E41: Jessica Chiew of Canva on Building AI-Native GTM Org

Hello and welcome to the Revenue Leadership Podcast by Topline. I'm your host, Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner.com, and every Wednesday we dive deep into the strategies and tactics being used to drive success by the best revenue leaders in the world. So join me as I sit down with revenue operators to discuss actionable frameworks that you can implement in your business today with no No sales pitches and no platitudes.

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Today's guest is Jessica Chu, who runs GTM operations and strategy at Canva. I'm sure everybody listening knows Canva. They're a 5,000-person organization today, over $3 billion in revenue, and shockingly, 220 million monthly active users, which I had to double-check with Jessica because I couldn't believe it when I heard it. Prior to Canva, Jessica was the global head of revenue strategy and analytics at Sana. She was a GM at Spruce Health. She came from a consulting career at McKinsey prior to that. And I'm really excited for this one. I keep getting drawn into AI conversations whether or not I try to or not. And I've followed along with some of what Canva is doing and a little bit of your content along the way. So I'm really excited for this one. And thank you for joining.

Thank you for having me. I can't wait to have a great chat today.

Yeah. So, uh, the topic is GTM AI transformation. It is the topic by far that I get asked about the most from other CROs, from people that, uh, want me to speak at events, or like founders reaching out. It is the, the topic du jour, and I'm trying not to make the podcast only GTM AI, uh, although it's quickly becoming that. So, there's clearly like such an intense anxiety, urgency, and interest in the market. And so, I'm hoping today we can give people some first principles from which to work from, to think about, okay, I'm a traditional Series A to D or E SaaS company, and I know that this is a transformative technology, but like, where the heck do I start? And we'll get into how Canva's done it and some of where you think the market's going.

Yeah.

So that's the framing of the conversation. My warm-up question though, is this the most fun you've ever had as an ops leader, this period of time we're in right now?

It's so much fun. I sometimes I say this to my team and it's a little cheeky. It's not really what I believe, but sometimes like ops and especially sales ops is kind of the same problems over and over again, just in different contexts. But I think this is the first time that we've actually had a chance to be super creative and build almost like product owners and think about how to change how we're building sales orgs for the first time in at least the last 5 to 10 years, I think so. Yeah. Having fun, being really creative. It's like kind of a muscle we, I personally haven't felt I've stretched in the last few years, but have been in that mode at least for the last year. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I felt a little bit like this when the sales engagement boom first happened in sort of like 2014, 2015, but nothing like this. Nothing with this, you know, scale of transformation and this size of opportunity. And, and the funny thing is this is definitely the most fun I've had in, in my career. AI has a lot to do with it, but then I also have this like constant existential dread that I'm not doing enough. I'm not moving fast enough. I see something that Clay is doing. I chatted with their CRO a couple of weeks ago. I was like, oh my God, we need to go faster.

So yeah, the combination of dread. I think it's tough. I think, you know, I've been really curious and creative on this stuff and the team's been doing a lot. When you speak to other peers and other leaders in this space, I think you realize that not everyone is like navigating this in a way that feels constructive. People are nervous. It's really hard to figure out. So I'm excited to to dig in. Um, but yeah, I agree. I think 2014-15, like, great new tools came out, like when call recording and like outreach automation and instant booking stuff, like, oh, that was— that felt like a bit of a burst. But even for me, like, I would say over the last 3-4 years— my vendors will hate me— I've not leaned into vendor conversations because, you know, I haven't found— like, it's, it's like a lot of tools have been commoditized, been so much consolidation, like people haven't been bringing really exciting stuff. But that's all changed, like in the last 6 months I've had to— I'm leaning in, I'm speaking to early stage, I'm speaking to all my existing vendors and like being really open to hear what folks are building because it's changing so fast.

Yeah. How many demos a week do you take right now?

Oh, I'd say like 2 demos, but then also just like meeting with earlier stage companies to see what they're looking at because some of the folks that are emerging out there, that might be 2, 3 people, like they're not reaching me, but other companies that are much smaller than Canva are looking at them. And so I learn a lot by Speaking to earlier stage peers, to be honest, as well. So demos by proxy.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's similar to me. Like anywhere between 2 and 4. Because we're, I feel like we have a plan and I know the next few building blocks, but it changes so fast and I feel like I just need to stay with finger on the pulse.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay. So we're going to break this conversation up into roughly 4 parts. I really want people to walk away with a strategic framework. Framework to start, like how to think about where you should start with this transformation. I have particular opinions on it. And so, I'm going to bounce a couple of those off you. And then once we can give people a strategic framework, I would love to talk about use case prioritization, specifically where in the stack can people start. Then we'll talk change management and maybe if we have time, talk personal productivity, but we'll see. You joined almost 2 years ago, correct?

Mm-hmm. Correct. Yep.

And so post-ChatGPT moment, but at the very early innings of these starting to, that AI transformation coming into GTM tooling, how much momentum was there around AI in go-to-market when you started?

Yeah, I think, It was starting. So I think we were just coming off, as you said, like everyone adopting ChatGPT. I remember like 2.5, 3 years ago when I was at Asana, we had this huge, I mean, we had this huge AI push and we had like some BDRs pioneering these very detailed like creation of research agents speaking to prospecting copywriting agents and like demoing their workflow. It was like you could see the code being written. It was like a 15-minute process and boom, you have like maybe one email, right? Better than anything anyone had written. But I think we were still kind of at that moment where that felt like really exciting but still pretty heavy. And maybe I would say fast forward to a year ago. So 18 months after that initial point, okay, now we have vendors where like that entire workflow is like you click a tab, you push a button and you've got not only that, the contact source, the first 3 emails drafted. So But reflecting on when I joined Canva, it was still an excitement phase for me, but I don't think that we had the clarity that has been building over the last 6 to 9 months. So I think walking into Canva, at least I had the benefit of Canva being very much like an AI-native, AI-first company, both on the product development side. Like, I think we've been really early to the AI game even prior to all the momentum in the last few years in terms of building features and being thoughtful about philosophy. But more importantly, I think as a company, like AI-first has been part of our culture to the point that, like, I use the example, like we in our half-yearly performance reviews, our founders added a question over a year ago at this stage, which is like, how are you using AI in your workflow? So I've had the luxury of being in a company where that is part of the founder's philosophy, leadership philosophy, like forefront. And everyone has access to all the tools that they want, right? So I think the appetite was there in terms of like, how is it transforming my job, our go-to-market org? Like it was really early days 2 years ago. We're in a really different spot now over the last 6 months.

