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GTM 167: Competing with Giants: Inside You.com’s Battle Against OpenAI & Google | Peter Grant

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Peter Grant is the Chief Revenue Officer at You.com, the AI search and productivity platform reshaping how people find and create information. A veteran GTM leader, Peter has built and scaled revenue engines at some of tech’s most iconic companies — from Siebel Systems to Salesforce to C3.ai — working directly under legends like Tom Siebel and Marc Benioff. Today, he’s leading You.com’s charge against giants like OpenAI and Google, bringing precision, storytelling, and speed to the most transformative era in technology.

Discussed in this episode

  • How Peter defines “the biggest opportunity of our lifetime” in AI
  • Lessons from working under Tom Siebel, Marc Benioff, and Rishi Khosla
  • How to hire SEAL-Team-Six-level GTM talent
  • Why belief and speed are non-negotiables when competing with giants
  • You.com’s differentiation strategy against OpenAI and Google
  • How to operationalize AI literacy and agentic workflows
  • The ROI gap in generative AI adoption, and how to fix it
  • Building products that stand on truth

Episode Highlights

00:14 — The biggest opportunity in technology this century
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af_n_k99-k4&t=14

05:25 — Lessons from working directly with Thomas Siebel
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af_n_k99-k4&t=325

06:41 — How to hire “SEAL Team Six” sales talent
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af_n_k99-k4&t=401

10:24 — Why “train hard, fight easy” defines great enablement
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af_n_k99-k4&t=624

20:08 — The new sophistication bar for AI literacy in sales
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af_n_k99-k4&t=1208

25:14 — How You.com differentiates against OpenAI & Google
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af_n_k99-k4&t=1514

30:00 — Peter’s personal AI productivity system: 40 agents
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af_n_k99-k4&t=1800

40:12 — Speed, truth, and trust: You.com’s go-to-market culture
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af_n_k99-k4&t=2412

48:30 — The “war room” story: building a sales plan overnight
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af_n_k99-k4&t=2910

59:45 — No easy days: why startup life mirrors special forces
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af_n_k99-k4&t=3585

Key Takeaways

1. Belief builds companies.
When you’re competing with giants, belief is your most valuable currency, inside your company and out in the market. Peter’s leadership philosophy starts there. 

2. Hire SEAL Team Six, not a crowd.
You.com’s hiring process is designed to stress-test for passion, precision, and problem-solving under pressure. The mission demands it.

3. Train hard, fight easy.
Grant borrows this from elite teams: rigorous onboarding and continuous enablement create effortless performance when it matters most.

4. AI literacy is the new GTM advantage.
Teams that deeply understand how to use, prompt, and build with AI will outpace those who don’t. Literacy creates leverage.

5. Build on truth, not hype.
In the AI era, you can’t paper over a weak product. Great GTM starts with an exceptional product experience that proves itself.

6. Differentiate or disappear.
When OpenAI and Google define your market, speed and clarity become survival traits. Pick your lane and go deep.

7. Speed without values is chaos.
For You.com, speed is grounded in values: trust, openness, and truth. Culture sustains velocity.

8. Mentorship compounds.
Peter credits his career growth to great mentors, and now pays it forward to the next generation of GTM leaders.

9. Execution beats education.
The best learning happens in motion. Build, ship, and iterate faster than your competitors can plan.

10. This is a once-in-a-lifetime window.
Generative AI is the biggest shift since the internet. Those who sprint now (with purpose) will define the next decade.

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor: BoomPop

A quick pause to spotlight a partner that helps GTM teams actually connect—BoomPop.

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GTM 167 Episode Transcript

Sophie Buonassisi: 0:00

Because it almost feels like Google and OpenAI had a baby. And you’re just playing this middle ground that is so, so valuable and needed.

Peter Grant: 0:07

It is.

Sophie Buonassisi: 0:08

We’re living through it right now.

Peter Grant: 0:09

What Peter Grant calls the biggest opportunity that we have ever seen in a lifetime in technology.

Sophie Buonassisi: 0:14

As Chief Revenue Officer at You.com, he’s going up against giants like OpenAI and Google. And you’re competing in one of the most competitive markets. You know, you’re up against giants. He’s building at the pace of change while holding onto the values he learned from working with three of Tech’s greats. Tom Siebel’s precision, Mark Venioff’s storytelling, and Rishy Koslav’s philosophies.

Peter Grant: 0:33

Find someone that’s exceptional. Be a sponge to them.

Sophie Buonassisi: 0:35

In this episode, we cover a lot, including how to hire SEAL team six-level talent, run a go-to market motion in the age of AI, and build products that stand on truth.

Peter Grant: 0:45

You can’t paper over the cracks of a poor product, I mean.

Sophie Buonassisi: 0:48

And the reality of building?

Peter Grant: 0:50

This is a matter from running a sprint.

Sophie Buonassisi: 0:52

All right, let’s get into it. Peter, welcome to the podcast.

Peter Grant: 1:07

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:09

Yeah, it’s a pleasure to have you here. And you’ve led Go to Market Teams through some of the biggest, most monumental shifts in technology, including cloud and now AI. How does this feel in comparison?

Peter Grant: 1:22

It uh well, it this this era that we that we’re in now. Um I wish I was 25 years old and starting my career all over again. So I’m very envious of the younger generation coming through for the reason this is the biggest opportunity that we’ve ever seen in our lifetime in technology. The impact is having the speed is permeating, you know, just the consumerization. If you look at ChatGPT, the speed, 100 million users in 60 days or less, now 800 million active users, monthly active users, sorry, weekly active users that they actually have is pretty incredible. And obviously you’ll see that consumerization of coming from the consumer going into the enterprise as well. We’ve never seen anything like it. And it’s obviously not just ChatGPT, it’s many other companies that have come alongside that, but that is really, really exciting, right? So they’re market makers for you, which is great from a marketing point of view. You don’t have to waste your marketing dollars educating the market. Why? You just have to spend your time now on differentiation. I think that’s probably the biggest challenge. If I go back to when I got into the information technology space back in 1996, I joined CBO. And CBO was going from mainframe that era to client server. So we always say, oh, client server, this is a big shift where computers we put in the hands of the end user and everything else as well. And we created a category. We created CRM. So Tom Cebor was a genius at doing that. And he realized when he was at Oracle that you it was difficult to see your customer information, he wanted that 360-degree view. We did that, we dominated that market, we caught we created that category. We went from literally zero to two billion dollars in four years and a few hundred staff to 8,000 staff. So you learned discipline in Amsterdam processes and execution. It was absolutely flawless. And you’re right, I went to cloud. It wasn’t called cloud back then in 1999 when Salesforce launched. I joined just at the end of 2002 in the UK, but it was actually utility computing. And Mark was a genius, a genius marketer and still is about telling that story about how to do it. And things were a bit slow to begin with, to make that transition, go from client server onto cloud. But look at yeah, look at them now. It’s absolutely the the gorilla in the market space. But this is so much quicker. This is unprecedented. If you took digital transformation, Google took five years to get to 100 million users. Now, obviously, the internet has been an accelerant or the World Wide Web for doing that, but even TikTok took nine months to get to 100 million. So what you’ve seen with GPT has been pretty incredible. And the speed is moving at now. I think in the value there were 500 net new startups in Q1 this year in generative AI. So if you’re the you put yourself on the other side of the fence, right? You’re the buyer.

Sophie Buonassisi: 3:56

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 3:57

Yeah. It’s really hard to know who to go with. And that’s the biggest problem there. One, the speed, the change, the new people coming into the market, and what is your key differentiation that buyers want to go with you?

