Ep #118: The AI Solution for Streamlining RFPs ft. Gaurav Nemade (Co-Founder, Inventive)

[00:00:02] Adil Saleh: Take your time. [00:00:05] Gaurav Nemade: Cool. [00:00:07] Adil Saleh: Hey. Good morning, everybody. This is, Adil from Hyperengage Podcast. Yeah. I mean, it it was amazing to see how generative AI is transforming by not just seeing Salesforce pushing out this Copilot, OpenAI having these kind of updates that are going to transfer. NVIDIA is, you know, having their own GPU that's gonna change the world and, and and how other bigger giants in every category, beat CRM, beat, you know, in in the developer's platform. There there are many. It it was for me, personally, it was more about learning how people are solving problem with building these software products. When it comes to generative AI and AI powered platform, I'm sure all of us must have seen AI powered with every platform on the planet. You can see the directory of Y Combinator. We have, like, more than, you know, 30% of our episodes, reaching Y Combinator products. Most of them are AI powered, but a lot of them, I think they need to they'll find new inventions while staying within the AI, and they'll find new initiatives, you know, on a on a broader spectrum, staying within the within the sales, support, success, developer, product, engineering, whatever category that they they are in. So what we have today is is is the founder of Inventive. I I personally found it really, really interesting to have some platform that is finally doing something that's slightly different than than all the noise that we have. Probably, it's just not the noise. It's just that we are getting it because a lot of platforms that we we come across, they're mostly efforts, and this is something that we found pretty, pretty unique and interesting. So today, we have Gaurav, who's a chief product officer and cofounder Inventive. Prior to that he's been there, at Google for quite a long time. I guess more than 5 5, 6 years there, in in the product management, and and also in the in AI team. You know, they they have their own AI and brand team, that he was a part of. So, it was so nice to, you know, have him today and learn more about how Inventive is trying to change, how you deliver RFPs, how you smartly, construct your responses on proposals, and how sales teams can work smarter than harder. Thank you very much, Gaurav, for for your time and coming on. [00:02:31] Gaurav Nemade: Hey. Excited to be here. Thanks a lot for inviting me. Conversation with Gaurav Nemade about his entrepreneurial journey and building AI technology [00:02:36] Adil Saleh: Likewise. Likewise. So thinking about, like, not so much about Inventive in this Inventive platform, but what brings you, to it. You know, looking at your background, of course, bring a lot of folks, that are highly, you know, kind of their our peer group. Like, they come from. They are now building platforms that are exciting. They're they're making such a huge impact in a quick succession. A lot of them, that you you might know too. So what is that one formula that you guys have? Like, what is that mantra that you guys have? Like, coming like, it's just it's not just about, like, a lot of people that we see, in the states. Natively from there. Like, they've been, like, 20, 25, 30 years. So what's coming now, people coming out of IT only back in 2014, 13, 2011, 2010, working at, a few companies, at scale, for about 7, 8, 9 years in building a platform that, turns the world around. So what is your story? [00:03:35] Gaurav Nemade: Yeah. I think IT is definitely are a fascinating place. It takes a lot of hard work, perseverance, to kind of get in there, and I think that just continues over a period of time, for people. As for me specifically, I think the way I, ended up starting Inventive I think it started almost a decade ago probably before that. I always had this bug of starting something of my own. Tried a few things in college. After college, I started my first company, which was called NovusMinds. The idea there was we were trying to build Stripe for India. So, basically, a payments platform for India. We got the timing right, but, ran into some execution issues. So I had to cut back on that, and I eventually landed up at Google payments where I spent about 4 years, 2 years in India, and then I had an offer to move to Googleplex in Mountain View, so I moved here. And then after that, I spent about 4, 4 and a half years roughly in Google AI and Google Brain. That time was really transformational. I think I saw some of the first ever large language models being built inside of Google. I think, this, I was the first PM on this project, that that ended up, becoming Lambda and eventually powered Google Bard. So we were building a 2,700,000,000 parameter model, and there was, like, today's SLMs are bigger than that. But at that point of time, it was, like, such a big deal. And I saw everything from hallucinations to trust and safety issues to responsible AI issues firsthand in the very early stages of this technology. So it was, as I was nearing, like, 4th year at Google, I was like, this is an amazing time to, like, get out and build something of my own. I always had that bug. Gaurav Nemade's Journey