And there's a range of, I think, like adoption interest. There's companies like ours that are just like all in from CEO down. It's clearly the future. but then some companies that are a little slower on the move for, for whatever reason. Uh, when you talk to folks like that, so RevOps leaders or revenue leaders in companies that don't have that same, uh, don't have that same support, what advice are you giving them?

It's a great question. I mean, one, I think it's really hard if you don't have company-wide backing that this is important. Um, And so for me, it's like you've got a role model that like, you know, with your teams, like that's how you run your team. That's how we approach go-to-market ops. But I think it's like practically really difficult because we've been on this journey as well, right? There's one thing to say, hey, in everything that we do, we're looking for ways that AI can augment or improve existing workflows. But at the same time, like everyone has a day job and everyone has a life. So you're trying to ask folks to carve out 10% of everyone's day to do this. And we should trade notes, but my big learning is even the most basic workflows take iteration when it comes to— Yeah, we can talk.

Yeah.

Found simple demo really well. When you get into the nitty-gritty, it's like, oh, it's actually like 20 different design decisions and implementation steps to get this right and get this at a point that you're really excited about. And so it's really hard, I think, when you're asking for like 10% of everyone's day. So The advice I give is like our learning has been that the first step is you have to tell people this is now part of their job and they have to take this part there and they have to be experimenting and exploring. It's part of everyone's JD. But we were on this journey and it was interesting. We had a call with a vendor where they showed the potential and I had this aha moment maybe like 6 months ago where I was like, shoot, we need someone dedicated on this. And so I called someone on my team who was working on another program and I was like, I think we need to change your job. Tomorrow and I'll give you the weekend on it, but do you want to move into a dedicated AI role? And luckily for me, that person is awesome and was also excited. And I can see the difference in like how much faster we've been able to move with folks that are dedicated. And I see it at least on LinkedIn as well around people starting to move people into these dedicated roles.

Yeah. And so what's that role called for you?

We call it our— he is our go-to-market AI lead.

Okay, that's funny. That's the same title we've used.

There you go. There you go. I know folks like Clay have got go-to-market engineers and all that type of stuff. It's getting its own branding. But for me, it's interesting. I'd love to trade notes on how you've hired and what you've hired for, but it has to be this person who is a combination of kind of like a product manager, deep understanding of sales workflows, and then able to drive and project manage a cross-functional technical process really every time you stamp out one these workflows?

Yeah, our— so our setup is interesting, and we'll talk about this when we get into more— when we get into like where to start. But I think, um, there's a data layer that is the most important part of any of these transformations. And so there's actually a lot of this job— there's a lot of these jobs to be done that actually for us live in data ops. We have a really strong VP of Biz Ops and Data. He has teams of data scientists and data engineers that are working on the underlying foundation for a bunch of this. And so, and there's a lot of people in the GTM engineer category that have that job that really do that. They're like, I'm a Claytable expert. I'm doing all the enrichments and the water flow stuff or waterfall stuff. But that for us actually just lives in the data team and we're solving it there. And so for me, the GTM AI lead, is finding ways to go improve the workflows and tooling and solving problems. So, an example is just like when there is no tool that exists, are you going to vibe code an internal app? Are you going to just build like an extravagant Clay table that answers this thing? Is it, you know, are we just like teaching people to MCP into like different things we already have and we need to give them a prompt template library. That's sort of the GTM AI lead for us.

We're in the same place. Yeah. To me, the work we're doing with Clay, roles for customers and enrichment, that's to me the new way that sales ops does their most basic job, right? Which is making sure our CRM is up to date and accurate and enriched. Our go-to-market AI work is all about those workflows that sit on top of with the, the data layer. Yeah.

Yeah. I was asked by a company yesterday a similar question. They're like, well, you know, like we've got some data people in RevOps that do this stuff and then we've got data people that are associated with product. And so how do you reconcile this? And I, my advice to them was it's gotta be centralized. Like, I don't know. I think in this AI world where data being clean and centralized and having consistent access points, it like just needs to live in one function. And we have dedicated people in data. There's data people that are dedicated to GTM and to product, but it's centrally managed. Is that similar for you guys?

Yeah, we have a central data team. That's our setup as well. But yeah, you raise a really good point, which is it's interesting. It's interesting with Clay, right? Like we used to have a central data team. Who had built and managed their own waterfall. And now you've got a vendor who is like, it's a waterfall out of a box. And so we've had to also rethink like when you don't need data engineers maintaining this infrastructure, or how do you have folks who are not just maintaining the waterfall logic and plugging in all the old vendors, like we can uplevel the data resources we have as well to getting to the next level on data. I'll give you some really great examples. But it's part of this transition of like engineer to analyst profile.

Right.

So previously it was like, okay, we have all these people maintaining a basic waterfall. And at the end of the day, like I'll give you an example, verticalized sales teams and slicing and dicing by industry. We could only like rely on the structured fields and tags that are clear bits of info.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, it only gets you so far, right? There are weird edge cases. And so now we're able to like plug that stuff into Clay. And say, all right, regardless of what the structured fields say for these accounts, that it looks a little blurry, let's go and like look at their websites. And this is the spirit of how like what we define as an industry and come back and tell us whether you agree or disagree with it. And so I think the skillset for that type of inquiry that requires a lot more business context and understanding of like what we're trying to achieve with enrichment is a different profile to the folks who are like maintaining the integrations.

Data engineers. Yeah.

Data engineers. And so I think that's something that we're working through as well, which is how do we get on the data side people much closer to the business intent? Because that's how you can get the most out of these tools, right?

Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. That's similar to the profile that we're putting into, uh, into that function. We're looking for, for folks that, like, for our, uh, data scientists who will be, uh, aligned to the business units We want somebody who went to, did a computer science degree, but then worked in consulting, like was a McKinsey consultant, and then has spent a couple years in the tech company. That's like our perfect profile because they, they have the combination of business context, technical capabilities, and they can solve things either within Clay, you know, faster and easier because that's a platform, or outside of it if there's like weird edge cases that we need to build ourselves. That's a tricky one. Okay, let me go back because I knew I would go get in the weeds instantaneously. So, how is the company approaching this transformation from like a high level? Are you guys doing a bunch of bottoms-up experimentation in these different business units? Is there like an AI council? Like, where is the transformation being driven from?

