Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:52:33 · S2, Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang
[00:52:33] S2: What's some cool AI stuff you guys have built? [00:52:35] S1: Yeah. I mean, we have built our own agentic harness for for sales use cases. So, all this... I mean, to to call back to the to the coding harnesses, taking a lot of inspiration from from the systems like the Codexes and the and the clouds of the world and sort of building bespoke tools that are very sales focused, bespoke workflows that are all kind of geared toward GTM use cases. So we built our own version of that that powers pretty much every single thing that powers the Monaco platform. So from scoring of TAMs, scoring of ICPs, and defining of ICPs, through to pipeline evolution, through to all the mundane kind of things that maybe a salesperson doesn't wanna do, which is like, Oh, update my meeting, pre meeting notes, update my summaries, all these things. We have agents powering all those workflows. So we've done that. It kind of comes out of the box. And yeah, so long long agents, long horizon agents for... Long horizon agents and short horizon agents in some cases for GTM use cases. [00:53:36] S2: And it's pretty domain specific, built on foundation models. Would you do any of your own models for [00:53:42] S0: this?
00:53:42 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[00:53:42] S0: this? [00:53:42] S1: Yeah, it's a good call out, because so far... I mean, I think this is generally true of a lot of vertical AI companies, is you kinda start where you sort of use the frontier models as third party services to see what's possible, because they are the very frontier. And then, I think we've seen this, I guess, in the past week with the whole Harvey sort of where they... Plus 50% to minus 50% margin kind of question. I mean, I think, irrespective of the numbers, I think what is interesting is, at a certain point, things do become interesting from a cost perspective. You start to wonder, can you do it faster on, you know, open weight models? And then that's a lot of that. Then a lot of what I think the purpose of the AI pieces are is just to post train those models, build environments for, you know, kind of to post train using RL and things of that nature. So we're kind of in that phase right now. [00:54:25] S0: Oh, fun. Yeah. I've been calling this table through the agent lab playbook, but that is kind of my coining of, like, you know, like, start from the user first and then they they they use whatever models you need to to build products, but then you can backfill the the model side once you have the user base. And then the the model labs go... [00:54:44] S1: Kind of [00:54:44] S0: go the other way. They they start with the big pre trains, and then they try to find users. And it's like very... You know, it's hopefully working as a as a as a split. The Monaco would be on the sort of revenue GTM side. [00:54:55] S1: That's right. Yeah.
00:54:55 · Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang, S2
[00:54:55] S1: That's right. Yeah. [00:54:56] S0: And I think it's interesting. They would want to serve you while also try to compete with [00:55:02] S1: you as monolabs. That is correct. [00:55:05] S0: One of the things that I've been... Obviously, I dabble in some of this. I think one of the hard problems is actually enrichment. Mhmm. And I would say I spent a lot of my time doing that for for basically SEO and, like, research and what have you. And I imagine for you, it's actually, like, a core part of that. That's right. Do you find that models are good at it? Do you have any vendors that, like, you like working with, you wanna give them a shout out, whatever? [00:55:33] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So we we have used... We were early adopters of Parallel, and then I think they're very strong. [00:55:38] S0: Okay. So just general search? Yeah. Mean... Not like ZoomInfo or [00:55:41] S1: some of No. Those No. No. But, we use Parallel. We also use Exa, so we'll give it to... Give a shout to both of those folks. [00:55:47] S0: Can you compare that? [00:55:48] S2: They're both [00:55:51] S0: friends. [00:55:51] S1: They're both They're both friends. They're both folks that, that we [00:55:54] S0: like to You'd be have very interested if you like one of [00:55:56] S1: them. Yeah. [00:55:57] S2: I'll keep
00:55:57 · S2, Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang
[00:55:57] S2: I'll keep [00:55:58] S1: it I'll keep it neutral. I'll stay I'll stay Switzerland in this today. But, yeah, I know. So so... And then, of course, we do our own version of enrichment as well. So we... It's it's like most of our data systems... I mean, part of, one of... When I think the most valuable pieces of software that we build or most valuable systems is kinda like our world database, like the database of companies, enriched companies, enriched accounts, enriched contacts. So, like, that whenever we are constructing ICPs for folks, we have the most up to date information about who you should reach out to at which company at this point in time. Like, I would say that one of our... Like, I think where we are, like, world class, hands down, is just demand. Like, are a very good demand company. Like, we help companies increase their meetings booked in a [00:56:36] S0: way So that find buyer at... Find buyer at the [00:56:38] S1: right time. Right? And it's kind of [00:56:39] S0: like the combination of What do mean at the right time?
00:56:39 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric, S2
[00:56:39] S0: like the combination of What do mean at the right time? [00:56:41] S1: Like, there's there's times when... Like, here's an example. Like, if you are if you are targeting someone that just... You are selling to VPs of sales, let's say. Okay? Like, the the the right time to to reach out to them is not when they are, like, sort of in the middle of some... Like, they've been at the same place for the last, like, five years. If they are now in the middle of, like, a job... Like, a good signal is, like, once... If they've gone from one job to a new job, they're now entering a new place where they're more likely to be to purchase or be open to a purchase of a new sales platform because they're in the middle of a job transition. So going from company to company B for VP of sales, a good signal of, hey, should you reach out to them at this point in time is, did you detect that their LinkedIn changed or something like that? [00:57:19] S2: How much of this is your expertise put into model and harness versus models are good, there's generic best practices? Like, is there, there's obviously some value in both. Yeah. Is it just the glue getting it reliable, doing it all in one platform, doing it well? It seems like there's also stuff that we wouldn't know that you guys are also domain experts in that's baked in. [00:57:43] S1: Yeah. I think without the former, would, it would be like a fully commoditized... [00:57:47] S0: I mean,
00:57:47 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[00:57:47] S0: I mean, [00:57:48] S1: not fully... I mean, because there's still a lot of value in the all in one. I think, like, that is something that we definitely pioneered. Like, most companies in the sales space started as just, like, point solutions. And I think they're... They try more of, like, the y c approach of you kinda, land and expand. You kinda pick a niche and then you expand from there. And we, from the get go, I mean, that's why we stayed in stealth for the greater part of a year and some months, was just building, because we knew we wanted to be the all in one from the start. But, you know, that alone is is powerful, it's meaningful, but I think the real power is the fact that today, Monaco as Monaco has, like, a world class go to market team, like, truly, like, world class go to market team selling Monaco, of course. But we also have the same go to market people that sell Monaco are the ones that are, like, what we call for deploy account executives. They're FDAEs. They're effectively, like, well, it's like human human salespeople that are like the consultants of sorts that help onboard all of our customers, get them like building agentic workflows, and are effectively there to like help guide them through every part of their own sales go to market life cycle. And so, to your question, it's the all in one yes, but it's also the fact that we have these, like, you know, Sam and we have brought on a lot of former Sam's team members and stuff like that, who were the best people in GTM at Brex and other places. So we're codifying all of that in the platform.