Jake Aaron Villarreal: I'm Jake Aaron Villarreal, born and raised in Silicon Valley and here to take you behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder, the journey they're on, the problems they face, the products they build in an effort to make our lives better. I'm excited to have with us today Marty Kausas, co-founder and CEO of Pylon. Marty, welcome to the show.
Marty Kausas: Thank you. I'm excited to chat.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Hundreds of AI startups are launching every month, battling to build their founding teams. As a leader, your job is to get results. When it comes to hiring, that's where it gets tough. So, you go out and you try a recruitment firm, but they don't understand your story. They're off target. And when they send you candidates, it's a waste of time. We believe you should never have your time wasted. That's why we launched Match Relevant, because your story is more than just an open role. It's your founder's journey, the problem you're solving, the product you're building, and why it matters. When we work with companies, we make sure we understand your whole story. So, we go out and do a search, we're on target, it's worth their time, they're interested, and more importantly, it's worth yours. And when it comes to hiring engineers, we work to make sure we get it right by deploying a team of seasoned CTOs that have built some of Silicon Valley's best companies. They can collaborate with you in the technical interviewing process. They can be a sounding board, or they can run it for you. When it comes to building teams, there's no time to waste. Let's make it count. If you have a role that needs to be filled, book a time with a hiring guide at matchrelevant.com and learn how we do it.
What did you see in the market that you felt like we could build something that isn't out there today?
Marty Kausas: Yeah. So, the specific insight we started to see—and this is through blind like asking people what your problems are. Like it's not, we did not have this problem before. We had seen snippets of it, but definitely like it was not like a core pain point that we had felt. We understood that a lot of B2B companies were starting to talk to their customers not only over email anymore, but opening up shared Slack channels, Microsoft Teams channels, Discord, WhatsApp, all that stuff instead of just email. And that that would break a lot of their workflows like CRM tracking, activity monitoring, sending product marketing blasts, creating tickets. So all of those processes would break and that was really important. We saw that as like a big shift in in trend in the world and we latched on to that specific new way of operating and thought there could be a company or product built around that.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: There's a lot of incumbents that have been in that space for some time. What was it that they didn't have that you're creating today?
Marty Kausas: Yeah. Literally the first piece, which is just hey the ability to track customer support in Slack. The incumbents do not support that. Yeah. Even today Zendesk doesn't support that. Intercom doesn't support that. Freshdesk doesn't support that. Salesforce, even though they own Slack, don't support that in Service Cloud. So if you have customer shared, like shared Slack channels, you literally just cannot track the tickets in there.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's crazy because I mean we work with hundreds of companies and I'd say probably a quarter of them only want to communicate with us through Slack.
Marty Kausas: Exactly.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: And you know we provide services but also support, and it's really easy. It's real time. It's so shocking that no one's done that. It's great that you're kind of first to market there. Is there a moat around what you've created that's like is it kind... you're kind of protected or is it just "hey we've got a solution, we're ahead of the market, we're just going to run as fast as we can"?
Marty Kausas: Well yeah, so and to be clear, like the first iteration of the product that we had, there were other startups who had tried like the first version of the product. So first version of the product was just an integration between Slack and Zendesk. So that's it. It wasn't actually trying to be a full support system at all. We were just solving that core problem. And we were not the first to do that. In fact, we were the 13th as far as we know who tried from that same starting point. But the key is we kept at it for long enough to discover what the bigger market opportunity was. And the timing just really lined up for us, where our... one of our big incumbents, Zendesk, was not doing well since their private equity acquisition, and that was helping us quite a bit. ChatGPT had just come out. So now AI was starting to rip and all these models were coming out. So there were, you know, a lot of things going for us in terms of timing. And then also just we stuck with it long enough to learn kind of what the problems were in the broader space. So eventually, a year after just building the integration, we actually had this thesis of, "Oh, we could build a better customer support system specifically for the B2B segment."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, really cool. You know, it's funny. I was looking at your website and some of the companies that are using your product are actually vendors of ours. So we use Deel, we use, you know, Vellum, the CEO of Vellum was on our podcast.
