Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:19:40 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:19:40] S0: I love that. I subscribe to the same, truly only the paranoid survive. And to be in a position where you're growing this quickly, the world is evolving so quickly. And we have watched companies grow really quickly and overnight also disappear. So I think that culturally, culture is strategy for breakfast. So I think that's a fabulous way to be a leader right now in this year of 2026. [00:20:05] S1: Yeah, have tell people when they come in, when they join, when people are interviewing, I'll say to them, Hey, you should be abundantly aware that this company is doing very well right now. But there are scenarios where we fly the plane into the side of a cliff and this whole thing goes to shit. That is very possible. But with the same intellectual honesty, I also believe that there are scenarios here that if we execute on plan, we could build a company as big as Salesforce or Adobe. Yeah. So it's kind of down to us. [00:20:38] S0: Which path do choose? [00:20:39] S1: Yeah, it's an execution game. [00:20:40] S0: Well James, in such a short period of time, you've had incredible progress. And, you know, I was Chief Digital Officer of a Fortune 50 company, so I know just how much it takes to get into those organizations. As of today, you're already a third of the Fortune one hundred are your customers, almost 20% of the Fortune five hundred. That's a lot of adoption really quickly from very big players. How'd you do it?
00:21:02 · James Cadwallader
[00:21:02] S1: I mean, what I want to say is like building the best product. Yeah, say unapologetically to the team that everything downstream from great product. I think if you're a CMO of a Fortune 100 brand right now, you understand that this is the biggest platform shift in the history of marketing. And you have a choice. It is, okay, should I rely on my legacy software who's introducing ancillary features to try and speak to this platform shift? Or do I want to partner with ProFound whose promise is that they will keep us at the bleeding edge of one of the most important platform shifts in the history of internet marketing. And that choice, that decision for 99% CMOs is a no brainer. And then, we have to reciprocate. We have to ensure that we're living up to that promise, which is to keep these enterprise brands at the bleeding edge. We are shipping ferociously. Every day there's new features launching through our platform. We have super robust post sales function, which we partner super smart domain experts with these marketing teams to be there as a thought partner and keep abreast of everything that's going on in this constantly evolving landscape. We also have a full deployed motion as most good vertical AI companies do these days, where we can go and parachute in a marketing engineer into the enterprise who will actually have prescriptive takes on, this is what we should do here, this is what we should do there. And yes, so all of these things, along with that, it sounds boring, but a lot of enterprise features as well, like permissioning and
00:22:44 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:22:44] S0: Everything they need to get through all of their own internal All [00:22:48] S1: of these things start to become really important when you're working with giant brands. [00:22:53] S0: And you built all of it. [00:22:54] S1: We built all of it. Yeah. And it actually takes a long time to build all of that stuff. And you want it to be bought to tie and reliable. So, yeah, there's not one sort of silver bullet response to why we're winning the enterprise. But it's kind of a combination of all those things. [00:23:13] S0: That's impressive. Really, really impressive. James, I want to shift to a little bit this just dead internet theory. I think it's just for everyone listening and watching, it's a really interesting one. And I would love just to know how do you think about what the internet looks like in five years, knowing that right now we're still as humans getting online, looking at our computers, but rapidly you're watching that shift pretty quickly. What does the internet look like in five years in your mind?
00:23:13 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:23:13] S0: That's impressive. Really, really impressive. James, I want to shift to a little bit this just dead internet theory. I think it's just for everyone listening and watching, it's a really interesting one. And I would love just to know how do you think about what the internet looks like in five years, knowing that right now we're still as humans getting online, looking at our computers, but rapidly you're watching that shift pretty quickly. What does the internet look like in five years in your mind? [00:23:47] S1: For brands and marketers, I don't think this is a big concern. I think for the folks or the businesses whose product is content, it could be a very difficult period. I think this is existential to publishers whose product is their content. Yeah. These large language models have been trained on core content. And we're seeing the disintermediation of human attention with that content where I just ask Chat to give me the scoop on, I don't know, the latest happening in the world. And Chat will send an agent to visit one of those news sites or visit, you know, that there's so much volume of content that, you know, that an agent can get the answer for you from somewhere. For these publishers who rely on a human visitor hitting their web page, and then showing them an ad to fund it, I think, yeah, it's gonna be... I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about where this can go. And it's... It could be very difficult for those publishers. Only if your only if your product is content.
00:23:47 · James Cadwallader, Alexa von Tobel
[00:23:47] S1: For brands and marketers, I don't think this is a big concern. I think for the folks or the businesses whose product is content, it could be a very difficult period. I think this is existential to publishers whose product is their content. Yeah. These large language models have been trained on core content. And we're seeing the disintermediation of human attention with that content where I just ask Chat to give me the scoop on, I don't know, the latest happening in the world. And Chat will send an agent to visit one of those news sites or visit, you know, that there's so much volume of content that, you know, that an agent can get the answer for you from somewhere. For these publishers who rely on a human visitor hitting their web page, and then showing them an ad to fund it, I think, yeah, it's gonna be... I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about where this can go. And it's... It could be very difficult for those publishers. Only if your only if your product is content. [00:25:00] S0: So you're saying if your product is content, just to be provocative for a second, the question is, do you even exist? Is there a place for you at all?
00:25:00 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:25:00] S0: So you're saying if your product is content, just to be provocative for a second, the question is, do you even exist? Is there a place for you at all? [00:25:08] S1: Perhaps. But then this is where the sort of dead internet theory comes in. Because ironically, the large language models, or just answer engines, generally speaking, if you wanna call it that chat, Gemini, etcetera, they rely on the content in order to answer the question. Of course. So the thing, like, the example I always use is, you know, say if there were, God forbid, an explosion downstairs on Broadway, chat... And we ask ChatGPT right now and said, what's going on on Broadway? It doesn't know the answer to that question. It doesn't know what's happened on Broadway. What it's relying on is a fleshy human being experiencing the explosion downstairs and writing a blog post, a news article, something about the explosion, and then it can go and rag that into its answer. So humans play this very important role where we are becoming like APIs between reality and AI. [00:26:02] S0: That's so interesting. Humans are... That that... That's a good one. Humans are becoming an API between reality and this agentic future.