#265 Jesse Zhang: Decagon's CEO on Maths Olympiads, No Small Talk & Transforming Airlines, Banks, Large Corporates

Hi, I'm Vitt at the founder and host of this podcast, The High Flyers. Everyone, I'm Jesse. I'm one of the co-founders in the CEO here at Dacoguy. Jesse, I am so excited to do this and I must say, everyone in my research said Jesse doesn't like small talk. So hopefully I ask you some good questions and we get past this whole talk. I didn't know I had that reputation actually, I guess, I guess it makes sense. Hey friends, welcome back or welcome to The High Flyers Podcast, where we do reimagine a high flyer, showcase the brightest and most relatable role models and companies and their journey from sunrise to today. As one of the premier products in our curiosity center, line up, providing on-demand intelligence to help you be one percent better every single day. I'm your host, Vitt at Aguilow, and let's have some fun. Our listeners have called this podcast a meticulously researched biography unveiling the extraordinary lives and decisions of the most remarkable individuals and companies from around the world. We hope you're enjoying our catalog of 200+ episodes, since we launched in 2020, with many of our guests appearing in rare public interviews. It's now time to explore your curiosity. Please enjoy. Let's set the scene with some fun facts to get us going, where we born and where do you live now. I was born in Boulder, Colorado. Parents went to see you, Boulder for grad school. Then I now live in San Francisco. Hmm. I'm Kins on back that story and work what was your first job and what do you do now? First job, senior year of high school, I intern at Intel in Colorado. So that was the first job who's software engineering. Learned the Pearl programming language, so that was interesting. Now I'm a CEO here at DekuGon, so not too much engineering these days. Yeah, obviously we're a software company. Do you want to just for the small group of people that might not have had a decade on? Do you want to just give them a summary on the company? Yeah, of course. Easiest way to think about DekuGon is we're an AI customer service agent. So it's a conversational agent that can you have phone calls with people or chat with people that almost serves as a front door for the brand. So we often sit in front of call centers or we can take inbound calls or make outbound calls. It's kind of just a wafe for consumers to interface with your brand. We work primarily with the large top end of the market. So like big airlines, banks, telcos, retail, healthcare, tech companies, and so that's where we've found the best fit. And the reason people work with us is the number one great way to deploy AI for operational efficiency and so that you can massively improve your bottom line. And two, it just really elevates the customer experience. That's what we do. And we're about 500 people total now. We started the company two and a half years ago. We've raised now about 500 million. So the business is growing really. Yeah, again, another topic that I'm super keen to unpack. And Jesse, as you know, the purpose of this show is to re-imagine the concept of a high fly. To go beyond just people's job titles and recognize them for their impact. Is there anyone you know who you feel hasn't got the recognition they deserve? I mean, there's a lot of impressive folks here. Recently, I was talking to the founders of etched. They're building a computer chip. So they just launched. So haven't done as much press before. But yeah, I think they could be good. Founders of etched, did you say? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Sounds like an interesting one. Let's run back to clock and go to your Sunrise, as I call it. Each other, and I'm conscious. This is an interesting one because you've not really talked about Jesse, the human, which is why I was really keen to have you on. I feel people know decking on really well. But they might not know Jesse, the human being as well. So let's see how far we can get into that story. You mentioned Colorado, and you mentioned your parents. Tell me about that. Tell me about the upbringing and the influence of family. Yeah, I mean, where do I start? So most of the Chinese Americans, my generation, have, I think, their parents came over, post-cultural revolution for grad school. That's when things first opened up. So a lot of the academics came over to do their PhDs and master's programs. And so my parents came over and they found their way to see Boulder. So usually you kind of get matched with a university to not have to pay for school. And then you kind of go out scholarship. And so they ended up in Boulder. Which I'm very thankful for because Boulder is a great place to grow up. It's so beautiful there. Everyone's very active. It's a nice college town as well. It's not as like academic-minded as the Bay Area or New York or Texas or Massachusetts. But it's, yeah, it was a great environment. So grew up there. I think started getting more into like math, things like that, just through math contests, which was not really the norm in Boulder. But kind of found a community of folks. And I think that was very influential in my life. So a couple of months ago, we met with Viral for all the people who had done math and piads in the past who are now a startup founders. And obviously there's a big correlation there. It teaches you. I mean, not just the technical skills. I mean, that's obvious. But it's also just problem solving. And then also just really performing in a competitive, super high-pressure environment over a long period of time. Right? You're just grinding and studying and just like slowly improving over years and you sacrifice all their stuff. And that translates to quite well. And as it turns out, to a founding company. Because you don't really shy away from competition. You embrace sort of a lot of the grindy aspects. And it just kind of feels normal. Yeah, that's kind of how my upbringing influenced where I am now. And after high school, went to Harvard for college. So you can peer science. And then after that came out to the day. And my research, one of the things that came up is, I think one of the comments you said in one of your other interviews is like, your parents raised you in a fairly intense way for a period in your life. So apparently you acquired a, like, I think the words you used was lazy kid from the age of three to 15, I believe. And then I think you were doing piano like four hours a day. And you and your sister, like, your parents really wanted you to achieve your potential. Can you unpack some of those reflections? I would say it's like most kids are lazy. Yeah, there are exceptions. And I know some of them. I don't know. Maybe they just got lucky genetically or whatever. Most kids would just gravitate towards like, you know, playing games or whatever. So I think in hindsight, also, yeah, quite appreciative of my parents. Like when I say intensity, it was just like, everything was geared towards like improving for the future. You know, so we have TV in the house. They're like zero games. And it's just, yeah, we're just like working. And when you're a kid, you actually kind of get used to that. It just just starts feeling like the norm. But when I was really young, this like, the age is like five to eight. Like piano was kind of the focus because my parents decided that for whatever reason, which was a, I don't know why they decided that. It doesn't seem like a super good decision. But they kind of teach us you work ethic, I guess. So it was many hours of piano a day, like probably to be on average. And then up to like five, six for competitions. And then they decided to pivot into math. And yeah, I think I'm naturally fairly talented in math. Like way more talented in math than piano. And so that started accelerating. And yeah, it's just when you're in this situations, there's kind of like a intensity to it. Because you're not doing it necessarily for fun at that time. You're doing it for achieving results so that you can get to the next level. Or like their mind like eventually go to good college or whatever. So that's that was kind of the initial start. But eventually as you get older, like 13, 14, I think there was like a big shift. Because you kind of become sentient as a kid. And if you're good at something, you'll naturally gravitate towards it. And then at that point, it kind of switched more towards like be just doing stuff because I wanted to. So now that was kind of the progression. But I think in hindsight, we're kind of thankful for that. Because yeah, it kind of breeds a lot of this, these qualities into your DNA of being able to handle a ton of pressure, being able to keep up like a very high intensity for a long time, be able to like embrace and like not shy away from just like really intense competition. And high goals that are hard to achieve. And I think a lot of this generation, so my generation of immigrants are like, be more specific to Chinese Americans. I think it's like a very different generation. It's kind of like a different species of person because you have to have gone through this. And then I think that's why people are doing pretty well in startups or whatever. The Chinese American ones really interesting. And I was talking to some of your investors about this because some of them have immigrant backgrounds themselves. And I mean, I've got that. I'm Indian Australian, grew up in Australia. And when I think of my childhood, I didn't quite like I was just another kid. I didn't really appreciate my Indian heritage at all. I mean, you've got Ashwin as you co-found. I was also got Indian heritage. And then it was now I go. It's actually a superpower because like the reputation Indian Americans or Indian Chinese Americans have is so strong because they're known to be intellectually really good and and tend to have a really good impact. Do you reflect on that? Like even your parents can you talk a bit about your parents like what they did for work and how that shaped you? Yeah, I would say to be honest, I don't think about it that much. Like there's some correlation, but like you know, at Dechagon we have a very diverse team. So it's not so much like that in particular. But yeah, just for me on a personal level, I think it's less about the cultural background. It's more about like what was the environment that you grew up in? And I think a lot of immigrants the parents came in and they're just like like so like almost like nervous. Like hey, there's like strong so tight because you know, they're used to like a very like a much tougher life. And it's just like okay man, like everything has to be perfect. Like everything has to be like done well. And in hindsight, I don't know, you could have chilled a little bit. But yeah, I think that's that's really the reflection. So my mom has done aerospace research, her all career at CU Boulder. So she just retired. And then my dad did like SAP implementations. So you know SAP is right. Yeah, so it's just like big companies have to adopt SAP is a whole process pre-technical. He does like IT work there. Yeah, interesting. One of the other comments I had in your interview, I listened to many of your interviews for this work research, Jesse and you talked about you. dad telling you about Huawei's culture. Again, was that because of his own Chinese heritage where he would tell you about Chinese culture and Chinese heritage? 