do with the data, and what you wanna do, like if you don't want us to have that, what you should do instead. And so email, for example. Google allows us to only ask for the header in an email, not the body. So we only take the, To, CC, subject line, that's it. We don't want the body, we never wanna see the body, we don't wanna store the body. Compare that to something like LinkedIn, which is like sort of already public because you can see the connections, so that's like not that bad, but we don't wanna have access to your credentials. So we're doing that on device, we are never sending your credentials to us. So as much as possible, we're trying to choose the, we're creating the integration in such a way that we don't even have to think about that. The other problem though is notes. The actual contact info, the email address, and groups and things like that, like metadata around it, in the same way that if you were messaging somebody about somebody else, you wouldn't want that to get out. And so we encrypt all of that at rest and in transit and all that stuff. So there's a lot of complexity to it, and that's why a lot of people just don't bother. They're just like, this is a shitty contacts app, it's gonna stay on your computer, we won't do any smart stuff. And the tension we always have is all the smart stuff and automation requires data. And so we gotta, we will give you the choice. We will be very upfront about what we're doing. We will never sell your data, but we need to be very transparent about it. And most people want, would they prefer the automation at the end of the day than the privacy? But if you fall on the other side of that, we call it a spec, like the privacy spectrum, you can choose at any point whether to disconnect something, not connect it at all. As you get more comfortable with us, you can connect more stuff. And that's what ends up, we end up seeing it all the time. You'll start with Calendar, Calendar's public. LinkedIn's public, and then you just start connecting more stuff over time.

I have a question about idea selection.

Yeah.

So it's a running meme in the venture community of people going to build a new personal CRM.

Yeah.

Even I started my career in venture even 6 years ago.

Yeah.

There were dozens of pitches about personal CRM. Yeah. And so I think one of the reasons that people want to start it is because almost everyone feels the same point that you're trying to solve.

Yeah.

And so as you were going through those user interviews and then raising capital and then now scaling the company, Why did you say to yourself, not just that you're competitive and want to build a killer company and solve your pain point, but I'm sure you knew, like, a lot of people have tried this. What made you say to yourself, hey, we're doing something different here?

Yeah, it's a great question. So we, as part of those user interviews, we went and talked to either founders or heads of engineering or heads of sales at all of the, like, every product that we had used before. Um, so There was Refresh, there was Contactually, there was Connected. A lot of the— two of those were acquired by LinkedIn. Contactually was acquired by Compass for real estate agents. All the way back to RelateIQ, acquired by Salesforce. Back to, um, uh, what's the, uh, with the P, Plaxo. Um, so there have been iterations in the space. They are all very much influenced by the time that they came out. So Plaxo, for example, it's like Web 2.0, da da da da. Um, RelateIQ was very much like the first wave of the AI and like machine learning, um, phase. And we sat down with every one of those founders and we were like, what went wrong? What did you learn? What would you have done differently? Why did you sell when you did? Why did it fail when it did? Like, what was the story? And a lot of what we learned was, number one, the way that they framed the product or the way that the go-to-market was— there was either an issue with go-to-market or in a lot of cases, they were actually acquired before they expanded to teams. Right on the cusp of thinking about Teams products and Teams, uh, uh, you know, uh, network effects and things like that. Teams products are like much more sticky. Um, we believe you have to do both. We believe that there is like a product that can do both. And the landscape today we think is meaningfully different than it was, you know, 5, 10, 15 years ago. Social media is different. Um, the willingness to pay for work software is different. Um, the, uh, the number of tools you're using to do this today and how CRMs and work tools fit into that has changed. And so we have like a whole thesis around that and we have like, you know, like probably 2 or 3 slides in our deck of like why now. And we have like testimonials from all these other people who are like, these are why my version failed. And you have to look at that critically and then say, okay, what am I gonna learn from each of these things and what am I gonna ignore from each of them to then like have enough plausible deniability to like dive headfirst into this product again. But we think a lot about like rippling, right? Like it's like, generational company that can be big enough if you do a lot of things right, and you need to write a lot of software. Like, that's the thing that we sort of feel is like to get your network in there automatically, like for you, it might be LinkedIn, email, iMessage. For other people, it's like we have whole sets of people that are like, what, you don't have WhatsApp? I can't do this. And so like we have to build WhatsApp. And so the, the, the way that you think about a network has changed. We think it's actually gotten easier than before, but also you're not as dependent on— there are not APIs for a lot of this stuff, so we're writing that from scratch. But we think if you do that right, there is a meaningful both B2B and B2C company there. You just have to, like, you have to build it. You have to, like, do it right. And you have all the privacy and customer acquisition and all those other problems along the way.

