Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:15:38 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:15:38] S0: Yeah, how do you make sure it's not a bunch of garbage? Before we go there, because I want to come back there, I want to take a minute and just ask a question, which is your team at ProFound, which is almost 400 people, obviously, your growth has been astronomical from a 3,500,000 seed to now multibillion dollar valuations recently. How do you keep up? How does your team and let me ask this question really clearly. These huge LLMs are at war with one another, to put it bluntly. They are all Anthropic and OpenAI and Gemini. And everyone is building as fast as they can at a breakneck speed that honestly we haven't seen in tech in my career. You live outside of that world because you're not sitting inside any of those companies. And you have to keep up with their speed and their changes and their edits because your product thrives by doing so. How does that work? How do you think about your tech and product teams and how they think in order to be able to keep up at that pace?
00:16:39 · James Cadwallader, Alexa von Tobel
[00:16:39] S1: I think there's a pragmatic response to that question and then a sort of philosophical. To start with the pragmatic, we collect from different data sources and triangulate. We survey the models, so if you ask the models, they give you an answer. So we survey the models at scale. We also connect to our customers' own websites to gather first party data at the CDN level, which is super valuable because you're able to see, once you connect to a CDN, you're able to understand when your pages are being cited by these AI models. And then the third is we built a very large consumer panel of real user interactions. We spent a tonne of capital and time and energy building together this big consumer panel of real user interactions with AI that grows every month. Think of it like a big market research. [00:17:31] S0: Great, and that becomes a power slap Yeah, [00:17:33] S1: billions of real user prompts, real user conversations. We collect the prompt and the response. [00:17:38] S0: Oh, that's so interesting. That's like almost a new Reddit entirely in some ways that you have internally.
00:17:38 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:17:38] S0: Oh, that's so interesting. That's like almost a new Reddit entirely in some ways that you have internally. [00:17:43] S1: Yeah. Don't own the data sources. We license from multiple vendors. Like the most well known source of consumer marketing data is like Nielsen. They invented the idea of, you know, consumer research basically like a hundred years ago or something. Yep. But now in 2026, there's there's so many of these that exist. So we've gone and aggregated all of them into one big patchwork quilt quilted one big consumer panel of real user interactions with AI, and that's super valuable. So those three data sources allow us to stay on top of what's going on with the models and the consumer interactions and how that's changing. But maybe to the more philosophical point of, like, how do our team stay ahead? I think that's cultural. And I'd say, yeah, we have... You know, I always say, like, violent aggression. [00:18:36] S0: I'm like, I know what you mean by that exactly. [00:18:39] S1: Yeah. We we we... You know, I I want... I I try to be the team that you wouldn't wanna compete against. I think about that often. I think about, you know, if I were a competitor looking in, how would I feel? And I wanna make them feel as bad as [00:18:54] S0: possible Terrified.
00:18:54 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:18:54] S0: possible Terrified. [00:18:55] S1: At all times. Yeah. We have an extremely paranoid culture. I don't subscribe to the manifestation thing. So I spend a lot of time talking about outwardly, not in a way that makes people miserable, but I talk about... I done all hands with the entire company where I've spoken through blow by blow examples of how we die. And everyone's face goes, why? And everyone's clearly freaked out. But then I remind people that, Hey, this is our destiny to control. Like we, you know, I'm gonna highlight ways in which we can die. And that's going to make you as paranoid as me. Because I don't think this is, I think people should know that [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.
00:19:40 · 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