Going From Blobs to Billions. Clay's Co-Founder Breaks Down Inbound, Outbound, and AI-Powered Sales.

Clay co-founder Varun walks through how the platform turns inbound and outbound into AI-powered workflows. A live demo shows enriching a lead with LinkedIn data, seniority scoring, and generating a meme-enhanced message. He also covers Clay's hiring for "go-to-market engineers" and the company's cautious approach to AI for creative work.
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This is trying to understand who's signing up to your product, figure out if they are a good prospect, qualifying them, and then trying to score them to determine how good of a prospect, where they land. And this is, by the way, workflows that Anthropic, Figma, Cursor are all using, Creative Power. And then, like, if they, you know who they are, they are a good prospect, you've qualified them accordingly, how do you and then create some language for them over LinkedIn or email or whatever to reach out to them and get them going, you know, and then do that very quickly. And so that's what you're trying to accomplish here in like one comprehensive workflow.
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Everyone, welcome back. Let's go! I'm excited. Varun here, he came all the way from the States for you guys, so give him a round of applause. Just by show of hands, who has seen like a Klay billboard, any Klay anything? Okay, you got some fans already. Let's go. All right, so we're excited. We have Varun here today. We're going to take some questions. So if you want to send me your questions on the livestream. We'll do some spicy questions at the end. Yeah.
Okay, great. And keep it— we want to make this very engaging. We want to make this very, you know, conversational and interactive. So, you know, bring out your hardest-hitting questions. Like, yeah.
Okay, so this will be fun. So for those who maybe don't know Clay yet or haven't seen the billboards, you know, bit of a reputation for like going viral, doing all these like crazy marketing things. Like, I know you guys have sent people like clay figures of themselves. Like, you've done a bunch of crazy things. Like, is this just you telling the team? Like, where does— and your shoes are even like— his shoes, the shoes are great. His shoes are great. Yeah, like everything is brand. So like, where does all that come from?
Well, maybe I'll just explain Clay for just a minute. Well, I have some baseline and understanding if if you aren't familiar, uh, basically we are trying to help everyone in this audience grow their business. At the end of the day, everyone here has a TAM. You're just trying to find the delta. And the only ways you can do that are by converting your inbound, by going, getting outbound, or taking your existing customers and expanding that. And we help you do that by giving you all the data providers in the world, giving you LLMs to improve that data and bite data points that no one would ever have, like, is a company SOC 2 compliant or is it B2B or something, or something way more interesting. And then we let you use those as primitives to run growth campaigns and the most creative growth campaigns. So we can talk about some of those and those could be like personalized ads or outbound campaigns or direct mail. And, and Play becomes the vehicle by which you run your most creative growth ideas. So coming back to marketing, yeah, we, I will say brand is very core to our company. We bought clay.com, um, uh, before any revenue. We have a full-time in-house. Actually, we contracted with him originally, and this is again, we almost had no revenue. We have a clay artist in-house. Yes. Okay. But originally he was a contractor. Okay. And we had almost no revenue and he had a very innovative business model. So he would like make these blobs and they're bead of the blobs, bo— blobs. But he would have like, he would say, okay, you can get the blob, but it's like $3,000 and you can rent it for a year and then you'll have to renew it again next year. So it was like SaaS business model for like claymation blobs. But I was obsessed with the blobs and we all were. So we like paid for the blobs. We had a head of brand of like 15 people. And yes, like, uh, like there are a lot of inventive things we do on marketing. And so, but all of these things we don't do just because for the sake of it, we do it because it's like very core to us and it's very authentic to who we are. You wouldn't hire the head of brand or have the paymation artist or pay this much money for blobs every year. Sure. If, um, when you don't even have revenue, if it wasn't like core to your identity. We do it because it's like what matters to us and it's beautiful and like that's really representative. And over time as the business has worked, it's turned into like a real differentiator. On the very creative marketing campaigns that we do now, Generally speaking, I find that B2B marketing is very boring, extremely boring. And generally people look at, like, I just saw Philip back there. He's a CRO of Personio and we had dinner recently and, and, you know, people would look at Philip and I mean this with all the love of my heart, but people will look at him and be like, hey, you know, you probably get your news from Gartner and, and, and like Forrester. And that's not true. You know, like he doom scrolls LinkedIn just like the rest of us. And so how do you communicate with Philip or Amelia or any of these people in a way that feels authentic and fresh and interesting? And, and, and keep that, uh, you know, and, and do that with like, and do that with some pace. And so we are trying a lot of different things. More recently we're doing more like, like my CFO and I are doing these videos where we analyze the ROI of marketing.