So the way you're talking right now is explaining how big of a problem you're going after, but apparently one of the biggest misconceptions is the size of your team.

Yes.

You clearly have a knack for hiring A+ talent. It's undeniable if you guys have been able to do what you have with the size of your team. You can share that if you want. Obviously not, not needed, but nonetheless would love to get a better understanding of like how you think about hiring and what your process is for distinguishing A+ talent versus the rest, because what you've done with the size of your team is mind-blowing to me.

Appreciate that. No, people think we're like much larger all the time. I don't know if that's like We, I think we just do good work and we put that like front and center. And so then people just, I think, assume when they see a level of polish, like it's clearly not like a, you know, random project from like one day. Like people see that there's like a lot of work and attention has gone through it. So a lot of what we do for hiring, I'm gonna give credit to my co-founder, Matt. Like he is, I think, the world's best person at identifying that. A lot of what we do, We've changed the process over time. It's work projects. It's sitting down with a person on a real project with real, like, you sign the NDA, you get them in your code base, like, let's work together. Design, code, like, business, whatever it is. Like, let's work on something together. We're gonna pay you, like, 100%. This is, you're a consultant for a 2-week period or a 1-week period, and we're just gonna, like, we have to be in the same Slack and communicating before we have any sense of whether you are good or not.

This is your interview process?

Not like, not first time.

Or like your hiring process?

Like, pretty much like, Almost immediately we will jump to that.

Have you ever heard someone doing that before?

How do you do that with folks that are W-2 full-time at other companies?

Harder. They do it as a side project. They do it. It's like we will, we sometimes like will delay the payment or stuff like depending, 'cause we don't wanna like step on it. They're gonna do it on their personal computer obviously. But we are like, you have expressed interest, you're doing it on the weekend, you're gonna need a full day or two. Like we, we need to see enough work output. It's too easy on a Notion doc or on a phone call to bullshit. It just is.

So you're not doing a full 2-week sprint with them?

Not usually. Sometimes, if they're not employed, we may. Or if they want to dive in more, in some cases we'll do it hourly so that if you spend more time, you'll do more. Usually, but you're in Slack, you're in a video call with us in some cases. You're brainstorming, you're showing us work output, right? So if you're a designer, you're gonna show us all the stuff that went into the final product, and we're gonna look at the artboard together. We're gonna look at what did you try first, why did you do that? It gives you more surface area. You just, you can't, the idea that you can get to a decision on like 3 to 4 hours of Zoom calls and one take-home or two take-homes is, we think is ridiculous.

And have you had people who've taken their own initiative to walk away from it 'cause they're just scared of like—

Yep, 100%. And then we've had people who spend like, they're like, we tell them like, you know, we'll spend 1 or 2 days on this and then they'll spend like a whole week. And like, and you get both sides of it, but that's, isn't that—

And then you all do it, then you maybe don't even move forward with that person. It's just part of the game.

But in a lot of cases, isn't that initiative worth something, right? Isn't seeing how much time somebody spends worth— like, again, I don't know how people interview today, but that's how I interview, right? If I'm sitting down with someone and they're like, here's a real problem that we're having, let's think through it, I'm like headfirst. I'm like excited, let's think through this. What have you tried already? I realize that I'm coming in cold to this problem. You guys have thought about it much deeper than I have, but here's what I would do. Here's like step 1, step 2. Like, you take a little time alone to reflect, think about it. "Come back with your thoughts, let's have a conversation. Like, let's just do it like this." I'd rather dive in with you in this way and pay you for it and, you know, X% of the time not hire you than to hire you and then part ways partway through that because it's not working out or you, it's not, because people are, I think, often not misleading the person on the other side of the table. It's just that we don't have enough time. Like, you don't have enough time to see who I am and how I do work. And it's as much a talent thing as it is a style thing, right? Like, some people are overly— when you start doing that, they're like asking too many questions. They're like overly communi— they're not willing to like take the risk and jump and just assume something and then like come back later and retest their assumptions. So you just learn a lot more about people. And especially at a startup, you have to see that get-up-and-go attitude. Like, you have to see that firsthand before like, you know, I think all three of us would probably interview very well. But then like, when you actually sit down and do the work, like depending on the work, I'm going to, I'm going to do shit. Like you're going to see I'm terrible at it.