Marty Kausas: Yeah, exactly.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: And so... and you know, Deel has got like 35,000 clients and they've raised a lot of money and they're going to go public. So for them to use your product is, you know, a really good, you know, statement that it works, it's functional, and it's something that is valuable. So that's really cool. You've went out and you raised money, uh, once you've got the product into market. Walk us through your journey there with raising capital, because for a lot of clients we work with and just people that we know in general, you know, it's kind of hit or miss. You try and go out, raise capital, doesn't always work, and spend a lot of time and effort. But you seem to have a fairly good track record of doing it. What did you learn in the process? What, what can you share with other founders that they can learn from?
Marty Kausas: Yeah, so there are some things that I could share that you can learn from, others that are just like built-up network and social proof. So I'll say like, for your first round of funding. It's, you either... so this is always the case, but you either have to be really "pointy" is what we like to say internally on one dimension, like you know you have a lot of revenue or a lot of traction already, or there needs to be a lot of social proof because investors have realized—and you know, YC is like this—where they're betting on people for the early, for the first round of funding right? They're really just like, "Hey, are these people smart? They're likely going to pivot a million times. Will these co-founders stick together? Do they know each other well? Can they build their own product?" So, you know, YC in particular loves technical founders because they don't need extra capital technically to keep iterating, and so they can just keep going if they're building a software product and don't need to hire more people. So, you can give, you know, YC founders 500k and they could survive off of that for 5 years. And if you're like two software engineers or or three, or some of you are technical versus not, you can tr... you have so many shots at that.
And so, you know, for YC in particular, they're looking for people who are super hungry, super high energy, super technical, who are going to grind on their product. Now, that's very similar to most early investors where they are going to look at kind of that, those competencies. And then also just social proof. If there's someone else that's going to vouch for you, that they know and trust, who says, "Hey, they're really good, that they have like high likelihood of being able to build something," then they're going to take that very seriously because at the early stages, most people don't have anything.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's good to hear. You raised $17 million, if I'm reading this right, in a series A. How long did that take you from start to end to raise that capital, that round?
Marty Kausas: Yeah, less than 14 days. It was very fast. Basically, we were not looking to fund raise. In fact, we were cash flow positive for the past 3 months and we so, you know, money was not needed. In fact, before that point, we had raised $3.3 million and we had spent maybe 200k of it net.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow.
Marty Kausas: So like we, we were very efficient with our capital and also we as founders, you know, we we did that up to like 10 people maybe. We as founders were also gating our salary based on revenue and just to make it like highly motivating, "Hey, like we have not made it, this is like very much early days." And so we started our salaries off at like 35k, then 50k, then 75, 100, now we're at 115. And so very much like, you know, limiting ourselves and making it clear to the team that we don't, if we don't win or if the company doesn't win, we don't win as well. And so very motivating for us, very motivating for the company, and then also very motivating for investors too. So we were very cash flow efficient, didn't need the money. We were focused on like building quality product.
But then we got preempted by an investor who already knew us, already knew our numbers. We were basically, they were on an email list that of like a small group of people that we were sending, "Hey, here's our like monthly updates to." And so they already knew exactly what we were doing and like where our revenue was, what our growth was. And so they came in and wanted to be early. And that kind of kickstarted our process where, you know, we're like, "Okay, you know, if there's money that's coming from good investors right now or being offered, then instead of waiting six months, we should probably have our conversations now while everything's going well and just have like a really quick process instead of having to do something more complicated later."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. God, that's incredible. It's always good to have revenue-positive conversations with investors, especially when you're not really looking for it. Who led your round?