Sophie Buonassisi: 4:08

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I have to ask before we go down so many different paths, what was it like to work with Tom Siebel?

Peter Grant: 4:14

Tom’s a legend.

Sophie Buonassisi: 4:15

He is.

Peter Grant: 4:16

Yeah, he’s an absolute legend. He um I learned so much. So I’ve worked for Tom twice. When I was at Cleveland, I didn’t report him to Tom. I was a baby sales rep. I was like 27, 28 years old, and I was running accounts in the UK. But more recently, I was at C3 and I was on Tom’s management team and I ran the USNAPAC for Tom. And it’s probably one of the best educations and learnings I’ve ever had from one of our industry’s most prolific uh entrepreneurs. But it was a it was hard. You know, it’s tough. Tom is a, he drives, he expects results, he rewards you incredibly well as well, but he’s in highly professional. I’ve never I don’t think I’ve ever worked with anybody has so much attention to detail, so professional, so focused on his mission and what he wants to do. And what’s really interesting about Tom, he’s obviously phenomenally successful, but he still has that appetite today in his 60s. He’s still in the office early, he works really late at night, very focused on every single deal that’s there, every email that goes out, every single proposal, every contract that has his name on it. Tom has touched that. So it’s pretty incredible. It was a great learning curve for me.

Sophie Buonassisi: 5:25

That is incredible. Just pure ownership of everything. And I I do have to say a huge congratulations. You just announced your Series C $100 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, which is just incredible. And the growth that you’ve experienced at U.com. Now I’m sure there’s principles that you’ve taken from Tom now into your leadership. I’d love to hear a little bit more around how you’re thinking about hiring and growing and really developing talent now in this year in this environment.

Peter Grant: 5:53

Yeah, well, thank first of all, thank you. It was a team effort. We have an amazing team at you.com, led obviously by Dr. Richard Sosha, one of the leading NLP research scientists in the world, and Brian McCann were the leading AI research scientists as well. So we’ve actually gravitated around them. They are two of the pioneers in this space. So we feel very lucky to be able to work with Richard and Brian, but we have an amazing executive team and engineering team that actually made that happen. From Tom, I think one of Tom’s other key key skills is basically hiring amazing people. Yeah, not everybody has a talent to see what good looks like and what great people are, but Tom literally, what we in the Britain we’d say plays in the premiership. Yeah, lots of people think things are good, but unless you’ve operated at that level, you don’t really know what it’s like. So the way akin to I’d explain in the US would be still Team Six.

Sophie Buonassisi: 6:41

Okay.

Peter Grant: 6:41

Right. So I always say that, yeah, I like doing things early. I’m not a big company guy. I’m that zero to one or one to ten guy. That’s when I sort of come in when you’re looking to scale, you’ve got product market fit, and you need to pour some fuel on the fire and really execute what you’re trying to do. So the hiring process is really important. So I will basically look for your sales skills, your sales knowledge, your sales execution, your customer advocacy, your leadership potential that you actually have. And the way we do that, we have a very quick fire interview. We have a set of questions that we take you through and we mark you. We actually use AI now to do the marking with me to make sure there’s no bias. And I’ve loaded all the perfect answers I’m looking for and everything else. If you get through that, you then come back and you do a panel.

Sophie Buonassisi: 7:28

Okay.

Peter Grant: 7:29

And on the panel, we’re looking for a slide on yourself to see you’re a cultural fit, you know, what you like to do outside of work. We’re looking for your career achievements. So think about a timeline of since you started your career, the companies you’ve worked at, and what you’ve achieved at those particular companies, you know, club trips you’ve been on, presidents’ clubs you’ve made, the type of logos you’ve sold to, the deals that you’ve sold, the personas that you’ve sold to. So I’m looking to see you’re a fit for selling our type of applications. Yeah. Lots of you have done infrastructure deals, but they’re not the right people for us saying productivity or applications, for example. No disrespect to them, but it’s not necessarily what we’re looking for in our particular space. We’ll then ask you to pitch back our company to us.

Sophie Buonassisi: 8:09

Ooh, I love it.

Peter Grant: 8:10

Yeah? So, and then because it’s you.com, you can use you.com to help you put the pitch together.

Sophie Buonassisi: 8:15

Truly, true.

Peter Grant: 8:16

So we want to see that you can actually use the application itself. And I should say, even before you get to the first interview, we will give you a free license of you.com. And on you.com, we’re quite unique. You can do training classes that take you from fundamentals all the way through to mastery. So it’s an investment you have to make in yourself. Yeah.

Sophie Buonassisi: 8:34

I’m sure you weed people out in that process, too.

Peter Grant: 8:36

Yeah, we will we will weed people out, but hopefully people say this product’s amazing. I want to sell it, and this is where I can sell it, and I can I can make myself successful and therefore make you successful as well. So yeah, that’s why we do it uh in the process. People listening to this would probably go, This is a big lift, right? Remember, we’re looking for SEAL Team Six here.

Sophie Buonassisi: 8:53

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 8:54

Right. So so we want you to put I like football.

Sophie Buonassisi: 8:56

We can we can go prendly.

Peter Grant: 8:58

Okay, and the leader. Um, so so then you would do that, and you’d you pitch back you.com, then you have the demo of the product as well. Yeah. Yeah. And then the obvious 30, 60, 90 day plan. Yeah. And what’s really interesting about your first question is people often put what they can achieve in 90 days. And I always say you need to achieve that in 30 days, right? The speed this market is moving at, the change and everything else as well, the competitive pressures that are coming, the decision cycles are a lot faster. We have to work quicker and faster, right, in what we do. So we look, we put them all the way through that, and then we do the reference check, the back channel, and everything else as well. And then we do then that’s a team um effort, the panel. So they’re talking to product, customer success, their peers. We’re making sure that we think they’re the right fit. And ultimately, can they be successful if they come enjoy? It’s a big investment we’re making.

Sophie Buonassisi: 9:47

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 9:48

Yeah. You know, they used to say, you know, miss a mishire with sales reps is going to cost you a million dollars. Right? Time it takes to hire, bring them on board, the ramping, realize you’ve made a mistake, pipeline loss, effort, and everything else as well. So we, you know, the the old adage of basically hire slow, fire fast is you know what we’re definitely akin to. But then once they’re on board, you need to put them into training, you need to put them into enablement and everything else as well. So we invest, we’ve actually invested, I’d say, ahead of that for the size of company we are. With some amazing RevOps leader, uh, must give Spencer a shout out here and Ben Cotton and our enablement team.

Sophie Buonassisi: 10:24

Oh, Ben and Spencer.

Peter Grant: 10:24

Yeah, exactly, right? But they are doing a phenomenal job for our sales kickoffs, for our certification that we do. Then everybody has to go through certifications. I have this mantra, train hard, fight easy. So really understanding our product. So going back into what I look for as salespeople, um, they’ve got to have a really good understanding of the product, right? Inside out, they’ve got to be able to articulate it. The good thing here is you’re selling a product that you use every single day that makes you productive.

Sophie Buonassisi: 10:49

Truly.

Peter Grant: 10:49

So you should be a domain expert.

Sophie Buonassisi: 10:50

Yeah. And you should be passionate about it. And I love that that philosophy of going through the process because if somebody falls in love with the product, inevitably they’re gonna be super passionate when they’re selling it.

Peter Grant: 11:00

Exactly.

