S12E2: Supercharging Sales Teams Using AI with Alexa Grabell, Co-Founder of Pocus

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Welcome back to The Room podcast. Today we're thrilled to take you inside the room with Alexa Grebelle, co-founder and CEO of Pocus. Pocus is redefining how sales teams prospect, leveraging AI agents to automate the manual, time-consuming parts of sales research so reps can focus on what they do best. Selling. Since launching out of Stanford's GSB, Alexa and her co-founder have scaled Pocus to support leading go-to-market teams at companies like Canva, Asana, and monday.com, with backing from investors like Coatue first round and Box Group. Alexa's journey into tech wasn't linear. She started her career in consulting before heading to business school, initially thinking she'd become a VC, but a class project turned into a company and she hasn't looked back since. In this conversation, we dive into the early days of Pocus, the decision to build AI agents for sales teams, not replace them, and the lessons learned from scaling a B2B product in a noisy, fast-moving market. Key topics in this episode include building PLG tools as a non-PLG founder, early go-to-market hiring missteps, fundraising hot takes, and the future of AI-powered selling. Madison McIlwain and I were so energized by Alexa's clarity and conviction. We know you will be too. Let's open the door.

Alexa, thank you so much for being on The Room Podcast today.

Thank you for having me. I'm so excited.

We are so excited as well, and we wanna hear your entire story. We love to start at the beginning with our guests. Tell us, where did you grow up and how did that shape your view of the world?

I grew up right outside of Philadelphia, and when you ask this question, it's very interesting cuz I didn't, think about this. I didn't put two and two together where my mom was actually super entrepreneurial, but I wouldn't have thought of her as a tech founder. She first started her physical therapy practice, uh, very small, but still from nothing. And then she actually went on and started a small consumer goods product. And so she was always experimenting with different ideas and trying new things and building it literally with her hands and At the time, I didn't think anything of it. I just thought she had fun experimenting with new things. But now looking back, it really did shape my ability to think, okay, I can build something. I can do it from scratch. I can try it. I really appreciate that from my early childhood.

That's incredible. What was the product that your mom built?

It's no longer around, but it's called Wrap-Ez, W-R-A-P-E-Z. It's stretch fabric, reusable gift wrap. So she was always really frustrated by wrapping gifts for us. So she built it out of that. And it, it's cool to just literally start with your hands and build nothing, build something from nothing.

Well, it's incredible that you had such an entrepreneurial role model as a mom. Tell us, when you were younger, did you ever think you were going to become a founder yourself?

No. And I think that's such a misconception if people think that they just go to elementary, middle, high school and think, I'm gonna become a founder. I I never thought that. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I actually didn't know I would become a founder until I became a founder. I'd be curious if it's the same for both of you, but that's what it was for me.

No, I always joke that I always wanted to be the first lady, not the president. Like, that seems like a cooler job. None of the stress, but like the access. And I feel that way a little about being a founder now with the podcast. If people ask about it and I'm like, no, it wasn't the goal, but I'm happy that I arrived here.

Totally. Just like a few natural steps and you look back and you're like, oh my gosh, I'm glad I just kind of stumbled into this and didn't know what I was getting myself into.

Totally. And I think that's really important to know, right? Because sometimes life takes you in different ways and there's one thing that leads to the next to become a founder. So you don't need to, at the age of 18, think you're gonna be a founder to become a founder.

College and education, I think it's such an integral part into our early careers and how we see the world. So let's dive into that a little bit. For undergrad, you attended Manderley Vanderbilt University. You studied engineering there. Tell us about your time at college and then how that led you into your new grad years at KPMG.

I went to Vanderbilt not even really knowing what engineering was. I just loved math and physics in high school, so I was thinking this probably makes sense for me. And so once I got in there, I did love it and I took some mostly engineering classes, some business classes. I didn't know what I wanted to do, and so I, after graduation, did what everyone else who doesn't know what to do and went into consulting. And really the reason being is I heard that consulting is where you learn business, and truly you do. You learn how to be customer-facing, you learn how to build financial models, you learn how to present good stories. And so very glad I did it to learn those quote unquote business fundamentals. But again, it's not like I woke up and said, I'm gonna be an engineer, or I'm gonna go into consulting. I went into engineering because I liked math, and I went into consulting because I wanted to quote unquote learn business.