It's a great question. I think the model we've taken, which has been kind of sponsored and designed by our founding founders and leadership, is we do have like a centralized AI council. I don't know what we exactly call it, that sits within our IT organization. And their mandate and job is they've staffed up with like cross-functional folks of engineers, technical engineers, our security privacy team, and they are empowered, like they are resourced to empower the functions with whatever AI initiatives they want to deliver. So there's no excuse for lack of like company-level support and staffing to get new vendors on board to build out workflows and drive cross-functional alignment. But I do think a lot of the power has been put back on the functions to bring to the table like what their ideas and programs are. So it's this combination of like, yeah, company-level AI council with empowering functions. I do think that like functions are at different stages and go-to-market is typically ahead, right? Because yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's where a lot of vendor action is happening in addition to customer support and that other type of thing. That's the model we've taken.

Okay. And so where do you, uh, where did you start and where do you advise people to start when there's like hundreds of use cases, all of these vendors. You could start with like upskilling people to use tools. It could be about picking tools. You can be like, oh, just start with the data. Where, how do you think that people should approach the problem?

It's a great question. I mean, it's pretty, maybe before I give you our approach, I just want to acknowledge it's pretty overwhelming, right? Because AI, quote unquote AI is coming from so many different directions. You've got individual folks on the ground pioneering their own workflows and using tools. You've got your existing vendor stack coming to you every week with the new feature, AI feature that they've built.

Yeah.

Every brand is an AI company. You've got new vendors emerging who are saying, we know how to do this point solution really, really well. And then you just have like company leadership saying, hey, this is a priority, like show us your plans. And so yeah, it's coming from every direction. We've been on a journey, I would say, and this will land at like the approach I'd recommend. I think it started with individual contributors all bringing their best ideas largely out of hacked together GPT prompts. Then we spent a chapter looking and working with our existing vendor stack to say who's got what, what are we excited about? And then we ended up in a more kind of organic space, which was like, what are the jobs to be done or the workflows that we feel like have the biggest opportunities? And how do we want to solve those? And I think my advice would be the quicker you can cut through the first two steps and get through that noise and just landing it, like for our business, like what are the biggest blockers and pain points? Where are the bottlenecks in our business? Okay, then look at the landscape to say, what are existing vendors offer? What are new vendors offer? What, what can we pioneer and innovate ourselves? And where do we need to build and actually build out like data engineering resources to build in-house. That's kind of where we've landed, which was start with the jobs to be done and then, you know, kind of like map how you wanna solve it across the many different ways you can solve it. So that's where we've landed at. And so for us, I'll give you some examples like quality prospecting, hyper-personalization. It's what's on everyone's mind. Like we know that that's a gap for us. And so we've started there and then we've gone through the whole exercise of like, Okay, do our existing vendors kind of do that well or do we have to bring someone new on or is there stuff we can build ourselves? And for that one, as a tactical example, we brought on a new vendor to help us with that. But that's kind of been the approach we've taken is we've like, it's like a slide on the left-hand side. It's like what our priority jobs to be done that we think are going to move the business regardless of, you know, who's got what. And then just keeping an eye on like all the innovation coming from every direction, you kind of just make some bets.

Yeah. The advice I find myself giving the most in sort of reflection of where we've gotten to is companies should start with the data. And like, if you don't have really high quality data about your market, about the accounts, about the people, and then contact data to actually get in touch, mobile phone numbers in particular, a lot of other stuff isn't going to work because, you know, this is AI is a pattern recognition and a replication engine. So if the underlying data is not good, then, then you can't understand what a best fit customer looks like or, or forecast properly. So I, I keep telling people, I think, go solve the third-party data problem and then the first-party data problem, which is if your product data isn't— doesn't touch your prospecting data, or your sales reps aren't really filling out CRM fields properly, then again, like, you don't, you don't really have the the basics to then build hyper-personalization because, you know, if only some of the context of the prospect and what's happening across.

Yeah.

Yeah. How can you, how can you do, how can you put that into like an ML model and, and have it make much sense of it? What's your reaction to that? Like this is becoming more of an opinion.

And so I keep stress testing that, but like, I know I would really agree with that. I think there's a lot I take for granted coming from largely a PLG background with both Canva and Asana in that a lot of the first-party stuff that you piece together to me is kind of inherent to the motion and something that we've always invested in. But you're absolutely right, like enrichment is one piece and just like that bread and butter stuff and then piecing together the full 360. I hate the overuse of the word, the customer 360, but really the 360 of all of your marketing interactions or your product interactions and then all your sales interactions as well. That is the fuel to you know, things like personalization, things like prioritization, and really changing and transforming some of the ways that our reps spend their time. So no, absolutely agree. But I think there's a piece of that that I have been in a luxurious position of taking for granted, to be honest.

That, yeah, yeah, it is definitely not, not the, not the norm. Like, most of the conversations I have with folks, this is, this is what I ask, and they're like, oh yeah, you know, I was like, what's the quality of sales reps filling out fields? And is your Salesforce getting worse over time or is it getting better? And they're like, well, like worse because, you know, the things aren't updated and then, you know, we all know. And so the, I generally am like, go just use Momentum. That's what we use for sales.

We should talk about it. Like, I'd love to hear your experience on getting to your partnership with Momentum, but I made it, I've been on a journey. Like we've got a big project called CRM Autofill, which is basically what you said. I stood up at our sales kickoff at the start of the year. And I promised the sales team, I was like, we will never add another picklist to Salesforce. We can do, tell me loss reasons or competitors. We know that we make them mandatory and it's junk information. And before every QBR, we're like manually taking our top 20 deals and filling it out anyway. But we've been on a real journey with that. 'Cause I think I had an aha moment. I'm gonna figure out like September last year, I was like, we should be able to do this better. Um, and then you hear about a few vendors like Momentum and others, and, and we took some vendor calls. And just as like a practical reality, I was like, one, I was like shocked at the price tag of some of these companies that didn't have proven customers yet. Two, I was like, okay, it's about a 3-month procurement process to get this through, cynically. And I've got scar tissue around adopting earlier stage technologies and partnering with early stage vendors because we've got a big business to be running and we're at the scale now where I can't kind of run the risk of folks not sticking around or their product direction changing. And so we went on a bit of what felt like a wild goose chase where it's all these highs and lows of like AI iteration. But I found an ML engineer at Canva and we basically were like, oh, we're going to build It was like a queryable Gong database. We're on Gong recording. It was like, this is a Gong RAG essentially. We could build a structured table about all these things that we never have to ask reps for again. And I think one big learning that I'd love your take on is like so easy to prototype in AI.

Oh man. Oh yeah.

We had this moment of glory, hence my big statement at SKO, which was like, we're never going to make you do that again. This thing was like so fantastic. We could turn around iterations so fast, but then it was like slow. It didn't really get the answers right. And so fast forward to, that was in December and fast forward to now July, like we've finally tuned it and it's finally working. And we now have built this like in-house platform as opposed to going with vendor that we've got like the product team is like building their own insights out of this structured data.

