Ajinkya Nene 0:00 We only care about the things that matter. Come up with that list of like one or two things like if these happen, this company does great. Nothing else matters.
Taylor Kenerson 0:12 Welcome to the Hyperengage podcast. We are so happy to have you along our journey. Here we uncover bits of knowledge from some of the greatest minds in tech. We unearth, the hows, whys, and whats that drive the tech of today. Welcome to the movement.
Adil Saleh 0:31 Hey, greetings, everybody. This is Adil from Hyperengage Podcast, I have my co-host Taylor Kenerson. She’s looking beautiful today, by the way. And Ajinkya is- he’s some guy that we’ve just recently got to know about their platform as well, he’s a co-founder of
Trellus.ai, it is an AI-powered coaching prompt generator for sales representative sales teams STRs. And we’ll learn more about what they do. Thank you very much. Thank you for taking the time.
Ajinkya Nene 1:00 The thing that everyone talks about other areas just like startup startup startups, right. It’s like a normalized thing for when you’re growing up. And so, for me, it was never a strange decision to ever want to start a company or sort of do my own thing like that was common sense.
Taylor Kenerson 1:14 Or strange that you went into the-
Ajinkya Nene 1:16 Exactly, I mean, the funny story is right, like out of college, I ended up going to McKinsey for a bit. My parents were actually like, against the decision for what it’s worth. Like it’s flipped for when you talk to other folks like my parents were like, No, why would you not go to like a software company? Why would you not do tech. And so for me, it was actually to go against the grain was to go into consulting and try corporate. And I quickly learned, like, what corporate really was right. Like, I think a lot of corporate is around managing expectations, managing upwards and sort of, you don’t really care too much about is this project gonna realize a ton of value, it’s more on like, is everyone going to feel like I am realizing a ton of value, right, which are sort of two different things. And I personally wasn’t super energized or excited by the concept of let me do all this, like work that makes people think I’m doing useful work instead of just, you know, go and do useful work in the first place. And yeah, it was just like a thing I’ve always wanted to do. I think I got my taste of corporate and was like, Cool. I know for sure that I want to do startups, and I’ve tried the other thing. And so yeah, what went along with the journey. And here I am today. But that was kind of the impetus for why I decided to do it.
Taylor Kenerson 2:32 What’s really amazing is how quickly you were able to become aware of you knew you wanted to get you know, an experience in the corporate world, which is awesome, you did that. And you quickly realize what you started to not like and you pivoted immediately off of that. And now dive into like, where you are now how you met your co founders. So how you met your other partner? How that you know, how the idea came to be? What, what were your first steps, like, what do you even do when you have an idea?
Ajinkya Nene 2:59 Yeah, yeah, so I think I almost like did it in the reverse way, which is, you know, I don’t give this advice to anyone, which is like, decide to start a company and then figure out the idea around which you’re gonna build your company, I think, you know, like nine out of 10 times, that’s like a route for failure, and like, a route for experiencing a ton of pain. But I was just sort of, like adamant. I’m like, No, I’ll figure it out. Like, this will be a good thing. So. So this is like November of 2021 or so. I’m like, looking for co founders. There was a whole journey there. Like lots of you know, but I think the biggest thing is like, look for your network.
Taylor Kenerson 3:34 I was gonna say what goes into like looking for a co founder, like you initially go to your friends and like, Hey, did you want to start a company? Like, how does that dynamic play out for people that are like, Oh, my God, I have a great idea. But I know I can’t do it alone.