It's funny because so many of our guests on the podcast were management consultants and really got a view of the world that way. That's honestly quite interesting because you wouldn't think that would be such an entrepreneurial pipeline.

I think it's changed. I think for our generation, yes, cuz that was the where you go to learn business. I do think for the future it's more of the like product role at a startup, or even now a sales role at a startup is— if I were redoing it, I would do that.

And then another thing that we see a lot is people going to business school and then starting companies after business school. In 2019, after years in the workforce, you attended Stanford's GSB. Tell us why business school.

Before that, after consulting, I went to a startup called DataMiner, and I was building out the sales ops function. And when I was there, I loved it. It was awesome. That's where I really learned how to operate and build and be in startups. And what I saw though throughout my entire career in even engineering and then consulting and then tech, it was just so many men in leadership positions. And honestly, I never worked for a woman. So I went to business school again with this vague concept of I want to become a female executive and I want to maybe become a VC because VCs can invest in female founders and I can change the future for women. And so, applied, went there. Of course, I didn't end up becoming a VC, but I went for this grand vision of we need to change the game for women in tech. And one hypothesis was by being a venture capitalist, I can do that.

While you were at GSB, you did dip your toes into investing. You founded the 21 Fund. Tell us more about that fund and how GSB more broadly set you down that path into saying, hey, I actually want to be in the driver's seat. I want to be building as a founder.

I got to GSB and just, I'd say 90% of the people that go to GSB, I was like, I'm going to be a VC. And I did all of the things to become a VC. I did the fellowship with Pear, which is amazing. Everyone should do it. I did MBA fund. I did everything you could possibly do.

I'm sorry, I'm cracking up because I was also doing the Pear fellowship. Shout out Keith Bender. And then also I'm starting the fund for my year.

Oh my gosh, I can't believe it, it went that long. That is so phenomenal.

It's crazy because, so I'm not at GSB, but we don't have a strong history of doing it at HBS, and we've been talking, I don't know if you know Steph, who founded Pin, the platform for like crowdfunding for investment clubs. Anyway, that, so we're using a GSB-founded company to run ours.

Yeah, Steph and my husband started the 2020 Fund. Shout out, Lior Mushin is They're the brains behind all of this. He started the 2020 Fund and then he handed over the keys to myself and a few others of here's the secret sauce. And so we started the 2021 Fund as well. Yeah, you should check out Lior and his new VC fund as well.

The other crazy crossover here is when we were raising our pre-seed, I think Lior was one of the first investors I spoke to.

I didn't even know that.

Which is, yeah, you know, like pitch number 3 type of thing. So that's truly crazy.

Go to GSB to start a company and find your husband.

That would be really nice. We can talk about that too. Good go-to-market strategy for sure. I definitely feel like the fund component of business school is interesting. Just for the listeners who aren't as familiar, it's like this concept of unicorns are built every day coming out of these great business schools across the country. Let's always invest in our peers and friends who are starting companies and our hope and our belief By the numbers is that it will have an outsized return for the fund. So the LPs are actually our classmates. And I think this is like a really cool access point. And Alex, I'm curious to hear how this shaped your story and your ultimate path, but of like, in a very lightweight way, investing in the venture ecosystem, which is very illiquid and quite frankly, usually very expensive to get access to these funds. So it makes it a bit more palatable and accessible, which I think is really encouraging because I think that's one of the hardest things about venture is you know, how hard it is to break in.

Yeah, it was phenomenal and I would do it again. It's a way for both your classmates from the investing side to be able to have a piece of the pie and without spending millions of dollars, putting an investment for $3,000 to have a part in this. And it's essentially an index fund for your class, but then it's also very valuable for the founder side. So we probably invested in 40 founders of which I guess I invested in myself as well. So we're, we're in a group chat with each other. We support each other, we ask each other questions. And then also when you tap into your classmates that are now LPs in your investment, they're not just incentivized to help from a we love you perspective and we're peers, but literally from a financial perspective, they're incentivized to support.