Oh, that's cool.

All gone cold, right? We're gonna be able to go in. Now we're just picking like what fields we actually wanna push back to Salesforce. Do we even have to push them back to Salesforce? Cause we have this, Snowflake table that we can structure at any point. So it's now this amazing moment of glory, but it's been a 9-month journey. And in hindsight, I was like, should I have just gone with a vendor? But it's really hard to figure out, like, just with the pace of things, you know, and how fast things are moving, like, what's the right investments to make? Who do you partner with? And what are the benefits of being able to own this stuff yourself as well?

Yeah, we wrestle with that same thing. And so we're, we're careful with who we, who we bet on. I think about those early stage, because I think I was one of Momentum's first 3 or 5 customers or something. And so it's really, I think about it the same way I think about writing an angel check. Are we directionally aligned on solving this problem in the same way? Because if we have the same philosophy, on how this problem should be solved, then I think you'll iterate in the same direction as I would want to go. Because I've been there where you have an exciting pilot and then you're with a vendor and they go someplace completely different. You're like, oh my God, this is not what I signed up for. And so it's about, are we philosophically aligned? And then do I think these founders can win? Because that's the other piece of it. If the if that founder can't win, then the product won't get better all that fast because they don't have enough traction, they can't hire the engineers, and you're really, you're really trying to buy a tool that you think will be way, way better in 12 months, especially in the AI world. Like, there's a, there's a bunch of implementations. Like, we use Avara as this sales simulator, and the first version of that was pretty janky. It was, it was like really cool. It was a great, it was a really impressive pilot and prototype and a super impressive team. I'm like, this team will figure out how to make it better and better. And sure enough, like 3 or 6 months goes on and it's, it's great. And now I have the advantage of being, I like partnering early. We're a much smaller company than Canva, but I like partnering early because then I have this, this compounding advantage where my team has already adopted this tool. It's a part of our, it's a part of our environment by the time the tool is great versus everybody else just trying to like catch up and figure it out.

Yeah, I feel like you get yourself a competitive advantage where you're in it, you've shaped it a year before everyone else. But I do think we're at the point now where we're working with these vendors to shape these tools, and, and if everything goes well, they're going to be available to everybody. So then hyper-personalization, like, does that become commoditized?

Commoditized, yeah.

What's next after that, you know?

So yeah, Stevie Case was on, was one of my first guests, and, uh, this is probably my most quoted thing from the podcast now, is like, execution is the only moat. Like, it's the only, the only durable moat and advantage you have against your competitors. And because, you know, there was all these Vanta clones that did it cheaper and, and whatever. And so our approach is just like, we're just going to move faster than everybody else, and that's our, that's our advantage. And just assume that everything is going to get commoditized.

Everything is commoditized. How do you keep staying ahead, right? And you keep getting that one— I mean, I think it might be longer. Some of the, some of the legacy customers, like legacy companies here, are really not anywhere near where it sounds like you guys are. So I, I do think sometimes that head start is longer than we think. But yeah, you just got to, you got to keep up. But it's, it gets exhausting because, um, things are changing quickly and this stuff takes time, right?

Um, and, and so how you've— how have you approached build versus buy? Like, what's your, your mental framework for when you want to build something in-house versus use a vendor?

Yeah, I think it depends on, well, One thing I will say when it comes to vendors, I think I've gone on a journey. Totally resonates what you said around picking vendors at this time and place like you would angel checks and really backing the team and founder vision. But I have grown a little averse to point solutions, if I'm honest.

Yeah.

And spending more time with platforms like Relevance AI is a new vendor that we've brought on board. Where you can basically build various workflows and AI-based workflows in one place, given how much time it takes to get a vendor on board, like understand the capabilities, build expertise in your team. Like for me, flexibility of being able to do many things with a platform— Clay's another great example, right? Yeah. Is resonating more than the AI SDR, AI VDR, AI account scoring, you know, a couple examples. So that's one thing I think about. On the build versus buy, I think there are some pieces that are like, we should make some foundational investments. So the auto-updating of a CRM, to me, that has so many different use cases and parts of, like, it's just so impactful to be able to query or understand at an aggregate level everything happening across tens and tens of thousands of sales calls every month. So much outsized benefit to the company, I probably would err on the side of wanting to own and control that because I know it's going to pay dividends and be a long-term new data source that we've honestly never been able to tap. So for me on something like that, that was kind of logic around it feels like we could go for velocity and get someone on board quickly, but do I want to be able to own that and iterate on that and control that? Probably. So for me, it's around like leading to like something about impact and how how much of a foundational AI asset it is, I think I'd lean towards building. But we're also in a different spot where I have a ton of access to really strong engineering and product resources to support me on that, just given the scale of the company. If I was at an earlier stage place, I think I would err on the side of velocity and just bringing these vendors on board and seeing what we can do.

Yeah, that makes sense. I think there's something around you mentioned isn't an AI asset. And there's certain things that you do want to own as a company. Like, I think about this in terms of, you know, the knowledge models that are getting spun up. You know, so we've got an AI customer support bot, which is trained on one model. We've got, we're piloting an AI SDR now. That's a different model. We've got, Guru internally, which is, you know, queries on every like Guru card. You can write Guru cards. Okay. But that's sort of a, that's a different knowledge base. I think the first principle here for me is I'm trying to limit the number of surfaces.

Yes.

And, uh, one of like your aversion to point solutions. I have a very similar one. It's not about a point solution because I'm okay if it's a point solution in the background. What I'm really trying to avoid is new surfaces for the reps to live in because it's just so deleterious to somebody's ability to focus because they're already living in their inbox, their Slack, Salesforce, Salesloft. Then you want them in Gong with their call recordings. It's too much.

Yeah, we should talk about that because we've implemented a bit of a model where we have the go-to-market AI lead and then I've paired him with workflow experts. So it's like, how do you get like high velocity experimentation? But then also I've got like an AE workflow expert, an XDR workflow expert, a CS workflow expert, and they are kind of the gatekeepers of what do we enable the field on, right? Like we have to have a really clear pointed view on this is how you do your job. This is a day in the life, maximum 4 tabs, you know, as a person. So we can talk through that a little bit.

So say more. Yeah, that's super interesting. So then you've got, So this GTM AI lead that's centrally solving like AI workflow problems. And so those are individuals that are paired in the RevOps team that are paired to those functions?