Ajinkya Nene 3:47 Yep. So this is what like the advice I’ll give: the biggest thing you should be looking for is first like, of course, your friend network and folks you’ve worked with before, it’s just easier to like, start off with a lot of trust. And, you know, like, you know, each other’s working styles, you know, like, what folks care about and what they’re incentivized by. But, you know, if you can’t find that, and a lot of folks can’t find that effectively. Your second order is like friends of friends, folks that like your friends can like vet like, hey, that this person’s good. They like know what they’re doing. They’re have their like, head straight on their shoulders, and like, they’re not gonna go off like the deep end. So that’s sort of like the first filter, you’re like, looking to hear that looking to confirm that. And then the second part is really around aligning incentives. And so what I mean by that is a lot of folks who tend to go into the startup world, they have really just different risk profiles. So like, for example, IT folks in consulting that were in my network, they tend to be very risk averse, where they’re really looking for like that stable route towards you know, making a couple 100k a year and like, I mean, it’s a totally great route and like, get to a great life. But like doing a startup where you’re gonna get basically paid $0 And like, you know, you have no idea of this thing is gonna be worth anything. Give them like five years. Yeah, just like a very different risk, taking-
Taylor Kenerson 5:03 Ultimate risk.
Ajinkya Nene 5:04 Exactly. It’s just like a very different risk profile. And so the second thing is like, you need to understand that the person you’re working with has the same risk profile as you, right. Like, if they’re only interested in, hey, this is gonna be a one year adventure for me. And then like, if it’s too risky, and like, I still can’t figure out, like, I’m gonna go ship, ship off back to corporate, like, that’s just not gonna work, because they’re just like, never gonna be as incentivized or motivated as you. And so that was like, number two, like trying to, you know, and there’s like, all sorts of articles online about like, questions, you should ask questions you should explore around, figuring out that risk profile. And then the third thing specifically for me, it was, I was also looking for, you know, someone who wanted to found more of a technical company that would rely on like AI solutions. So just that was just like, my strength and like, the stuff that I knew, and like, the stuff that I was personally excited by. And so, you know, like, I was open to the realm of ideas, but like, I was not going to be the person who started this, like, very specific SaaS workflow company that does like this really esoteric workflow, I get it just like not the thing that would energize me. And so like, having someone who wants to go down the same route, so it’s important. But yeah, other than that, like we ended up, I ended up like meeting, my current co founder through one of my best friends from college, who used to work with my current co founder. And so that was like, the vetting where he was like, yeah, he knows what he’s doing. Like, he’s extremely sharp, like, and that was the end of it. Yeah.
Adil Saleh 6:33 Oh, great, amazing, you know, it becomes challenging at times as well, you know, you you, you need to make sure that they are equally, not just incentivized, but also motivated. You know, knowing the risk and knowing this roller coaster ride ups, you know, a tech company starting up with, you know, doing a whole bunch of different things alone, sometimes a lot of times you fail, you’re not gonna get outcome for longer period of times. So it is very, very hard. So how did did you actually align with with your co founder? Who was really, really important? That was a very important role for your business?
Ajinkya Nene 7:08 Yep. So I think the biggest thing was, we were it was the type of company we wanted to found, right. So like different types of companies that you can found have different types of risks. And like, the easy overlay is, if you’re building in a new market, like totally unproven, and it requires like, 100 miracles for this company to work, like, and if it does work, like you know, the company’s worth $100 billion. That’s an extremely different type of risk than like building a b2b SaaS, where it’s like, hey, kind of a proven market. You know, this is like the innovative turn, you’re taking on it. Like there is like sizeable risk, but like risk, you can sort of estimate in your head. So we were both kind of on that second camp, honestly, like we were, I mean, you love to think of like, Oh, I’m going to take this, like crazy consumer app swing like that, you know, blows up to billions of daily active users. But But I think like, at the end of the day, those types of things, like you only read in the media of like, when they do work out, you don’t read when it doesn’t. And like 99.9% of people, it’s not working out. So you’re, like, insane confidence and belief that like, that’s the thing you’re destined to build, if like, that’s the swing you’re going for, then I didn’t have any, like, conviction videos like that, and neither did my co founder. And so we were a lot more on like, okay, more of a hedge risk. We think there’s a market that’s like, already been proven. And like, these are like, the ways we are like, adapt to building like the best solution for this specific spin on it.