Sophie Buonassisi: 11:01

Quick pause because it’s event season and this is a game changer. At GTM Fund, our portfolio companies, our LP operators companies, we’re all planning events right now, as I’m sure you are. Sales, kickoffs for next year, company retreats, conferences, you name it. It’s a lot of work. Planning these company events has been made simple, though, with Boom Pop’s AI powered platform and event planners. They handle everything from venues to experiences, so you can create an incredible event without being bogged down by the planning process itself. And as a listener of GTM Now, you’re eligible for an exclusive discount, full service event planning for just $99 per person. Terms and details are on the webpage in the show notes, which is boompop.com forward slash GTM fund. Head there to start planning your next offset.

Peter Grant: 11:43

So you have to have to be very analytical as well. So we look for people there, especially in this particular space, is pretty technical some of the stuff we’re doing, but you’ve got to be driven by numbers and not by, you know, emotion and everything else as well. Got to be really good at forecasting. Yeah, we have to run our business on commits, yeah, not wishes and stuff. And so we need to make sure that people are professional, analytical in the way they assess their deals and everything else as well. We look for people that are humble, yeah. The most important thing, actually, I should say we look for people that are trustworthy and honest.

Sophie Buonassisi: 12:11

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 12:11

Yeah. So a lot of our business that we’ve found so far in the accelerator we’ve done over the last 18 months is winning net new accounts, but the growth in the existing accounts, I think last quarter, our net retention rate was 169%, which is phenomenal. It’s up to charge. You think gold standards 130, good is 100%. So that’s really good. That means people are buying their few hundred licenses or API calls and then constantly increasing uh what they’re doing with us, right? So it’s important that you’re an advocate for the customer. So we don’t want this drive-by-selling. We want people that really care about customer success and they put the customer at the heart of everything they do, right? And they fully understand the implementation process, right? What it takes to make that customer successful, and you’re gonna be with them on the journey. And I know if you’re a buyer, you’re gonna look at me and say, Do I trust you to make me successful? Right. Does that person, that rep, have influence inside the company that if it does go wrong, because it will go wrong, knife of these perfect, that they will get the right people on my account to make sure that I’m gonna deliver against my MBOs and make sure I’m gonna be successful if I make a decision to go with you.com. Because I was taught at a very young age that buying decision is a very lonely decision. So you need to make sure you’re de-risking everything for them and you’re gonna make them successful. So those are just some of the tenants that we look for when we’re hiring, and then what we do in the enablement, we obviously follow all that through as well. So that’s I think that’s so important. If you look at building tech companies, there are four main things, right? One is the people.

Sophie Buonassisi: 13:40

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 13:40

Yeah. Doesn’t matter what who you are, what you do, right? You’ve got to have amazing people on on the on the bus with you. And you have everybody rowing in the right direction. So every focus on a plan and a an envision that the founders have and a category creation that you’re gonna go after, and they all believe in it. They may not may not agree with this sometimes, but they have to agree to disagree, but then commit what you’re effectively gonna do. No, no, uh, you don’t want uh Dennis Robbins on the bus, yeah. Uh number two is you’ve got to be in a really uh amazing market space, right? So yeah, is you gonna dominate the world, you’re gonna dominate the US. That’s irrelevant, right? But it’s gotta be dynamic, it’s gotta be moving, right? It’s gotta be buyers in that market and everything else, right? Number three is you’ve got an amazing product. And I think that’s even you asking your question earlier about changes. I would argue you can’t um you can’t paper over the cracks of a poor product anymore. What you’re seeing changes in go to market are these PLG motions. So look at lovable, look at cursor, right? Look at their growth they’ve had in such a short space of time, because they’ve been so focused on that cut product experience. Yeah. And that’s my thing about consumerization coming from the consumer, as well, like a mix of consumer and enterprise product people, because they understand what the consumer, that that instant sugar hit you have, but the enterprise side is about that pain, that that vitamin, not a vitamin, excuse me, painfully you’re providing to them to they say, Yeah, I need this, I have to buy it, right? I have to find budget for it, I have to replace this um existing system. But I think that’s really important from a product point of view. But if you have the right people in the right market, you will make the product work eventually. But eventually, these now instead of being months and quarters, is now literally days and weeks by the speed you have to uh iterate up. And the final thing is timing. Getting your market right. And it is market with gen AI, everybody’s investing in it, right? If you look at the latest MIT report in the last 18 months, is it 30 to 40 billion has it been invested in generative AI? It’s incredible. Yeah, whether it’s been successful, we can come on to that in a moment, right? But yeah, so I think those are that’s why people are so important. That’s why people should spend a lot of time investing in the right people, right? And not making mistakes there, because they will they will drive your business forward, right? And then giving the freedom to do that. So from a leadership point of view, I would say set a mission for them, find the right people, let them know what their individual role is in that mission, then let them go and execute. As a CRO, you you you know, most CROs have marketing, they have sales, they have customer success.

Sophie Buonassisi: 16:05

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 16:05

But you never find a CRO’s good at all of them, I don’t believe. People may disagree with me, but I care through the sales side. Yeah. Yeah, then I learn the customer success side. Yeah, marketing, yes, of course I’m aware of it, but I always hire the most amazing customer success person, Doug Duke and I have worked together for the last three uh decades now. He’s he’s incredible. So yeah, so we’ve got the same person on the team, I trust him, right? And now um Caddy doesn’t work for me, but Caddy’s come on our team, she’s incredible as well. So you just have these really, really good people, really good at their job, and then we just have to operate together as a team.

Sophie Buonassisi: 16:37

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, first of all, that’s incredible. I love the framework of just laying it out in terms of a five areas. And one thing you mentioned was their ability to go deep on the product and understand the product. In turn, the utilization and adoption of AI for personal use and just the ability to learn because you’ve emphasized the speed at which everything is changing, is so, so crucial. How do you actually gauge in the interview process itself how adept people are at learning AI and adopting new technologies, not just your product, but AI overall, to anticipate all of the different needs that they’ll have in their AE function?

Peter Grant: 17:15

Yes or leadership. Yeah, it’s a really good question. It’s actually funny, the interview process has actually changed in the last 10 months because when they came in before, they were doing basic prompt engineering.

Sophie Buonassisi: 17:24

Right.

Peter Grant: 17:25

Yeah. And we go, Oh, that’s that’s cool. Because it was even new to us, right? That’s really good. And then somebody changed our mind when they started using Python code and they started doing some really sophisticated stuff and workflows with you.com. And that was a sales guy who does not have a technical background. He’s actually a poet by training. Um but he blew us away. And then we started to realize that in the market, most of the salespeople coming in are actually have a pre-sales type background or quite technical. And so to answer your question specifically, we’re just seeing in the sophistication of what they’re doing with the agents and the type of use cases that they’re solving with them. So as a tip to anybody who’s interested at you.com, don’t come and say about auto write my email, don’t create this content, because we’ve seen all of that. That’s old hand in what we’re doing now. Yeah. So a lot of the stuff we’re doing is these agentic flows, going really deep, doing a lot of deep research, finding different use cases in certain verticals that um these agents can solve for you now that previously you couldn’t solve before. So to answer your question specifically, is it’s the AEs that understand that and work back from the customer experience and then say, okay, how would I solve this with AI? And then they use the AI for ideation. So I think I could like pseudo intelligence, you’re using a different version of yourself, right? But can go much more deep and much quicker and bring back information for you to help you ideate. Right. Right. So we use a product we have called ARI, which stands for advanced research and insights. But I will use that not just to go out and scour a thousand websites in five minutes and come back and give me this very comprehensive report. I will start saying, now you’re a CE in this CMO. Actually, start from the beginning. Let’s do the ideation, you’re a lean canvas. This is an idea I have. Um, a girl from Research, who would be the ideal customer profile to sell it to? Who would be the persona? What would be the value prop and everything else as well? What might what’s the competitive landscape look like, et cetera, et cetera. And they come back and they give you some various forms of ideation, go, this is pretty cool. Now write me a product requirement document, the PRD for engineering for building this particular product. Yeah. And then could focus on these personas if I agree they’re the right personas. It will go off and do all that for me, right? Oh, this is really good, right? Yeah. Now write me a go-to-market plan, right? That backs up doing all of this as well. And then go off and write me a go-to-market plan and what geography should you go to and what account. It will actually pick out certain accounts. I say this, now write me a press plan. Now it will go out and it will find the journals, it will find the journalists for me. It will come back with the messaging, the copy for it, and everything else as well. And they say, finally, now write me pricing and packaging. I can do all that in a couple of hours. I think about build a whole business case and ideation. So that’s that’s the that’s the sophistication we’re looking for now.

