The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
00:23:02 · John Willett
[00:23:02] S1: All that felt, you know, relatively low risk, which is really lucky. So, yeah, we we quit our jobs. We were fully doing it. ChatGPT coming out November 2022 is probably the single biggest moment where previously... I mean, our... If you look at our pitch decks to... Like sales pitch decks from before that, we wouldn't even mention AI because it was not a good marketing term. It like was distracting. People associated AI with like predictive machine learning and like big data. It was like, oh, you're gonna help us do portfolio analysis. It was just, we did not really like jive with like, we were trying to build like front office workflow automation software and like linking that with AI made no sense. And there was also just a lot of... There are a lot of skeletons in the closet in investment banking in terms of previous... I don't wanna call any companies out by name, but like previous companies that had purported to do like PowerPoint automation in the pre LLM era. And I had access to like five of these when I was at Barclays and they never got used because they weren't good enough. And so there was a lot of that kind of mental block to to get over. Well, when ChatGPT came out, everyone kind of had that moment. And it still took us another year to, like, really commercialize partly because we had to get through, InfoSec and governance and all these things. But we could at least start to talk to guys like Blair and talk to guys like Peter Orzak from Lazard and get to know them and and start to ingratiate ourselves as people who are, like, really focused on this space and thinking thoughtfully about it and have raised some money and are building in it and really kind of pitching ourselves.
00:24:24 · Vidit Agarwal
[00:24:24] S0: Tell me if you if you had... Let's assume I worked at one of those companies back then, Lazard or or JPMorgan or or what have you. What was the initial opportunity? Because, again, you mentioned at the start about, like, Ligure and Javier. I know both Ligure and Javier really well. They've both been on the show. They said, like, AI changed how enterprise started looking software. Right? Mhmm. I feel I see that every day, like, across the stack, like health care, government, accounting firms, law firms, banks. I think to your point, like, ChatGPT has made a mainstream where they all seem very pro software where I don't think they had that desire pre ChatGPT in the same extent. But I'm curious what was that initial pitch or that initial opportunity that you were presenting to them? And, like, yeah, maybe you can tell us about the QLE customers and how you got them on board.
00:25:10 · John Willett
[00:25:10] S1: Yeah. A 100%. I mean, like the first real customer was was Lazard. And the pitch to them was kind of just like, hey, these models are incredible. They're going to change how you work. That change is gonna take a lot of harnessing from a technological perspective and also a lot of, like, human capital transformation. Trust us with both. Like, you know, we're gonna have an engineering team who is fully focused on taking really what was OpenAI at the time and kind of teaching it, prompting it, to do financial tasks, giving it access to all the financial market data, giving it as much context as possible on how Lazard works. So that was one. And then the second part was like literally like myself and Gabe and a couple other folks like Rachel Freeman, Alyana who were ex bankers and were like, we will just come in to Lazard every day and we will write all these custom prompts and workflows and automations and get to know your bankers super well to actually start to embed this stuff into their workflows day to day. So that was kind of the original pitch. To your point, and I'd never... I've never sold SaaS or software in the previous eras, but you're totally right that investment banks... I mean, is a perfect example of this. Like, when I came over here this year, I was not sure how European banks were gonna be procuring this stuff because there are banks in Milan and Madrid, etcetera, that like basically like missed cloud. Right? So they're like very, very kind of slow to adopt stuff. But they all now have these like agentic AI task force, and they're trying to figure this stuff out. And, you know, I think for them, it was probably more like the Claude Opus four five stuff as opposed to the chat GBT moment that that really put stuff into focus for them, but, like, they're getting there too. So to your point, like, these banks, I think, have recognized that whereas previous transformation cycles have been about cost cutting and maybe about security and and maybe about data organization internally and things around HR and human capital management, this one is about existential revenue transformation. This is about what do the next five to ten years of the industry look like. We think they're radically different.
00:27:05 · John Willett, Vidit Agarwal
And every bank, no matter whether you are JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, or some like small regional boutique bank, if you don't have a good AI strategy, you are putting your entire business at risk. And that's something that like we used to need to like sell really hard. Now it's something that doesn't even show up in our deck. Right? Like that is like so table stakes obvious and the entire conversation is grounded in like, are we going to help you address it? So the urgency has, has been completely different, I think, from from previous cycles. [00:27:33] S0: Well, even if I think of... Like, I recently had Jesse from Decagon on Yep. The CEO on the pod, and even he talked about, like, they sell to enterprises mostly, and and he was saying he's been amazed at how it's gone from, like, an efficiency conversation to actually a product conversation. Yeah. Like, it's not just a cost setting. Mean, that's a whole topic we can talk about is, like, cost management. Like, that's a topical area with token spend and and just efficiency. But it was just down Vrogo in the early days. Also, side point, you mentioned Rachel and Alyana. So you had hired a team by then when you had [00:28:03] S1: I guess by the Lazar deployment, it was just Rachel and then, yeah, Alyana and some other folks, Nikki Coley came on kind of over the next twelve months or so. [00:28:12] S0: And then when did you raise the next round of funding that Keith came on board for? Keith's reporting. Is that straight up to Lazard round?
00:28:12 · Vidit Agarwal, John Willett
[00:28:12] S0: And then when did you raise the next round of funding that Keith came on board for? Keith's reporting. Is that straight up to Lazard round? [00:28:18] S1: The Lazard deal was December 2023. We rolled it out in the first half of twenty twenty four because we were like deploying it like kind of on prem or in cloud prem, which was not the best way to deploy the software at the time. And so it took a little while. And so once that was like successfully deployed and 1,500 bankers were using it day to day and and the feedback was good, at that point, we were able to to raise our series a. So I think Keith came in maybe in like August 2024 or something like that. [00:28:45] S0: And so by that point, you had clearly more customers. Right? You had more traction. Yeah. [00:28:49] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We kind of have like Lazard and then like a few... Like three or four boutiques that had started on like smaller things, but we're starting to talk about upselling. That was kind of the the shape of it at the time. There were like... There was enough to show somewhat of a a repeatable kind of motion there. [00:29:04] S0: Tell me about in this week and connect to present day, like customer discovery. Like, in the business I run behind the podcast, we... Yeah. I think I said to you the other day, we work with, like, JPMorgan and and Macquarie and a whole bunch of these banks, and that can be like a six month process just to understand what their problems are. [00:29:20] S1: Yeah. To
00:29:20 · John Willett, Vidit Agarwal
[00:29:20] S1: Yeah. To [00:29:20] S0: get the right, like, stakeholder and get the meeting and then fall into their budget cycle and Yeah. Procurement onboarding. You've done this. Right? Yeah. What is your [00:29:28] S1: Six months even sounds... Six months sounds like a dream for that. Yeah. That's Yeah. [00:29:31] S0: It sounds ambitious. Right? That would [00:29:32] S1: be the quickest sales cycle ever. Yeah. [00:29:34] S0: Yeah. So tell me how's your discovery process changed? Again, if you met me today and I was your ICP at one of your target customers in Europe, let's use Europe as an example. Yeah. How do you build trust with them and how do you understand their problems to then convince them to buy a robo?