As a founder, it's often hard to find community of peer founders. It's often a lonely journey, so it's incredible to see how that sort of business school background, having that group chat really was a part of your starting journey. And so let's talk about starting Pocus. You had your idea in business school. So tell us about those early inception days and the moment when you decided that you were going to build your own business and go down that path.

Did all the VC stuff, realized I don't like investing. I love building. I was just so jealous of all of my classmates that were building startups. And I realized coming from a startup background where I was actually building things in sales ops, that I had ideas. There were a lot of things in sales ops that are fundamentally broken and need to be improved. And so I went into a class called Lean Launchpad. I don't know if they have that at HBS, but they take maybe 10 teams of students across GSB as well as engineering school with some theses of hypotheses of what could be a big business. So I met my co-founder Isaac. He was in the engineering side and joined Launchpad with this hypothesis that sellers can be more productive and there's ways to make them even better if there were data from all these siloed places combined together. And that came from my sales ops background. And so we spent probably 8 weeks, uh, ideating on these ideas and running series of experiments, before landing on the idea of what led us to Pocus today towards the end of the class.

I'd love to talk more about Isaac. It's so great that you found a co-founder through the business school experience. And, I'm honestly having these conversations with a lot of my peers right now. Like, we've done this in this kind of sandbox space and, we love each other. We think we're both great humans, but does this mean we should start on what is likely a 10-year journey? How did you guys broach those conversations as you were coming out of the Lean Launchpad moment?

Yeah, we actually did Lean Launchpad with 4 people total, um, and then just left the 2 of us. We started just the 2 of us, brought 2 others in and, and did just us. We were both co-founder dating, I like to call it. We always joke, he talked to every single one of my 5 roommates who were also looking for a co-founder, and I talked to all of his friends. So we literally both talked to 40 people in the other person's class. And what we were both looking for is an idea that we found very exciting and something that could be 10x better than what exists today. And then similar values and ways that we wanted to build a company. And so a lot of the values we have today of, they were, we used different words, but being humble achievers, being really smart, getting a lot of shit done, but no ego, or being a delusional optimist. Like we wanted to be a place where people can have fun and think positively and Also, we don't wanna work a 9 to 5. We want to grind it out when we have to and work really hard. And so we talked a lot about those visions and values. And over time, you have to start working with someone and get in the weeds and see the challenges that there's gonna be problems every day to actually figure out. You can have the best friend in the world and they could be an awful person to work with. You really have to get in there and figure it out.

Forcing those hard conversations early and also getting those reps in and actually getting to the point of being like, okay, I know all of your worst, but also best traits, and we're gonna know how to push through those moments and have the difficult conversations to get to where you guys were, which was post-graduation, we're going to market with this startup. So I guess taking a step back, Pocus is certainly redefining the sales prospecting industry, and you're providing a suite of tools for go-to-market and sales teams. We've mentioned the term sales ops a few times already. Could we just take a step back and, and explain What is Pocus product and how did you get there from an aha moment?

Since day one, the reason Pocus exists is to supercharge sales reps. We wanna make a world where you can have the best sales reps in the world being super productive, generated pipeline, closing deals. Now, which didn't exist when we started, that can all be powered with AI. So we can talk about that journey. But what Pocus does is it's a collection of all of these different AI agents that are scraping both your internal data and external data to do all that manual tedious work. Of researching and prospecting. So sales teams just have to get alerted on specific things with their accounts. They get alerted with complete summaries of how they should actually do their job and recommendations for how they should reach out to prospects and close deals. So that's what we are today. There was definitely a journey from— the vision has stayed the same, but what our product has looked like and the positioning from the days of LinkedIn Launchpad to now.

My understanding of the sales tech stack is it's incredibly sticky, right? Because once a team from a sales org puts you in and it's working, you're closing more deals, it's really exciting and you want that product and tool to continue to win. And you guys have managed to do that with companies. We've actually interviewed the Clockwise team, you know, Asana, Monday, Canva. These are household brand names that are leveraging your product to continue building out their own business. How did you get those first customers to say yes to you?

