The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
00:39:25 · Matt Turck, George Sivulka
[00:39:25] S1: Great. So everyone, pivot to crypto right now. Announcing the rebranding of the event. Crypto driven [00:39:33] S0: Crypto Crypto New York City. Exactly. There we go. [00:39:37] S1: I wouldn't come. Switching tacks a little bit and talking about go to market. You've innovated there as well. I think among other things, you have a very different take on who salespeople should be for a company like Hebiah in terms of backgrounds. Do you wanna talk to that? [00:39:57] S0: Yeah. I'm happy to. I don't know if this audience is interested in like like sales playbook and lineages and all that stuff. [00:40:04] S1: But Yeah. I think there's a fair amount of people, you know, building companies.
00:40:08 · George Sivulka
[00:40:08] S0: So, you know, one of the things that I commonly think about is the best enterprise SaaS selling organizations over the last, whatever, two, three decades, all come from the same lineage or the same DNA. So they all come from like BMC and AppDynamics, and now they went to MongoDB, and they're all kind of like the same thing. They have the same playbook. They have a framework called Medic or MEDDPIC, which is all around how you sell value. AI is very different from those organizations' products. If you actually try to apply this standard, okay, we're going to do this type of discovery and we're going to do this exact sort of medics sale, there's some things that will take and that you can extend to AI. But right now it's less around pain. It's less around standard enterprise SaaS cycles and probably more around FOMO, around missed upside, around value cases that are really hard to define. And so the profile of a traditional seller that would excel at these best in class playbook organizations, we'll see if that takes for Hebia, if that takes for our peers in B2B AI application spaces. The jury's still out. At the same time, one of the things that we've seen really work are people with domain expertise. People that can speak to the customer's lingo, vernacular processes, and work. And honestly, people that are very similar to consultants. And kind of having that playbook consulting muscle together is, I believe, what will work when there's a true paradigm shift over when the last two years of enterprise assets, it's really just unbundling of things that people already know exist.
00:41:54 · Matt Turck, George Sivulka
[00:41:54] S1: So interesting, right, to that concept of FOMO buying. Do people still ask you about ROI? How to justify your price? And if so, how do you do it? [00:42:04] S0: Part of the beauty of Hebia is that we... I think we're one of the only AI companies that builds value cases, and that is really significantly upselling our customers. We treat it like a traditional playbook company. We actually build a really strong understanding of if you're spending this much, this is what you're getting in return, or these are the expenses that you can actually remove. And we commonly partner with the world's best financial firms, not to just give them an AI tool like our competitors, but to actually go out and understand and say, okay, at the board level, you're trying to impact your P and L to the tune of a $100,000,000. These are the ways that we've seen it done. And it's like, you know, a bit of technology and a bit of consulting. Yeah. [00:42:46] S1: And is your ROI based on cost saving, meaning hours not spent doing the task, or
00:42:46 · Matt Turck, George Sivulka
[00:42:46] S1: And is your ROI based on cost saving, meaning hours not spent doing the task, or [00:42:53] S0: is it based on increased revenue? There's cost saving. It's not only hours spent. Sometimes it's removing third party legal expenses or third party consulting expenses or third party expert network spend. But a lot of what really is driving value and capturing the imagination of customers is the idea of, Hey, you can actually make way more money with AI. If I had an infinite number of employees that were experts at a task, maybe I could end up really reading every single SEC filing and finding a bunch of red flags and finding a place where the markets really are inefficient. Or if I had a bunch of expert employees spend infinite amount of time, maybe my law firm could actually litigate a case better than any other law firm in the world. And that's much harder to capture. We can't defend it with an ROI calculation, but it's part of the reason people buy. [00:43:48] S1: Do you come across actual cases where people will say, well, we're not gonna hire x many junior consultants, analysts, bankers, because now we have this tool
00:44:02 · George Sivulka
[00:44:02] S0: or similar kind of AI technology? I'll say one final story. I think we're running out of time. But I think it's a really interesting story, and it kind of talks about the future and whether or not we'll have juniors. I think we will have juniors. I've seen some people that talk about it. I haven't seen a lot of people that do it. I've seen a lot of third party expenses, like legal fees. I'm very short Accenture and consultancies, and the big four. But in terms of juniors, Morgan Stanley and some of the folks there always claimed that they invented the analyst. And the story behind that is, one day they got a bunch of computers at a computer room, and they said, Hey, we don't know how to use these computers, all the bankers. And they hired a bunch of kids that were like nerds from Columbia, and they brought them down into the computer room and they said, Hey, we're gonna go and have you use the computers. And the person that made that decision came back to Morgan Stanley, whatever, twenty, thirty, forty years later and said, Hey, you still haven't figured out how to use computers? And I think the intuition or the underlying sentiment there is when technology is created like the computer or like AI, and it's a true revolution, you end up actually having lots of people come in and do jobs related to the technology. So I firmly believe that being an investment banking junior won't look the same as it looked five years ago. I definitely believe the same for investors, for lawyers, for everyone else. But I actually don't really think that that will decrease the amount of jobs. I think that someone like Morgan Stanley will claim to invent the prompt engineer, and we can laugh about it fifty years later.
00:45:48 · Matt Turck, George Sivulka
[00:45:48] S1: Actually, couple of last questions from me, and then I'll open it up to folks. Can ask a personal question? Always. So you are, in the grand scheme of things, incredibly young, and you're building an incredibly impressive company. Perhaps that's inspirational for anyone in the room that's, you know, thinking about building their own company. How do you do it? Like how do you, you know, maybe not in front of investors because investors like very young founders, but you know, you're going to go to the like top people at some huge asset manager and whatever, and you're going to say, hey, you know, I'm going to revolutionize your business. Like, how do you lead as a young founder? [00:46:23] S0: I think naivete is a superpower because it's incredibly hard and terrible existence to be a founder. Everyone always says, oh, I wouldn't do it if I knew what it was like. I think that's actually true. And so I think that young people end up changing the world because you just don't know how hard it will be. And then you're like, oh, I'm here. I don't have any other option. But I think it definitely demands a lot. I'm not the person that does everything at Hevia. I do a lot of things at Hevia, but we have a lot of talented, later in their career folks that I learn from every day that I'm incredibly fortunate to work with, and that I'm incredibly grateful that they believe in me. But, you know, still learning about sales playbooks, and information retrieval, and all the rest from people that I love working with. So, I think that's a superpower, is the team always.