Adil Saleh 8:37 Because we, we spoke to leadership at Gong as well, of course, they’re also I think, the sales teams with intelligence with, with, of course, training and management, a lot of that. And, of course, that’s a long journey, like 10 years long journey that he explained, and starting off with becomes really hard to penetrate even with with a very good, you know, sound addressable market, and the good team and technology. So who decided to go for the Y Combinator? Like, why did you decide that? Because there’s loads more like Techstars, chemists, you can bootstrap, you get a lot of folks that can Angel invest into, into you, whatever you believe you can sell them, you know, so yeah, what was the reason behind?
Ajinkya Nene 9:21 Yeah, I mean, I think like, from the side of financials, right, like, we were both first time founders. The thing that yc is, like, paid off over and over again, is purely like the network of founders that you get access to. Right. That’s invaluable. And there’s a couple of reasons one for that like one like you get a market you can go and sell into like YC companies tend to like use YC company tools. And so you have like immediate access to a market just that like that will be okay trying like an extremely bad prototype like that is very hard to get elsewhere. You can probably get that from Techstars and all those other communities as well. But like, that is like a place to yc is uniquely situated among the accelerators. Second is right, like, you’re gonna face a ton of challenges when you’re a founder in terms of nothing’s working, you’re gonna have to pivot. And folks who have done that before, and like, they can tell you, hey, I’ll be fine, just like get through this and just like keep working hard. That’s like those little things are actually like incredibly important for keeping you on track and making sure you continue on with your founder journey. And so those those two things like for us were actually very important, like in terms of motivation and getting a community around us. And yeah, I think also, like the YC label does not hurt. It’s generally like good, right? When you want to recruit for your company, when you want to raise more capital, when you want to go and sell your product and get more users, like folks are more interested in working yet, just because like the, the name has a history to it. And so, yeah, I think it was a pretty good reason for us. I think for like, second or third time founders for sure. Like, if you already have your network, you’ve already have your brand and everything. Like, it’s probably not as raw, it may be not as relevant. But for us, it was.
Taylor Kenerson 11:00 Yeah, that’s absolutely. That’s so insightful, too. I’m so glad you touched on the support aspect of things. And sometimes, you know, people forget that when you’re building a company, there are infinite layers that go into this ecosystem of, you know, oh, I have a great idea, like then building a team around that and thinking about all the different functions that go into just like taking that idea. And getting to like, step one is just like a tremendous like mountain and uphill climb can be. So can you dive into like how either YC helped or like what your idea phase look like? Like, what were the initial conversations? How did it shift or pivot? How did you become aware of some of these challenges? And then what your first like steps look like?
Ajinkya Nene 11:45 For sure. So I think the interesting point is like, in SaaS, specifically, it’s hard to like, come up with good ideas, if you don’t have domain expertise, and we did not have domain expertise in like, most functions of SaaS, right, like, most of our careers have been, like, specifically in engineering or like building like very specific engineering tools. And so, like, when it came to like, Hey, we should build for this specific function versus this function. Like, we were honestly, like, coming up with ideas out of thin air, like, oh, this could be like a crazy idea if like, you know, our first idea I’ll tell you was, if an AI could tell you like, how pissed off your boss will be based off the Slack message you said, you know, because like, we were like, Yeah, like that, you know, you’re not sure if you should send this message or not, because you may piss off someone, like, we’ll have a piss off meter, and then they’ll, like, tell you something. We thought it was a great idea. We tried selling it, we tried building it. And, you know, it was just like, there’s not a real real problem that companies will pay for. And it’s also kind of a weird solution to it. And yeah, just to take it back to your original point of like, the whole idea of pivot phase, the thing that YC taught us really well was, you know, if you have an idea, just like kind of build, like, the smallest version really quickly. And it’s like, put it out in someone’s hand. Like, an idea doesn’t mean anything, it’s like all about execution. And so just like, come up with an idea, put it out in someone’s hand. And like action begets basically information, like that’s like, a quote we would sort of live by and so you like learn, right? Like, as soon as we put that out, people were like, This is weird. Like, I don’t really need this and really cool. Like, you know, there is some fear around communication, but like, This doesn’t feel right. And so like that actually, path led us to okay, it seems like people are interested in opening, discussing ideas around, you know, AI, helping them improve communication, but like, this is like totally the wrong form factor. And so then we tried everything else for like a customer support, probably something there. So we like messaged a bunch people on LinkedIn, we’re like, hey, well, would you want if like, we could automate this part of customer support? And I think we quickly realized no, there’s like 1000 solutions that do this. Like we’re not like the first on this team that like thought of this, like brilliant idea. And you never will be for what it’s worth generally but like, we were just like, not convinced by the opportunity this or like, okay, cool. Let’s go to Sales. Like it’s a revenue generating function, let’s find something there. And then it was just kind of like a sequence of steps where we were like, Okay, let’s start with Zoom calls. Maybe let’s like try to improve communication on Zoom. It felt awkward, it was like not a real good foreign factor. And then we learned about like cold calling and dials and we were like, I think we found it this sort of work this sort of makes sense. And then we just kind of you know, kept shipping product and kept learning
Taylor Kenerson 14:28 Unpack a little bit for us what you mean by like, improving this communication digitally. So you saw like on zoom that there was this missing link? And then what like what is it about this communication? How How did you see it can be better or improved? And what were these problems?
