Ishan Mukherjee (Rox) Talks About Supercharging Sales with Agentic CRMs

We have the, uh, the founder of ROX on, um, who is here to tell us all about SDRs, AI SDR technology, agents, and, uh, a whole lot more. But I'll let him introduce himself.

Let's go!

Welcome to the Temple of Technology, great to have you here. Uh, how you doing today?

I'm good, I'm good. Thanks for having me on, John. Jordy, nice to meet you. Um, Sam connected us, so excited, excited to join Your Ramp sponsors.

Yes.

This is a Ramp sponsored segment. I mean, seriously, like I went to Ramp and I was like, okay, there's a whole bunch of noise in this whole industry, but there's probably something that's working. Like, just tell me what you guys use. And they were like, well, we use Rocks and it's great. And so, uh, they introduced us and I'm glad to have you here. And I wanna learn more about the product genuinely because, uh, it's not something that we're using yet, but in the future we imagine that, you know, Millions of people are getting phone calls and emails from us every single day encouraging them to listen to the show, encouraging them to download, rate us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts. We want a really intense million AI salesforce, and we're hoping you can help us with that.

We want a swarm.

We want a swarm. You want a swarm. The Borg. Amazing. But anyway, what do you actually do?

Yeah, absolutely. We're still pretty early. Most of it is all word of mouth as yet. So there's a big launch coming in a couple of months and we actually have a sales and marketing team. So we built the first enterprise-ready agentic CRM. So it's a new generation of software where the CRM works for you. So rocks the system like in RAM gets installed, it unifies all your customer data in one place, keeps it in, in RAM's environment and then feeds a swarm of agents. And our agents are designed to supercharge the Max Freemans, the Sam of the world. Like how do you supercharge the highest compensated frontline kind of winners or killers in go-to-market.

I love it.

And the way we do that is we double or triple their productivity by having these agents basically do a lot of the back office work. Like, and that's kind of our vision is the winning companies of tomorrow like Ramp are gonna have supercharged builders with Cursor and Cognition and supercharged sellers with hopefully Rock. So that's what we do.

I love it. I have a ton of follow-up questions. I mean, it sounds like one thing that we were, kicking around was this idea that maybe it's too early to have an agent at the front line actually writing copy, hitting send, and maybe we're more in the Centaur era where a human with an AI is more powerful than either a human or an AI alone. Is that how you're thinking about it right now? Even if in the long term you're going full, the AI will actually send the emails.

Yeah, and kind of going off of that specifically, I think everyone can see why back office work is getting sort of automated.

Perfect for LLMs.

And, you know, cursor can have an amazing NPS even if it has like a huge error rate. Yet front office work, when you're interacting with customers, like everybody's experienced this at some point, you know, either the individual themselves or an employee of the individual, like sort of messes something up with a customer. And it's sort of like this frustrating experience because it's like actually lost revenue versus like, a lost 5 minutes like correcting a bug. So yeah, balancing that sort of front— like the bigger challenge is probably like the front office work where the error rates just have to be much lower.

Yeah, absolutely. As Lulu kind of gave me the best advice, like we're building batsuits, not butlers. And the core idea comes from— I've held the bag all my life and I ran a good market for a public company before. We're not at a point where you can completely go FSD for your largest customers. The core idea is how do you supercharge Sam or Max or Eric with AI, but they are the ones who are orchestrating or queuing the system where they review and send, because the cost of really messing up is in, in my kind of the small term feels like a bad email, but you would degrade trust through the brand, through the person, and that's what we focus on is how do you build an agentic system that you could use today? It's not vaporware, it's things we can use today, but how do we supercharge the kind of frontline kind of back carriers? I think over time, like, there's going to be dramatic seat compression or efficiencies to be had where people who support those back carriers, which is kind of 80% of the employee base, they will have to kind of evolve to thrive or kind of risk basically not being relevant.

Can you talk about the innovator's dilemma, sustaining innovation in agentic systems versus disruptive innovation? Logan Bartlett on his show said that You know, if you go back to mobile, the, the, the Salesforce of mobile was just Salesforce. And his thesis was that maybe the Salesforce of AI is just Salesforce. But, and they're obviously doing stuff in AI, but at the same time, we're seeing Apple drop the ball on product development. Google's dropping the ball on product development. It feels like there's more fertile ground than ever. So how have you reasoned through that and why are you taking this bet, even though there's some people that are saying, hey, Hey, it's only a matter of time till the big guys get it together.

100%. Like Benioff's the GOAT. Like he's the GOAT of all GOATs. Let's go.

Let's hear it for Benioff, folks. Legend.

Yeah, like I grew up not in the Bay Area. Like you read up on them and they're the big inspiration. So if you look at ServiceNow and Salesforce, they have a massive advantage because they have distribution, but also data. Like kind of firm belief is that the alpha is in working with the intelligence providers and earning the right to be the custodian for enterprise data and bringing in public data. So our position is what we're arbitraging is what some, somebody who holds kind of a bag at a public company knows is traditional systems have both lost usage, the users, they don't want to use them, they use new tools, but they've also lost data. Data is now in the warehouse. So if you, 40% of the data in a software kind of data warehouse, like a Snowflake, is actually go-to-market data. Interesting. So when we think about kind of building these new systems, incumbents, a $3 billion kind of incumbent has a massive advantage. But what we're focused on is how can we, A, earn the eyeballs of the Sams and Max Freemans of the world, but do it in a way where we're doing a rug pull where build a system of record, which indexes the data that's not already in the system of record, right? So Ross gets installed, indexes everything in the warehouse, brings in, you can connect all the other sources. And I think the winning kind of companies would be folks who bundle data and users in these platforms that hopefully earn the right to be the next kind of default platforms.