from Google to Building Inventive [00:05:20] Gaurav Nemade: So, yeah, I quit Google in, about, like, 2 years ago, 2, two and a half years ago and started exploring a bunch of ideas. Yeah. So that's how I essentially ended up getting into Inventive, and I'm happy to get into the story of how we landed up at, the RFP Automation space. That's a fascinating story in itself. But, that's that's kind of what my story has been. And just one last thing I wanted to add. Personally, I feel that I'm kind of a person who like to challenge myself and try out a lot of new things. And the whole idea about building something valuable that customers absolutely love, was something that really intrigued me and got me back into the early stage ecosystem. [00:06:03] Adil Saleh: Very inspiring. In terms of, like, the way you did of course, when when you're working at Google at AI, it's so hard to compartmentalize your ideas. You know, ideas that you really can build a software or any product or service. You know, it's it's hard when you're doing it. It's so scaled. You have range of different, you know, you can say networks coming up with different ideas, and you're sitting around people that have, like, their I mean, it's not I'm sure it is. You're not gonna be the only one. There's gonna be so many people coming up with different Inventive. So it's it's hard to, stay laser focused on what you really want to do, and it becomes harder as opposed to some company that is, just in the first, like, let's say, 5 years of, their business, and they're not doing anything up to that level of scale. So now thinking of, this, like, what exactly kept you believing and and committed into, building something in in in the RFP space and in the, for for the sales teams and what was the inception of this. I wanted to say because a lot of owners, they come up and say, hey. We live with this idea. You know, we we bought a previous company. We lived this this idea for 2 years, and we didn't realize that we we want to build some platform 2 years back. But now we realized and we just skipped the job and started building product, and that's a regular story. This is this is kind of an unfiltered podcast. I don't have interest of making it, you know, monetizing it and getting ads and all that. I'm not gonna make money out of it. It's just about I need to get some unfiltered, communication that helped me and, the audience there. [00:07:34] Gaurav Nemade: Yeah. For sure. So, yeah, the the, start of Inventive, I think the story, I feel very intriguing and interesting personally. So, and I know each other through our, like, friend circles, and we got together about one and a half years back. And we aligned on a couple of, like, key principles in terms of building the start up. Pivoting from Video Generation to RFP Solutions in B2B Space [00:07:54] Gaurav Nemade: 1 is we all wanted to build something that was big and valuable in the b to b space, and that means that sometimes the first idea that you have or you start with is not the idea that you land in. As a fun fact, about I think 40 to 50% of y c companies end up pivoting within the 1st year of, starting, which is like I was just mind blown by that that fact. And so it's like the way I think about it is you, you pivot and you try out new ideas because you don't want to settle for local minima sorry, local maxima. And that's what we did. So, when we started Inventive, we were actually building a video generation platform for sales and marketing teams. So the idea was video is like talk of the town. Everywhere, people are using videos for sales, for demos, for a number of things in b to b sales. So and it's a very tedious process. So we started by evaluating what can we do there to help. And seeing that firsthand at Google, like, with large language models, multimodal models, video generation models, we saw there was a huge opportunity there. But as we were, building on like, as we were working on our thesis, we went and talked to, like, close to 50, 100 salespeople. And every time, not every time, but a lot of times when we talk to these people, this RFP problem came up again and again. People are like, oh, man. Yeah. The videos are good, but you know what? Like, I'm really struggling with these RFPs. So we started digging deeper into it, and we realized it's a huge opportunity. One, about 600 to $700,000,000,000 worth of projects get allocated by RFPs just in the US across public and private sector. These RFPs can anywhere be from 5 pages to, like, we have seen something in 300 page range, and they can have anywhere from, like, 20 questions to, we did one with 1500 questions. So these would take these salespeople, like, anywhere from hours to several months sometimes to respond to these RFPs properly. So we, like, really got deep into the problem, spoke to, like, close to 50 plus, like, proposal managers and sales leader in the space, and we had, like, strong conviction, that this is a space to be in, and there's a big problem. We also looked at a lot of incumbents in this space. And talking to their users, we realized that they are facing a lot of content management challenges. Like, managing content that can be used for generating these RFPs is such a big pain for all of them. So