Exactly. So kind of a hybrid of a programs enablement person, but we just, in addition to launching the go-to-market AI lead, we also reconfigured some folks' roles. So we now have workflow experts that are responsible for running programs and playbooks, but also having a really pointed view on how to do the jobs for each role. So we have one for AEs, we have one for XDRs, and one for CS, because I think my rally cry to the team is— Robert, our go-to-market AI expert, will be annoyed at me, but basically my war cry is like velocity. Like, let's test, let's iterate, let's experiment and see what's great. But at the same time, I don't want to have an uncontrolled environment for our field where There is AI experimentation, 12 ways you can do workflows via existing vendors and new vendors. And so how do we have the balance of both rapid experimentation, but also simplicity, clarity, tool and tab consolidation for the field, right? So the job is those workflow experts are kind of the gatekeepers of what do we actually enable the field to do. When we hire a new AE, you've got core jobs of prospecting, deal management, Where do you do those? Do you do those in Pocus, a tool that we have? Do you do that in our new prospecting tool? Where do you do account research? So I've got that gatekeeping relationship where I'm like, we are always auditing where the best workflows and ideas come from, but it has to make sense for a rep or someone on the ground. And we have to be able to distill their jobs to be done into as little surface area as possible.

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So, um, how do you do the experiments then? So, so like you're trying to do experiments and you want velocity, but then where, but you don't want to like cause chaos in front of the reps. So do you have like pilot groups? Do you have like innovation labs? Yeah. Say more.

Yeah. Like a, it's not really formalized yet. We're still early on this. So it's not as if I have, uh, like a field advisory board or anything, but for every workflow we roll out, we're testing it with a handful of reps, 2, 3, 4, getting their feedback and then seeing what works before we go and re-enable everybody on something or we go and update our new hire onboarding to say, here's what we do and how we do it.

Okay. And so are you, what are you doing to consolidate surfaces? Like this is a thing that I'm very interested in.

I think you have to be really pointed on even if 3 of your existing tools say they can do the same thing, like AI, like account research. I'll give you an example.

Yeah.

We believe like you should only really be doing it here. And why? It's because we've invested in this tool and set up all the right connections into Salesloft so you can do your research to prospecting in that place. It doesn't exist elsewhere, or we don't believe that that other tool does it as well. We've really invested to make sure that this tool where you're doing account research has all the access to our own enablement material, PMM material, so that it's tailoring that research based on our fit. And your GPT, maybe you've got a great one, but probably doesn't have all that. So I think it's just being really prescriptive, to be honest.

Yeah.

Do it here, don't do it there, even though there's shiny stuff everywhere, while not stifling you know, people experimenting and finding things that we certainly haven't found as well.

Yeah, that's the tricky thing. I'm erring on the side of prescriptive. It's like, I don't really want the reps playing around in a bunch of different tools and figuring out their own way. Like, it's— I think it's a distraction unless they are really spending the time to go deep and learn things from first principles and understand the prompt engineering and the workflow management, they're just sort of going to bump around.

It's such a fine balance because I feel like there are the top 10% of reps who are super creative and technically fine. Great ideas. That have great ideas as well. And so you need to look out for those folks and make sure they're surfacing all their great innovations. But for the majority of reps, I understand and agree.

Yeah. And so how are you balancing iterative improvements, things that are like, oh, this is obvious and simple, like, let's go do that with the big bets with a ton of payoff?

Well, one framework I have is like anything that touches a customer or prospect has to be done highly iterative with a very high quality bar. Anything that's behind the scenes, internal only, a Slack alert for deals that are stalled or meetings completed so their manager has visibility, we can just launch, ship, and figure it out as we go. Lower fidelity is totally fine. So that's one framework I have. I don't know. I feel like on the maturity journey, if we were at the point of everyone doing personal experimentation and productivity hacks, most of the use cases we're at are still at the point of just augmenting human workflows, making someone faster, more efficient, having a better customer experience or prospect experience, like higher quality. We're not really at the point where like we're actually transforming roles though, I think. And so like I would love to make some big bets there. I just, I personally don't feel like I'm ready or I've seen enough of those where I'm ready to jump in yet, but we're doing a lot in that middle layer.

Yeah. And so was that an intentional choice to say, we're going to go, we're going to go make reps more efficient? Like that's the thing. Yeah.

I think, I mean, that was the obvious piece that came up first, which was, oh my God, like sales admin and so much time clicking around. Like a lot of the initial excitement was like, okay, we can make this easier and better. I think I've changed my thinking though, as we've dug into these tools. It's not just about time savings, but it's about like better experiences, like better, higher quality experiences in everything that we do. So it's not just sending, you know, an okay email with like 7 less clicks because you haven't had to click around to, you know, in ZoomInfo to contact source and then add that to a sequence. Now I'm actually like, oh, like you can do it in 7 less clicks and actually write an email that you like have insight into your customer and their company and the person like in a way you never have before. So for me, it's moved from, yeah, it started off just organically as efficiency and now I think it's really like delight, effectiveness, and like quality experiences that you can not only differentiate because you've got a much more efficient sales team who's like X more productive than your competitor, but like one that's delivering much better and like kind of interactions and human interactions.

Yeah. Yeah. Makes, makes a lot of sense. Um, I want to— we've been bouncing all over.

Uh, okay.

I'm going to ask one more tool around, or one more question around this, like thinking strategically about it, and then we'll get into use case prioritization. So you mentioned that, that you mentioned the importance of leaders being on the tools and like really being in there. First, why is that like important for you? And at what level of the hierarchy are you saying, like from CRO to frontline manager, everybody's got to be hands-on? And so like, why first off? And then what are the things that you're learning there?

Yeah. Well, I think the first thing I'll say is like, I think a lot of the changes that AI can deliver, I mean, we're transforming workflows at this stage. And so unless you're like really understanding what that workflow looks like, like for a lot of us, it's been a long time since we've actually had to go and source a contact, add it, like go through those 7 clicks that we talked about. So unless you're kind of like really alive to what that reality looks like today, I don't know whether you can have your own perspective on where the efficiencies are to be gained. And so for me, it's about closeness to the workflows and the reality of though, that's really important. Part of it's also like, yeah, again, folks on the ground have day jobs and they have jobs to be done and keep the lights on. Like how much time do they have to experiment? Like the more senior you get, like the more time we have to kind of think expansively with all the context of the broader business to be able to do that. And so where does it cap out?

I don't know.

I don't know whether I'd expect a CRO like yourself. I mean, you're unique, but at a larger company, should they be on demos and really testing and being part of these pilot groups? I'm not sure, but I think that definitely frontline managers and above have to be really hands-on understanding the pain points in the current workflow so that they can have a point of perspective on not only where to focus, but what the biggest gains are to be had.