Ajinkya Nene 14:44 Yeah, so So I kind of take it back to like two things, right? Like one like, all three of us like 20 years ago or like even probably 10-15 years ago. We would not be having this conversation on Zoom like we likely would be in person like sitting next to each other if we were doing a podcast like This is just like not, this is like now this is the normal way people work, like the normal way people work is to not sit in the same room together. And it is to talk over digital communication channels. Right. So that’s like number one. And so what that means is you’ve like, for the first time in history, the ability to like, intercept these communications in real time, and change what someone is saying or how they’re saying it. So that like, it can lead to a better outcome, right? Like, think about how many times even in in your own lives, right, like you’ve sent a message during work, or said something on a zoom call, where you’re like, oh, I should probably just like, shut up, like not said anything, or I should have said something else. Right? Like, there’s so many so many situations like that. And so, so for us, it was like fairly, I think we’re, we feel it’s fairly obvious that at some point, there’s going to be some level of AI, like in all our communication medium that sort of guides you on, like, what is the right thing to say, especially in like a professional environment? We were convinced of that. And so it was more of like, finding where that thing happens first for us. And like, we think you’ll start off in sales more effectively. Because that’s like, you know, salespeople are fine with having their conversations recorded, analyze, like any edges, good edge, and like, essentially sales. And so yeah, that was kind of the the original idea, such and then,
Taylor Kenerson 16:14 What was the first like, then you had this idea? And then you talk about shipping fast? And like getting that constant feedback loop? What was like those first couple of ships? And how did you then pivot from there? And what was and then also, how did you create this feedback loop where you were able to get direct feedback, and also like, execute, because that is a huge gap in founders to, you know, we know you have to ship and build, but how do you actually create that loop that drives that?
Ajinkya Nene 16:43 Yep, for sure. So I think there’s a couple of things here, right, like in terms of shipping the initial product, you can probably come up with like two or three features that like showcase the potential of your thing. Still, let me take an example. When we start, when we tried the Zoom environment, it was like, we’ll add a zoom bot to this meeting, the you go to a web page, and then like that you sign in on like, based off who you are in the Zoom environment. And then it will tell you coaching, like it’ll flash it on your screen. It’s like a horrible user experience. But like, it gets to the point of, you know, like, it’ll tell you, you’re speaking too fast, or like speaking for too long, or like, Hey, you should say this or say that. And we like hard coded a bunch of things, right? It wasn’t like super smart. It was like hard coded. Like it wasn’t AI, it was just like the concept was there. And so we could like test is the concept interesting. And then like how product feedback works, right? Like you just go get folks to use it, watch them use it. And you should have like an opinionated feeling of like, well, what should the product look like, especially as a founder in the early days, like a user is not going to tell you like a user may tell you oh, I want it like this. I want it like that. But you should just like come in with like a fairly strong opinion is my, my like, judge on it. Yeah. And then like, have like,
Adil Saleh 17:53 It becomes easier when you have the domain expertise, let’s say a lot of b2b platforms in the Customer Success space, where digital CS teams, the founders, co founders, they are more from the from the same background, they’ve been working Intercom working in different companies as CS leaders. And now they know how exactly the workflow the experience, like product experience, play out for the users. But it comes harder, like for people, a lot of people that don’t have the domain expertise, like hands on, they haven’t used it, they haven’t lived with that problem. And looking at the SaaS experience of it. So how do you see that? How challenging was it?