we decided to hone in on that particular pinpoint. Discussion on RFP Management Platform and Sales Motion [00:10:23] Gaurav Nemade: And right now, what we try to do is we want users to spend 0 minutes on managing their content to get to these RFPs. We like, our AI content manager basically takes care of that. I'm happy to go into the features of the platform more. But overall, like, we found conviction by and our story of how we got here was, like, not a straightforward path where, you know, we started this, and we had a vision to kind of do this, but it was more like, oh, oh, oh, this sounds interesting, and this is, well, like, super valuable. [00:10:52] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, you you had a lot of moments where that actually caught you off guard and they came unprecedented, and then you went in deep, and then you saw an opportunity. And and and that's that's amazing. Like, looking at, I exactly don't know how sales motion work in in that organization, but I do have an idea because, you know, when I was running a service business, we had this contract coming from the state of New Jersey, I guess. Yeah. And and we applied for it, and it it was quite a job. Like, it was so legacy as well. Like, some questions and, some of the things that we wanted we we didn't know how to do it, and then we kept researching. It took us, like, I guess, like, 5 to 6 days for for a company that small. There are only jobs to do that, and it took us a lot of time. So that's that that makes sense. So looking at, like, your customer segment, like, do you think that a lot of your customer segment, like, major portion of your customer segment is not that tech savvy? So you're gonna have a motion that is gonna be more sort of, like, you know, high touch, like, you're gonna be very white glove and you know? What what what was your initial, sales motion like outreach motion was like? How did you validate this, this problem with people, of course, handing over to the platform and and and then they delivering value. And once they perceive value, and then you you tell them, hey. This is something that you gotta be paying Gaurav, and, you can use for all of your, RFPs, and and you can use it at scale. So could you give us idea on on what what what was that motion like? [00:12:17] Gaurav Nemade: Yeah. So I think our sale, we're pretty much like a sales led company at this point of time. We have, like, our inbounds, outbounds are primarily the ways through which we are, selling the product at this point of time. I think the the buyer and the users in our case are very well aware of the problem. And in in a lot of cases, they're also using some incumbent tools. Addressable Market in Proposal Automation Software [00:12:40] Gaurav Nemade: So the good thing is, like, we don't have to educate the market. We just have to go and, like, help them solve the pain point that they are facing either with the existing tools or with their existing workflows. So, yeah, that's what has been working for us so far. [00:12:54] Adil Saleh: So it's just not too much marketing driven. It's more sales driven because they already have, realization of the problem, but they they they they don't go for the problem because they're not so number 1, they're not so tech savvy. They're not a lot of platforms doing it, or they are, like, they are too much, a lot of these organizations, sorry to mention, they are, like, more, like, dedicated more doing less with more. Yeah. So I think Yeah. [00:13:19] Gaurav Nemade: We yeah. We're we're seeing a few, like, different types of customers, like, especially if when, when we are selling into tech companies, for example, they have, their presales teams comprises of solutions consultant, sometimes, like, tech proposal managers. These guys are pretty tech savvy, and they they are able to use, like, the product really, really well. But, in slightly older school industries, for example, when somebody is going and selling to government, for example, for, very, like, you know, not so tech savvy use case, They, of course, struggle a little bit, and we have to be, like, very, like, provide them with a hand white glove service like you were talking about. [00:13:57] Adil Saleh: Okay. And just one this this question, and then we'll talk about the use cases more, dig in more. Like, I'm sorry. I didn't have enough research on top of me around this. So how much, like, altogether, what is the size of, of of, addressable market in terms of, the the the RFPs shared in the private sector only. You mentioned that in the in the in both private and the government. Like, what is the what is the addressable, market in terms of RFPs shared only with the private sector industries? [00:14:28] Gaurav Nemade: Yeah. So total, I think about, 600 to 700,000,000,000 is the projects that allocated across our like, across public and private sector. I think about 80 to 85% of that is probably government, and 60% of probably 80 to 85% of the government spend is actually in department of defense. So close to 300 to $400,000,000,000 worth of RFPs are primarily just in department of defense. And then, like, the other 10, 15% would be, like, non defense, and then the other 10, 15% would be private. Completely private. Yeah. At $700,000,000,000, I think it's still a huge huge, market generally. Huge. Yeah. Mhmm. And then in terms of their tools yeah. In terms of, like, the automation software and tools, if that was the question that you were asking, the the the the total addressable market for just RFP automation tools is somewhere between 2 to 4000000000 is what my guess is. Exploring Untapped Markets in Proposal Software Industry [00:15:24] Adil Saleh: Okay. Okay. And rest is untapped. Like, it's something that it's untapped. Like, they're not penetrating that, big like, let's say talk about CRM. Salesforce is is the is kind of first word. They're the giant. This category has this category been defined yet, or is this gonna fall under the sales? Because, I think it it should have a category with with with a market size of this big. [00:15:47] Gaurav Nemade: So, just to be clear on the market side. So, when I say 600, 700,000,000, that is the projects that allocated via RFPs. So, basically, let's say the government wants to create a bridge. The bridge would potentially cost them, let's say, $50,000,000. So that project size is about 50,000,000. But the size of the market, which helps them write the RFP responses, that is about, like, 2 to 4,000,000,000 is what I was suggesting. [00:16:16] Adil Saleh: Okay. 2 to 4000000000. Okay. That's that's still a big big number, you know, as you're thinking of type businesses. And Mhmm. Building a Gen AI First RFP Automation Platform for Tech Companies [00:16:22] Adil Saleh: I'm sure you have done all this, all these these numbers and all, and you know how many of these approximately are the technical businesses that you can target really, really fast. And it looks like looking at your competition. Like, as you mentioned, you have, like, you're competing with a bunch of tools. How they're approaching, like, in terms of go to market at scale. I I I I know one of it I mentioned, and I think, you know, they are trying to do some sort of thing, and, you know, of course, they have, like, both enterprise size, midsize, and, SMB size, segments too. So thinking of next 2 to 3 years, how you're planning it out? [00:16:58] Gaurav Nemade: Yeah. So I think we, I'll just quickly get into what we are doing, and then I can jump into the the what the go to market motion because that might make more sense just to, from a understanding perspective. So, as a product, I think we're building, like, a Gen AI First RFP automation platform. And there are 3 key benefits or 3 key ways we are building this platform, which we are convicted on. The first is providing automated responses for the questions that are asked in the proposals. So right now, like I said, there could be anywhere from 50 to 1500 questions in an RFP, and that can take sometimes days, sometimes weeks for companies to just get, like, a given response. So we help them get automated responses within, like, 1st 15 minutes of using the product. The second is one of the biggest challenges the people in, in the space face is just access to the right information. A lot of times, either they're these let's say, they are using an existing tool, that tool doesn't have that information, and they have to go chase a subject matter expert to add that information even if that information exists somewhere in the organization. So what we do is we integrate with a lot of their internal knowledge sources, ingest a lot of data into, like, Inventive. And then now we take care of how we want to use that information for responding to the RFPs. This is a very complex AI problem to solve, like a, modeling problem and, like, a AI problem to solve. So what our goal is that the user should spend 0 minutes in managing content in their content library. So we have a AI content manager and a very powerful knowledge hub, that we provide to the users. And then the third thing is that we believe that, there is a significant opportunity to enable competitive advantage in the RFP process with the help of something called AI agents. So, for example, we have built a competitor research agent where it like, you just give your competitor name. It will go out. It'll do a lot of, like, research on the competitor from their website, blogs, marketing, news, blah blah blah. And then give you, like, a holistic view of how you can potentially frame your response to a question so you have an upper hand on the that particular RFP that you're doing. So, those are kind of, like, the high level pieces that we [00:19:14] Adil Saleh: You call them Copilot. Right? [00:19:16] Gaurav Nemade: Yes. So the Copilot is, like, the overall product. And then within Copilot, you have, like, agents different agents that you can use for different Like, a competitor research agent. You have a brainstorming agent. You have a workflow agent and so on. So the the value additions for the users. And, because we are a very tech forward product at this point of time, our go to market is focused mostly on tech companies. Discussion on Onboarding Strategies for Mid-Market Tech Companies [00:19:41] Gaurav Nemade: So our target is, like, mid market tech companies at this point of time that are really looking to get that competitive edge, and, you know, like, drive that efficiency within their