'Cause I found that it was interesting and I think he said one of the interviews that shaped some of the values in the company and I think one of the quotes on the Decacon wall in some of the offices perhaps was influenced by Huawei, is that true? - Yeah, I mean, I think that has less to do with culture is just, he just reads the news and he's like, "Oh, this is cool." - Yeah, a lot of the companies in China are super intense though. So like Huawei is one of those and basically the story is in their main headquarters in bright red letters on the wall. They have a quote that is in Chinese but it roughly goes along the lines of, there's no challenge that can't be overcome and there's no enemy that can't be defeated. And so we have that written on our wall in English. But yeah, it's just like, the competition over there is even more brutal. I obviously understand it less 'cause I'm American but there's just so many people and for every single and the market's also so big. So every single company has insane competition and as a result through that brutal competition, the people that rise up are pretty intense companies. - And tell me if I met you just last fall to a bit. Tell me at age 18, so you've just finished high school you're thinking about college. If I met you at that age, what would I have as you do with your life? - Probably quant finance or something. Like become like a trader 'cause a lot of the math contest kids and the older ones either go into academia or trading. I don't think academia was like ever, am I calling? So trading probably would be and I worked at a bunch of trading firms in college just as internships and I quite enjoyed them. So I was HRT, Citadel and they were very fun experiences. So that would probably be the default. But as I said before, I think at the time I was seeing a lot of the older friends I had sort of start exploring, starting their own company and it seemed very exciting. Obviously didn't know how hard it was at the time but that's what really inspired me to just go do it because it just seemed like a much more fun way to spend your early career. - On the mats or limp yards, I realized we haven't talked about that and that's been intentional 'cause I feel like in all the interviews you've done, they try and connect that to their good on success and I feel that's limiting the success 'cause that's probably only one part and maybe this confirmation buy, I said play there as well. But how do you reflect on the limp yards and the mats competitions? I almost feel how do you reflect on it if you didn't have that experience? Do you think your experience building companies would have turned out differently? - Yeah, of course. I mean, it's hard to say what the counterfactual is. I think for me, it's just become a big part of how I grew up and sort of the way I approach things. And I do think it's helpful, right? Like I said, I think it's a couple of things. I mean, it's very good for teaching you technical skills which is obviously important. It's also really good for problem solving. Even the non-technical problems we have, how do you design the org? How do you scale a go-to-market motion? Same problem solving principles apply. It's just kind of this big amorphous problem when you have to break it down and think about things very logically, systematically. And then third, which is also underrated is just the community because it turns out this is a very strong group of smart ambitious people and as we've all grown up, people are also doing great things and there's a lot of learning and inspiration that we can get from other people. So a lot of my friends from those days have also started big companies and some of them have done it before us and we get to learn from that and see what was work well from before and then a lot of them have been able to recruit to DecuLan as well. So it's been a huge help for us. Obviously it's not the only way by far to start a company. So there's many, many successful founders that have done it through other means but that's what works for us. And we kind of gravitate towards other people that have that background. Yeah, I think you referenced that photo that went viral and X with you and Scott from cognition and nothing else and there's a famous photo that I think a lot of folks have really resonated with, right? And that probably helps with which is brand building and getting resonance with those, with that community. - Yeah, I mean, it's actually kind of improbable how many people from that world are starting companies and have had some success. So yeah, it's awesome group. - Yeah, well, I think some of the VCs now are running retreats just for folks from that group 'cause they've seen the success that you've had. It's got us out of the business. - Yeah, I think the alpha is gone from that group. So now they're targeted like crazy. - So tell me, so you've had this early childhood. I think you said you went to Harvard, found a grad, is that right? - Yes, Harvard. - Yes, you moved to Boston. Tell me about that 'cause I think you studied computer science but then you finished your studies in three years. You finished a year, yeah, is that right? - Yeah, that's right. So I don't remember why you're at May 16 or something. I'm gonna first start it and yeah, it was, it was honestly a good time. I mean, the biggest takeaway I had from school was just the community that you get to create since a lot of those friendships last forever and very helpful for, as we're building tech again. Also met my wife there. And so we, she was your older, so we graduated at the same time. My sister was there when I was there as well. So, honestly, it was like very, very good memories. I will say that school won't necessarily teach you the exact applicable things that you'll need later on, right? Like so, I would say computer science at a lot of the, high top institutions is fairly theoretical. Like you're learning to be a computer scientist and a little bit less of like a straight up engineer. And a lot of those engineering skills are what matter more in your life afterwards. But it's something good foundation and again, more importantly, it's the people that you meet. - You mentioned your wife and I was gonna ask you this later, but can I just say she came up so much in the research for this? Like I, I, you know, I speak to a lot of founders and often it's like very work oriented with you and Ashwin. Like one of the most common threats I've come up in the research from your investors, from your colleagues, from friends was like you both valued life and work. And I think the comment that came up that I like towards Jesse is in months, but aware of who he is and shows up in a way that is very human-centric. Like I know I joke tell you about the small talk, but people also give you compliments. And can you just continue mentioning your wife and I think Christine, I've actually heard she came up with the name Decagon. Can you first confirm that? And too, can you just talk about her for a second because I think that's quite cool, like both you and Ashwin, like you both didn't think you'd like 20s and you married and you're building this incredible company. That's quite rare in the tech world. - Yeah. Talk about my wife. Yeah, so she did come up with Decagon. She, I mean, choosing a name is pretty hard. I think she's like fairly good with names. And yeah, she's just a bit of big part of my life and our life as well as we've, as we've built the company. We met when I was 19. So we've been together almost 10 years and Mary Trouffour, who just had her wedding anniversary last week. - Yeah, I mean, it's like, it's very important, I would say, in a founding company because everything is so hectic at work and having a very solid personal life is very helpful. So it gives you a bit of a foundation to build upon. Otherwise you'd be constantly worrying about personal stuff as well and it just distracts from what you have to do at work. But yeah, she's very supportive. I mean, she's kind of gone through this journey already with my first company, which was way more hectic than this one. So she's like very used to it. And it also just helps. I mean, I gosh, when I very similar in that sense, like we, I think we're very, very work oriented, as you said. And so it is very helpful to have someone in your personal life that helps you stay balanced and like you're a drag to events that you would not have done yourself. And then the four of us spent a lot of time together. So you know, we actually convinced them to move to our building. So we now all live in the same building. And we spent a lot of time and that obviously helps the sort of the relationship between the two co-founders as well. Yeah, but she's obviously great. And we try to spend as much time together as possible. - Yeah, I mean, I actually actually said to me, when I spoke to the other day, I'll find you bump into each other when you go on holidays. So you've actually had to now go to different places because you can go to the same places and just see each other. (laughing) Which I think speaks to your, your, your, you guys are so into, in tune with your views of the world, right? - Yeah, yeah, I mean, we also, I think that's important for co-founders, honestly. Like I think, so my whole thing is, you know, starting company of the zero to one phase, like no matter what anyone says, like zero to one phase is by far the hardest. And it's hard for a bunch of different reasons. One of the reasons is, you know, there's not that many, just not that many, like, good ideas at any one point. And so finding one is quite difficult. - But other reasons, it's hard is