Yeah. Yeah. I've been pretty clear with my team that I expect everybody to build capability here because they need to be able to make iterative improvements to their own, to their own day-to-day. It's like we're, we're in a performance review cycle right now. I'm like, if anybody's hand typing their whole performance reviews, I'm going to be really mad.

Yeah, for sure. That's a really obvious one.

Yeah. As opposed to, you know, you should just use Whisper Flow or Super Whisper to dictate a bunch of stuff and you just dump in all of your old one-on-one notes with that individual and ask the model to give you themes or whatever. And I think that the manager has to be conversant enough in AI that they can make themselves more efficient. We're going to do a bunch centrally, but a bunch of the central efforts are actually to make the reps more efficient. But I think, but I'm looking to the managers to try to find opportunities to make themselves more efficient, and then we'll codify those and, and roll them out. Yeah, the— my leaders gave it some name, recipe books. They're like building these recipe books of stuff, um, that, that they're learning. So I agree, I think, I think people just have to be hands-on.

Yeah, I don't know where this— like, you know, I think we at large organizations, you have a lot of middle managers who are like I don't know, you've got a great framing on this, but professional people managers. And I think even the example you gave, like the ability for us to be effective people leaders in a world where we have so much access to data and you can know what's going on in the ground. Like, do you need people who are just translation layers of, you know, from the work on the ground up all the layers? I think that's gonna fundamentally change even with just like how we show up at work. Do day to day. And so I might be controversial, I think that's going away. And so if you're not a leader who— yeah, if you're a leader who kind of sits in those middle layers and is just about organizing the work, like, AI can organize the work for you already.

Yeah.

What— where do you—

is your job to take information from the team down here, repackage it, and give it to a team up here?

Yeah, repackage, synthesize, relay up. Like, no, you know, even the most basic user of ChatGPT can do that already. So Yeah, that's a hot take, but I think I'm curious to see how quickly it'll evolve.

Yeah, totally agree. Yeah. And we're trying to do a bunch of this. Like we just built a, we just built new workflows for our MBR so that it takes the information that people are using for their written weekly updates and repackages that, right? Repackages it as a monthly update. And yeah, you're going to have to go in and and the leader will have to go in and groom. But if the model can give you a pretty good starting place, then that's awesome. Like, even for the podcast, like, I have a very, very lengthy prompt, and I'll take the transcript and put it into my Claude project, and it just runs the same project instructions, and it gives me, like, a version of my newsletter that's 80% there. Yeah. You know, like it would, it would normally have taken me 3, 4 hours to write, you know, a lengthy article about every single podcast. And now it's 25 minutes for me to just like, I'll, I'll get the output, I'll, I'll edit it as an artifact and be like, no, like my notes, this was a more interesting point. And so I'll just copy paste from my notes. Like, no, swap out the third point for this and here are my notes and like take it from the transcript, fix this. So you messed up Jessica's intro and then I'll do like a hand edit in Substack. And so that's a 25-minute workflow now that used to be when I first started the podcast, I tried to do it by hand and it was like 3 hours.

Yeah.

And, and I wanted to write, I wanted to write a couple by hand so that I could feed it to the model and be like, this is what I want the newsletter to look like. You know, just like a multi-shot prompt. And I think managers have to be able to do stuff like that.

And I think they should be excited about that too, because it's like, it feels so high leverage. It's like, oh yeah, this performance team with like infinite resources, like it's kind of a very addicting feeling. So I hope people are excited about it.

Yeah, but going back to your point, I think where folks get stuck is, uh, LinkedIn makes everything seem like magic, and everybody says that, like, in their demo or their marketing copy, it's like, oh, just put in your thing and then it's like miraculously awesome. And that's not really the case. Like, it takes a bunch of— you try it, look at the output, it's sort of wrong, you go fix your prompt, you try it again. You run the table a third time if it's like clay and you just have to go back and forth and back and forth. And you know, the thing that, the thing that takes you an hour, it's now you're 3 hours into trying to build that workflow, which feels frustrating. But then, you know, now the thing that took you an hour before might only take you 10 minutes.

Yes.

You have to have the patience. You have to have the patience to, and the interest to, to tinker. Like I love tinkering, so it's, it's fun.

And I, yeah, I have some envy though for like, uh, companies smaller and more nimble than Canva, just the scale that we're at. I spend time with earlier stage companies and we'll be talking about ideas and then the things that we're actively working on and hope to launch in months. And then you meet again in a week with them and they're like, yeah, we just built it. Yeah, we've got processes and stuff we've got to adhere to as well. But yeah, some of this stuff like we're working with, even with Clay, like bread and butter is on enrichment. But there are some enrichment things that we want to achieve. That we have the luxury of— they, they are such great partners to us. We have an amazing CSM, folks on the product team, but we're working through things over months to tune them and get them to exactly what we're trying to achieve. So this with vendors and partners, but it's not— it, you know, the very simple use cases, again, super easy to prototype, like really hard to get it to, to do what you, you need for the business.

Yeah. Um, so I want to talk a little bit about use case prioritization. We've talked a little bit about— you started to attack the areas of efficiency, trying to make people more productive. How did you think— how rigorous was the process of you identifying, okay, like, these are the places where we're gonna go? Is it like a big meeting, you take all the ideas, did you spreadsheet them? Like, how did you decide on what gets what gets prioritized on the roadmap?

More organic for us. I think we all have really, as like business leadership, have like really good intuition about, again, the framing is like the bottlenecks in the business, right? So I think we had a really good sense of those were the places. The other thing we added on were like, what are the more transformative bets that we want to make where, you know, solutions may not be proved out, but tapping more into the curiosity of, in addition to what's challenging us today, like what could the future look like? So that was the second way. The really interesting piece though, and again, this comes back to why I feel so strongly about being a leader who's in the detail and leads from the front, being close to the workflows, like I've spent a lot of time and my team spent a lot of time like interviewing reps, looking through Salesforce, looking through detailed activity feeds in Salesforce, to get a real sense of like what's going on on the ground in a way that like the Gongs of the world don't even, aren't even able to show you, right? Like discovering like what are, what's the content of the emails we're sending out? What's the, what are the case studies that we attach to our prospecting sequences? What's actually happening on the ground? And I would say we had a lot of aha moments from that like very laborious detailed process of just sitting down, shadowing, looking through activity feeds that were also another source of ideas. So for us, I would say it was more of an organic process, but they were the 3 things that I think have really helped us hone in on what, like, where are the 5 or 6 use cases that we're currently investing in.