organizations at this point of time. And I think once we get to that, we will expand our segment and use cases. [00:19:59] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. You mentioned, about about the onboarding of, you know, it's really hard to, you know, get the right question in place for your customers. That's a problem. And I was also thinking, set up differently, like, how you're trying to set up onboarding for, for a lot of these, you know, customers in the tech segment. These onboarding and time to value is gonna be the biggest thing. Like, how fast you deliver value, your product delivers value. So do you did you take any kind of initiatives? I'm I'm not saying, like, it should be set for and all, but, any anything, like, you're trying to, you know, make sure you minimize the time to value as much as possible? [00:20:40] Gaurav Nemade: Yeah. I think we do, so we do a couple of things. The first one is, like, when we onboard a company, we do, like, a workshop where we walk them through what are the key features and how do we get them set up, like, really, really quickly. So right now, we are all, like, very white glove and trying to, you know, be as close to the customers as possible. So that is 1. Building a Strong Customer Success Team Post YC [00:21:00] Gaurav Nemade: Of course, we do a lot of, like, videos. We use a lot of Loom videos to just educate customers around the product, what's going on. And then we also do, like, a lot of education stuff within the product itself. So, like, prompting and guiding when what user needs to do and so on. But you're absolutely right. Like, getting to that hero journey as quickly as possible is where the value lies, and that's what our goal is usually within the pilots. [00:21:25] Adil Saleh: Cool. Cool. Cool. And you're sitting in the of course, just in the 1st 2 years, like, thinking about how you wanna expand the team. Right? Because when we do research, like, what we first thing do, like, is a team. What kind of team that they have? Do they have customer success managers, account executives, account managers, solution architects, implementation managers, onboarding message. This gives an idea on the motion side of things, like post sales motion, which is what we, we talk a lot about. And, as you mentioned, like, it is something that, that is something that you gotta be investing more once you understand the customer journeys. And, of course, you know, getting too closer to the product market bit. I was just, relating to a blog, written by, Jesse Lemkin just a few days ago that you can you can even lose, the product market fit and and get it all over again. So it's it's just about it's not a moment. It's it's it's just the journey that you need to catch up every single time, you know, and and and you you gotta chase it every time. So now thinking of a very, very strong team, I know that, you guys are, you know, real industry veterans, all 3 cofounders. How much of an impact did did it make, you know, going into YC? Lessons learned from Y Combinator and the strength of having a strong co-founding team [00:22:36] Gaurav Nemade: So, yeah, just a note on the cofounders before I jump into the YC. Y c. So you're absolutely right. I think, we have an incredible team at hand. And I spent a lot of time in the space. Before we started Inventive, I was at Google AI Brain, like I mentioned. And Vishak is a researcher in AI from Stanford. He actually has a book on deep learning as well. So very hardcore in terms of machine learning. And Duran was the CEO. Duran, had a company before this in health care analytics where they stored data for north of 100,000,000 patients. So he's built, like, systems that can scale. And, of course, like, he sold the company to, Roche, and, there, he did like, his team did a bunch of RFPs. So he had, like, firsthand experience with this problem as well. Getting into IC was, very interesting. I think, the maybe 2 or 3 core pieces of nuggets that at least I personally took away from there is, like, a start up strategy do a lot of fancy things when they start. Like, they want to do x and they want to do y. And y c has this golden advice, which every time I struggle with focus, I go back to that advice. And that is, like, talk to users and build product. It's, like, as simple as that. Like, just have a thesis, talk to users, and build product. Like, every time I'm confused, I just go back to that, that that that golden saying, basically. The other piece I think that YC does incredibly well is just getting the right set of peers. So, like, right now, I have, like, phone numbers of so many incredible founders on my phone. So anytime I'm struggling with a problem, like, dude, I'm struggling with this on inbound. Like, how did you guys do it? And people are willing to take your calls, respond to your messages, help you out. So that community is, like, really something that propels you, because the name of the start up game is learning. Right? The faster you learn about users, faster you learn about how to do things, you move fast. So I think, yeah, across those 2, YC has been, like, incredibly helpful, and I really look to the come look forward to, like, keeping being in the community and, you know, learning from