I've seen, I was like, oh, they're talking numbers on the LinkedIn.
Yeah, yeah. Or like, hey, hey, Karin, like I wanna go to the Super Bowl with 5 prospects and they'll cost $16,000. And he said no. And like, and those are really resonating and getting a lot of traction. And so we're doing a lot of these things that feel authentic to us and help us connect with audiences, but in new and innovative ways. And I think the reason we're able to do this is we actually hire very nontraditional people to do marketing.
Let me ask you this on all that. Is it working? Like, does it show up in the numbers and the revenue? Like, do you guys get a lot of inbound from it? Like, how much of that translates back into the business? Yeah.
So, I mean, it obviously depends. Some are hits and some are flops, but when you're being this creative, that, uh, that's gonna happen. I, what I will say unequivocally is we are capturing mindshare a lot. Like you, like just for the last month I've been in Europe, pretty much everyone I've interacted with has actually seen these videos with me and our CFO and they bring it up, you know? And the hardest thing to do in B2B marketing is actually capture mindshare because it's so competitive. There's so many companies out there, forget even our own space, but there's generally so many things are happening. And obviously people are on TikTok and reading the news and there's all these things going on. So the number one thing is, can you capture mindshare? Can you do it obviously in a way that's consistent with your brand? And then, um, like how do you translate that to people? And so yeah, we do see that in— it's accelerating deals, it's bringing in new inbound, it's staying top of mind. And when we have a moment when people need Clay, like they're ready to, to do something.
I wanna touch on recruiting real quick and then I'll let you do a, a demo for folks just so that they can understand Clay conceptually before we do the rest. The thing I see all over LinkedIn, the last 6 months is, we're hiring a go-to-market engineer, we're hiring a go-to-market engineer. And I was like, didn't, didn't Clay like invent, like literally like just manifest the go-to-market engineer into being? So first question, well, one, congrats, because I, this is like all I see on LinkedIn. Second one, how, okay, well, let's just do one at a time. How'd you come up with GTM engineer?
The origin was actually, I was coming up with a name for our own sales team. I kinda led sales for a while and was like, okay, let's build out a sales team. To be honest, at the time, no one really understood Clay. In fact, Amelia backstage was like, I was like, why aren't you guys using Clay yet? It's a mess of products. Obviously it's gonna help. And he was like, she was like, it's too complicated, which is a narrative that we're working on. But at the, but certainly it was too complicated 2, 3 years ago when we were selling the sales team, despite it being a go-to-market product. It was like, okay, why don't I find people like me who are like growth and ops people, people who are like our customers, and it's very like product-oriented and we really need that product kind of lifecycle and feedback loop. Yeah. Um, and so we need, that's like the mold we were looking for. And so we tried that as, as the approach. So we tried that as the approach and that, that profile really worked for our sales. And, and now our sales team is 35 people. We're still hiring those people to do our sales. Uh, and of course we have some traditional AEs, but when I was looking for a name for that to capture that, Kareem and I were discussing it and GTM engineer felt appropriate. You didn't want to do FDE? Uh, well, it's not really a forward deployed engineer, uh, because a forward deployed engineer is almost like professional services where they're actually going on site and setting it all up and whatever. This is a sales role to be clear, but it's coming from a very different background and a very different thing. Now the thing is, is No other company can do this actually, because it only makes sense for us because our product is Clay. And like, if you're Figma, you're not going to have your designers sell Figma. Designer 2, 3 years ago, that's what we started as. And this is what we realized in the market is that people were hiring people who looked like our salespeople to, to use Clay internally as the ops team. And so what it became is, okay, who are the people using Clay and other tools like it to build revenue systems using automation and AI? To run growth experiments to grow. And maybe they're building their own software internally. Maybe they're using Clay. Maybe they're— all of them are operating with a product and growth mindset. They're iterating quickly. They're experimenting quickly. That became the thing. And then we obviously like, uh, enable that and fuel that. And now we actually even have a go-to-market engineering marketplace that we've launched to match talent to the top companies because now the best companies in the world from Cursor to Framework to Webflow to OpenAI are all hiring for go-to-market engineers. And so we are matching people in our community to get those jobs.