that, is actually pretty difficult for co-founders to really work out. It's kind of like, it's a bit like a spouse relationship and that it's kind of luck based in terms of if it works out or not. There are like so many factors that have to all align. Like you have to, you have to, like a compatible personality, you have to both, like, you operate at the same level, you have to both like, what the same thing out of life and out of the company. So, yeah, the personal side also does help with that. - Let's go into that and let's jump around here, 'cause I think that's a really interesting one around your learnings from your previous company, lucky to, that you got now, 'cause again, I noticed in my research that I think your previous company, two of you go, founders left. Pretty early was this one, Ashwin, like everyone says, you and Ashwin are young and young, like you are totally in sync. Like, again, a bunch of investors said, like they can speak to Ashwin and they're confident they've captured your views and they can chat to you and they're confident they've captured Ashwin's views, which I think is to your point very rare. So can you share from your previous company, what did you learn and then, yeah, how did you meet Ashwin and how did you build that trust? Because you perhaps were weary after your previous company, right, where the Ashwin is the right fit for you? I want to, weary probably not because I actually think the benefit of the first company is that my intuition was a lot better around like what could work. So I think after we started working together probably in the first couple of weeks, I think we felt probably that it was going to work out. But yeah, learning's from the first company. So number one, learning we were a consumer app and I learned that I'm not very good at consumer. I think it's very different like brain chemistries for consumer versus B2B or enterprise or whatever you want to call it. And the way I would summarize it, which is kind of like a gross oversimplification, but consumer is more intuition based. Like it's more about the founder having like good intuition and like trying stuff very quickly and just like doing a bunch of experimentation and then you kind of hack it from there. Enterprise is a lot more, you can like reason through it. So the reason why I would say a lot of technical people or a lot of math, computer science people gravitate towards. Enterprise is that you can, you know, you have a customer that you're working with. They're real person. They talk to you about like what they're willing to pay for and that's that's how you reason through the problem. So that's number one is I learned that I'd rather work on enterprise. Less than number two is yeah, the co founder thing, right? So, you know, I started the company with two great friends of mine. They were called from its end. Yeah, you get along very well. There was nothing crazy. It's just like they, I think we like wanted different things out of life. I don't think they care that much about you starting company and it is pretty brutal in the zero to one phase. So they eventually got burnt out and then I was a seller after that and still trying to decide what to work on. And eventually, honestly, like got pretty lucky, pretty lucky, right? Like we eventually worked build something that in terms of like got quite a bit of traction and then eventually we got acquired and this was your end of 2021, which is a good time to get acquired. And that's how it worked out. But I think the other learning there was it's very important to have a strong co founder. I actually think two co founders is the best, but you know, people with different preferences is just like that's like one single relationship that can be really strong. Whereas with three co founders, you have to like somehow have three super strong relationships, which is which is a lot harder. And but yeah, having a good co founder makes it 10x easier, maybe even more than being a solo because solo is both a psychological pressure and struggles and like not having someone else that has the same level of context and commitment, but also you just don't have someone that like to really bounce ideas off of. And then the last lesson I would say is we were remote because of COVID and I didn't really like that. So that's why we're a person company. I mean, now I always feel like the question that captures this would be what it what it was the first time founded Jesse optimized for that now second time successful found the Jesse looks back and considers naive. Hmm. Yeah, the way the way I would describe it is that you know, first time founders or at least for me, you just end up spending a bunch of time like a bunch of really hard work on stuff that if you just thought about it, maybe like a little bit more would be like clearly not worth the time. And so there were a lot of these like ideas that you know, we just thought were good ideas and we would like for what of reason we thought it was a good idea. In hindsight, they were not very thought out. Oh, this is a really good idea because of like this thing we read or like this theme and then you like grind a bunch on it and then you realize like, oh, that was like waste of time. And so as you get more experience, you get a lot better at figuring out where the signal is and figuring out where to spend time and how to get that signal. Right. So how do you talk to a customer in a way such that you actually suss out? Is this actually important or not? So those are the things that you can't really teach. I think you just have to go through reps to build that intuition. And are there any things from if you think of your first call it three months of deck gone, were there any things that you did consciously because of the like a sky tissue? Yeah, I mean we were, I would say we were very, very intentional about customer discovery. So when we started the company, we were like the biggest thing was, hey, let's make sure we don't get stuck in a IDMAs forever. So let's figure out how to get out of it. And from our previous experience, the answer was like, okay, there's you have to do insane amount of discovery to actually get enough signal. And so we just talked to as many people that were willing to talk to us. And the conversations were not just like, hey, what, what can we build for you? Like what, what, what pain points do you have or whatever? Right. It's like those, those are very surface level conversations. It's going really deep into like, okay, if we built the solution for you, how much would you pay for it? How would you justify the budget and ROI with your broader team? Like who else needs to sign off? Like, where's the budget coming from? And these are things that is basically like sales discovery. So like it, it sounds cool, but it's essentially just, you know, sales discovery. And you can do it as a founder in a disenfuel sales team because people know that you're just trying to build something for them. And if you get really good at sales discovery, then that helps you figure out what's a build. Tell me how you go about that. So again, let's just use me as an example. Let's assume you approach me or you got introduced to me and I'm a target enterprise buyer of your software. What would you want to ask me? What would you want to talk about in that first, second, third meeting? Yeah. So ideally, you get as much as the first meeting as possible. So it's just getting understanding of, you know, what is your job in tail? Like, you know, tell me about the company, like what are the different teams? How are the other teams? Okay. Okay. For your team, like, what are you, what are you working on? What are some of the big priorities right now? Like, where are you spending your time? And once you have that, like, mapped out, then it's like, okay, it sounds like this is a big source of time. Here are some hypotheses for what's new product could make your life a lot easier. And then it'd be kind of like how, like what's your reaction? So then you might say something like, okay, yeah, this thing is maybe not useful. Okay, but this thing, like, yeah, we would really use, like, this is this is going to be really useful. I'll be really excited to try this out. So then, okay, you can't stop there because then you have to ask, okay, if we shift this to you, how much will we pay for it? And now people sometimes struggle to answer that immediately, which makes sense because it's, like, it's kind of a direct question. But then it's like, okay, well, usually people are really appreciative of you asking that question because it's, it's like, they know like they're, they're not trying to waste time. You're not trying to waste time, right? So, so then, then people start thinking like, they actually like are put on the spot of thinking through like, okay, how much would you pay for it? And then, and then oftentimes your answer might be something like, okay, yeah. So let me think through it like, okay, you know, this would be super helpful. But we have like, you know, three people doing a full time right now. And like, maybe if we launched it, you could, we can, I can maybe be able to be assigned like one person. So like, maybe like a thousand bucks a month. And then it's like, okay, it's probably not that valuable to you then because, you know, it's like, okay, I'm thinking, all right, this is a lot of effort to build. A thousand bucks a month, we like, crap ton of customers for that to be to be valuable. And so, that's how you do it, right? Because then now, now I have an idea of like how valuable is this really? And you often get into situations where people tell you they're super excited about something because maybe because they owe you something for beyond a call so that they want to be helpful. But once you get into it, you get into like, oh, well, you know, the budget's tight right now. Like, I'm not really sure how we would justify this. And it's like, great. I just see it the budget time, like, try to build out this, this one product. But eventually, when you hit something that people actually can justify, and it's very clear what the ROI is, then you can start building and you can have to go, there's something really quick. So you have to use it and then go from there. When I spoke to Ashwin last week, I asked him, I said, what's one area that Jess has done that's impressed you a lot. And he actually said enterprise sales. He said, he's been really impressed by how you've learned enterprise sales and you've just, you're killing it in enterprise sales. How