I LinkedIn DM'd a lot of, a lot of people, um, telling them, hey, I'm a student at Stanford, here's my idea, can I get feedback? And Clockwise was actually one of our first design partners that we built with. So I pinged one of their AEs. I was like, I want some feedback. She gave us feedback. We started meeting with her every week, moving from Figma to actual product, and then it moved to, okay, this looks like something we'd want. So I connected with Matt, the CEO, and got them onto the product. And Matt actually became an early angel investor of Pocus just because we were working so closely together. It's a little bit of brute force. And Claudia, I'm sure you have a similar experience of just reaching out, begging people to give you feedback until they're willing to try things out.

One thing that I realized the hard way when we started building our initial version of our product, which we've since had kind of pivoted away from, was when you're working with a design partner, you have to be really strategic about how to get honest feedback because a lot of people are really great at saying, yeah, this is cool, but that doesn't mean they're actually going to pay or use the product. So it sounds like you and Matt and the Clockwise team clearly had a really productive design partnership. What advice would you have for founders that are in that design partnership phase? How do you get the most out of working with a design partner?

Sam was just telling me this, how it's really confusing because design partners always tell you things are great and then they don't want to pay. And the reality is you're not gonna convert every design partner because design partners usually have been through hell with you, through buggy products, through just early iterations. But you always have to be asking the tough questions. And I found it helpful to say, look, I'm asking as a founder, not as a seller of this product. I genuinely wanna know what do you hate about this? What do you wish you had? What doesn't exist here? What is still not working? And then the biggest test is, will you pay for this? And if it's. Someone that's an IC, will— are they willing to go to their boss and fight for this? Or if it's someone that's an executive, do they see that this is transformational to their business? So design partners can have different goals, right? You can be working with one to build the product that they actually want, or you can be working towards, is this something that companies will pay for? And so that Clockwise, it was— we were probably building with them for a while before they paid. And I think they, they paid us nothing compared to what our contracts are now. And so they're They're still on that legacy pricing, but that's just what design partners are.

Yeah. If I'm an AE, why do I love Focus?

AE is a couple things. One, they're able to surface opportunities they wouldn't have identified before. And so last quarter alone, we've generated half a billion in pipeline for our customers. And so we're actually able to surface this information to them so that they know that it's the right time to reach out to a prospect. Another thing is call prep. So when you have a meeting coming up, we're able to give them all the insights based on AI summarized research from your internal data, like CRM, data warehouse, call recording, email, as well as external data like 10-Ks, blog posts, podcasts, to save them 10+ hours a week just digging through that data.

That's super helpful. Thank you. Because I think there's just such a deluge of information and when your job is to ultimately book new contract revenue, sometimes you don't know what is the most valuable details and how you're going to surface that. And it sounds like the platform is empowering people to do their job better with this data management component. And one of our favorite guests we've had on a few times is actually the Hightouch founder, Kashish Gupta, and they're doing a lot. And what at the time when we had him on in 2022 was called the modern data stack, I think it's shifted a bit on how we're talking about it externally. But how have you guys been part of that movement of these tools that are helping power data going from point A to point B?

I love the high-touch team. So we're less about moving data around, more about surfacing insights that are relevant for sellers. And so I'll also say we're less about replacing the sales rep's job. We're more about supercharging them. So what I mean by that is there's a series of data that's sprawled everywhere. They're usually a sales rep has a million different tools open when they have to just simply figure out who should I reach out to and how do I win this deal? And so for us, by taking all that data and surfacing it in a way that's super relevant, super short and sweet to the point, giving them everything they need in one cohesive area, that's where we help. We're less about what high-touch does of taking data from one place and moving it to the next.

Absolutely. No, it's helpful to hear about and just that distinction is really useful. Thank you. And I guess you could say it's like magic.

Hocus Pocus.

Yeah.

A classic film and definitely a really fun analogy. And honestly, it's working. And from the venture perspective, you've raised over $20 million in a Series A from Hallmark Venture firms, from Kotu, First Round, and Box Group. We're curious, who was the first person to say yes to investing in Pocus?