Yeah, I could not agree more strongly about the ride-along and like being in the details. My, my sales leaders are all like doing the job actively with the reps. Like my director of BDR will sit down multiple days a week and make calls like executing the exact job that the reps are doing because you learn so much or sitting next to a rep and watching them work. It's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, why'd you go over here? Oh, like I wanted to figure out this and that. I'd be like, wow. Like you'd be so surprised by how far people veer from the playbook. And a friend of mine, Tess Whitaker, who's the VP of RevOps at, strategy at ZoomInfo, she did a day where she was a BDR and like made dials with her team. Actually, my, my HRBP and my recruiter are both doing that with, uh, just to like learn more about the day-to-day of the, of the job so that they could be more effective at what they're doing. And I loved it. And, and they'll actually be both great at it, which will be fun.

Yeah, I know. Well, I'm going to tell my HRBP and, uh, and recruiter to, to do the same. Yeah, that's a great idea.

Yeah, it's, it's, but the, the macro point is you have to be close to the details to, to make good decisions or else, you know, the, the funny thing is when you see, or when you're in organizations where a decision maker is like, oh, we're gonna change this workflow, or we're gonna change the, the comp plan in these ways, or we're gonna change our positioning. And you're like, well, you couldn't have been— you cannot have spent any time with a rep or a customer in a long time to make that decision. It is such an important thing.

And especially for ops leaders, like, that's where I have my greatest self-consciousness, which is like, if I'm not doing that, like, I can't show up in a credible way saying, I have this love and I'm here to make you successful. So, yeah.

Yeah. So, let's switch gears and talk change management a bit. So, uh, this is a big change for people, and I think especially frontline reps, there's a lot of worry that their jobs are going to be taken by AI. Um, there's, you know, people of all seniority levels that are— that have sort of these concerns. How are you approaching change management so that the teams feel excited about AI not overwhelmed, not scared that it's taking their jobs? What's been the approach there?

I think, again, I think I'm in a luxurious position in that my day to day, just as a company culture, we don't have a ton of that resistance. So that feels lucky because I don't think that is the norm. Look, I think giving people those moments of delight like that you talked about in terms of even the newsletter prep of like how high leverage it feels to almost be like, I think about our poor ops analysts who are otherwise enriching and working sales, like support tickets, like the moment where we've trained them on Clay and they can see the power of it. Like the actual emotional feeling for them is like, oh my God, like this saves me X hours. Or like it would have taken me days to do this. And I think you really quickly get that buy-in when you find the ways to have folks on the tools and seeing that, and they feel this moment not of threat. It's easier to feel like it's a threat when you don't know how it works or how it can supercharge you. When you turn that feeling of threat into a feeling of leverage, then I think for most of the folks, right folks, it's like excitement around, wow, I can operate at the top of my pay grade. I can do the things that I already knew felt like very automatic, rote tasks. And so I think that's been the biggest piece that I've seen. That gets not only just buy-in, but like excitement and people raising their hands to say, can I be involved in this? How do I carve out more of my day to spend time on this? It's like moments of delight and that feeling of like incredible leverage that I think you and I at least know well. So that's one thing. And I think the second thing is like bringing people on the journey. Like our BDR leader is the subject matter expert with all of the outbound prospecting work we're doing. And so this is a career moment for them all as well around how they can reshape and transform the roles that we're doing. And that stuff is never going away. The human element of selling and supporting customers is never going away. And so it's like, how do we all get 100 times not only more efficient, but like effective at bringing that value to customers? So I'd say that. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. We're both in advantageous positions when, you know, a company is growing and you can attract great talent, I don't find we have any of this resistance because we've largely deployed stuff that just makes the team's lives better. Like if you're not writing in your own CRM and you have better quality leads and contacts to call and, you know, then it's easy to get buy-in. I think there's— we were talking a lot about automation in the in the customer onboarding journey, and I've, I've had to have the conversation with them. It's like, look, I want to automate all of the lowest value parts of your job, and because I've got a laundry list of things that I would rather have you doing. And I— and it was when I explained that part of it, and it's like, look, like, you guys can't spend any time teaching a customer how to use the tool or planning their marketing launch. Like, we're gonna— because we make websites and apps for, for restaurant owners. It's like, you, you know, we don't spend any time planning how they're going to announce this to their guests, but I want you doing that. And so I think that was the thing that was helpful for, for that team that was a little more skittish about it.

Yeah.

Um, it's, you know, like, I want to, to, I want people's level of abstraction to, to be higher. And I hopefully, I think we're seeing this, you're definitely seeing this in software engineering.

Yeah.

You know, they're the, the lowest levels of software engineering are definitely like getting abstracted away. They are diminishing in importance and volume, but then, you know, your senior engineer now sort of acts like a principal engineer or an architect. And how do you teach skills to bridge that gap is an open question that I don't have an answer to. But I think there is a path where everybody could be doing something that's, like, more impactful than what they're doing today. BDR is doing lead research. Come on. It's not fun.

Yeah. What are you doing? You're reading and then you're writing. Like, what about thinking, how do we get BDR? Like, this is, this would be my pitch is like, how do we get you to be better experts in companies, their industries, like, like understanding trends, making personal connections and not doing the stuff that, you know, they, they, they know and feel they don't enjoy that. It doesn't feel high value add for themselves. And doesn't feel high value for prospects as well.

Yeah. So last question on this topic of prioritization. How are you personally prioritizing your time? Because you can get pulled in so many directions right now. Like there's so many Twitter threads and articles and stuff that I want to read and demos I want to take. And so how are you juggling it all today?

Oh, I love that question. I'd be curious how you're doing it as well. But I, I want to spend more time in this space. I want to spend more time understanding what others are doing, which is why I'm so excited for this conversation. I want to spend more time with vendors and that, like some of the stuff we were talking about earlier, I want to spend more time on the tools, shadowing, building, and iterating. And so for me, it's like, even as an ops leader, I'm trying to rethink how I have spent my time over the last 5 to 10 years too. Like, what are the keep the lights on stuff that don't feel high leverage in this moment right now? How do I get more leverage to my team and carve that down? So, you know, we go through the motions, we have our regular weekly, monthly, quarterly cadence. How do we get in a better spot that I start to diminish that stuff? So you free up, I don't know, you know, what used to take you 5 days, and that's where a lot of the productivity stuff comes in as well, takes you only 3 days. So you can carve out the time where, you know, half your time is spending leaning into this because I do think it's a competitive advantage. But it's hard because, you know, transformation hasn't happened such that we don't need to. I mean, there's been a lot of gains made in the last 5 years, but we still need to run a forecast and we still need to, to have all those accountability and visibility conversations. So it's hard, but I'm actively working on it. And my goal is like, how do I free up 2 days a week of my own time to spend on this? But that's 2 days a week that I wasn't spending on this previously. So yeah, how are you doing it?