Ajinkya Nene 18:31 It was pretty shocking. I mean, like, the biggest answer is you just have to have like 10x more conversations than the other person. Like this is actually where I like made a lot of mistakes early on, where I believed okay to validate and test an idea I should like, shoot across like 500 LinkedIn messages, trying to get feedback and stuff maybe of those, like, you’ll get like 10-15 meetings, and then those people will talk to you. The real answer is you should like message like 5000 people, and like, get like 100 Plus meetings on the calendar. And like, listen to each of those people and like meeting 30 or 40, you’re probably not going to learn anything new. At that point, you probably know the workflow. What you’re really testing beyond meeting 30 and 40 is like, okay, like I actually can predict like what this person is gonna say next because like, I just have, like deep intuition now of like, what’s going on? And that’s sort of my answer to the question. It’s like, if you come at a disadvantage in a space, your answers to just like, talk to like 1000 More people than like, another person has to because they’ve already like done the work.
Adil Saleh 19:33 10x more doors.
Ajinkya Nene 19:36 Exactly, exactly. And like that’s just like a thing you have to sort of sock up and do and it like sucks. Because what you will quickly learn is like most people have just it makes sense. Like most people are like busy in their day to days. They’re like don’t want to really talk to like random people on the internet often. But there are and I found this surprising a surprising number of people who are open to doing it. I just like talking to random founders on the internet and helping them out like there are super nice people that like allow you to get started. And like that is all you need.
Adil Saleh 20:04 There’s a whole BPO industry working on that, by the way, like on average five to six calls to the American average American citizen, they get on daily basis, like calls from overseas calls from, from the States. And they’re, they’re talking like mortgage, it’s a big industry, auto insurance, medical care, in life insurance, a lot of these so, you know, talking about like, post launch journey, I’m sure you’re working hard, where’s the product market fit. And of course, you know, trading making shipping the product better based on the feedback, working closely with the product team, tech team, customer facing team is pretty much hands on with, with customers starting up, I’m so sure that you must have, you know, figured out one segment to go really, really widen, it can be a BPO industry, it can be you know, recruitment space, they have a lot of big agencies, they have autodialers. And they have all their databases, content management, inside their own custom systems, there are so many loads of them open source as well, they are building on top of it. Go high level is one of the one of the systems that I know of. So what industry do you think at this point of time?
Ajinkya Nene 21:11 Yeah, for sure. So right now, and this can change, like honestly on like a couple of weeks basis. But right now we generally target like Series B plus, like B2B SaaS companies. Those generally are where models do best in terms of, you know, like, we focus on their cold callers, and like the scripts that they care about. And also, we integrate very well with the tech stacks that they’re used to using. So these are all the and the reason for that is like, as you mentioned, like all these BPOs, and all these other sort of dial Heavy Industries, they all use very custom tech stacks. Like, it’s actually pretty crazy. Like, I think there’s like hundreds of dialers out there that they’ll all use or it’s in house like it’s super custom based. And so, as a founder, you don’t really have the ability to like go and integrate 100 platforms, right? It’s just like, not something you want to go and maintain. And you want to you want to go and like integrate like three platforms and get like hundreds of folks to go and use your platform. And so for us, like b2b SaaS companies tend to use like, Outreach SalesLoft or, and there’s like one or two other dialers, like, if you integrate like those five, you basically capture like 80 90% of like b2b SaaS folks, and like, what dialers they use? And so for us, like, that was like a strategic decision we made to go there, eventually, we will probably go towards the BPOs. Because they just have higher volumes. And like, they probably have higher ROI, because they have higher volumes on our sort of software. But like we’re just not there yet.