One of our professors at Lean Launchpad, who's a Pear partner, Mar, she actually approached us after the class and said, we wanna give you this before we had even a product. And so we said we were honored, flattered, flabbergasted. And then we said, we wanna build a product before we raise a pre-seed. So then we went back to her. It was her. And then I think the first that we signed a term sheet was Box Group though. It was either Box Group or Pear around the two of them.

And are you based in New York?

I am. I was in SF at the time, but I recently moved to New York.

I hear about Box Group a lot in the New York ecosystem, so that's, that's great. Maybe just one question for me before I pivot back to Claude's is what's a fundraising hot take that you have?

I don't know if this is a hot take, but keeping fundraising as short as possible, and you should never be fundraising until you actually have a term sheet. So making sure that when you go out and start talking to investors, you can say, especially for a seed round, which should move pretty quickly because there's not much diligence to do. It should be, I have a term sheet, I want this to move over the next 2 weeks because I think the time pressure and FOMO helps drive the round.

Incredibly helpful advice for folks that are fundraising, especially during this time of year. We've had a lot of folks on the podcast give advice for just fundraising more generally, or getting your first term sheet at the seed or pre-seed. Pocus is an enterprise startup, you're selling into other businesses, obviously had an incredibly successful Series A raise. What advice would you have for B2B startup founders raising their A? What metrics do you think these funds are looking for?

There's similar things within every raise. It's gonna be, you need a great team, you need a great product, and you need customer love and traction. The actual metrics just change, like as you raise. I haven't raised a B yet, but I imagine from those, just the data element becomes more, uh, in the weeds. For us, for an A, traction is the most important thing, and that comes from customers. So I think more than anything, it's actually customer love at the A of just people that are obsessed. I will quit my job if I don't have this. If you give a customer a call, they will say, this is the best thing to ever happen to me in my job. And then of course, we raised at a different time where funding was much easier, but now you need to see that month over month growth and more important to see the consistent growth versus the kind of ARR metric in total.

Thank you for sharing that. Looking back at kind of my journey as a founder, one of the toughest things for me coming from a product background and not having had any experience in sales was how do we build our sales team? How do we set up our sales stack? What are our SDRs doing? Now it's like, this fully automated pipeline into Salesforce, so on and so forth. But the sales landscape has really changed a lot even since a couple of years ago when I stood up my sales team. AI has really changed sales motions. It's completely changed how SDRs are prospecting and finding accounts. How did you think about iterating on your own go-to-market strategy and monetization plans in the current AI context, and maybe how that has even impacted the Pocus product?

Our belief as a business is that AI can supercharge sellers in all of their jobs to be done. So everything from prioritizing your target accounts to doing the prospecting, to taking notes, to updating CRM, everything. AI can really help them do all that part of their job. Where I don't think AI is yet is, or as interesting, is fully replacing the seller. And so how we've thought a lot about it is where within our business can we use AI ourselves? To replace the tedious manual work to free up our sellers and to free up the broader go-to-market team so that they can ultimately have larger books and get more done because they're spending less time doing research and data digging and more time talking to sellers. I think another thing that has changed a lot related to AI, or more just related to the changes in market, is that sellers need to be way more strategic and value-driven. You can't just go out there and spray and pray and email everyone with the same email and send mass outreach. It has to be way more leading with a point of view of, hey, I saw that your business is undergoing this transformation. This is how we can help. And that actually in itself led to one of our product features called AI Strategy, which takes all this information and then surfaces up a POV for the seller, or point of view for the seller, to break into an account. Between AI freeing up the reps' time and then the need for reps to be more strategic that came from our own reps doing the work and then we're able to support other teams in doing it. Totally.

I remember when our sales team was talking to me around like, how do we figure out how to better personalize our emails? Where do we go to research all this stuff? Do we just Google the company? And it was like, yeah, I guess, but now with Pocus, they get those insights right away.

Cool.

So we chatted a little bit about the sales teams themselves. Madison McIlwain, what goes wrong when founders try to build their initial go-to-market team?

