Clay Chose Three Rules Early, and AI Arrived Fast Enough to Use Them
The sales software company was already growing before ChatGPT, built on three assumptions and set up to use AI.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478]In 2022, Kareem Amin, the co-founder and chief executive of Clay, a software company for sales teams, decided to get narrower.
Clay would target go-to-market teams, meaning the people charged with finding customers and growing revenue. Specifically, it would start with sales, and specifically with outbound, the cold emails and calls used to win new business. It would build for agencies that live on data from many providers, not for startups, and it would support those users openly while fostering a community around them.
For Amin, the lesson was courage and commitment to those non-obvious choices. That commitment let Clay start to take off before ChatGPT arrived, leaving it ready to absorb large language models, the AI systems that write and reason with text.
That readiness was technical as well as commercial. Clay was built to connect to almost anything, and it worked like a coding tool fitted with sales building blocks. When language models appeared, the team plugged them in, and in his words it "just boosted everything."
Clay then went from one to 100 in two years (Amin did not specify one to 100 of what), and he said that growth would not have worked if the company had not been pointed in the right direction before the wave came.
Behind that sprint were three bets. First, that people in sales and marketing are creative and deserve the most powerful tool, not a simple out-of-the-box product. Second, that the right user was RevOps, short for revenue operations, the specialists who run sales software and data. The company framed that job as go-to-market engineering, the work of removing obstacles to growth. Third, that Clay should charge for usage, for the work done, rather than for each seat, so customers would not be punished for getting more productive with fewer people.
Amin said, "almost every other decision in the company falls immediately out of those" three ideas. Anyone inside Clay could decide what to do next by checking whether it fit the three assumptions, which was his way to run a company growing that fast.
His lesson on timing was to set the direction early, "so that when the wave comes, you go with it and you're not fighting it."
Questions people ask
What is outbound sales?
Outbound means trying to win customers who have not asked to hear from you, usually with cold emails, calls, or messages. It is the opposite of inbound, where buyers come to you through ads, search, or referrals.
What does the RevOps role do?
RevOps stands for revenue operations. These are the specialists who run the software, data, and processes that support sales, marketing, and customer teams, and who try to make growth repeatable.
Why would a company charge for usage instead of per seat?
Usage pricing charges based on how much of a product a customer uses, such as records processed or messages sent. Seat pricing charges per user. Usage can suit automation tools because a small team can create a lot of work.