can you talk about that process? How have you and maybe it connects to your previous point where you said your previous company was more conjumer focused and you learned that enterprise is a bigger opportunity and perhaps opportunity you enjoy more. That sounds great now on hindsight. But was that a big learning curve for you as a founder as an executive of the company to learn how to present to enterprise and then actually close deals? Yeah, actually that's a very good question. If I were to think about it, I would say not really. So I think it came very naturally to me. And I think it's more of like a talent thing. So like, for example, I would say within engineering, like people are actually just like talented different things. Like Ashwin, for example, is a very, very talented engineer. But even within engineering, I think like people's brains sort of gravitate towards different things. Like, because now that I explore a lot of different types of engineering, like, I would say like my brain gravitates more towards like maybe like the web stack and then like algorithms, I guess. And there are a lot of the types of engineering that we do like in our infrastructure, back in like, it just takes me a long time to like for me to wrap my brain around certain concepts, whereas like for Auschwitz, like super fast, right? So it's like the same concept outside of engineering in sales. I think I just, I both naturally enjoyed it, and I think it came fairly naturally because things generally make sense. I think I empathize with people quite well, and when you're talking to a enterprise buyer, I can empathize with like what they want to get out of this, and what they, what their goals are, and like what is helpful to them, and like it's just, that is very helpful, and that part I would say has come more naturally to me, so that's why, that's kind of like how Auschwitz has built responsibilities at the beginning, 'cause like to me and we were both doing everything, we're both building the product together, we were both doing sales together, and I think over time, we just kind of gravitated towards like, him owning the tech and the product and me owning our good and market motion, and yeah, I wouldn't say it was like super difficult for me to like force myself to learn. - I wanna continue on Decagon, but I almost wanna go back to the Loki period and talk about the transition from Loki to finding Decagon, because I know you sold Loki, and many would say that's a good outcome and a good exit, and I know Ivan from who's now at Excel was involved in that acquisition when he was at his previous company. Can you take me inside your headspace at that time when you had that acquisition, like we said, you learned a lot, your two co-founders left, I'm sure she couldn't scale it to the size you maybe wanted to. What was that like? What was that self talk like, particularly after this journey you've had where you've been the smart kid, right? We just talked to each other, you were the, in the Matt Salimpias, you were doing piano for us a week. You had all these jobs early on, then you started your company, you raised a bit of money from Andreessen, nothing you go into YC, but then the company didn't achieve the heights perhaps that you wanted. Was that a tough internal moment? I think if the acquisition did not work out, I think it would have been, and I'm not sure how I would have handled that, like hopefully I would have good enough mental to handle that. I think because the acquisition did work out, and you mentioned Ivan, yes, I was very involved in that, and I think it's obviously grateful for him, but because it did work out, it was the feeling is more relief, I guess. It was like, oh, wow, thank the universe that this worked out, you know? Because otherwise, yeah, I do think, especially at that timing, like if it had taken three more months, like all the markets crashed, like things, I think, it's really not a good spot. So yeah, I mean, I think obviously, I wish the company could have grown even larger, but at the time, it was mostly just like, you know, relief and gratitude and like, oh, wow, like, thank you, world, you know? So that was the, that was the mindset of the time, and then it also, it just gave me time to reflect after that. It was like almost four years of my life, and it was like the first real job that I had, and so I got time to reflect on, you know, what I did enjoy about it, what I did and what I felt like it was good at, what felt like it was bad at, and that informed the next steps. - And so you've sold the company, you've, let's just visualize, you've got the money in the bank, you've packed up your stuff, you've left the office. Did you have some period to explore? Like I do a bit of angel investing, and one of the questions I love asking is, what were you reading at the time, what were you consuming? Like how did you form the early seeds of Decagon? - Well, at the time, you kind of just look around and like for, you know, all the smartest people I know, like what are they working on, or are they reading about? And I would say at the time it was two things, it was large language models, so LMS, this was actually pretty chat GPT, so this book, but like, you know, like GPT-3 was out there, and like people were just generally excited about the technology, and so that was, that was a good signal, right? 'Cause like if smartspeople you knew are like reading about it, then turns out it's exciting, like yeah, it turns out to be very true. The other topic was zero-knowledge proofs, so a lot of my, I would say like math friends were getting very interested in ZK stuff, and so I did spend some time like reading about that and like trying to understand like what it was, I would say it's a lot harder to understand that area than legal models, but it is, it's like I think it appeals to Matthew people. And yeah, we're just exploring use cases. So there was a bit of exploration, but I was like, I met, when I met Ashwin, and we started working together, we probably landed on this current direction for decking on in the first month, so it wasn't a super long exploration time. - Take me inside, when I spoke to Kimberly at A16Z, she told me about the A16Z retreat, I think I think you and Ashwin might have met in mid-23, I believe. And what's interesting then is exactly to your point, AI wasn't as mainstream as it is today, and I'm failing to show AI agents won't even a term. Like people weren't talking about of the way they do today. Can you share how you even thought of the description of the business and also Ashwin said you explored a few areas and then realized customer support is a meaningful opportunity? Can you take us inside that discovery process, Ilyon? - Yeah, the discovery process is, recently what I described before, right? We would try to stack as many calls during the day as possible. So like, I hope ideally a full day of calls, and it was through anyone that was willing to talk to us. So like, anyone our investors knew, anyone our friends knew, and then at night we would hack together, prototypes for whatever, whatever we thought at the time, and then we show at the next day, right? And so the process was kind of like a random path of meandering. So as I talked about before, we were excited about language models. At that point, Chad GPD had already come out. So the GPD forum was out, actually. So a lot of people were excited about language models. So that was not like a unique viewpoint that we had. But we were just thinking about use cases, and we would throw a bunch of them, ranging from data analysis, security, presales, a bunch of like operational workflows, and then a lot of the operational workflows that eventually converged into customer service because of those questions we were asking, right? Like we would ask people, "Hey, how much we pay for this?" And there's sort of variance of that question. And people would be like, "Oh, well, we have four people doing this, "operational workflows, so the value might be half a person, "salt figure, something like that." But we have 500 people in our call center. Like why don't you guys go do something there? And we heard that multiple times from a bunch of different people. So that's how we arrived at the idea. Really? So it's just kind of like putting together enough reps and enough data points to actually like, suck out what the signal is. And I would say at the end of the exercise, our conclusion was there actually aren't that many good ideas, a good gen AIDA ideas for the enterprise. And really it was customer service and coding, or like the two big ones, the two big application ones that companies would invest in. And I would say, yeah, in hindsight, that was pretty accurate. These are the two big markets. Obviously now as the technology's gone better, it's open up the aperture for way more other types of applications, but at the time. And I should mention we were explicitly exploring applications because that was what we were most excited to build, rather than like some sort of infrastructure company. And I feel like also the other thing that you did really well that I uncovered in the research is you weren't positioning it as another software. I believe you're positioning it as a chance to replace some of the labor in the companies. And I think that perhaps led to some of your early contracts being larger than other startups might have early on. Is that true? Yeah, I would say that's accurate for AI in general. If you think about the target market, right? So I mean, the market itself is already massive. Just like just customer service, but also just the broader conversationally, I market, I'm actually massive. So there's so many use cases for us to go after. But it's not even replacing existing software. Like most of it is, hey, we're actually spending so much money on our customer support operation because we have all these outsource call centers and so on. It's kind of the services labor. And that market is 10 to 100 next bigger than the software market. So that does help. And so when we kind of talk about business cases with our customers, it's along the lines of, hey, we have deployed this agent. We've shown that it's going to give you this much automation. So you're going to save millions and millions of operational overhead. And we've shown that your consumer is actually like it more. So it's a better experience for them. And that's how you justify the business case. One of the things that's come up quite a bit in when I think of like some of the other founders