Congrats to Kareem Amin, Nicolae Rusan, Varun Anand and the entire team at Clay on their Series B! I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to work with them over the past five years. https://lnkd.in/g5jQi_Ah I first met Kareem and Nicolae over Zoom (in the age before Zoom). They weren't raising, but I remember walking out of the meeting and saying "oh man, they're really, really good." After a few bi-coastal meetings they were kind enough to fly out to SF and we spent some time together live. My excitement only grew – it was clear they were both exceptional product thinkers and aesthetes. (Side note – years later I learned they had camped out in the Notion office above Sightglass when Ivan and Simon famously moved to Japan to rethink Notion 1.0 – that office has some good karma.) We tentatively agreed to work together. It was May 2019 and the end of Game of Thrones was monopolizing the zeitgeist so I invited them to come over, have some dinner, watch one of the final episodes and then (hopefully) sign a term sheet and formalize the partnership. This ended up being a horrendous idea. Terrible. The episode was S8E05 "The Bells," which fans of the show will know is probably the longest, darkest and most depressing episode of the entire series. I think we were shellshocked for a good 10 min, but eventually the pall wore off and we formally signed a term sheet. (Thank you!) There are lots of parallels between Notion and Clay (not just the shared office space). It took a while to find product-market fit. As fun as it is to build horizontal productivity tools like spreadsheets, its brutally hard to get the usage flywheel started. The Clay team relentlessly iterated on the product for a couple of years, honing down on a single ICP and set of use cases around Sales. Varun joined as co-founder and brought a tremendous amount of creativity to our community and overall GTM. PMF for bottoms-up products is a funny thing – one day you just cross some threshold and it starts working. Then it just keeps compounding week-after-week, month-after-month. That day was a little over two years, and as Kareem said, Clay has been growing 10x y/y ever since. The community love is truly exceptional – one customer privately said “If someone told me I had to get rid of Clay, I’d go on a two-week retreat to think about what my life had become.” It's very much a two-way street – the Clay team is as customer-obsessed as anyone. What the team has built is incredibly impressive but also very much the beginning – Clay has the ability to rewire the entire GTM stack at companies, enabling an entirely new, more thoughtful and tailored form of customer interaction and conversation. Congrats to the entire team! But we're just getting started. Onwards and upwards!
Jaren Glover
1mo
🏋🏾♂️🙆🏾♀️
Ali Hussain
1mo
Clay is a fantastic product, we have been impressed at Tabs, congrats Varun Anand!
Product Leader & Advisor | ex Productboard, Bumble, Onfido, Elsevier & MailOnline
1moGreat to see this. I’m often baffled by how few execs who I think need to have their teams play with Clay every day haven’t heard about them 🤯 Hoepfully this round will go a long way to changing that. Congrats Kareem Amin and team 🙌