Marty Kausas: It was Andreessen Horowitz. So Jennifer Li, the partner there who actually now runs their infrastructure fund. She's one of the newer GPs. And we had actually met her quite a while back just socially at, through like this Kleiner Perkins fellow program that ADV, Robert, and I had met each other through. And so yeah, knew her very loosely back then. And then we had met each other at some networking events here in SF like leading up to them starting to, or us starting the Series A conversation.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Really cool. They must like your founder mindset because you know you've shared, and we've seen that you know, at one point you guys were sleeping in the office. You've got beds lined up. Your founders are across the way. And you know, for most people that might not work, but early stage that's a different mindset. It's a kind of "attack the market all hours of the day and do what you need to do to succeed as fast as you can." Is that still the culture?
Marty Kausas: Yeah. So, it's so funny, like the living in the office thing really has like developed into even like stories that are made up at this point because it's just so easy to tell that story and so fun that like people exaggerate it. It actually is. I mean, it's all 100% true. We lived in our office for two years. And the second slide actually in our Series A deck was a photo of my co-founder Robert on a mattress on the ground like in our like living room of the office and with our logo in the back. And so it's like honestly at this point an iconic photo of like him there. And it was incredible. Like investors absolutely love that photo.
And yeah, I mean you should, right? If you have... you want to bet on founders who are 100% all in on building something. And frankly, like you know, work-life balance and being I don't know a holistic person or being like a balanced person is not really what you're optimizing for if you're trying to build a company and especially if you want to build something really big really fast, which is our goal. So, um, you know, seeing people who say, "Hey, I don't need a separate apartment. Like, I'm just going to put a mattress on the ground and like sleep there every day." And then people are going to show up and like that's my life. That is obviously very appealing. And it makes sense that you'd want to bet on a team who is less balanced and, you know, very spiky in terms of their work ethic.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. You know, it's funny, we hire a lot of people and we ended up hiring a girl that she interviewed and the last question we, or she shared her answer was "You know, I'm a total workaholic. I fall asleep with a laptop on my stomach." And I was like, that image of like, you know, like working and not even caring, you're still in bed working. It was like we got to hire... I like that mindset. And it sounds like you guys have that type of culture as a company. What's the business model you're selling to SaaS companies? Is it a per seat? Is it a... How does it work?
Marty Kausas: Yeah, it's actually quite simple. And we don't try to innovate much on price. We try to innovate more on product. And so since it's an existing spend, people are buying already a Zendesk or a Salesforce Service Cloud or an Intercom or Freshdesk. We're just replacing that cost. And so we're not trying to be like, "Oh, here's like some other pricing model that's maybe all usage-based or something like that." No, we'd rather make it very simple for people. "Hey, like you're looking at both products. It's the same price. Which one do you want?" And so we've very much mimicked the price and so it's primarily seat-based and then there are add-ons that you can purchase for AI as well.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Really cool. How much is AI part of your product?
Marty Kausas: So for the first two years it was not part, or first year and a half, it was not part of our product at all, even though you know we started the company 7 days before ChatGPT came out. So it was not a big part of our product. And then suddenly after we built this platform and we have like all the pipes and the data we can start to do really cool things with it. And so AI is now increasingly one of the primary reasons people buy us, instead of the initial insight of "Hey, like I'm able to support my customers over Slack or Microsoft Teams or some other channel."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So for potential buyers out there in the audience, what's the experience like? Is it a system that you log into and you have multiple channels that you can connect with your customers or how does it look and feel?
Marty Kausas: Yeah, so you log in and there are a couple parts of the product. Two or maybe three big ones I'd say. First is kind of the ticketing system interface. So you're logging in, you're seeing all the support requests that are coming in. And these might be coming in from a shared Slack channel that you have with a customer. It might be coming from an email that came into your support at email. It might be a ticket form or a chat widget message. All of those flow into kind of one unified inbox for you. And so it's all tracked, all very easy to see. And then people will create automations to route those to the right people or to like auto-label them so you can categorize things. So that's like interface one where you're tracking and responding to tickets.