For folks that either hiring whatever they call it, go-to-market engineer or FDE, maybe if they want to hire an FDE, what should they look for? Because like, I think the thing for me and for probably a lot of folks in this room is like, people don't have this skill. Like, it just doesn't exist.
So the way I think about it, and maybe even for Answering the explicit question, I think what we've just generally seen is the way the org chart in sales used to look like and still looks like in most companies. You have SDRs who are prospecting, AEs who are closing deals, RevOps who are maintaining systems. The issue with this is it operates a lot like an assembly line, and assembly lines aren't really good for sharing learnings and scaling ideas. And so the new org chart that we see in all these cutting-edge teams is you have like go-to-market engineers, like a few of them who are building product basically using Clay or building their own or coding themselves. Sometimes with a data scientist even, to take some of the best ideas that these sales team people are doing and scaling them and running experiments to see what works and what doesn't work.
And then just before you do the demo, like when you're personally evaluating like candidates for go-to-market engineers in-house at Klei, what's the number one thing you look for?
I'm looking for creativity is the number one thing. And that can usually be demonstrated like in the take-home.
What is this take-home? Like, what's it like? You give them homework?
Like, we have— we actually have take-homes for every role at Clay. Okay. But, but the take-homes could be like very different. They could be a lot of different things. It could be like, hey, like, here are 3 companies, come up with 3 creative outbound campaigns for them and build it in Clay and let's— and let's—
And do you, do you comp candidates to do that or expect them to do that if they want to get the role? It depends.
Generally speaking, take-homes at Clay are not compensated. It's just part of the formative process. If it's for some reason particularly long, we will compensate. Okay. And in a lot of roles, like, by the way, the woman Sarah you were working with, she— her first day was actually only yesterday because before that, when you were actually working with her, she was on a work trial at Klei for 2 or 3 weeks. She wasn't even full time. She was on a work trial where we were trying her out. I see. Okay.
And is that standard for like any role at Klei? You guys do a trial?
In the early days, we would do work trials for almost every role. Okay. Now we don't because now we know how to interview people and we have a better understanding. But there are certain roles like Sarah's where it's hard to interview for, it's hard to evaluate for in a traditional process. So we opt to do a work trial instead.
All right, let's give people a little context. Let's put this— Varun's going to come to the desk. We're going to swap.