Everything. If you're a first-time founder, if you're a second-time founder, uh, I think you can learn a lot, but I have yet to meet a first-time founder that isn't secretly behind closed doors saying, I've done everything wrong in my go-to-market team. Like engineering is way more straightforward. There's a product to build, a new product, and you, and you build it. With go-to-market, there's so many more unknowns of What's our ICP? How do I position it? How do I sell it? Do I need a more junior rep, a more senior rep? Do I need someone that's SMB or mid-market or enterprise? Do we run POCs or not? Literally everything can go wrong and it's just moving as fast as you can to run the experiments to learn what works and what doesn't. This is why I see it at every startup. Only 50% of AEs work out because it's, you, you don't know what type of AE you need until it starts working.

Yeah, that certainly resonates. We've gone through a few in my early journey. The other thing that I think a lot of non-sales-driven founders, like founders from either engineering backgrounds or product backgrounds or marketing backgrounds, often feel is that a salesperson can sell better than themselves. And I think that might be a misconception when you're building your initial million in ARR. What advice would you have for PLG or B2B founders that might not feel comfortable in sales looking to get their first million?

Yeah, we did our first million before hiring sales. I just brute-forced it, honestly, me and my co-founder. And the way you do that is just getting in front of prospects every single day and doing your own outreach. And for us, we sell to CROs. I was just emailing every CRO that would talk to me and promising them this great future. And so I would say I got there with zero expertise on sales. It's less about sales for the first million, it's more about leading with value, being strategic, understanding their business, figuring out how you can solve their problems, which I guess is sales. And then once you hire a sales rep though, they can bring in the ex— when I say expertise of like how to do great discovery, like how do you want to properly project manage proof of concept, like how to do a proper negotiation. That stuff can come later. Once the first million, you're just getting them bought in on you and the vision that you have.

And then I think especially in 2024, you have a lot of founders saying, oh, there's all these incredible AI tools. We'll just buy all these tools and it will just work. Companies like Clay and 11x.ai have made headlines with massive fundraisers recently. Tell us a little bit more about how founders should be thinking about the AI sales tool space. What is this new tech stack?

It's a great question, and I'd say it's very exciting to be in AI in sales. It's also very confusing for people right now because all of these tools sound exactly the same. We're actually putting out a market map later. I'll send it to you guys to get your feedback, uh, before. But the problem is right now is that every single tool sounds the same, but what they're doing is actually really different. And so Clay and 11x are both awesome. Clay is very great for rev ops and growth teams doing scaled outbound. 11x is really good for replacing the SDR and doing also that scaled outbound where Pocus sits and a few others is more in support. Supporting the sales rep. So not taking the sales rep out of the picture, it's actually giving them an interface to tell the sales rep what to do. There's also a million other tools that are being built, like an AI CRM or AI sales enablement collateral, or the new AI call recorder. It's confusing, I would say, for people trying to navigate it in case they're like building out their tech stack. Start with the jobs that need to be done. What is the pain I feel right now? And then is it a scaled motion or is it more of a high-touch strategic motion? Is it more ops-focused? Is it more CRO-focused, more rep-focused? And then back into it from there. And don't buy AI just for the sake of AI. Really find the pain that you need to be solved.

On the fundraising side, I think some of these people are raising so much capital, and I think the talk track is because that's how much compute they need to be able to run their models and their product. And obviously with sales, as we've talked about, there's just no cap to the data that you could be running to understand it. How have you thought about the capital needed today versus when you started this company in like your overall dollar amount that you're looking to raise?

I'd say also besides just capital, I would think it's also how you charge customers and how you're making sure that you can cover the cost based on what you're providing for them. And so you've probably seen a lot of things moving from a seat-based model to a usage-based. So you have a credit system. So when you're spending money to power, the customers are then giving you money in return. I think the fundraisers, sure. I think that's kind of a, a way that you can explain needing capital. I think a lot of it right now is just excitement and investors wanting to be part of this future.

Have you built on it, shifted your own pricing strategy and setting up your own go-to-market?

We're in the process of moving from more seat-based to usage-based because of this.