Adil Saleh 22:41 Cool. Cool. Thank you very much for clarifying that. Because I was thinking you call by to give because I’ve been a salesperson, back in two years when I started too. So I see this feeling pretty good, because now the same company is using Gong and platform- They’re trying to custom integrate Gong too, they have a big structure so you know like, down the road you can absolutely do that. So you’re working closely with SDRs and account managers and account executives. Is that right?
Ajinkya Nene 23:05 Yeah.
Adil Saleh 23:06 So what’s the flow for them, like if I’m an account manager or account executive, I have like 10 Customers who look after doing the cadences, QBRs. Or they have like one script, like do you have to feed it inside your platform, how does that-?
Ajinkya Nene 23:17 Yeah, yeah. So generally, I guess to be a little more clear, we generally focus on SDRs and BDRs. So like a little earlier than the account management/AE position. And they tend to have basically a prospect area or prospect list that they go after. And they’re going to dial say, on the order of 50 phone numbers a day. And so it’s a little different from like the account management side where an account manager has 10 customers that they’re in charge of, they know them well. And like for them, like coaching on a dial is not as necessary. Because if you have a relationship with the person, right, like, you don’t need to be told, like, hey, phrase it in this way, like you may get a better return. Like, you know, it’s sort of like, it’s just like the order of business and like how it’s done. Instead, we focus on like SDRs BDRs. And like folks who were less like cold calling, like hundreds of people a week. And so that’s that’s sort of where we live. And in terms of like how they use the system, we basically provide like a lot of the coaching out of the box, because the beauty of cold calls is no matter what you’re selling, like a cold call tends to look the same, which is like, can I have like five seconds of your time? Tell you what I’m talking about? Yeah, can you take a meeting with my account executive like that is the structure of a great cold call, like a cold call never ends? And like, here’s the pricing of the SaaS package, can you give me like, can you take this order form like it’s just not going to get there? And so like because of that we can like coach a lot of things out of the box, essentially.
Adil Saleh 24:41 Cool. Cool. So and you’re already integrated. Like you’re like you’re working where they’re working like inside their textbook.
Ajinkya Nene 24:47 Exactly, exactly. So they don’t even have to lift a finger. They just we actually work as a Chrome extension. They add our Chrome extension, and then whenever they place a dial, we will just pop up automatically for them.
Taylor Kenerson 24:58 What made you do the Chrome extension?
Ajinkya Nene 25:00 Yeah. So so it’s actually a pretty big thing. It, it’s because of like how the dialers work. So they’re all browser based. And the Chrome extension sort of gives us easy access to like, everything we care about in the browser. Plus, like accessing the real time audio streams. The issue with doing it say like through actual integration with the platform, like SalesLoft, Outreach, is, it’s, you know, it builds a lot of integration work, when you have to add a new dialer, like you have to get really specific with like, all the different API calls, and like making sure that they work. But like, if you have a Chrome extension, like he just like, bypass all their integrations, and like their marketplaces, and like, just work, and like, no one has to do anything. It’s like a five second integration. And so it’s kind of great.
Adil Saleh 25:45 Yeah, it’s similar to a lot of, you know, customer facing platforms. They have many system integrations back inside their sales force inside of their CRM did all of that. Great. Great. So what does like, of course, you have acquired handful of customers right now. You know, a decent funding round. Have you ever raised funding as yet?
Ajinkya Nene 26:05 Yeah. So we we’ve done like, basically a small precede after yc.
Adil Saleh 26:10 Great, great. So of course, you’re gonna burn it for around six to 12 months? So what does your GTM framework look like?