A demo. Wow, I'm getting upgraded, guys. So we're going to just do a quick demo to kind of get people an understanding of Clay and get a sense, but it's going to be interactive. So, um, what I want is a couple volunteers to basically give me their LinkedIn URL. Got one person. Do you know your LinkedIn URL? This guy. Okay, this guy right here. That's you. Okay, perfect. Wow, 15,000 followers. Popular man. Okay. We're gonna take— Okay, we're gonna do that. Okay, amazing. Anyone else wanna volunteer? This is Francis. Francis Osifo. Okay. Okay. So let's get into it. All right. So basically what I'm going to show you is like an inbound workflow. Now, remember we talked earlier, there's only a few ways you can grow a business, right? Inbound, outbound, and expanding your existing customers. Inbound and outbound are actually the same thing. It's just where's your lead originating from, right? And so I did that form with you guys to get like something as an inbound point. And we're gonna walk through a workflow that covers, you know, 70% of Clay's functionality. And we'll give everyone like a really good overview. Okay, so let's say you signed up for this thing and we've gotten a few people here. We got, we got Milo, we got Michael, and we got Francis. Amazing. And, and look, we got a bunch of information about these people. So we know we got Francis right here, um, is signing up at, at rata.co. We got, he's an angel investor, he's CEO of Rata. We got a bunch of info about him. We have Milo over here. He says he's a family dad, very sweet founder. We got a lot of information on Milo. He's in Denmark. Okay. Uh, look, it's the right person. 15,611 followers. So still, still just as popular on Clay. Okay, great. So we got a bunch of information. And let's see what more we can find. So we got his LinkedIn profile, we got the companies that they work at, we got the domain, and, and we, we're getting some more information. Okay, so we know that Francis is a founder, we know that Milo is doing growth, which we know, we know that Michael is a CMO, and we actually have all their past experiences here too. So we can search through this however we want. We know every single title and job they've ever had, basically. This is like a, obviously like a wealth of information that we can do things with. And then we check to make sure that we know their domain is correct. And then we're actually going to find out like what senior— how senior is the role, right? So imagine someone signing up for your product. You want to know, are they like a, like a C-level person or are they like something else? So we have like an AI column here that's analyzing the job titles to determine how senior they are and then categorizing it into like CXO, VP, director, head of, something like that. So that's pretty useful qualification. And you can see the AI prompt over here on the right, uh, and how it's like qualifying it into all the different, into all the different kind of, uh, levels of a role. And then we see, okay, how big are these companies to help qualify it? Sales headcount, like how many people are on the sales team? That's pretty useful. We can even scrape their website and like get a bunch of information to the website that then you can search off that and be like, do they have information on the website that could indicate if they're a good fit? As an example, if I was— last night I was talking to someone, uh, running a benefits company, and you can imagine they would want to scrape a company's website to determine, hey, are you— what benefits are you offering your employees? Then you want to get your work email. So we got Frances' email, Michael's email, and Milo's email. And we were able to do this because we have a waterfall. And so at Clay, we're able to use, like, we have 150 data vendors in Clay, and we do this thing called waterfalling. Where we try lots of different vendors to get you the data. And if it doesn't come in the first one, we try the next one, and then we'll also validate, um, the emails as well. And so you can see that through all of this, um, like you just expanded the waterfall right now, basically. Yeah, I just expanded the waterfall and you can see that I, that's what enables us to get like the highest coverage because we try so many vendors to make sure that we are like getting the right email. Okay, so that's great. And then we want to like, okay, find something about the company that we can use in the email to reach out. And so we got like the mission here for Rada and Ystep and Riff. We got like a one-liner about each of them. I can show you even the AI prompt that we wrote here. So you're writing a sentence about a company, you want to understand what they do, and, and you're giving a lot of constraints so that you can have a one-liner that you can include in an email. You're also seeing, okay, who their customers are, and then I am, what I'm doing here is I'm actually gonna create a meme. And so for all these people, for Francis, Michael, and Milo, they're going to get a LinkedIn message soon. Um, and I could show you what the meme is for the meme, um, to make it, you know, even more engaging. I'll show you guys what the meme is too.
Uh, can you pick something that's not a meme? It's like they, if they don't wanna do a meme, a nice message for them too.