Sophie Buonassisi: 20:08

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 20:08

And then now you put yourself in the head of somebody in a healthcare company or a travel company or a finance company, right? And you need to, they need to walk in their shoes and see how they would use the AI to dramatically improve their productivity.

Sophie Buonassisi: 20:21

Okay. So it sounds like it’s really that sophistication gauge that you’re looking around. What type of sophistication do they have in the interview process for building and thinking ingenically?

Peter Grant: 20:30

Yeah, exactly. We’re we’re we’re looking towards, you know, this super intelligent enterprise, right? Yeah. Step back from there is ATI, artificial general intelligence as well. We’re not there yet. But you’ve got to, you know, if you can dream it, we will get there eventually. The technology’s coming and everything else. I think one of the big things that we realized last year is there is a lot of AI illiteracy. So we say people are not being trained. They’ve just been given the tools, whatever the tools may be, whether it be us or one of our competitors or whatever, but they’re not embedding the training. They’re not investing in people to actually do it. And that’s why we partnered with this company called Pair that we’ve now embedded inside the trains you and all the LLMs and everything you can do. And the most important thing is this role-based training. So, no, I’m a CRO of a tech company. It gives me specific challenges to do and how I should use the technology to overcome those challenges really quickly. As an example, have an outage, need to alert the customers or an upset customer, whatever it may be. Now go and do a mind map on your whiteboard. So go and draw a wine mind map on the whiteboard, is how I’m going to answer this particular particular customer challenge. It says then take a picture of it and then tell the LM to write an email to your boss to get approval for what the actions are. I never knew you could do that 12 months ago.

Sophie Buonassisi: 21:47

I love that. I I especially love that because it solves for the gap between agviation and execution, which is one of the biggest ones in AI. Like a lot of companies, what they’re doing for enablement is they’re creating these environments where AEs can create their own agents and then you can share and see what other agents people are building, which is great. Don’t get me wrong, that’s fantastic. But a lot of the time you still have that agation gap, whereas you’re actually showing them the ideation process and then the execution is exactly.

Peter Grant: 22:14

It’s it’s going back to the MIT report. Um so 30 to 40 billion spent, 95%. So they hadn’t didn’t have an ROI. Right, which is frightening.

Sophie Buonassisi: 22:25

It is frightening.

Peter Grant: 22:25

Yeah, and it’s the reasons you’ve just stated, right? So number one reason is lots of the use cases were focused on the front office, on sales and marketing, but they were point solutions, right? And they weren’t being measured or they weren’t being trained to get the full value from what they could actually do. They were doing very basic content creation, email creation, and basic account research as well. Um, the second reason is they weren’t embedded into the workflows, to your point, that can be fully agentic in what they could actually do. Um and I’ll give you an example where we’re doing that with a customer in a moment. And the third reason, which is really interesting, is that most of them were failing because they weren’t working with domain experts. So they were taking APIs or taking GPTs and deploying them, but they weren’t really doing proper what we would call private rack, private retrieval augmented generation over your data, getting highly accurate results, or they weren’t having an outside view of the web as well for their agents, and they were failing in the projects to basically deliver, which was disenfranchising the end users as well, especially when you had the hallucinations and the uh inaccuracies. Um so that that customer I was talking about is actually the telegraph. So the the telegraph’s one of the UK’s leading newspapers. Yeah. Uh we’re just rolling out a thousand star everybody at the telegraph. But the two main use cases are really interesting. They have 500 journalists, and what we’re doing is we’re doing a legal fact checker. And we’re also, so we’re doing a legal checker and a fact checker. So legal check is basically are you writing this article in lines with the editorial policies of the telegraph? Now, normally most humans have been trained on that. We have an employee guide handbook, yeah. But it’s very specific to their journalism based on their political beliefs and what they can and what they can’t say and everything else as well. So we’re having to retrain the LLM, change the uh guide so it can be interpreted by the LM, but do it all live whilst they’re writing so it could be checked because it’s not holding up the journalists. So that’s one thing. The second thing is it’s a it’s a fact checker. So we have a web index, so we can go out live to the web when our algorithm will search. So if it’s saying, you know, Peter Grant, 45 years old, two dogs and everything else, it’s gonna come back and say that’s not true. So then you’ve got one, I’ve only got one dog. I’m joking, right? But the thing is, right, so you make sure it’s factually correct. Their biggest complaints have been around um uh poor journalism for not correct uh correctly uh reporting facts correct uh where they should be. So but that’s embedded into the workflow of the journalists and then pushes it to the CMS, the content management system. Right. And that’s really important in what we’re doing. And we’re doing lots of other things with them, so it’s really exciting. But uh yeah, that’s that that’s a really good example of the training, of supporting them in their workflow process, right, and pushing it out to the CMS as well.

Sophie Buonassisi: 25:14

Yeah. And talk to me about differentiation. You mentioned it earlier, it’s one of the biggest, most important things. We see it on the venture side now, there’s consolidation happening, and companies that are not highly differentiated are are not able to raise subsequent rounds, are not able to grow. And you’re competing in one of the most, at least it sounds like the most competitive markets. You know, you’re up against giants like Google and OpenAI. And we are love to hear how you’re thinking about it and how you see it in the market too, through your role and also all of your advising for startups.

Peter Grant: 25:44

Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I mean we’re generating tens of millions of AR, but we want to generate billions. And if you look at the launch of OpenAI this week, the death day they had, you know, we say we said a a few weeks months ago we want to get out the open AI blast radius. That blast radius went nuclear is weak. If you look at what OpenAI are doing.

Sophie Buonassisi: 26:07

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 26:07

And they and they’re frenemies, right? Because we use their LMs, right? We’re not we’re we’re uh you know 40 different large language models you can connect to with you.com.