Ajinkya Nene 26:18 Yeah, so right now we’re basically looking to, we’re sitting around like 450 SDRs, using Trellus like, every day, now, we’re sort of trying to, like grow that fast to like, get to like the 1000s. At that point, will sort of have like large scales of volume and data flowing through the system where we can really get effective ML models around like cold calls. And sort of just like, be the best in class there. And so that’s, that’s like our six month like, get more SDRs. And videos using the system, make the ML models better. And like if we can execute on both of those will win. And so like, that’s like, the split focus of the company is like, my co founder focuses on the ML models, I focus on like getting more SDRs BDRs. And like, hopefully, both of us succeed, and then good things happen for the company.
Adil Saleh 27:03 Right, great. So Craig is going to be working on the infrastructure side on the on training the these data models, all the data that you- Oh, great, great, great. There’s another tech company,
involve.ai, they’re doing a similar job for Customer Success teams data, they’re basically getting data in bulk, like in raw form. And they’re, they’re training those models in house, building all those curious machine learning. That’s, that’s the best way to do it. Because just like opening the door now, for the next six months, they’re, you know, generating these millions of data sets and house. So I have a friend that works for opening. And they’re doing codes and all of that at the big end. And they were very, very large scale, working spending their mornings with stuff. So what is that? One advice, because now this series, this entire new series that we started, from last week, we got founder of June, we got a bunch of other Y Combinator startups. And we are featuring these stories to help the startups and also enable the startups absorb with different resources that we have on the stage from different platforms that we, you know, be featured. So what is that? What advice did you have for any company as small as two people banging their head around in one single room doing the coding and other doing the marketing? What is that one advice that you want to give that founder starting out? Getting in the SaaS business?
Ajinkya Nene 28:28 Yeah, I think it’s basically only care about the things that matter, right? So and the reason that’s like, pretty good advice, generally, that I found is you didn’t come up with like 100 things that like are on your plate, like, oh, I need to do this compliance thing, I need to do this, like this filing, I need to like, email this like, investor, keep them updated. Like there’s like 100 things you could like, potentially put on your list that like each sound important. And you’re gonna go crazy if you do that, and you’re gonna get stressed and like, it’s not going to work. Like instead be like, Okay, these are like, this company only works if like these two things happen, like, come come up with that list of like, one or two things like, if these happen, this company does great. Nothing else matters, like, absolutely fine. And so like, figure out what one of those two things are for your company. And then just like, make sure all your like brain power is just focused there. And then when your brain is fried, do like the silly work. Like that is like my advice. Like don’t ever focus like your energy on like silly work. When you’re productive. Like for example, when you’re super productive, you should not be doing like payroll things or compliance things you should be doing those things. And this is like, probably bad advice in a general way, you may get into like regulatory like, you should like make sure that things are squared up. But like that’s not where your energy should ever be focused. You should not be doing the motions of a company just like focus on like, what your critical-
Adil Saleh 29:47 Your high value tasks, and you should know what foods you need to serve on the table and what you need. Now, that’s more important than anything that you need three months later. Exact same thing that we spoke with Enzo about, as well. He is like, this is one of the things that Michael speaks a lot to like Michael Siebel and Dalton, these folks that, you know, vision is not always so important when you are trying to build something from scratch. It is so important for you to of course, you got to be married to the vision, but you don’t have to go so deep in the eyes every single day. It’s not needed. What’s needed is what you need today. So that’s super important. Great. It was really good advice. Ajinkya it was really nice having you today. And we look forward to having more of these stories and look forward to getting back again, maybe in a few weeks or months. Because we we get like more eyeballs into the continent. People definitely request more platforms to come over and over and have multiple learnings and you know, different questions or different segment of discussion points to come on.
Ajinkya Nene 30:53 Yeah, no, this was great and excited to have done it. Appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Taylor Kenerson 30:58 Have a beautiful day. We’ll talk to you soon.
Adil Saleh 31:02 Thank you so very much for staying with us on the episode. Please leave your feedback at
adil@hyperengage.io, we definitely need it. We will see you next time and another guest on the stage with some concrete tips on how to operate better as a Customer Success leader and how you can empower engagements with some building some meaningful relationships. We qualify people for the episode just to make sure we bring the value to the listeners. Do reach us out if you want to refer any CS leader. Until next time, goodbye and have a good rest of your day.