Okay. Yeah. So we, we have like a, a meme for the, for the, for the vibes and, uh, and a thoughtful line for the sale. And so, okay, so we're creating a meme here, and you can see we're just actually doing a random meme selection and then taking the data from their LinkedIn profile to personalize the meme for them. Okay, so we do that. Should we look at the memes? Okay, so, okay, so this is Francis's meme. Y'all got any more of that seamless global IT onboarding? Rayda's got you. Pretty good. Um, let's look at Michael's. Wow, Michael, 2x exits, new categories, keynote vibes, mental riffs. Pretty good. And let's look at Milo's. Let Milo build momentum. Let's go. So that's pretty good. And then we're actually using Clay to do a lot more very creative research on, on websites to get new unique data points, right? So. We are doing like GTM research. We can see what this one is trying to do to like get a lot of unique information about their go-to-market strategies that you can then use in your email outreach, right? Because hey, you know, you're— that your outreach— this is the way you do go-to-market. Here's how you can use Clay to accelerate that, right? So it's very tailored. You also probably want to know, hey, here are some unique data points that these businesses care about. And then you can in your email be like, hey, like Clay can help you and find these unique data points in these ways, right? Other qualification details are like your funding information. We get that from a lot of different sources. So again, you can see how we have a waterfall from Harmonic and Crunchbase and things like that.
What do people sort through all this, right? So like, let's say this is like your campaign, people are signing up, like, what do they do with all this next?
Right, so this is basically a very comprehensive workflow to do a number of things, right? This is trying to understand who's signing up to your product. Figure out if they are a good prospect, qualifying them, and then trying to score them to determine how good of a prospect, where they land. And this is, by the way, workflows that Anthropic, Figma, Cursor are all using Theta Power. And then, like, if they, you know who they are, they are a good prospect, you've qualified them accordingly, how do you then create some language for them over LinkedIn or email or whatever to reach out to them and get them going? You know? And then do that very quickly. And so that's what you're trying to accomplish here in like one comprehensive workflow. And then you even score it. So you have here, like, here are the scores for, like, whether this is, like, a good fit. And you can, like, set up a very custom score. And then lastly, we're coming up with a couple of things here, right? So what you've also done is we've created a research brief for the sales rep who's going to take the call. So if I go here, I'm going to see Michael's, like, research brief. And this is, like, a full document that's been created for the for the sales rep about Michael and his company that they can read prior to their, like, meeting.
Does this tie any of their data, or is this all just what you found on, like, the internet?
This is all what's online. Yeah, this is all what's online and what they submitted in the form. And so you have so much here, right? You have non-traditional data points that you can suggest. You have, like, obviously a bio on them. You have, like, all this research that's been done. You have financials on the company. So we can look at another one. Maybe we look at, um, Milo's. So again, like a very comprehensive brief here that you can, you can bring up. And then that's like call prep for the rep. You can send a Slack message and then you can see here, here's the, like, here is the message. And so you can send the message over LinkedIn. Boom. And then lastly, you'll want to update this in your CRM. And so you can check, hey, have they already engage with us in any way. If not, here you go. And then updating the record in the CRM. CRM agnostic? Yeah, we can use any CRM. Yeah. So this is basically a very comprehensive workflow for inbound that covers a lot of different bases from qualification to scoring to CRM upload to sending them a message. And you can pretty much implement immediately to kind of like get your inbound kind of working. And so many companies like, for example, Cursor, they had so many free users using their product, didn't know who they were. Saw an immediate revenue uplift because now they knew who they were, they could convert them into revenue.
So it's not, so it's not just, you know, like trying to get new leads into the funnel. It's also they can use it to like nurture basically inbound qualifications.
Yeah. And so really, I mean, it's very flexible. Yes, totally inbound or taking your existing customers and dramatically upselling them, figuring out where they work, how can you, how can you upsell them there and then putting them into this funnel and then reaching out to them. All right.
Do you want, do you still want like 2 more volunteers?
Oh, to do some growth hacking? Let's do it. Yeah.
If there's 2 new volunteers there, we're gonna actually bring you up on stage.