Sophie Buonassisi: 26:15

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 26:15

However, I think the war you’re seeing play out is back as we had in the 1990s, where you had the Mac and you had the Microsoft operating system. And everybody was basically Microsoft, and then up came Mac OS, and it was really cool and trendy. Only designers used it first of all, and now I don’t know where they are market share-wise, but open AI is probably the Microsoft, if that makes sense, uh analogy. Who’s gonna whether it’s gonna be anthropic or whatever on the on the desktop side, I I don’t know who’s gonna win on the other side of that war. But it’s not something we’re gonna do with the capital and everything else that we have. Yeah. So I think a couple of things. One is you’ve got to look at what you’re really, really good at. Yeah, and if you look at the history of Brian and uh Richard, they were two of the original AI research scientists in large language models. Richard invented prompt engineering. Brian was the first to take um an open source large language model and apply it to protein research in a lab. Wow. Yeah. Um, this is like eight years ago or so. Richard invented prompt engineering. Richard has a patent pending for marrying a large language model to a web index, stuck and hallucinating. But they’re real, real core skills in search and providing highly accurate answers. So we’re going to become more the AI search infrastructure layer for all of those agents that are being deployed. So we would see more of OpenAI and everywhere as customers that we can really enrich those particular agents, right? So first you have your web index, but then you look at your vertical strategy domain expertise that you have. So you go into like legal, you can go into healthcare, you can go into e-commerce is another really big driver. So anywhere where data’s trade changing rapidly, that it’s designed for human search and not for LLMs, we want to change that, right? We want to make it available to the LLMs, get that conversational output, right? Much more unstructured data, but moving really rapidly, right? And then feed the agents. So whether you’re a Salesforce or, as I say, a chat GPT, you need to connect all different types of data, but you need to have a view on the outside world. And if you’re domain specific, you need to be experts in knowledge in financial services, in trading, or whatever it may be. And I and that we see is that there’s less people operating there. It’s a much harder problem to solve. You need quite a bit of capital, right? But you need a lot of search expertise, intent, understanding as well. And uh, we have an amazing team that have followed Richard and Brian to do that. Yes, we’re still gonna do the private rag stuff. So we think you’re gonna mix the private data in there as well. And you st everybody said they can do it, but the the proof is in the pudding that what we call the final mile, it’s actually really difficult to get really highly accurate results coming back. And that’s why we’re all we I we get up and go to work every single day to provide accurate answers.

Sophie Buonassisi: 29:02

I love it. I love it. I know this is is certainly not doing it justice by any means, but it almost feels like Google and OpenAI had a baby. And you’re just playing in this middle ground that is so, so valuable and needed.

Peter Grant: 29:14

Yeah, it is. Yeah, and I makes it become even more uh pertinent in the future rapidly, the speed is moving out. I think people are gonna start to realize that as you see more agents deployed, you know, part of the vision is that we will manage agents. Now, Zuck said this last year, right? But we we generally believe that I probably have 30 or 40 agents that I use, whether it be writing OKRs, V2 Mond, doing the interview process. I have one listening in to make sure there’s no bias and score as well, to make sure that I haven’t missed something as an example. Um, obviously, you can do your normal email stuff that you might have that’s doing your output, right? The research agents for us, account research, um, 10K agents, you know, briefings before me, all sorts of stuff that deploys it, just makes me so much more productive. And my sales team.

Sophie Buonassisi: 30:00

Mm-hmm. Okay, so we’ve got the company productivity that you’re enabling with you.com, but I want to lean into your productivity now and your team’s productivity, like you just talked about of you’ve got 30, 40 agents. That’s a lot of agents. There’s a lot of research that says, you know, people can manage up to, I think it was about 12 agents right now, and eventually it’ll be, you know, 20, 30 and so forth. But it is that management part and minimizing hallucinations and so forth that is really challenging and providing the context continuously. How are you managing so many agents?

Peter Grant: 30:29

Well, I don’t manage them all at once.

Sophie Buonassisi:30:31

Okay.

Peter Grant: 30:31

Right. It’s it depends on if you think about your day, what you do in your calls and everything else as well. Yeah. Um and the ones I probably use the most are like the basic ones, like just recapping meetings, giving me notes and everything, doing my one-on-ones with my team, right? So, you know, listening to that conversation is trained, you know, what’s your pipeline, what’s your commit, right? What account is it coming from, and recapping what the actions in this particular meeting and and everything else, right? We’re just taking a step back. A normal salesperson only spends, believe it or not, 23% of their time actually talking to customers.

Sophie Buonassisi: 31:08

Wow.

Peter Grant: 31:08

Yeah. Now if you could double that, that’s 50% of their time, nearly. I don’t know. And then for you don’t need to hire as many people, potentially. And that means a yield you can get from from the salespeople is much more productive. Right. So that’s really what we’re sort of sort of trying to do. You know, we’re a small startup, right? Doing it at scale, where you’ve got 10,000, 20,000 salespeople, that is a significant saving uh for organizations. And then it’s a matter of training, and the other important thing is sharing agents amongst the team as well. Okay. Which you can do with you.com. So if you build a really cool agent, you can share with everybody else. Suddenly everybody else becomes really productive, right? So you have that learning curve that people go through how to build an agent, what it can do, how to prompt correctly. So we even have an agent that builds prompts for us. So you call it prompt like a boss. So I so I just talk to you.com, but I don’t have to type.

Sophie Buonassisi: 32:02

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 32:02

So I can just talk to at speed, right? Give me personality. I need to do this. Like v2 moms, everybody’s familiar with v2 moms, you know, from Salesforce or OKRs, right? But every single quarter, we rewrite them. That’s the speed things are moving at, right? And we do it. I literally done mine in half an hour. Like days, right? As soon as I get it from the CEO, what the direction is, what number you want me to achieve, how many people I need to hire, right? What metrics I need to hit and everything else. I just tool them all into the agent and bang, it gives them out. I put you cut and paste it, put it into Google Docs, send it back to the CEO to Rich and say, hey, you happy with these? Is this am I aligned with what you want me to do? Yes, and I deploy to the team literally the same day. That is a huge productivity saving from admin and everything else you may need to do. The other really important one is um think about customer ideation. Um, we didn’t really talk about this earlier, but lots of people, we don’t even know what this technology can do. We don’t know how it can drive and transform people’s businesses. So we now use Ari to help us. So if we’re going to a certain customer in a certain vertical, uh, let’s take uh travel hospitality, let’s take a cruise line, let’s pick one up.

Sophie Buonassisi: 33:12

And did for everyone listening to Ari is and it is kind of like your equivalent of deep research, is my understanding.

Peter Grant: 33:19

Yeah, well, I could say deep research is their equivalent of Ari, but yes.

Sophie Buonassisi: 33:22

There we go. I like it, I like it.

Peter Grant: 33:24

Yeah, so RE stands for these balanced research and insights. It will go out to a thousand websites in five minutes, it will do basically reasoning, chain of thought. You can change the prompts to make sure it’s doing the the searching for you correctly. It will read a thousand up to a thousand websites, it will then say, oh, these thousand, three, four hundred of them of a particular interest as sources for me. So it would bring back the whole website. Yeah, so not just a snippet and everything, but whole uh citation with the snippets and everything else. And then it will start to do a generative output and where it sees data or information, it would turn into charts and graphs as well for your report. And then it will put into a PDF for you. So you now you have it as an like an analyst as a particular report, right? So going back to my example, say with a cruise line, we’re not experts in cruise line, but we may say, okay, how can uh genitive AI impact the guest experience for a cruise line? Now, a cruise line has basically pre-booking. So when you’re looking on the website, I want to go on a cruise, what I want to do. Now I booked it. Then it has pre-boarding. So now you’ve got a mobile app. And what do I need to know? I’m going to this particular country. Do I need to have my passport? What should I pack and everything else as well? Then you have onboard where you are. Now, how do I get to this particular restaurant? Where do I book this? If I want to eat sushi tonight, where is it on the ship? Now, some of these ships have 40 restaurants on them. They’re absolutely huge. And then you have off-board when you go and visit a location. I want an itinerary. What do I want to do today? Right. And then you have uh post-board when you’ve basically left the cruise. How do you therefore keep them as a customer? So in that instance, we used Ari to produce all the use cases. Now we can completely transform the user experience, or sorry, excuse me, the guest experience. And it gave us all the set use cases for that particular uh prospect that we’re working with. And then when we went in, they think we’re domain experts.