But that is so mind-blowing to me. We're in the process of making a very important hire right now. And so I'm like thinking to myself, I want to try that.

You will save money. You will save money in the long run. It will like the X dollars per hour or X dollars per project. We've, we've paid it. We have— if you go to the W-2 section in our HR software, we have like a lot of people.

I actually have 150 people who have been paid. Yeah.

My team is like, you meet somebody, go Great. Like, even if it doesn't work out, like, it's been great working with you. We appreciate it. Like, here's a W-2 you're gonna get at the end of the year. Like, it's not that— it's ultimately not that hard, and it saves you a lot of anguish in the long run. Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious, the one thing, among other things, but one of the things that we've had over the past couple years kind of building Platter and Verbatim has been multiple moments of like little trough of sorrow and then a recommitment to the project. That's why we call it Turning Pro. Yeah. So I'm curious with Clay, What were those moments of, shit, I don't know if this is gonna work, and then a recommitment, a renewal to, this is the direction? Mm.

That's a great question. Um, let me think about that. Um, there are definitely a few. Um, I feel like I'm having a tough time right now. No, no, there's all— I mean, like, it— that happens like intraday, you know?

All the time.

So it's like, it's like, like, it's a, it's a—

Oh, we're gonna die.

Yeah, exactly. No, I think the big one, um, the big one, I'll, I'll think through the, let me, let me zoom back to like 22, 23, 22. Um, end of '22, we got access to, uh, I guess it was GPT-2, 2 to 3. Um, and we were like, okay, this is cool. We're like, we can summarize some of our data. Like I'm, I'm constantly looking at a tool. And being like, how does this fit in? So every WWDC, Apple announces new technologies. We're like native apps all the way through. We're like, okay, how do we use this to make something easier, faster, cheaper, whatever, magical experiences for the user? Same thing for GPT. And so when we had like, we got onto the beta, we were experimenting with like summarization and like drafting emails, stuff like that. It wasn't there. Obviously faster. I think everybody had that moment with, with ChatGPT, we had it with like the API and we were like testing, we were like putting in test data. We were like, okay, this is like giving us good output. Oh, if we change this, you know, this gives us great output. And I think at some point, I think, I think at some point it became, uh, sort of like, uh, existential where we were like, does this, how does this fundamentally change software? Like, is this just how we're gonna do things now? Is just we're gonna type things into chat prompts and that's it. And at various points we had had prototypes of where Clay was entirely chatbot, or you do it over text message, or you do it over email, or like, there's a lot of different ways you can use a, you start emulating more of like an EA or chief of staff where you just like start asking for things and asking questions. And so that sort of 2 to 3 week period where we were like, let's dive into this and really understand this technology and have a, we need to, this is the first thing, probably the first thing outside of our immediate company where we need to have a point of view on whether this like is existential or not. And I think we decided, you know, after a lot of attention and prototyping, we think it's an evolution. Software is not gonna like disappear. Like you're still gonna have a UI. The idea that you want a, you know, a set of faces, it allows us to make that job easier for you. We don't have to code every new UI. We don't have to like, things will be much more adaptable. But that was a pretty weird, I think a lot of people felt weird. I think a lot of like startup and like entrepreneurs, like people that code, That's where people started, they were like, "Oh, I see it now." And I think that's where we were like, "Okay, we have to like really," almost like an offsite style, like really think about this. 'Cause day-to-day, you're not gonna have time to think about big jumps like that. COVID was like that too. Like we had some big sort of like company-defining moments in COVID. We had investors calling us being like, "Take these, you know, like, you know, haircut deals. Like you need cash. This is where like entrepreneurs are made." Like, and it's true. Like the world could have ended like 3 weeks later, right? Like it could have. And we were like, like, if it ends, like, we're done. Like, it's not like, if it's existential, like, our, like, little company is not gonna exist anymore. But you have to make those snap decisions and then have enough information to get to the next checkpoint. And I think a lot of what we think about is, how do I just get enough clarity? What do I need to know for the next step for me to, like, continue going? Like, what is the next checkpoint that I need to have clarity on?