Well, let's just give them a heads up of what's gonna happen. So, so they, so they know what they're signing up for. So, before you raise your hand, what we're basically gonna do is some live growth hacking. And what, what that more or less entails is You should ideally have some growth problem in your business and, and you should, and we will help you with it basically. And, and so you would come up, tell us a little bit about your business, tell us like, you know, who your customer is and what growth problem you have. And we will try live to brainstorm a solution. Yeah.
So with that being said, we need 2 people. So if the, if you start with, so one and then Drew another We have already done yours.
Well, there's one in the back. Oh, yeah. Come on.
In the hat.
Hey guys. One is Martin.
Senior Marketing Operations Manager. I'm from a company called Personify Health. Okay, great. We work— I work in marketing ops, but working really closely with SDRs trying to roll out agents. Okay.
And what is like the main problem like you're trying to solve? Is it like the SDR outreach or what is the—
I mean, for us, the main problem that I'm dealing with at the moment is is A, how we implement those kind of AI agents. We're still kind of primarily human-based. We have like 8 SDRs. The problem is about kind of phasing out SDRs and phasing in agents, how to do that. And the time to roll this out, right? It would be me doing this.
So I think it would be helpful to kind of understand what is the most manual work they're doing right now, and then we can decompose that to like how you can build that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
I think the most, the most manual reaches is a lot of discovery for bringing in top of funnel through marketing.
Got it. And like the complicated bit, why it's manual is because there's like complicated account hierarchies or things like different like market segments.
Yeah. Okay.
So I think for this, this, by the way, I think is a relatively straightforward workflow you could build in Clay. This would obviously be like different workflows for different audiences, but basically like I actually used to work in health insurance, so I like deeply understand that market. You know, this is a market that's actually very offline to some degree because a lot of health insurance brokers in the US are working in brokerages that are mom-and-pop brokerages, right? So for that, what I would recommend is actually you can use Google Maps or OpenMart to get a lot of the small health insurance brokerages and then you can use that to reach out to them and then you can use Clay to find the people who work there. Now, again, because they're offline, a lot of them are not going to have LinkedIn profiles, is my guess. But a lot of these health brokerages will actually have like an About Us page on their website with their team. You can use Clay to scrape the website and use AI to analyze it to tell you who all the people are, and then use Clay to find the work emails. So that would be like a workflow that you would set up here. And if you don't have the bandwidth internally, which it sounds like you don't, you could hire like an agency, and we can recommend some that could help you do this. That's great, thank you.
Okay, I have a little bit of time. So a couple things I want to dive in on, just because we've seen now like an actual— we've given people context and what Clay can actually do. Where do you see most people like, what's your most typical use case of the product? Is it like, like an AI SDR? Is it something else? Like, I feel like people only think of it maybe as like enrichment.
Yeah, I mean, enrichment is definitely a starter use case. Yeah. Like, and we will like help you dramatically improve your data enrichment quality and we will do like a data test with you and you can use the waterfalls and you could get very custom data points like waste management uses Clay actually, and they use Clay because they, they— this is a very custom unique data point. They want to know who their customers are. They use Google Maps to get satellite images, AI to analyze the images to determine like what color the trash cans are outside people's houses to look and see if that's a very unique data point that a vendor is never going to have.
But what are they doing with that?
They're like, okay, they're using a competitor or they're using us, and because they sell to a lot of subsidiaries, so they don't actually always know who their customers are. And then if they're not using them, they can then market to them in different ways. Got it. Okay. So that's a very unique data point. That's a starting off point. And then you could also use Clay on top of that to do very creative growth campaigns. So that could be, hey, I'm using, I'm using direct mail campaigns to send customized cookie jars or whatever to people, or I'm doing like very personalized targeted outbound campaign, or I'm converting inbound like the workflow we just showed. And those are like more standard use cases in play.