Talk about the pressure that you feel and then maybe other, other companies specifically in San Francisco around— you see these companies coming out, you see these revenue charts, right? It used to be— and Billboards on the 101. Seriously, in 2021, I remember saying investors would say, you know, sort of best-in-class companies are getting to $1 million ARR in 9 months. And now it's basically like, okay, best-in-class companies are getting to $10 mil in 3 months. So if you're— and so what the sort of potentially toxic thing about this pressure is that it's making some people feel like, well, if I want to win as a company, like we need to put up, you know, just these ridiculous numbers that, you know, and anybody that's built a company knows that like, like revenue ramp is not necessarily always connect, tied to customer satisfaction or product quality or everything like that. So, I'm curious to know, do you think that sort of pressure to grow extremely quickly is forcing people to make sort of short-term decisions or riskier decisions or in some cases even misstate facts?

Yes, I think it's ultimately the founder psyche. I've been around the block, but I have to say two things this time around makes me the most insecure. All of us are very insecure, right? My wife's listening in. And obviously like we're all insecure monkeys in some ways. So two things, one is I think this new generation is about talking about these crazy kind of revenue curves. The way I internalize it is ultimately like the secret to building enduring high quality revenue is to make customers happy and the right customers happy. So we focus on strategic, like the Siemens of the world, enterprise customers like Redis and MongoDB and RAMP, like how do we land there? How do we earn the right to expand and be essential in these businesses which would generate enduring revenue over time as long as we're kind of helping them kind of secure and grow their own revenue. So that's how I internalize that. I think the game is going to be at quality about enduring revenue, and there are businesses like Wiz and Datadog to be built now. It's just that Datadog and Wiz, although they were rocket ships, they always focused on essential kind of solutions to really, really large businesses, and that's what we're focused on. The first part of the psyche I think is not spoken enough is the fact is end consumer expectations are on this invisible asymptote where they're expecting singularity. Like consumers, because they've been sold singularity and are using Perplexity and ChatGPT, they expect all work to be done by software. So that is actually the one that keeps me up at night. Like how do you deliver these authentic experiences which are inherently probabilistic to meet these kind of insane kind of consumer expectations. And that's where I think the winning products are going to come from. So the revenue stuff kind of really, really hits, but I kind of process it out. But the consumers and their expectations, there's some stuff that kind of keeps me up 24/7.

Is it, is it, uh, internally, are you thinking with the team, like, how do we achieve this sort of like ChatGPT moment for the enterprise, right? Like you could imagine, like, there is some place that you guys could hit in terms of product quality that would be so magical that like you would get that.

But Cognition kind of had that where they launched Devin and it was like this viral sensation.

Yeah.

Even though it was an enterprise agent for coding. Um, but it's a great question.

Yeah. Like, do you think that that's, do you think that that's like, maybe it's the wrong way to look at it because businesses will realize, hey, we have something magic here. We're not gonna talk about it.

We're just gonna like, you know, it's antiemetic, you know, we just Right, yeah, you're spot on. So we're in the boring space of ERP and CRM, the most essential but also the most lucrative software market. Like, we've chosen the path to be the daily driver for all customer-facing knowledge workers. So we focus on building something that's a land-expand— land with the Maxes and the Sams of the world, but grow into 200+ kind of active users at ramp. Like, that's kind of the core motion. I think that agentic applications that win is where everybody's using it day in, day out, and So we optimize for like internal, like post-land virality. So there is no seats, you land Rocks and everybody uses it. And I think that's, that's at least my thesis is become a daily driver.

Can you talk about the actual instantiation of the product? Obviously it sounds like you're plugging into the data warehouse, the Snowflakes of the world. It sounds like you're maybe not plugging into the Salesforce installations. Is there a Rocks app? Like how does a salesperson actually interact with Rocks? Day to day?

Absolutely pure Ramp-like kind of cracked engineering shop. So we build product, we are pragmatic product builders and we work with the platforms. So we have a web app, an iOS app. Yep. The guy who built Ramp and Robinhood's here. We have a Slack app, we have an email app. So we want to be the front application where it is a swarm of agents working for you. It's powered by our own warehouse native CRM. So it's running in your warehouse and it's a two-way sync to Salesforce or HubSpot, right? So that's kind of our core idea. Got it. In kind of large sophisticated organizations who are already winning, like the Mongols and these folks, like we would definitely integrate our API into their internal tools. In most of the rest, we want to build an application that humans actually want to use and then hopefully get 2 to 3x more productive this year and put them on a path to being kind of 10 times more productive.

Love it. Jordy, you got anything else?

That's all I got. Cool.

Well, this was fantastic.

We'll have to have you back for this big news.

I hear there's big news coming. I want him back when he announces it. I want to hear it here first. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, one shout I'm a sports nerd. I grew up in India getting up in the morning, seeing SportsCenter to see like Jordan and the Wizards. That's when I started watching it. So congrats on the success.

Hey, hey, we talked about this morning, like there's going to be a one-name entrepreneur for AI B2B SaaS, and you could be that guy. So I could be LeBron, you could be Kobe of B2B SaaS. We're rooting for you.

Wilt. Let's go.

Jordan. Well, thanks for coming by. Cheers, guys. All the best.

Thank you.

Bye.