I'm trying to get leverage with AI, honestly. It seems like a forced answer in this context, but I think, yeah, the only way to, to get that space is to try to get the low value stuff off your, off your agenda.

Yeah.

And so, um, we've got a really good team. That's, that's the other thing that helps a lot.

Yeah.

I have people on my team that, uh, are massively capable and I'm continuing to push them to take more and more and more. And we want to build more workflows that are automated and whether it's with AI or not, but just, just give repeatability. Because that's such a, that delivers so much scale. Honestly, like I just like replaced my doom scrolling time with Twitter AI time. Like I think, I think if I, I was never a huge social media person, but I think if you look at my Twitter utilization, it probably went from like an hour a week, 3 years ago or 4 years ago to like an hour a day every day. Like when I'm just sitting on the couch with my wife, like if we're watching a show, I'm like always like on my Twitter.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, now it's AI Twitter and I'm like lost in, like, I'll be like lost in these threads and I'll see cool things and. My wife's like, you're not even watching this show, are you? I'm like, got an earphone in and watching somebody do cool MCP stuff that I haven't seen before. And I think you just gotta like fit it in a little bit. There's some good podcasts out there on it. I'm having a lot of conversations.

I think going like, I love that. And I think I'm having, I'm finding a lot of great ideas and learnings through finding out like the like-minded peers who are leading and innovating. And sometimes you stumble across each other because you're working with the same vendor or sometimes it's through the LinkedIn feed or whatever, but such high quality conversation similar to this around it's not just the amazing demo screen grab that you see on LinkedIn, but like, okay, when you actually get into it, how did you do it? What are you seeing? That's informed a lot of how we've approached it as well.

Yeah. And you're speaking at Clay Sculpt in September.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. In San Francisco.

Good plug. People should come see you talk and I'm going to try to come to some of that because it'll be a whole room full of interesting folks to talk to.

Exactly.

Okay. Let's move to rapid fire because we're about to run out of time here. More general questions. So what do you think separates a great GTM ops strategy leader from just like a good one?

Oh, I love this question. I have this framework of functional versus business leadership. Functional leadership, you've done the job X half dozen times in 6 different contexts. You're deep on the craft itself. Those leaders are amazing. Absolutely need them. What you also need though is business leaders, not necessarily as the pattern recognition doesn't need to be quite as strong in the craft itself on the things like, in my world, enrichment, ROI, but understand the broader business context and can solve problems from first principles. I'm a business leader, I would say, kind of my training and my approach to how I show up in the work world. And I augment myself with functional experts. But I think that's like, and you can be different people at different times for different styles of leaders. But to me, I think that business leaders, right, who are able to build functional leaders around them can really take a different approach to ops and strategy world, which can otherwise be very much just like running the ship and kind of batting away the conflicts and disputes that happen on the sales floor.

Yeah. I think that's very I think you could say that about a lot of jobs. You know, that like if you're a first principles problem solver, uh, you have a lot of room to run.

Yeah.

What's the hardest lesson you've had to learn in your career?

I think, I mean, this is a blessing and curse out of being in really fast-growing organizations, but when things are going well, the job changes every 6 months. And I think you're honest with yourself every 6 months around, one, do you have what it takes to, you know, be in this next stage of company? Hopefully the answer is yes, but sometimes the answer might be maybe or no. And two, are you ready to sign up for like basically another sprint and another run in it? Then what may on the outside look like the same company, but it's actually at a really different scale. And I think, yeah, being at Asana at that $60 to $600 million journey and now on this rocket ship that is Canva, like that's something that I'm really, I think about, and I think it took me a while to learn that. But I think it's something I encourage all my teams to think about as well. It's both like, do you have what it takes and do you want to do it?

Yeah, the do you want to do it is a big piece of it because there's no resting in a high growth environment.

Yeah.

Like, oh great, you did your job and the company's winning. Now the next thing that you're tasked to do, you've never done before. You're like sort of out of your depth.

Yeah.

And so you have to keep operating with that, like, pace and intensity.

Yeah. I think you owe it to yourself and the company as well. Hopefully pays off by things keep, keep going well.

Yeah. Okay. Last question. What's the best thing you've read in the last 12 months?

Oh, honestly, tying back to, tying back to a lot of what we've talked about, it's kind of a LinkedIn Twitter feed. That's where I'm getting all the latest ideas, if I'm honest. There are no books being written on this stuff yet. And so it's the LinkedIn Twitter feed from both vendors and other folks like you and I who are discovering and wanting to share what they're working on. That's been, to your point on the scrolling time, kind of where I spend time. Yeah.

Who are the best AI follows? Who are the ones you go back to the most? I get asked this all the time, so I'm putting together a list.

Wait, it's weird because it's actually sometimes vendors. Like, I, I don't, I don't often say that, but like, if you look at the stuff that Clay puts out, the Momentums, the Tensions of the world, Cursor, that's right. Like, it's, it's kind of cool what people are showcasing. Um, I'm always a little skeptical because, you know, they are, they are folks with products as well, but like, it's, um, they're able to showcase, I think, innovation in a way that maybe other people are not not as comfortable showing right now. Like, would I show all the stuff that we're doing, our clay tables? Maybe not. Um, able to do it in a more anonymized way. So, um, yeah, I think with the pace of iteration, I, I rely a lot on, on some of those, um, accounts and the amazing, you know, 15-second screen recordings that they're sharing out. Get— maybe it's not exactly what we would build, but actually get the creative juices going and start to help you like calibrate on what's like— what are the boundaries of what's possible. Yeah, exactly.

It's funny because we were both nominated for that Winning by Design award. I was like, Clay should just win all of these. Like, I don't know, like, I don't know why anybody else is nominated. Like, they're doing way cooler stuff than I'm doing. They're on another level.

Yeah. And then you partner with them. Like, we've got, you know, then you partner with them and then you together find like even more exciting things to build. And I think that's just the phase that we're in as well. They're bringing ideas and then they're also co-shaping with like the Canvas and the owners of the world, like what's next?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, this was awesome. I knew I was excited for this one, Jessica, and it definitely like lived up to the— lived up to my internal hype. So I appreciate you coming on and sharing so much. This is— I think people are really going to like it.

Yeah. I hope we get to catch up in person as well.

Yeah. And people should come see you at Sculpt in September, whatever it is, and San Francisco. We'll plug Clay, the Clay conference for him.

Yeah, we'll see everyone there. Thanks for having me, Kyle Norton. Fantastic.

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