Number two, really important, is the help center. So you're able to set up like a customer portal where people can see their tickets, like a knowledge base where people can see like help center articles. So basically a place to go get help if you're trying to, you know, learn more about the product or answer a specific support question. So that's number two.
And then number three is increasingly becoming customer success views for accounts. So if you want to like understand... let's say you're a customer success manager or you want to learn about one of your customers right now, it's so hard to get data. You might go into a call recorder and like, you know, go ask questions about the calls. You might go into your old emails, you might... there's so many, like maybe Salesforce. We have all this first-party data being tracked in the Slack channels and the the emails and the chat widget etc., where we can create kind of like an AI summarized summary of what's going on with that account. So it will be like, "Hey, here are the use cases, here are their pains, here are like the recent things they've been asking about," and kind of just like AI summarized view of that. And so that's like actually one of the big next iterations of the product is not just doing the transactional ticketing, but then also kind of the account views and customer success views for our B2B customers.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's really cool. Who are you selling to within a company? Who's, who who cares about this application?
Marty Kausas: Yeah, so there are a couple different teams. The primary is support, and so customer support teams, they need a ticketing system, so they're usually the first buyer. But then in B2B... so in consumer, you just have support and we don't serve the consumer side. But B2B what's unique is you have customer support teams, customer success managers, you have solutions teams, professional services, account managers, all these people that work together talking to customers and like, should be interfacing with them and playing around with the data. So we sell to those teams holistically.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Gotcha. Yeah, that's great. So, as a go-to-market strategy, you've got incumbents that are out there. You're coming with a newer product that's got more channels to connect with your customers. You can see the data. You have maybe a better view of who you have to support and how you go about it. What's the biggest challenge right now to get new customers? Is it just educating them on you have a different product, or is it, you know, what's the biggest challenge?
Marty Kausas: Yeah, honestly the biggest challenge right now is we need more salespeople.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Okay, so actually the...
Marty Kausas: Yeah, that is by far the biggest problem in the company. And so we're like very aggressively, we just you know kind of shifted our strategy there on hiring and we're even starting to become like more public about our hiring uh because we just want people to come in as well as as outbound. So hiring is the biggest problem by far at the company, and specifically on the sales side. We actually have more leads than we can service right now.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, that's a good problem, right. You know, it's funny. The... there's hundreds of AI companies launching every week, it seems like. And you know, they've quickly gone from building the platform to hiring salespeople, like getting into market and carving out their niche quickly. So, we're seeing this trend of companies hiring sales people much earlier than we have in other eras in terms of startups. So, it's really interesting. It seems like you're kind of on that same path. Once you have the product, it's functional, it's working, you got a number of customers, like, how fast can you run, right? So, really, really cool to see that. And sales people, it's hard to always know what you're going to get. Like, you can look at their numbers, they hit their quotas, are they on target of selling what you do? How do you vet that out?
Marty Kausas: Yeah. So I usually first do a 15-minute screen which looks like... well it's 15 minutes, so super short, super fast. And usually you can tell whether it's a good fit at least like some like high-level criteria. And I'm looking at, do they seem really smart? Do they seem like they'll work really hard? And would I buy from this person? Those are the three questions that I'm asking. And so like those are pretty easy to just like get a quick sense of. Unfortunately, some of them are more subjective, so I can't say like "oh these are the exact details," but hey like I... they're charismatic, they come off as like really intelligent. Those are the things I filter out first.
Then we go immediately now into a mock sales call. So people will, the next we'll do a 30 minutes more if they, you know, pass that first 15-minute screen and I'll ask them to sell a product they've sold before to me. And so 30 minutes, pretend to sell what you're currently selling. And so I want to see, how do they qualify their prospects? How do they, are they able to find pain points? How do they draw those pain points throughout the call? Do they, can they demo a little bit? Do they set up next steps? Kind of all those like basic parts of the sales process. And can they do it on a 30-minute call? So that's what I'm looking for. And shockingly, a lot of people are not very good at that. And even though that should be their primary job of "Hey, like ask questions like learn about the problems that the customer, prospect has, and you know, try to like fit them to your existing product." Shockingly hard to find people who are good at that.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well, I spent seven years at Oracle selling technology and it was pounded into our head of qualify, close, ask questions, qualify, close. So, yeah, it's kind of hit or miss, but that's really cool. As you look into 2025, we're here now in February, you've got a number of customers. What's your... What are you excited about as you look into this year as we continue to forge ahead?