Super cool. Excited. Thank you for the breakdown, first of all, because I know a lot of earlier founders ask me, what tools do I need to use? And it is really difficult to understand. We should be linking that market map. Alongside this episode as well. We know that a founder's journey is full of high highs and low lows. Could you share about a moment in Pocus's life cycle where things just didn't go as planned?

Every day. I really think that being a founder is not glamorous. There's more things that go wrong than go well, but the high highs all make up for it. Um, the funny story that I always come back to, we started as a product-led sales company. We created the category, we created the community. Really our initial prospecting was based on product usage data for companies with a PLG or self-serve model. Since then, we've evolved to helping with all signals, not just product usage, but when we were very leaning into product-led sales and product-led growth and self-serve, we ourselves were not PLG or self-serve, and we got so much hate for it. There were all of these LinkedIn posts about how we're like frauds because we sell to PLG and claim to do product-led sales, but we don't do it ourselves. I've had people in sales cycles tell me, we can't buy from you because we don't agree with your philosophy. And so it was a moment of me being like, what am I doing? Second-guessing myself. Why didn't I make the product self-serve? And the reason we didn't was because we knew that it couldn't be self-serve when you're connecting to a data warehouse, when you are selling to a seller and need to get that access. Now it does not matter. This was like 3 years ago when this was happening. We beat all the players in the space, even the ones that were self-serve. But I remember in that time, like losing deals come from it, getting hate on LinkedIn, getting hate on Twitter. I was like, I must be an idiot. What am I missing? Everything that is a low, it just, you look back and you laugh because what feels like awful today is gonna be like a funny moment in the future. I actually keep a, Claudia, I don't know if you do this with the founder life, but there's a one line a day journal that you can do over a 5-year period. You can get it on Amazon for $5. And I write the line of the day every single day since I started Podcast. And so I can go back and see how I was feeling, what I was doing, what my worries about were early on. And they're so funny cuz it just does not matter today.

I wish we had this conversation 3 years ago.

You can start now.

Truly, I will.

It does take such mental tenacity to not let the haters get you down, whether it be because of a LinkedIn post or some offhand feedback that you get from a VC that's not very thoughtful and like cuts to your core or whatever it might be. So obviously you've done an incredible job at being tenacious through this experience and building an incredible company. So congratulations on that, Alexa. And we don't actually often talk about this cuz it's just something that we all experience, so why should we talk about it? But we did before we hopped on, talk a little bit about the venture world and how one of your theses about business school was like becoming a VC because that could maybe help change the underfunding that goes to women. And that's just an empirical fact, and I think It's awesome that you decided to have a founder. I love that Claudia's also a founder, and both of you have engineering backgrounds. Both of you were CS majors. Maybe just like today, how does it feel being a female founder? I again almost hesitate to ask because it's like, why do you qualify? But just like, how has that evolved since the beginning of both of your journeys?

I love that question, and I love it coming from both of you. I'm sure you both have also had the inverse where you're like, will you speak on this panel? We're looking for a woman. That feels awful because then I'm like, Oh, not because of all of my other accomplishments, but I appreciate that. And I'm truly, I said this in the beginning, very impressed by what both of you have been building and will continue to build. I don't always think about it, but when someone in an interview process is like, I admire you for doing this, or someone on my team is like, I took this risk because I saw you were able to do it, or there's a way to attract talent that are women more junior in their career because I'm the founder and CEO. Those moments feel special. Also when you get to meet other female founders and operators and there's a special bond like you two, that feels awesome. I don't think about it on a day-to-day basis, I would say, besides that.

Yeah, I think for me, similarly, you're laser-focused on executing and building the business. You and your co-founder are just in it. I think there have been some moments, especially in our earlier journey, where a VC would be like, oh, we love female founders. Claudia, you should be like pitching more because you'll be able to check that box. And like kind of comments like that, which take you out of it and you're where you're like, oh, that's odd. The worst one was we had this competitor tell a customer that we were in an RFP process with that I was non-technical and did not have a sufficient product for the customer. As a female founder, that company and that founder is like a little unhinged and has gone through a lot of LinkedIn hate. So, I don't think it was personal, but I think there are those moments where you're like, that's odd. But at the end of the day, if you're building a business that's successful, that's going to speak more than being on another panel.