them. Discussion on Product Vision and Entrepreneurship Journey with Gaurav Nemade [00:24:45] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. Yes. And as you mentioned that getting the right peer group, relevant peer group, that's important to the people that have done something that you're trying to do, right. You know? So that that that kind of people that that gonna help you and and and and just like network there. Like, they are look alike audiences, people that are solving different problems, come from different cultures, different background, but they are under one roof. They are trying to help each other. So one way or another, you find a problem, there's gonna be one person within that network that has solved that problem a month month ago or maybe, in the past. And then maybe they're still discovering the same thing, and you'll get some nuggets, out of out of that, you know, discovery that they found. So perfect. Like, looking at, you know, your journey, yourself, like, I'm just projecting it on you as a chief product officer. How do you see the product wise, going forward? I'm sure there is gonna be pivots. There's gonna be customers that are gonna help you learn, help you shape the product enhancements, and all of that. But a longer view of the product vision, I'm sure, as a CPO, what do you think, is that gonna be? And and just maybe a simplest way, maybe it can change, but at this point of time, what do you think it is? For sure. [00:25:56] Gaurav Nemade: Yeah. No. I think I think we have, like, really strong conviction on this. So, as we've been like I mentioned, we've spoken to, like, lot of sales leaders and, people in the presales teams as well. One of the biggest challenges that they face is this whole idea of getting the right content to create, anything from sales enablement content to responding to RFPs to, like, training people to, like like, there's just so much marketing. There's just so much content that gets created to enable sales, teams, essentially. And so the mission that we have set for ourselves is that we want to be able to leverage all of the content that company has and build intelligence that helps the sales teams win deals. So part of that could be, like, RFP automation, for example. Where we wanna get to once we have nailed this area essentially is becoming like a platform for sales team. So building intelligence for the presales teams, and enabling use cases from sales enablement to, like, marketing content creation. Anything that that that can help in driving the intelligence for, winning these deals. So that's kind of where the long term goal is for us at this point of time. And I think we feel very confident with the technology that, Vishak and team are building, which is content management piece is incredibly hard, where there's just so much content within the organization, organizing it in the right way, making sure just you use the fresh content and most relevant content to create these pieces is, like, an incredibly hard problem. And I I feel that we are, we're doing a good job in in solving that. [00:27:30] Adil Saleh: Yeah. And and I'm thinking it up, like, thinking of it as, like, you are just in the 1st 2 years of revenue. You have, like, handful of customer. You don't have a lot of data. You do machine learning and all those, you know, you had all the intelligence. You can train your own models and all, if you have that big of, data size or maybe you have patterns that are unique enough that you can train as per my understanding on on on on this. But, you guys know better. So that's that's what makes it part one of the reasons. Right? [00:27:57] Gaurav Nemade: Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, building a company is a journey, but I it's it's it's it's more about, do you have conviction, and do you have, like, the right thesis? And based on what you've seen in the last one and a half, 2 years, we feel that we are in the absolutely right direction. So, hopefully, we we continue, yeah, kicking some ass. [00:28:19] Adil Saleh: I also I also love the way, the founder of NVIDIA, he puts up. He says, like, if if an entrepreneur or a founder knows that how hard it's gonna be, he will quit. So he's putting a bet on, like it's putting the bet on uncertainty and and and taking a page. Things will get better. So I gotta push a little more, a little more next day, a little more next day, and that's, the life of a founder is. So you gotta make sure you be comfortable with, the discomfort and, you know, you solve the hard problems, if not the impossible. So I really appreciate your time, Gaurav, for all this talk, and I got to learn from that about about not just about, about, Inventive. There's a lot on the website. I know it's not that, you're not so marketing heavy. You're more sales heavy, but, there's enough knowledge, on the website where I got to learn how you're individually trying to, play your part and make an impact. And, with this such a background, it was pleasure, meeting you today, and I'm sure the audience listening to this, would definitely love this episode. [00:29:18] Gaurav Nemade: Awesome. Thanks a lot for having me, Adil. [00:29:20] Adil Saleh: Yeah. Love that. Likewise. Have a good rest of your day, brother.