Okay. So you've talked a little bit about like inbound and outbound as like a total go-to-market. Yeah. So for you guys, like because you are an AI company, where do you have maybe guardrails or just rules on your internal team on how they can use AI? Are you like, do whatever you want with AI? Or like, what is the—
what's the setup? I would say we're like pretty agnostic. Like we try to let people— we do a very bottoms-up And so if people want to use cursor or this or that, like, we're very open-minded. I will say, like, I think we are less— we're an AI company. We're obviously— it's very, like, a forward-thinking company, very progressive. I will say we're less— I think basically there's a lot of talk on the internet of, like, AI is the default for everything. And, like, you see the new, like, Opendoor CEO and they send the memo, or the new Shopify CEO, they send these memos. They're like, use AI or you're not gonna be here at all, you know? And I don't think that's necessarily the right approach. You know, in marketing, for example, marketing is all about standing out. You know what large language models are all about? Not standing out. They're all about reverting to the mean, actually. Um, and, and that's literally what they're doing. They're synthesizing a lot of information and giving you kind of a synthesis of it. And so if you use it for writing or marketing, you are kind of defeating the whole point of marketing. In coding, I, you know, it's a great, all these AI coding products and Claude and Perceval, whatever, are great products, but the issue with trade-offs with them is our engineers like understand less of the code that they're actually writing, you know, or making more mistakes, issues, can't debug it faster. Yeah. So there are all these very like tricky trade-offs with all this that I feel like people don't talk about. And so for example, we don't really want our team to use Clay for writing internally and, and for marketing. Like we want that to come from the soul.
And but do you use it for sales?
I mean, we use Clay to do like pre-meeting notes, right? We use Clay to automate highly targeted outbound campaign. But we are kind of— humans are coming up with the creative ideas to iterate and experiment with.
And then when it, when it comes to recruiting those humans, how many are you guys now? We're like 250 people. So of those 250 people, how many did you have to like— did you train everybody on Clay? Like how many kind of got it or like how did you hire for something that that's like, it's not really out there in the market, right? You're like, okay, I'm going to go in kind of dark.
Yeah. Well, I mean, you only kind of need the Clay expertise for the customer-facing roles and for everyone else, we have like a Clay bootcamp that you go through at the beginning of those, at the beginning of the company when you onboard and you learn the product and you learn everything. But look, I think what we're looking for is like underlying skills. Like, are you technical or do you like playing in tools? We have a take-home that's about Clay usage, right? Do you have a systematic mindset? Are you data-oriented? All these kind of like core attributes. And then we evaluate for that and we hire for that. And then we have like a rigorous kind of take-home and interview process that tests for that.
Okay. A couple last questions then. When you hire people, has there been anything that stood out to you the most? Like, is there an attribute, something where you're like, okay, I know this person, take-home test or not, is probably going to meet the bar and this person is not?
I actually try not to think about a bar per se. Uh, like a gut feeling.
No, you're just like—
There are things when I meet someone that stand out and that are like, okay, this is interesting and we should spend more time here, you know? And what, what are some of those signals, right? Like maybe it's creativity and creative ideas. Maybe it's they've taught me something in the conversation. Maybe it's like the sheer passion for the product. And they've demonstrated that by going deep on the product and explaining all this feedback. We're deeply understanding our vision in a way that very few people do, even our own employees do sometimes, you know? And so there are these like things that can stand out when you originally meet someone. But ultimately what we're trying to do is just evaluate things, right? And so for example, like, and like other unique things that you don't expect, like we hired a head of recruiting, but the head of recruiting is like a quasi-engineer who taught herself how to code because she was an engineering recruiter. I was trying to build empathy and like builds like Salesforce integrations on the side and stuff. And you don't see that that often in a recruiting lead, you know? And so there are unique attributes that you try to pay attention to, but it's a little less about like, do they have this quality or that? It's more like— and we have values that we care about, like low ego and negative maintenance. But really what it's like, we're just trying to understand who the human is and try to get as much information about them as possible and try to map that to what we need and like see if it's a fit. So actually we hire a ton of generalists. But none of them do generalist roles in the company. Everyone commits. And thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, thanks for coming to SaaStr.
All right, thanks guys.
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