A question I have for you is, if Klei fails, what's the reason?

It's a good question. I mean, we have— we do have a list. I'm thinking of the, like, the, you know, there's a lot of reasons why. Um, I think the— I think the ultimately— this is the one that I think about the most about. This is probably at the bottom of the list, but they get like progressively like, like more outlandish. I think how many people are like you? Like, how many people actually care? And if you have like a really pessimistic view on reality, on humanity, you're like, people actually don't care that much. Like, people don't care about like work relationships enough to do this at scale. Like, can we show the benefits of doing that? We know that there's hundreds of thousands or millions of people that do it. Are there like hundreds of millions of people that do it? Tens of millions of people that do it? What is that TAM? And how does that change as the workforce changes, et cetera. That's probably my most existential, like, at the end of the day, being a shitty person is too easy and is too much of a default for a lot of people. And it's easy to not send the gift or say hi or call somebody. I have more faith in people than that. But that's a pretty, especially when you spend a lot of time around very transactional people, you'll start seeing that. And then you're like, okay, well, people don't actually care.

It's so interesting, though, to think that, like, your worldview and bet on humanity is a huge piece of, like, your belief in, like, the product you're building.

Yeah.

Because if you came from more of a pessimistic worldview where, like, people suck, you can't change them, it is what it is, you probably wouldn't be building the product that you are today.

Totally. Or if you're like, all the only thing that matters is, like, getting candidates in the door, like, being transactional, you build a very different product. But, like, you have to be— you have to have that humanist touch and that design touch to then build a product in the way that we have.

So I have one more question because I know you got to catch a flight to Austin. She's doing a Tough Mudder tomorrow.

Oh my God.

I'll send you ready.

Yeah, please do.

Yeah.

If you could go back and tell your younger self a piece of advice that you wish you knew, what would it be?

Always send the email. That's always my— I mean, to back— this is going to— this is a callback, but like, this is literally probably my biggest, like, startup advice in general is like, Anybody you wanna say, like, I love your work, anybody you wanna say, like, hey, I just wanna say hi, anybody you, like, any tweet you see where you're like, that's a great tweet, I wanna just, like, meet this person, just send the message. Like, there's no downside, there's infinite upside. It is meaningful to the other person, and it can change, it can build new relationships, and it can change, like, how your company does, like, meaningfully. And all of the great, like, great acquisitions, great investments, like, they all start like that. It's just like, Hey, I know you don't know me, but like, this is me. Would love to say hi.

He DM'd me on LinkedIn.

There you go.

Yeah, actually, that's hilarious because I don't think there's another relationship in my life that came through LinkedIn other than the two of you.

Wow.

Let's go.

So I'll give you the quick 2-second before we jump off with him. I was on the internet trying to figure out content marketing for my company, like if I was going to hire someone or like what the solution would be to do that. And I swear to God, when I was looking, I opened LinkedIn, I had a notification He requested me on LinkedIn and I just clicked on his profile and his tagline is like, your content engine.

That is—

it was like your content engine. I was like, wait, this is so strange. It's like Google's— it's like Google's listening to me. So I just DM'd him and I was like, I know this sounds really freaky. I was— my two tabs open on my computer right now are like Adrian friend request notification on LinkedIn and like, how much should I pay a content marketer? And I was like, we have to just talk because I'm curious.

Yeah.

And the first call we got on, we ended up talking for 2 hours and it ended with let's start a podcast.

Yeah.

Serendipity, guys. Like, it's like, it's a real thing. Karma and serendipity are a real thing. They, like, they're too woo-woo and like whatever, we got to rebrand it, but like, that, that's a real thing. Just put that energy in the world, it'll come back to you in spades. Like, we, we are big believers in that. So, love it.

Zach, I really appreciate you coming on. This is a long time coming for me. Uh, if you want to look at that camera, let everyone know where they can find you. And you know what, because we're both super connectors, I want to just drop an affiliate link in the description, even though we've never done that before, because I'm curious to see if people who listen to us talk about relationships every day will actually respond to this.

Done. We can— you have the referral link. You can download Clay at clay.earth. Follow us on Twitter at Clay HQ. Same thing on LinkedIn. And I'm Zach Hamed. ZMH.org is my website. That's it.

Thanks, man. Yeah, appreciate it.