that I've either interviewed on this podcast, or I've spoken to generally in various capacities is the four things that often come up with this as product distribution, monetization, and retention. I'm curious in Decigon's case, would you agree like those are the four key aspects? And if you had to stack rank them, which ones would you prioritize first? Which ones do you prioritize now? So product distribution, monetization, retention. Huh. Is that a fair way to look at it firstly? Are those the full successful things every company needs? Yeah, I think that about that. I mean, those four are definitely important. I don't know if they're the only things that make a company successful. But if I were to rank those four in particular, monetization is at the bottom for us. I think maybe just like a fortunate sort of structure of our space is that that's not really a concern. It's fairly easy to justify the value of providing. So the monetization is not too hard. We don't really have retention problems. I think so far as we deployed people will retain it quite well. So I would say those two would be the bottom. Product and distribution are definitely the top two by far. Those two go hand in hand. In the early days, I would say it's mostly a distribution thing because that's what makes or breaks the company. It's like, are you good at getting customers to buy in? You don't really have a product at that point. So it's important to just get customers. Then you can build the product and inform the product based on what they need. That's been a big part of our ethos is that everything we do is built around this North Star of what do our customers want. We don't build any product or make any sort of technical decisions or with big research team. All the research that you do is in service of real customers. That goes back to, you know, Australian eyes, like general philosophy with building the company. We really want to avoid some of the mistakes that, you know, for example, I made in the previous company where you're just like building stuff that actually people end up not caring about. And then you just waste a bunch of time. So I would say product kind of follows distribution in that sense. So like you need a distribution first, you kind of get a sense of what the market needs and then, you know, what, what would actually close a deal. And then product, hopefully very quickly gets to that point and delivers a good experience. But then as the company goes on and you have those customers now, do you know what you're doing? I would say long term product becomes more important because that's your long term differentiator. There are people that have way bigger distribution than ours. Right. And so what, what is our advantage then is that, okay, well, we have to have a better product. So I would say, yeah, short term, like early on it's probably distribution and then as you mature product becomes number one. Yeah, I think I oversimplified that this full thing. So I appreciate this, this, this, this, there's a bunch of nuance to it and and subjectivity. So, so absolutely. I think the other one that ties into this, which is incredible that that amazed me in my research again is Jackie Hohn got to, I believe, a million dollars in an hour, I would just you an Ashwin. And I think you raised a series A and then you scaled your team, like even folk like Dennis and Perry and others who've come up quite a bit in research, like you have me hired them after that. And that's, that's pretty incredible, right? Like that's not a small feat. Yeah, I think it was impressive at the time. I think now nowadays people are scaling our really fast. Not with two people, not with two people. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, people also defied error differently. I think we had true. Yeah, with with me and Ashwin. Yeah, I think it goes back to we were just a good, a good team. So we were able to do a lot of things ourselves, like he, like we were the builder really quickly. So I would say even our engineering skills are like fairly complimentary where we were able to just like ship things super fast. And then we both like doing sales. And so we like, you know, we're just able to be fairly self sufficient with the two of us. He also knows about about like a bunch of random things like he like knows a lot about legal and like security. So like he just so low did sock to for us. It's just like, like because of that. And you know, I would say I was able to also like you know, pay a lot of track of a bunch of work streams. Because of that like two of us are fairly self sufficient. And that's helpful because that's only like one communication node that needs to happen. So you're like, there's not that much like tax of like coordination across the team. But then eventually yet we were able to hire people. So because we generally knew what we were doing. The other thesis I have is it's actually really bad for founders to hire people with until like the idea is like pretty solidified. Or you have like an inkling of product market fit at least because when you join a company, you don't want to be constantly pivoting. It's like that's super draining and it's very not rewarding for a for employee of a startup. Like for a founder is probably like, okay. But for employee, if you're like, you know, grinding and doing much of work, and then three months later, you're like, oh, well, all that has got to know now we're doing this now. That is very deoralizing. So. And was that a little bit. Yeah. Because it's not that we had employees on it, but we had gone through the pivoting process a lot. And I could tell like how emotionally like draining it could be. So we didn't really want to hire people until we were actually fairly sure about what we were building. And then we hired Amy who's our first engineer and she's still here. She's not leading a team. She's doing doing really well. And then we hired more of the progress. So we hired Dennis also quite fortunate. And Dennis is still our VP of engineering. So we got on as are like, you know, fifth team member or something, fifth or six team member. So, yeah, Perry as well. Perry is still here. So I mean, we were pretty blessed with the very, very strong. Like early team. And that's what needs to happen. You have to hire the early hires through your network. Because otherwise there's almost this like adverse selection. The happens of, you know, why are they joining your company. And yeah, so that's also the benefit of second time when you're a bit older, your like network is also a bit larger. And so we were hiring hire some great people. And that brings us this time. Or now we're almost 500 people. Yeah, incredible. And I mean, what's even more incredible about that is, but you and us when I still in the details. What I asked if the other day I said, Hey, how do you manage information flow? He said, what are you talking about? I am in the weeds. And I said that is, that is incredible. Like it's even 500. And both you and I should have still like across. He said you across every deal and you across every document. Does that get to a point where you make a call and you go, Hey, we just can't be across everything anymore. We need to, we need to just. And we need to keep that to someone else to manage and we'll step in as an escalation point. Yeah, there's no easy answer is that like being in the weeds is not necessarily good thing. So I was saying both of us are very, very in the weeds just because that's our personalities and we're just like. We know everything or like really evolved everything we like ping everyone like we just. It's like the thing that Brian Chesky wrote that was super viral around, you know, founder mode and just being able to like go across every level. I think we've ever had a problem with that. I think if anything or the thing that we've had to learn is more, how do you scale better? Because if you're the weeds for everything, that's actually not a good thing because it just means that things are not moving along smoothly or fast enough without you. So I think that's something we've had to get better at over time. Maybe this point is interesting because I mentioned earlier comment that came up in my research from everyone was Jesse is intentional and intense and I think an intentional point has come across even in this conversation where you just seem to have this maturity that I think a lot of founders lack. And maybe that goes to why decking on succeeding. How do you assess your own strengths and weaknesses? Like I think people would say you have a lot of strengths, but I've heard in some of your interviews. You've been quite candid about your development areas, which I think requires this level of insecurity that I think most of us don't have like I probably don't have that. I have this insecurity where I want to tell people about how good I am. Because I don't sense that with you like you seem pretty comfortable like just being who you are. Is that a fair have I read that correctly? Thank you for that by the way. And it came up came up in all the research calls, but tell me about how you yeah how you assess your strengths and weaknesses. I would say. Yeah, I would say the strength of mine is definitely like I would say I'm very self aware. So I know what I'm very good at and like what I'm talented at and what I'm not. Yeah, I think that's a very good trait because then if you know that then you can just do more of the stuff you are good at and like not do the stuff you're bad at is get someone else to do that. So I think that that's a strength. The other piece is I think my mind is naturally a very fast switch so I can I can parallelize a lot of things at once. And that is helpful in my job because you have to keep a lot of things in your head. And so even for us like you know we have it's not just sales but like even within sales we have a lot of deals going on like generally know like what's going on with all of them I know like all the people involved in all of them and who we've talked to and what the relationship is. And I would say in contrast, the OSH was very good at going super deep at one thing at a time. And so it's just kind of like the way our brain's work. So yeah, those probably top skills and then I mentioned before I think I'm fairly good at empathizing with people so I generally know how people are feeling and what they want to get out of a out of a conversation or out of a relationship. And I'm going to math to accept that's helpful. It's becoming less less helpful. Yeah. And you're