Yeah. And I'm so sorry you had that situation. I think it's when you talk to every female founder or leader, they have a story. I remember when we were pitching our seed, everyone thought my co-founder was the CEO, so they would ask him questions and he would be like, I actually don't know the answer. Alexa can answer that. Or there's early on when we were in product-led sales, all of our competitors were male and we got the same type of thing. And for me, it's, there's always going to be this bias and it, it is harder for women. Like when you go to these conferences or dinners, you will be the only woman in the room sometimes. And like, to me, I try to flip my brain and use this as an advantage versus feeling sad for myself. And so if someone asks me, will you be on this podcast because we need a woman, I'll say, yes, I would love to be on this podcast, but not because I'm a woman, but because of XYZ. And I will do it because it's opportunity for myself, for other people to hear from me. But I will remember that person that asked and I will not be a fan of them.

No, and it's just something that definitely to flip the table on the venture side, I found organically, I tend to get along with women, not better than men, but oftentimes the vibes can be better. So then there is just this organic component to who you wanna invest in and who you wanna work alongside, cuz perhaps maybe you see the world more similarly, or you feel like you can give feedback more organically and authentically at a board level. And so I think the ecosystem. Has really tried to figure it out. And I, I actually still don't have the golden ticket on like the solution, but I think having more open and honest conversations and having more equity on both sides of the aisle, like that can really ultimately help. Because I think what I wanna see in the next 10 years is more female founders taking their companies public. That means to me, we've had no problem investing in more seed and Series A female founders, but there's just this lack that has, I think, mostly yet to break through. We've been lucky to have some of the exceptions. We've had Michelle Zatlin of Cloudflare, but frankly, zero to IPO female founders, it's seriously less than 10. I haven't done the numbers in a while, but anyway, that's my prediction and hope that we can do that.

We have to do another episode, Alexa, when you take Pocus public. Oh, sorry.

Yeah, that was me.

Same with you. No, hopefully we'll have Canva this year. That'll be one. Or soon.

We should have Melanie on. That would be amazing.

Yes, completely.

Well, thank you for sharing a bit more about this part of the story too, and the journey, and I think taking your tenaciousness and, and pushing forward. We're so excited for you. So let's look towards 2025. What's on deck for the company and what's on deck for you?

We're starting to more aggressively build out our own sales team. Haven't even announced this publicly, but building out, hiring a sales leader, more AEs, SDRs, and for me it's figuring out how to scale that motion and go beyond beyond just serving tech companies and serving all companies. And so a lot of exciting momentum there to date. And that's what's top of mind for me.

Awesome. We'll plug that we're hiring. Love to hear it. I think we've heard that from a few of our guests. We had the Perplexity founder on this fall and they're hiring. The energy is back in tech and we love to hear it. We're obviously long tech over here, so excited for you guys to continue growing your company into the next year, both on the company side and then of course on the revenue side. I guess To close us out, our favorite question that we love to ask all of our guests is, who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career?

Yeah, it's funny. I don't think I would've had an answer to that before starting Pocus because I really didn't have any mentors that were a woman besides family, of course. So I look at all of the female founders in my life that I text a lot for the questions. So I know Shenzi at Merge introduced us. I'm probably texting her. Annoying her every week with some questions, or Tara from Rupa Health, or Lara from Sora. She just sold her company. Celine from Loyal. So there's so many female founders that I think they've had the most impact just from being in it together. And especially the ones that are a couple stages ahead of me where I can ask the quote unquote dumb questions.

That's incredible. Some great founders that you named, some past guests, some people we've known in our ecosystem. I'm jealous. I wanna be in that group chat.

Well, invite you.

Thank you, Alexa, so much on a busy day for talking to us about your story, building Pocus, and what's next for you in the future of the sales ops world. We just really loved having you in the room today.

Thank you so much for having me. You both are awesome.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast. If you want more from The Room every week, subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com/newsletter.

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