Sophie Buonassisi: 35:15

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 35:15

Right. And they think these guys really understand my business. And they bought innovative new um ideas that can really drive our MPS, drive revenue for us, improve the customer experience, look at uh rebooking and everything else as well, and keep them in the mobile app. So one of the big issues they had, for example, was that um 65% of all mobile engagements went to human after the first search because it’s the old-fashioned blue link search. It was coming through, here it is, it’s looking at their product information. It wasn’t telling them, it wasn’t having a conversation with them. And that’s what we look at is you know, you’re having a conversation with your data now, it’s talking back to you. And that’s so exciting. And how that can change things for customers. And that’s that’s a good example of how we use our own technology to do that, which accelerates the sales process. It differentiates us in the sales process. Um, and there’s some exciting announcements will come in the not too distant future.

Sophie Buonassisi: 36:08

That’s great. Well, we can’t hear can’t wait to hear them. And for for startups, you know, you’ve you’ve grown up some incredible companies and taking companies through these gross stages and advised a lot of companies. How should companies think about differentiation overall as they’re building? And maybe they don’t have the same kind of data just at their disposal. But what creates differentiation now at the core, if you boil it down?

Peter Grant: 36:31

Yeah, I think well, you’ve got to do something you’re passionate about. I mean, everybody’s everybody says this right. You and you’ve got to really, really understand it where you’re gonna differentiate him. But, you know, I I stole this from someone sequoia, but because this is a common problem for everybody, right?

Sophie Buonassisi: 36:43

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 36:44

Stay focused on it and go really deep and be really, really good at it, right? And be able to articulate it really simply so everybody understands it and hire people that will go on that mission and and do it with you, whatever it may be, right? And and go for it. But yeah, but I think that’s the main thing, right? You you have to be really, really core on it and try and, I mean, it’s obviously trying to do things that other people aren’t doing, but you think there’s another reason why they’re not doing it, right? But it’d be yeah, the the thing in this market, people are making markets for you. You don’t have to spend all your time educating, right? You just have to spend your time executing better and providing a better quality product and a lot faster.

Sophie Buonassisi: 37:20

Go deeper, execute well.

Peter Grant: 37:21

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean people go, well, you duh, obviously, but it’s it’s easiest to say from the outside, but it’s harder on the inside to do. Incredibly hard. Yeah, it is, right?

Sophie Buonassisi: 37:31

Like you said, one mishire can change the entire trajectory of execution.

Peter Grant: 37:35

It can, right? And I and I admire founders that stick to their core purpose, what they exist for, what they are going to do. Yeah, lots of people don’t realize. Back in the old days, Oracle nearly went bust like three times. As did Salesforce. Yeah, so especially Salesforce had a quite a turbulent start for what it was doing. People didn’t believe in it. You need to remember, back then, we were telling people, especially in Europe, go send their send their data to a data center in America or the American government, go look at it. Are you crazy? Right. I mean, that that was just a complete mind shift for what people are having to do. But I think, yeah, going back to your question, I think people that have that single purpose, they’re gonna solve that problem, yeah. Whatever, yeah, I honestly stay caught to your values there. Now, there are certain um anomalies to that, like what we’re seeing in OpenAI and what they’re doing is getting a bit harder. But then I would say, look at your go-to-market model. If you look at OpenAI, they also launched, they’re gonna do this $10 million consulting thing, like a like you’d expect an Essential or McKinsey to do. There are four deployed engineers from Palantir and C3. There are only so many companies in the world that can afford to do that. That’s what we realized with C3 very quickly. Tom used to say to BPO, never walk away from a small deal, run. Now he was focused very much on the Fortune 50.

Sophie Buonassisi: 38:54

Wow.

Peter Grant: 38:55

But I believe there’s there is what I’m seeing with generative AI is there’s lots of mid-market companies that are a thousand to five or ten thousand deployees, but their yield, their spend on AI is far superior than what I saw in CRM or you might see an ERP, meaning that if you buy a CRM system, 40% of your total company may be licensed to use it. If you buy an ERP, was it 20% or something, something like that? I’m not too sure I’m on the ERP guy. But what I’m seeing in Genitive AI is every employee is getting it, right? And every product is looking to be reinvented through genitive AI. Think about your website experience, how you search for products on the web, or how you serve people up from a customer success point of view and everything else as well. So I think the the you can still make a really, really good business by focusing on one thing, but also focusing one market area and one sizing as well. So vertical and sizing and build your business from there and then make that really successful and rapidly grow from there.

Sophie Buonassisi: 39:52

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That makes sense. Super interesting. And with speed, like you said, just continuously, continuously just becoming faster and faster. How do you think about your philosophy? You know, you you talk a lot about speed and truth at you.com.

Peter Grant: 40:12

Yeah.

Sophie Buonassisi: 40:12

How does that feed into the equation of your go-to-market strategy?

Peter Grant: 40:16

So I think trust is a really important value. And I remember Benioff saying this in the early days, and I didn’t really know what he meant. I sounds a really weird thing to say, because we have high levels of integrity and everything else, right? But you know, you’ve got to be trust in everything you do, what you say, your marketing, communication, how you salespeople, your delivery, the way you store data, your encryption, not talking about various things and all those sorts of things and and and everything else as well. Um when you’re moving really quickly is sometimes hard, but that’s where you have to fall back on your values of of what you’re doing. And you need to educate people um constantly, the direction we’re going, and bring those customers on the journey with you. In fact, the interesting thing is that customers can’t move as fast as you often. Yeah, and the speed of change that you’re doing. So we live in this bubble in the valley, right? We’re in the third largest economy in the world now, um, here in California. But you only need to go to New York or the Midwest. And even New York, they come here and they go, wow. Have no idea, you know, the growth and everything else as well. And then they see the speed, they see on the 101, every poster is AI, for example, like, oh my God, it’s all happening here, right?

Sophie Buonassisi: 41:32

Get it.

Peter Grant: 41:32

So I think here it’s it’s not too difficult to articulate that message, but as soon as you move outside, you have to constantly keep reinforcing it and the speed that we move at. I know culturally that we clash, not clash is the wrong word, but we find it difficult doing business in Europe at the moment because of some of the regulations they’re putting in place with the EU AI Act, with the publishers saying don’t crawl us anymore and getting everybody to sign up to that. But the work ethic is just not it’s just not in line with the speed, the market and the change it’s moving at. Um and I’m not gonna criticize them for that, but I’m just as an observation um that I think is also important as well. So it goes back to your question about speed of what we’re trying to do, is this is a marathon run at a sprint, right? And this is an opportunity that we probably won’t see in our lifetime ever again. So you just you just have to let people then hire it goes back to the hiring process. I say this is freaking chaos, right? I’ve never seen anything like it, and I freaking love it. Right. It is so much fun, yeah. Right. But sometimes I feel like I’m, yeah, it’s like you know, lions led by donkeys sometimes because you think, oh, we’re change chopping and changing all the time and everything else, right? We’re trying to get product market fair, we’re trying to get new customers on, we’re trying to grow like everybody else is like, you know, go to $100 million in nine months, and that we’re only growing at half that rate, you’re terrible and everything else. Yeah. Look at the old SAS days.

Sophie Buonassisi: 42:58

The standards have changed.

Peter Grant: 43:00

The standards have changed, right? But you do, you know, as you’re going back, I think so. Find people that can do all that chaos, right? But people don’t lose their values and everything else, right? They they go to the core tenants that we have, you know, as a business openness, transparency, trust is super important to us as well, and continually reinforcing that. And what we actually do, uh, to answer your question specifically, sorry, long-winded answer, at the end of every single stat um company call we have, we put our values on the screen and then we say we do a QLOS call at who has who has demonstrated these values in the company today, uh, sorry, this week, right? Whether it be in front of a customer, whether it be a support engineer, whether it be somebody in finance, somebody in people operations. What have you done that shows urgency, trust, customer support, advocacy, etc.? Right. And we get that we call those examples out uh to people. And it sounds a bit uh wokey, should we say, but it isn’t, right? Because it’s really important for the team to let them know they are living out by our values.