a good husband and then clearly family matters to you a lot. Right. So that's I think that's another one like there's more life than just just work. I try to. I don't know. There's. Yeah, me a good husband is like a never ending in Turkey and you're constantly learning new things and hopefully soon. Well, I've our first kid at some point. So that's. Yeah, totally. I mean, that's that's huge. That is absolutely significant in your life. And tell me the same in deck you guns case where again, like anyone you ask would say deck you guns up into the right and then there is also there to prove it. As you know better than most, there's many moments in a startup where shit, it's the fan and things don't work out and you're like, this might be an essential crisis. Is there one of those moments that you can maybe share that was a defining period in your life that you're glad that that happened and things didn't work out, but now it's paid off. I think it's all relative like I think deck you on knock on wood. Everything has been quite smooth relative to my first company. So because I've gone through those experiences like those seem way worse than whatever has happened so far. far and decky gone. Obviously, we've had our own struggles and, you know, losses or whatever, but everything does not feel that compared to the experience. So, I think the big difference is that in the first company, there was a lot of like very existential dread. It's like, it is what I'm working on, like, actually, like, I might as well waste my time or not. And I don't think we've ever felt that with decky on. I think we have, we're very fortunate to have real customers who are putting a lot of faith in us. It's like, it's very clear what we're doing is meaningful to them. And we built an amazing team of like really strong driven people. But I mean, yeah, I would say like the sort of setbacks are like, you know, sometimes we lose a deal or for whatever reason, we have learned from it or we try to hire someone and they end up not being able to hire them. Yeah, I mean, that happens, right? So those are kind of learnings, but none of that feels remotely close to, you know, some of the struggles from the first company. And then on the whole side, maybe one that if I can bring up just to give some color to that question is, I've been told you've had some people that you hired or a senior level that didn't work out that you had to let go. Can you reflect on that? Like, how did you go about that? And did that shape your future decisions when it comes to senior exec hiring? Yeah, definitely. That happens though. Like I wouldn't really say like that necessarily is a big, I mean, if I was obviously not successful, I want to view it as like a big failure. Like it's very difficult to have a perfect hiring spread. And also like I would say you company, if your company's growing super quickly, like the right hire does change over time. And also the pool of candidates also changes. And so it does happen. I would say some of our early execs were mostly because I think Ashwin and I did not do a super good job of like figuring out like what's the hire for? Like we have like some idea of like what's the hire for? And so we selected for that. And then we missed out all this. So I'll just leave an example. Like one of our early execs, I think checked a lot of the boxes that we were looking for. But the people that they were hiring did not really like we met them and is, oh, wow, this is like very different from what we what we want here. And so we we had not hiring any of them. And after this happened about 10 times, it was, okay, this is probably not the best fit. So stuff like that happens. And it's like, okay, well, that means we made a that's like kind of on us. It's like, okay, well, that means we kind of f'd up in the interview process. We should have just really looked at who, who would this person hire? Because that's one of the most important jobs of an exec. And so then the next time we did the interview, it's like, okay, literally make a spreadsheet of everyone you can hire in your first three months. And I'm going to go like meet some of them and like also like at their profiles and everything. So that would be an example of that. Thank you for sharing that. That I think is helpful. Is there a way you've learned to diligence, senior execs? Because I mean, I spoke to David that co-tour as an example. And he said this and he knows some service now where they've all got great resume. Right? They all look very successful on LinkedIn or on the surface or an interview because they know how to talk. But the test is how do you diligence that in the interview process or reference checks or other means again, back to your problem solving skills and your maths experience? How have you learned to problem solve to get beyond the exterior of a senior exec? Yeah, that just takes a few reps. So what we do now, so number one, we know that their number one job is going to be hiring. So that's really diligence. How good they are hiring. And so look at who they hired the past. Like who would they hire or what they got here and you meet some of them, do references, etc. Number two is you can ever do enough back channels. So we do way more back channels for execs now than we used to do. And those are the some of the best signals for if someone's going to fit in or not. And yeah, and then we it's just we just try to you know, spend time with them and try to do like a simulation as much as possible of real work. And that that that that parts the hardest part because you know, they are very busy people as well. It's not like you just like how do they all work trial for a week or something. But those are those are the big adjustments that we've made to the exact hiring process. And does that get more different? I guess when it comes to also expanding to new markets, so they recently expanded to APAC and countries like Australia, you doing stuff in Europe where when when is the right point to hire a market leader or a country manager or pit the title because again, some some folks tell me that it's like you need to be pulled into a market like you want the founders to fly and fly out, build a customer base and then hire a country manager, whereas other founders say no, hire someone on the ground that has the networks and they can go and sell. And then the founders just become an escalation point. How have you thought about market expansion in line with exec hiring? I don't think there's a right answer to that. I'm sure everyone has their own preferences. The thing I personally feel strongly about is you have you should get the leader first. New markets, especially if you just if you have like ICs that are doing work and they don't have enough support from leadership, you know, sort of top down, then it's very tough for them. So anytime we've done a new market now, it's get the leader first. And whether or not you have customers there, yeah, I mean, generally should be pulled into new market. I think there are some markets are as I would say is one of them where there's just a market everywhere. So it's less about is there a market or not and more about, hey, like is this good for our strategy? Like should we stay focused on what we are currently doing or does actually make sense to expand and for Australia for Europe, Latin, like we've we kind of just organically got customers there. And then we're like, okay, well, now it's time to go do it right. Maybe if we had we had done a sooner that would have been better because we'd be earlier in deals. But then, you know, conversely, maybe we were already at that time because you don't really like do so many things at once. So yeah, I would say there's not really already answered, but you just have to pick a time and get the leader and see. And then also just to broaden out on an international expansion, I'm curious how do you do you strategize for that? Or is that a bit reactive? And I guess the context here is like in my company, we work quite closely with like folks like Harvey and Legora, for example, and others in other spaces. And one of the things I've observed and it's an observation, not not a fact is there's a fast follow-up mentality sometimes where if your biggest competitor goes into a market, there's this sense of rush where the team goes, okay, we need to also go into that market. So again, in your space, you've got a bunch of incumbents, you got a bunch of competitors. Do you, how do you like this build internal conviction to go, hey, Sierra has gone into market X, but we don't think that's the right decision for us. We should go into market. Why is that a push and pull? Yeah, again, I don't think I'm thinking it's black and white. Like you would never just make decisions based on what your competitor is doing, but you also. I guess so far, like so far, how have you, how have you reached those decisions? Because again, back to being intentional, I get the sense you and Ashwin are very intentional about what is best for Decagon, not just what is best for optics, right? Yeah, I mean, I would say you want to use what your competitors are doing as an input, but ideally, you're making your decisions from first principles, right? So, and we were first principleing like when's the right time to get into a market. It's like, hey, are we as a company, ready, both in terms of resourcing and focus to do well in this market and have people there? And at the same time, is our business and product going to do well in that market? And so if both of those are yes, then you would do it. And there's no right answer. Like right now, we're making decisions the best we can for each market. Like, are we moving too slow, potentially? But it's like if you were moving faster, like maybe things were also just like get way messier and fall apart because you're not like seeing super discipline, this structured about the way you're building your company. So we just try to make decisions for first principles the way we see best. You know, our competitors, yeah, we have like the big platform as you have like, you know, more AI native companies like Sierra, like we do very well head to head against all of them. And, you know, Sierra, we there's the first company that the first customer that ever moved between the two of us. So someone turned off Sierra to come to deck it on. I've never had anything go the other direction. I mean, it's it's early obviously, but it's like you you want to do well against the competitors, but you can't you can't just be like, oh, well, they're