The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
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?
00:29:52 · John Willett
[00:29:52] S1: Yeah. It's a great question. And I think early on, so much of the effort was like, yeah, a, spent convincing them AI was like very important and that they needed a strategy. Then b, a lot of it was like very specific work workflows. It was like, hey, we think that your seniors are spending a lot of time doing this and your juniors spending a lot of time doing this. And like that kind of med pick style discovery was really, really important. Now I think we're just one altitude above. So there's the same type of exploration, but it's much more like, hey, what have you rolled out? Like, what are the tools on desk? Like, is it working? Is it not working? Where are the gaps? How are you managing token spend? Are you cross model? How are you building, like, firm memory? Is the system getting smarter over time? How is your internal data organized? So it's much more kind of like CIO, COO, CTO, maybe CEO level kind of altitudes for just the overall AI strategy. And then the pitch is pretty compelling. It's like, hey, look, like clearly you guys need a partner on this stuff and and every bank does. We don't think that your partner should be one of the frontier labs for a variety of reasons including cost economics, vendor lock in, just overall model risk, security, and domain focus. So you should go with a provider who's fully focused on this space and can help you hot swap between models. And then it's a bit about showing why we think that we're the right people to help you with that. And and it's kind of just like, hey, we think you guys have a great business. We think you can make it better in in these ways. We'd love to connect you with five clients who we've done something similar for in the past. We'd love to get the product into a few users' hands so they can kind of kick the tires and give you some confidence that it it does the things that we say we're gonna do. And then kind of going from there. So I mean, a lot of the much more cycles at this point are spent in the just enterprise procurement, infosec, governance side. Like that's that's where the meat of the like deals are at this point as opposed to like the upfront stage setting or like their need to buy or like why us? It's actually a lot more, okay, yeah, Rogo seems great. I know they're working with these vent, you know, these companies like whatever.
00:31:52 · John Willett, Vidit Agarwal
It's like, hey, which divisions would it make sense to start this in? How is that gonna align with like some other initiatives we have? How's that gonna align with our internal build? I guess those sorts of questions that end up dominating these these conversations. [00:32:05] S0: When I had Harvey's, CBO, John Haddock on the show, he almost said to me, like, prestige was their go to market motion. Right? They had, like, some big law firms held on, and that became a proxy for trust. [00:32:18] S1: Yeah. [00:32:18] S0: And I see that, like like, I think humans work on that, like, you recognize a logo. I guess a two part question. One, was that part of the Rogo story, like, using big logos as a proxy for trust? And two, were there trade offs? Like, one of the conversations I have with a lot of founders today is it's kinda like a carrot to chase the big logo. Yeah. But as you'd know, it takes a lot of resource and time and money to service them. And I kinda say the founders don't go after the big logos early on because then you have to hire like a sales team just to work on one account. Yeah. And if they churn, you have a big hole in your budget. So I'm curious, yeah, tell me about the proxy for trust and then when did you feel big customers were right to service?