Sophie Buonassisi: 44:00

Definitely. And I’m sure that alignment creates too in itself.

Peter Grant: 44:04

It does. And the other thing Richard does really well is, you know, we learn this from Mark, is at the beginning of every company call, we call out our B2 Mom.

Sophie Buonassisi: 44:12

Hmm. Okay.

Peter Grant: 44:13

What our focus is, what our KPIs are, what accounts we need to win, what we need to deliver, our accounts to make them successful as well. And all and there’s no ambiguity. Yeah, and it seems repetitive. And I remember Tom Siebel doing this and thinking, uh, you know, been in five years, they do it every single quarter. But that’s why he does it, right? To keep everybody on track. This is where we’re going. There’s no ambiguity, right? It’s not what we’re doing, why are we doing it, right? You know exactly where you’re going as a business, right? Mark was really good at doing this, and Rich has adopted it now. And even our size company, 100 or so people, people now comment, yeah. I I I I understand why I’m here for what my mission is and where we’re going.

Sophie Buonassisi: 44:54

And I I have to give it a huge kudos to you because, like you said, it you don’t know excellent until you know excellent. And you have to hire excellent people. And you’ve worked for some of the largest legends in tech.

Peter Grant: 45:06

Yeah.

Sophie Buonassisi: 45:06

You know, Mark Beninghoff, Tom, like we talked about Richard. So you are a reflection of that in yourself. You’re instilling that in all the people that are under you, and you’ve also learned a lot from those three. We’ve talked about a few principles. Are there other key principles that you’ve learned under their leadership over time that now you implement that we haven’t talked about yet?

Peter Grant: 45:26

Um that’s a good question. Let me have a think about that. I think um I think belief as well. So I also work for Rishi Costa. So Rishi’s a very successful entrepreneur. He sold his first company for 600 million to Moody’s, and then he built a bank which is worth multi-billions now. And I ran the tech side of the bank as a president and COO for him. And Rishi’s attention to detail, just like Tom, just like um Mark. Well, he had was more speed. Bang, bang, bang, bang, right? And it he rishi is more of a six by six by nine culture. Sorry, nine by nine by six culture, right? So six days a week, nine to nine till nine, and you know, and he was the one that said this is a marathon runner, a sprint.

Sophie Buonassisi: 46:15

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 46:15

Yeah. Um, but Rishi would not have anybody negative around him. Right. This is where we’re going, right. And you get with it, and everything was positive, right? He always had a positive outlook. I never saw him lose his temper or anything, and he was uh highly intelligent and very controlled, that sort of narrative, and he’s brilliant at articulating it. And he was good at getting into detail as well. Really good at getting into detail. In fact, I should argue the three of them were like that. So Tom, absolutely, right? I mean, Tom gets right down into your emails, what you’re doing, your contracts. I mean, I remember sitting in his office at one o’clock in the morning with a whole lot of SOWs to go out. Yeah. Right. And this he could buy it, but he would he would basically be the buyer. He believed what you were doing, what the deliverable was. He knew he was going to get paid. There’s no ambiguity. He had to go off and rewrite it, get it sorted, and everything else here. Mark with legendary, you think Mark’s very high level, but every now and then Mark would go into a deal, into your CRM, and go right down to your old chart, why are they buying? Where’s the activity? That deal’s been lost. Why haven’t you got a forward activity in three months and everything else? And Rishi was the same as well with the detail, and he was very good. And Steve Garnett was the same, taught me. But a problem is don’t just talk it out, get on the whiteboard, start to draw it out and ideate what that particular problem is. And let’s have a positive mindset to solve that particular problem. But yeah, I’d say, yeah, again, that detail, but also that enthusiasm, that positivity, that was that energy that you brought to the team, and then that solution, uh problem-solving mindset. In fact, Tom, if you go to the C3 offices, lots of it’s all um the walls are glass that you can write on, or the white, the all the white walls are actually white boards. Really? Special covering on them. Yeah. So at any time you can just stand up and ideate and fix problems together. And that culture is another thing I learned. I thought it was really good.

Sophie Buonassisi: 48:11

That’s great. Just a a speed a speed culture and what speed to fix it, get it done.

Peter Grant: 48:16

Yeah. Yeah. And I think I think the other yeah, the other thing actually reminds me of war rooms. So um funny story. So um I was in my uh exco one day and he said, Where’s your sales plan?

Sophie Buonassisi: 48:30

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 48:31

What sales plan? I said, What do you mean you haven’t got a sales plan? I said, It’s in the CRM, Tom. He said, You are joking me. And I said, No. I mean the sales plan, right? So get a sales plan. I want it by tomorrow.

Sophie Buonassisi: 48:44

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 48:44

Uh sorry, not tomorrow, next day. I walked out and I said the head of strategy worked for me. I said, He’s never told me I needed a sales plan. I was like, new to the company. He’s like, we’ve never done a sales plan. So and my counterpart for Julian was in uh Europe. Yeah. And he had to get an airplane then, literally that day, a fly to Redwood City. And we literally worked all through the night and everything else with uh head of strategy, and and we came up as a most amazing sales plan. So we literally got the whiteboard and we like slide one, slide two, slide three, what it was gonna be. And we built like pilot board deck, sales plan, go-to-market plan, marketing plan, everything we built and put together. But it’s a speed we did it at like in 48 hours. Yeah, and then we presented it to Tom, did so a few tweaks, and that became the execution, that became the blueprint and everything else. You see, other people, you asked for something, and like two weeks later you’re still chasing for it. Yeah. Now I’m putting into context, you had to prioritize it, but that was an important thing that we had to deliver that actually aligned all the go-to-market teams with with was in the CRM or in our heads. It wasn’t in detail. It was a very, very detailed plan we put together. Sorry. A sense of urgency.

Sophie Buonassisi: 49:54

Yeah. We we think about it on the investing side too, is how you run the process is how you run everything, where it’s indicative of it in a way. So your speed of executing in the process itself is demonstrative of how you’re gonna run your go-to-market experience.

Peter Grant: 50:07

Yeah, exactly. I think I think the other thing that’s interesting about this market is that we all have playbooks, but you can’t necessarily bring your playbook into this market, if that makes sense. Like what has necessared in the past is not gonna work in the future. Lots of those things have gone out the window in your go-to-market models and you know, how you generate leads, for example, right? And yeah, you know, you know, the old, yeah, I can’t remember I read it the other day, but um the old thing about doing emails, ABN campaigns and all that, you know. And the problem is because agents and bots are doing it, you know, lots of people can read through it. You can see there are sequences, have been auto-written by 11x or whatever, you know, whatever it may be. Right. And you’re not necessarily getting the traction, right? So we’re actually going back to a lot of old-fashioned things, you know, of basically going out to exhibitions, pressing the flesh, doing the dinners and stuff like that that you used to do pre-COVID.

Sophie Buonassisi: 51:01

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 51:01

That we’re finding those sorts of things that are working as well, right? Or creating communities of education because people don’t know what it could do, or bringing different industries together and saying, actually, how can we, you know, utilize this without sharing competitive information um uh to do those sorts of things. I think you have to have a really open mind of of what you can do and how you can change. And I’ve been I my fault has been in the past, I’ve been a bit too regimented. I’ve seen what’s work before, gonna bring it execute, but I don’t think you can do that in this market. I think it’s it’s it’s different and you need to be open to change, right? And then agree that, but then ferociously execute like you used to before.