Marty Kausas: Yeah, definitely. I think the product excites me the most. You know, I'm very much a "hey, like the product will make the company do well." And so, we're really focused on just building the best thing that we can. And there's so much low-hanging fruit that exists right now in terms of what we can build, especially with all of the new AI stuff coming out. So, you know, our perspective now that we have taken this approach of, "Hey, we are the B2B focused support platform." There's so many things... like if you look at support from that lens, there's so many things to improve so quickly. And so, you know, we're just chipping away at like all these ideas we have that no one's really worked on, or they were always add-on products to the main system of record that someone already had. So, like things they'd plug into Zendesk or plug into Salesforce as kind of additional, because there was never one tool that could do it all. So, you know, so much low hanging fruit. And the moment we do this, I think we'll actually probably rebrand into kind of more, as we like add in more and become like more of an all-in-one, we'll probably start pitching ourselves not as like a B2B support platform, but probably more as like a customer operations platform or like a post-sales CRM even.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, that's really cool. You know, as a company, it sounds like you're evolving as a leader of the startup now. You've got now 30 employees. How have you evolved as a leader?
Marty Kausas: Yeah, I would say not very much. The, I think we're still very much doing a lot of individual contributor work where we're on the boots on the ground like doing the, getting into the weeds. And so I don't really have any one-on-ones with people, like our sales team I've never had a one-on-one with any of them. Like they sit right next to me, so we talk all the time, but it's not like I'm like "Oh like here's like our pipeline review meeting" and like our like you know, "I'm going to review all your calls all the time." I just don't have time to do it. And so I think as we start to grow, of course, we'll probably like need managers and maybe I'll work with them to do more there. But really right now my focus is on making sure that the core business metrics are good. And so I'm very personally involved in the go to market process, especially the marketing, the selling, onboarding. And then my co-founders are very focused on product engineering, customer success. And so yeah, we have our kind of segments and we're very much in the weeds.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Wow. What a great story. I just want to end with, are you still sleeping in the office? Do you have people that still roll out their beds or is it, that was kind of early days and now you're at the apartment?
Marty Kausas: Yeah. So now we have a separate apartment. I actually wanted to live in the office and my two co-founders as well, we were kind of already like picking which meeting room we were going to sleep in, but then some of our employees were not super excited about it. So they're like, "Hey, I want to like be able to bring my friends on the weekends and if you guys are like just hanging out there 100% of the time, like kind of less possible to do that." And there was a downside of they, there's only... there shockingly is a shower in our office. But so that is good and a washer dryer, but there's only one shower. And so it would have been kind of awkward to just like have everyone working there and we're just like walking around like post-shower going into the bathroom, brushing our teeth, etc. So yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. That's funny. Well, I love what you guys are building. Excited to see how things go in the future. If anyone wants to find Pylon or find you, where do they go?
Marty Kausas: Yeah, just look us up on LinkedIn. Pylon, we have a bright purple logo with like a circle and some lines in it. And then myself, I'm Marty Kausas. You can go to linkedin.com/in/martykausas and I will be there.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Very cool. Well, Marty, thanks for spending your time with us today and thanks to the listeners for listening. It means a lot to me you spent your time with us today. My name is Jake Aaron Villarreal. Signing off for now, but can't wait to catch up with you all in the next episode. Until then, Marty, the world, take care. If you like what we're doing, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and follow us on YouTube where we go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to be a startup founder.
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