Generative Now | AI Builders on Creating the Future
00:35:25 · Mike Mignano, Gabe Stengel
[00:35:25] S0: Totally. So when you go to sell this product into any of these organizations, professional services, investment banks, etcetera, do think about it from sort of from a pure kind of sales top down motion? Or is there something here where you can actually have a bit of a kind of a PLG flywheel where, you know, one banker uses it and then shares the data with somebody else and that unlocks a new seat? Like, help us think [00:35:53] S1: about I would love to have more of a PLG flywheel. And it's funny, our, you know, new investors thrive. There's an investor there, Vince, Vince Hanks, who who... Who's awesome and super smart and has always pushed me to have a PLG product. Bankers, the domain is gonna be blacklisted. Like, they have such strict InfoSec policies that, like, if I had... You know, if you could just go to app.rogo.ai and log in, you still wouldn't be able to do it. I mean, you have to sell the hardware. Things just can't shared. You internally. Yeah. And I think that, you know, there's PLG possibilities on the buy side. At a place like Lightspeed, I'm sure people just go and use ChessVTM for personal devices, and then the firm thinks, okay, great. We may as well get an enterprise account now because we don't really want people using personal devices. But throughout financial services, it's a harder market to sell into from a PLG point of view. I mean, you can use PLG or some product led things as, a way to generate top of funnel. [00:36:44] S0: Right.
00:36:44 · Mike Mignano, Gabe Stengel
[00:36:44] S0: Right. [00:36:44] S1: But I don't think you're gonna see the same type of sales motion that a Notion or an Airtable has where it just gets some bottoms up adoption and actually significant revenue traction too. And then you parlay it into enterprise. [00:36:55] S0: I guess all those kind of like sharing and viral loops just get broken. Right? Even if you even if you had a URL and you shared it in Slack, like it just it wouldn't even unfurl. It wouldn't show you any con... Like, you would just have to have all [00:37:07] S1: Yeah. The MD stuff on team would say, I can't open this. There's a firewall. Right. Exactly. Yeah. That's gotta [00:37:13] S0: be really hard. I mean, and maybe again, going back to like how you learned security. How did you as a small team learn sales? You know, how'd you guys do that? [00:37:22] S1: Sales was a hard learning experience. Really? [00:37:25] S0: Yeah. Tell us about it.
00:37:25 · Mike Mignano, Gabe Stengel
[00:37:25] S0: Yeah. Tell us about it. [00:37:25] S1: Oh, yeah. I mean, I was computer science in undergrad. I went worked as an investment banker. I'd never met someone who worked in sales. Like, I just had never been surrounded by that archetype. It's hard. Enterprise sales is difficult. Like, it is not an easy thing that, you know, oh, sales is not that hard. You just show the product, you get people signed up. Selling the enterprise is there's 40 stakeholders. They all care. It's political. You have to figure out what people want to hear. What are the pain points? How to thread the needle? It's a difficult thing. I mean, it was all learning. We were lucky to hire some great, great folks early on who had experience selling into this market. And that really expedited my learning and our success. But it's not, you know, enterprise sales is not something to trivialize. [00:38:10] S0: Yeah. And because you don't have things like PLG, you can't even employ sort of like this land and expand motion where some random person starts using it, and then you go and you convince the CIO or whatever to buy it for the whole org. I'm guessing you're literally just doing like top down sales, just like banging on doors.
00:38:10 · Mike Mignano, Gabe Stengel
[00:38:10] S0: Yeah. And because you don't have things like PLG, you can't even employ sort of like this land and expand motion where some random person starts using it, and then you go and you convince the CIO or whatever to buy it for the whole org. I'm guessing you're literally just doing like top down sales, just like banging on doors. [00:38:27] S1: Yeah. More and more now we can sell like five seats to an investment firm, and that's a little bit easier. And then we go back in three months and say, hey, you have five seats, but these 20 other people have asked to get on too. Why don't you just get an enterprise license? So we see that more on the buy side. For banks, yeah. I mean, you're running pilot. You have big stakeholder conversations. You need to prove out the ROI. It is not the sort of thing that can be sort of PLG like. [00:38:51] S0: Yeah. Totally makes sense. So we talked a little bit about what you would and wouldn't do in the future in terms of potential customers and, you know, TAM expansion. But, you know, maybe where do you see the company in five years, ten years from now? And maybe like the the banking industry more broadly as a result of AI.
00:39:09 · Gabe Stengel
[00:39:09] S1: I think that five years from now, ten years from now, Rogo is going to be the most effective analyst on Wall Street. I mean, I think it will be very hard to run an investment firm or a bank if you don't employ Rogo. Right? If you don't literally have, you know, an army of Rogo analysts helping you be smarter and more effective. You won't be able to to, you know, submit a bid in the first round of a transaction fast enough because you won't have the... This army of AI analysts doing diligence. You won't be able to win the sort of the the s one bake off because you'll be a little bit less sophisticated in how you pitch to clients without a tool like Rogo. It'll be every firm's smartest, most productive analyst. The sort of flip side of that is we will also be able to offer financial services to types of companies that beforehand didn't get those types of financial services. Right? Like giving M and A advice, running fundraising processes, that's a type of high finance financial service, right? We don't think of it that way because it's not like a checking account that you can get through Chime or like a financial service like, you know, being able to buy and sell your own stocks through something like Robinhood. But these are still important financial services that a lot of companies don't have access to. If you have a, you know, dollars 20,000,000 EV HVAC business, who's running your sell side process? No one. So you're getting a 20% worse price when you sell it to some private equity backed roll up. If we have the technology to help folks do that, I'd love to directly offer it and help make private markets more efficient and help democratize some of these high finance financial services that, you know, not everyone has access to today because you can't pay Goldman Sachs $5,000,000 to, you know, run the process or give you advice or, you know, help you fundraise.
00:40:40 · Mike Mignano
[00:40:40] S0: That's super interesting. So yeah, I mean, we talked earlier about, you know, you don't want to get into FP and A. But I think, you know, we were talking about Disney and Bob Iger and we're like, oh, his corp dev team could use this. When you look at it through that lens, think to your point, I mean, this is something startups could use, you know, small businesses, small medium sized businesses, again, to get access to the types of services they might only get access to if they're a really big company and have internally or they're hiring somebody like Lazard. Is that kind of what you mean?