doing this like crap. Like what's because if you do that also like you're you're just kind of following so you can't do that. Well, I've actually had a good account that this company just named as copied some of Deccogon's features, right? And and and and and some of the folks that you launched early, they've copied and I asked you investors and they said yes, that is that is their understanding as well. Again, can you without going into the competition, because I think those are like very pitty questions that people ask and podcasts to go get some surface like go beyond the surface. How are you thinking about innovation? Because again, that came up a lot of my research where folks said you have innovated a Deccogon with some of your features, some of your automation, some of your product decisions ahead of the market and and you were setting the tone for the market and then some of your bigger either competitors or incumbents have followed your thesis. Can you touch on that? Yeah. So it's kind of like yeah, it's actually an interesting question of you know, when you asked me about myself personally, I think like for a company you also have to have a good understanding of who you are, right? Like what are you good at? We have competitors that have way bigger distribution than us, so either they're big platforms that have huge distribution or they have really good networks, right? Like Sierra was founded by pretty see sales force. And so it's like where are your strengths? And so far we have been pretty good at getting connected to folks, but really it's like, okay, well we have to excel by having a product because if we don't have a better product than them, then they're just going to out distribution us and what what is our right so when in those deals if they're more well connected and have a better product with us like wow anyone work with us, right? So it's like, okay, what is our strength? We're very good at product and that's where we've invested and so we've kind of just built our product quicker, we've invested a lot into like a really strong engineering team, research team, product team, and we we shit things really fast and our customers like that. And that is generally our strategy because like in order for all these customers to work with and we work with now with like, you know, so many of these top banks, airlines, telecom, healthcare companies, and the reason they choose us is because they like our product, they like the way we go about working with them. And you kind of have just have to earn that and other people, you're copying certain features and stuff that's just like totally normal so it's not like, oh, like why are you copying us? It's like, yeah, that's just how the world works. Like they see something nice is like you can copy it. And of course if vice versa is same if we see something out of the market where like, oh, that's clever, like, we're going to copy you to or hopefully improve upon it. So that means the real essence that is like copying people is actually becoming easier, easier, especially with AI, like with AI, it's so easy to copy so like a certain feature. So the real long term competitive advantage has to be your speed. And if you can ship product and better product faster faster rate in your like entire team and organization designed for that, then that's sort of the actual lasting advantage that you can have. Totally. And I think it's evolving so fast as well where even if you launch first, it might go out of fashion pretty quickly, right? Because the models as you know, growing, which takes me to my next question, which was your recent erota paper about like model selection and performance and and it resonated really well. Even I met at an enterprise event as I said to you like we outside of the podcast and listen to podcasts like as a big enterprise audience like in Australia and the US in Asia. One of the things I'm seeing is like I've never seen so much curiosity at the enterprise level about software and AI, like even that event you and I were at. I was amazed at the number of CEOs that were coming to you and were like Jesse, how can we meet you rather than you having to like get time in the calendar, which which I thought was like reflective of the beard we're in. Can you talk about what if what are you seeing the average enterprise is misunderstanding about AI or perhaps not thinking about AI in the way that you feel that maybe they should. So I would say number one thing by far is that people think of AI in a lot of the same lenses they would think about, you know, previous software products they've adopted. And in many sense, in many ways there are a lot of parallels right it's like new technology it's will make your company better. But people are really underestimating how much quicker and how much easier and you can deploy AI compared to previous software and so there are some enterprises that would say that really grow a kid and they they move way more aggressively and they're able to go live in production super fast like even for some of these super gnarly like organizations we work with that have been around for more than 100 years and they have like all sorts of legacy systems. You can get something live and actually like getting very clear wins in like you know, six to eight weeks right so. But previous in previous software world that's impossible. And so if the leaders are still in that in that mode of like, yeah, this is going to be like a six to nine month project. Then it will be a six to nine month project because years like that's that's how I'll take but if you're if you're a mode of like hey like AI those actually unlock things way faster than you can actually move way faster. And so to make a very concrete as an example in our space right like we as I mentioned we're kind of deploying these customer facing conversational agents for you know call centers and just time conversations. A big heart, a big sort of like time seek in getting that deployed is capturing business logic it's like how do you actually get the AI to behave as you want to follow your own procedures and how do you make sure that's it's accurate and historically someone have to do all that someone's got to go in and like program the agent in a way or configure it in the software and like center all these tests and so on. But now you can do it. You can have a second AI that just does that for you and does like basically 90% of the work and then yours coming in and checking it. And so all these timelines are like way more compressed in terms of how fast you can deploy how fast you can attain value. And I think that's still very, very underwritten. And I'm curious how you answer that in six months time right because it's evolving so fast to your point. Yeah, exactly. Is that also a challenge where you like can you still sign two year agreements with some of these enterprises because your feature set is evolving so fast and like you said the model selection is changing so frequently now. Yeah, so we have many multi contracts three three years. It's. I think the mindset is less so much about the feature set. It's like hey, are we a partner that they want to work with. So in the early in the early sort of engagement. It's or both showcasing our product and and you know the feature set but but we're very open that hey AI changes so quickly. The main reason you should work with us is that you should believe that we're going to stay ahead of the curve and be the ones that iterate the fastest and actually build the best product consistently. It always launched the you know the the new things before anyone else and kind of stay stay stay state of the art right. And that's really what people are looking for. I'm looking for a partner that they can rely on as like one of their AI partners and just feel comfortable that we're just going to be there to solve the problem regardless of what the features are. And our product is involved in a state amount of the last six months to a year. And so that's that's just how it's going to be. I want to change tact a bit and talk about investors. I've mentioned them a few times in around the research I did and I know some of you investors. A common thread that came up from both Ivan at XL and every fat at Bayonum I think two of your board members is they said both you and I should know very intentional about your board members. And you did a lot of diligence and I think our if has worked with I should before and and like you said you worked with Ivan before. Again that goes to I think intentional trait that people said where that's again unique where you said today it's a hot market. I think founders are chasing whoever gives them the biggest valuation they like cool will have your board and yes he is a seat. Whereas you and Ashman seem to be a little bit different. Can you again reflect on that and one how are you doing that and two where does that mindset come from. I think it just naturally was back to first principle is just like how like how should you choose investors right and so I mean first I should say that we're very fortunate so far and decking on like every single round was completely preempted and we had like tons of people. You know trying to invest and so obviously that's not always going to happen and when you have those situations then it kind of goes to like who do you want to work with because these are going to be very long relationships. So you want one people you trust that personal level but to you want people that will actually add ton of values of the company. And so what we try to do before every round is just like kind of test people how valuable will they be. And for us value is mostly just like can you help us get customers and can you help us hire. And the people that do a good job of that are we we try to add them to the cap stable and I would say in hindsight that has worked out very well because we're probably one of the companies out there that has. I would guess extract in the most value out of their out of their cap table because. Yeah we're very intentional about it and people like working with us because you know we you know let's say we're working with sort of like different people on the team and they interest us on and we go in and we win the deal and then we inwardly kind of communicate it back and say hey you thank you are you introduce these people we actually code the big deal out of it so like you know that helps your equity stake and also like you that means you're doing a good job. And so they feel great and it kind of it's like a self reinforcing loop. And we've we've kind of had that from a lot of our top investors like a 16c you know a Bane being capital ventures index code to like they've they've all been extremely helpful with with our go to market motion. And I think it's rewarding for them hopefully and then also kind of deepens the relationship is now they they haven't really got to see a racial process and so we have a dedicated team of people whose job it is I was going to say I was going to say that the folks at coach actually mentioned that they said you've got a person that hits them up all the time and say because LinkedIn intro and LinkedIn connection they were actually saying it's becoming a bit tricky because as you know some of the LinkedIn mutual friends actually not people there's someone knows. Yeah, I mean someone met an event and they were like oh we don't actually know them but we will find a way. It's like it's it's it's been very very rewarding and I'll get shout out especially to we have a master called ribbit capital there they're not one of our leads but they've kind of had an outside impact because they both have very helpful for customers but they're just like super sharp and super on top of on top of everything. And they've kind of been influential of our biggest customers and then they're all they always have like some sort of solution whenever we ask for something so. And investors are very important like these days I think you're hearing less less stories of investors that are just like negative impact. There used to be, it was just like a very common thing when people are just like net negative 'cause they tried to influence you and they don't know what they're doing. I think these days the market is so founder friendly that that is pretty rare, but I think there's still a pretty big gap between like kind of the average investor and the best ones that really help you. Does that change now that you've got all these growth investors in board? Like we still got quite to and even the recent round, I think index came in and others where their approach is a bit different to an early stage investor, right? Where an early stage investor is perhaps a bit more that he's a more the founder and the opportunity where his growth stage as you know better than me is often about the metrics, right? Like a coach who was investing at the big end of town, like companies getting ready for IPO. Does that create sometimes a tension where you've got to manage your early investors and your late stage investors? Not really. We haven't really felt any difference, actually. Maybe it's 'cause we're still fairly young. We start the company like two, two and a half years ago, so I know, it's incredible. But yeah, we treat all of our investors pretty much the same. I want to move to a bit of, bit on you for a couple of minutes and then we'll rapid, rapid-file sprint. One of the questions I love asking people like you, given you so I just feel intellectually aware, I think that's the word that comes to mind is you probably speak to a lot of other founders, like you mentioned one of the start and I mentioned Scott at cognition and others, are there any founders that you found really useful? 'Cause I think again, the founder journey can be quite lonely. Even though you've got a co-founder, like sometimes it's nice to speak to someone outside the tent. Like I'm always curious, if you had to pick a learning room and say you had five seats and you could invite four founders, ideally founders that you know and not let's put the celebrity founders aside. Are there four founders that you pick up the phone to and you go to them when you're in a pickle? - Yeah, I mean, it's just kind of different people with different things and everyone's very busy, but I would say my one of my favorite CEOs is Ali from DataRex and he's been very generous with this time. You know, I'm through ASIC and Zee and I mean, he's just like so smart and it's also like very good at both technical and go-to-market stuff. The ramp founders, I have a ton of respect for, so they're great. Yeah, so my friends from like the math world, Scott, Alex from scale, you may just like observing what those companies do or it is helpful. I'll also give a shout out to Winston from Harvey. - They're basically exactly a year older than us and our tri-rachery has so far and been like exactly the same. So that's very helpful because it's just like, you can literally just ask like, what exactly did you do at this point? So yeah, those guys have all been great. And then yeah, just like operators as well. Once you get to a certain level of scale, just kind of learning from operators about very specific things. So I learn a lot from successful sales leaders. So Dave Echo2, you mentioned, you know, Ron from DataRex, there are sales leaders that's who have just skilled massive teams that have done good stuff. - Yeah, that's a great list. And I know some of them like, we know the Harvey guys actually, you're talking about operators like Harvey, he's chief business officer, John Haddock. He actually was on the show last year and I think he's exceptional and he's a striped experience and I think the way he's shaping the company is pretty special and just his personality. I feel similar to yours, the way he's pretty intentional about way he spends his time and just goes about in a very constructive way. I want to move to Rapid Five Final's brand to close this out. This has been really fun and hopefully we can capture some of Jesse the human in this Rapid Five sprint. Is there one non-work investment, ideal if time and energy, but you consider the best in your life? Is there a holiday or a course or a hobby that you have? - Oh, sports, mostly. That's pretty active growing up, play a lot of basketball and keeps you healthy and it's very different for work. - Tell me in the last two years, like, again, Ashwin mentioned that you guys try and take vacations every six, eight months is there a vacation you've taken that you really enjoyed? - We just came back from the Dolomites. So that was really nice. Dolomites probably tied for a most beautiful place I've been to, tied with probably South Island and New Zealand, so those are the best. - Nice. Is there one thing you want to learn in the next six months and this could be in Dechagon or a Gendoline Life? - I mean, the thing that comes to mind is just learning how to operate, like managing a much larger organization. So that that's every single time the organization grows. There's like new things we have to learn. So that's where I'm spending most of my time. - And how does that look like? Is that reading books? Is that asking people? Is that just doing a through lived experience? - Experience. It's mostly asking people. And it's not that much you can learn from books at a certain point. And so you can kind of, yeah, mostly just talk to people. - Yeah, and they're probably selling those people you mentioned earlier, doing it themselves, right? Is there one AI product that you're using that is not Dechagon and ideally is not mainstream? Is there under the radar AI product that you're really impressed by? - Most of my usage is cloth. So that's not gonna be a good answer. Gennola is cool. So they're fairly mainstream now too, but I think what else I use? - Oh, probably mostly those. - Yeah, I think I think we're all using the same ones unfortunate, unfortunately. (laughing) - Is there one interview question you love asking prospective candidates in a hiring process? - Probably the one is just like, what is the project you've kind of worked the hardest on in your life? It could be anything. It could be non-work related either. - And can I ask you with customers, is there a question you love asking enterprise customers that you feel unlocks the most information? - Yeah, one of the questions we ask is, hey, if you fast forward like six months and you know, your Dechagon deployment is massively successful, like how are you describing that to people? Like what's kind of like the prioritized list of things that you will say? - Great questioner that allows them to visualize success with you, right? Which would tell I always works well psychologically. And last one, I ask every guess, if you had to recommend a question, I should ask the next guest. Of course you don't know the next guest, but anything I should include in my notes. - I like the questions you asked about, sort of personality and sort of like self-reflection. So maybe something around like, if they could like change one thing about their childhood, like, you know, what would it be? - I should have asked you this earlier, but now that you've given me this question, is there anything you'd change? Like if I can ask you quickly, like I know that's gonna be a long answer, but is there anything you'd say you wouldn't change anything, but if you could, would you? - Yeah, I mean, it's hard to tell like what changes would, sort of ripple down there. I would be very happy with my childhood. I would say the big thing is there are a lot of skills that I kind of adopted later in life that were, that like I could have done a lot earlier, just 'cause like this is, there's not things that my parents knew about or like really prioritized. So like, even just like, you know, like when growing up I was like very not talkative because I didn't feel like I was good at talking, but in terms of you have to talk in life. So I did all of these skills like that, like communication, like commercial instincts, even coding I wish I started earlier, but yeah, that's the beauty of experience, right? If we do everything at the start, then life wouldn't be as fun. Like it wouldn't be like a Pokemon game, where you're like collecting the points. - True, true. - Yeah, cool man, that brings us to the finish line. Thank you so much. It's been really fun, hopefully by some questions. - Is there ever been? - This was great, yeah. - Honestly, I think the, it was really great questions. - Hopefully the prep paid off, I spent a lot of time doing it. So thanks so much and yeah, see you soon. - Awesome, all right. - That's a wrap. So it's something in this episode, it's back to thought, send it to a friend or calling. And if you're curious, that partnering with us and the Curiosity Center, whether it's this podcast, to our reports, events and more, and join the ranks of existing commercial partners, including Google, KPMG, Vanta, the University of Melbourne. And I lose my details on the show notes. Until next time, I'm Vity Taggoil, and this is the High Files podcast.