Sophie Buonassisi: 51:38

Can you give us an example of one of the things that you’re doing right now that’s working extremely well? The pendulum swinging back towards in person, a lot of just one-to-one, human-to-human interactions. But I’m curious what that looks like in practice for you.

Peter Grant: 51:53

Yeah, I think uh we are starting to attend a lot of industry events where people are going. So media is a big market for us. So I mentioned the Telegraph, we have Deutsche Press Association, we have Apatik Umscha. Um, we have a number of other ones I can’t mention, but a lot of press associations we work with and other media titles. But meet well, we’re in Italy back in April, at Perugia, it’s like the Davos for media. We were presenting there, we put a customer as you, you know, would you got them to do the presentation, but they were demoing agents for us and showing all the sorts of stuff that you can do with the technology. And that’s where we picked up the telegraph. Um, I’ve got a guy in Poland right now who’s at a Polish event, he was in Dublin last week, a media event. We’re going to Paris at the end of the month. We’re finding those types of events. We’re meeting some people all talking, and uh, we’re making some really good traction doing those sorts of things. The other thing we’re doing is we’re going into some of our financial services companies doing lunch and learns.

Sophie Buonassisi: 52:49

Okay.

Peter Grant: 52:49

Right? So we’re teaching them how to do de-research. We’re teaching them how to do the prompting and stuff because some of these traders will spend their time doing some of the training, shall we say?

Sophie Buonassisi: 52:58

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 52:58

So you’ve got to walk the corridors and press the flesh with them and literally stand over their shoulder and show them how to do it and you know some interesting use cases. They’re they’re uh trading desk, they’re doing um research on pharmaceutical companies that are getting funded, getting patents, doing breakthroughs, etc. They’re potential MA targets for the bigger pharma companies. So they’re using our research tool to basically go out and do all that information. But but just being there in person with them as a as a guide to sort of help them is really good as well.

Sophie Buonassisi: 53:28

As part of an acquisition strategy or expansion? So this isn’t that new account.

Peter Grant: 53:32

So they’ll their bank is looking to put together deals for all the big pharma companies to gobble up some of the smaller biotech companies. Right.

Sophie Buonassisi: 53:38

If they’re not an existing customer yet.

Peter Grant: 53:40

Uh though they’re customers of ours. Yeah, they’re but they’re not for them. Sorry, no. These are the trading parts of the bank.

Sophie Buonassisi: 53:45

Okay, okay.

Peter Grant: 53:45

Yes, if we’re going into the bank who are customers of ours and we’re teaching them how to use our research tool, right, rather than just say bought it, sold it, and the pre-sales, but we’re actually going up there and doing lunch and learns to get more traction with them and more usage of the product.

Sophie Buonassisi: 54:00

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 54:00

And that’s generating more leads for us as well, going deeper into the bank, right? The the media event one is actually generating leads for us and they’re moving quite quickly. Yeah, we just we just launched a webinar today and we’ve already had like nearly 300 signups come to the webinar, it’s a bit old school, but uh doing the webinar stuff. But I I generally believe just being out there at the right targeted events with use cases for those particular verticals um is helping us. Right. So the email stuff is not really working for us. SDR, we we do use 11X um to go out there and try and generate some leads for us. Um that’s had you know some success in what we’re doing. We do, we have an SDR, she’s done really well. Um I think also, yeah, you need, I think, having an amazing website that that we haven’t had in the past. That’s we’re we’re cleaning that up and we’re seeing a much bigger lead flow and then goes back to your messaging and your clarity, what your mission, your mission is, what do you stand for, and everything else as well. So yeah, we’re we’re not perfect by any far stretch of the imagination, but we’re getting better and better at those things.

Sophie Buonassisi: 55:05

Well, it’s interesting to hear what’s working and what’s not. It sounds like the common thread amongst all those is thought leadership and enablement and really helping people get better and solve their problems.

Peter Grant: 55:14

Well, actually, what we do is we put our founders at the center of everything. Well, because of who they are. Yeah, I was gonna say you’ve got it too. We’re very lucky, right? So because there are so many people that are out there, right? But there are not many rich associas and Brian McCanns. If you look at um you look at the br brain drain between OpenAI, Apple, and and and uh Metra and everybody else, right? They’re on that path. But there’s only a handful of them in the world. And we’re lucky to have them as an asset. So it’s having that asset now working on your account with you, yeah. And we expose the founders, you know, to all our accounts and customers. They meet with them and everything else, they go to their board meetings and stuff, and that um gives us great thought leadership, makes them look good on their side as well, and helps with the partnership.

Sophie Buonassisi: 55:54

Mm-hmm. I love it. I love it. And I’m curious about your learning. So obviously you’re you’re learning in terms of product utilization. How are you personally learning about AI outside of you.com? Any favorite resources?

Peter Grant: 56:07

Um, I yeah, I I follow a lot of um, you know, people on LinkedIn, for example. I watch a lot of YouTube. I mean, it’s interesting, right? So you go back to recruiting, you’ve got to have this appetite and passion to learn. Wasn’t my forte score, if I’m honest with you. It was more sporty. But um, well, I remember joining SIBO, and this is pre um YouTube that God had to do so much reading, you know, and try and maintain the information and all this client service, CRM stuff. I know it sounds really basic now. Um, but I was lucky when I went to C3, I put the first boot camp in place and had these amazing people that work for me on the enablement side and had all the data scientists come in. So we understood machine, all the different forms of AI and the machine learning, computer vision, and identity recognition, etc., what an ROC curve was, what precision and recall is, we tested everybody on it. So you so you you had to had that goof foundation. And then in keeping up to speed on on, I watch everything on YouTube. I spend all my time laying in the bath, watching it on my bike, listening to podcasts, or you know, whatever it may be, just to try and keep me up to speed. And the other thing I do is I spend a lot of time with Richard and Brian. And they are because they’re two thought leaders, when they’re often going out there talking, they’re not talking about uh necessarily you.com and our use cases. They’re more about the future of LLMs and hallucinations and the meaning of work and how it’s going to change the world and all those sorts of things and and what they think some of the breakthrough breakthrough technologies are gonna be. That that that’s a massive learning. I say to Richard, I don’t know how you do it. You run you.com, you run a venture fund, you’re writing a book at the moment, you’re the most third most cited research scientist in the world for NLP, yeah. And you know, you appear on all these forums and everything else, and you’ve got such a depth of knowledge, he’s an amazing human being. So yeah, just so just if you find people that are super, super smart and attach myself to them, and if I can pick up 10% of what they know, then I think I’m up to pretty good innings.

Sophie Buonassisi: 58:09

I’d say so too. And what about books? Do you still read many books or have they written any impactful books per in particular on your career?

Peter Grant: 58:17

So um I I like Lucas when he wrote Elephants Can’t Dance? Many, many years ago, the IBM one, just yeah, transforming um there. Uh obviously I loved uh Horowitz uh the was it the hard things about the really hard things, which I think was a really good Buddha’s written there. And then we started to read things on the master algorithm as well about having all the different five R algorithms, one master algorithm that could solve literally uh every single sort of problem in the world. I did get into Blink list for a while. Oh, yeah. And when I was traveling going up and down the Blink list?

Sophie Buonassisi: 58:50

Yeah, yeah. Okay, I’ve got into that a little bit.

Peter Grant: 58:52

Yeah, when I was going up and down the 101, stuck in the traffic and or in the gym and everything else. But to be honest with you, I’d I’d move to YouTube. Yeah. And and then I and I or I will go into you.co and I say, can you give me a summary of this book and the main talking points and learnings from it? And I and I would do that.

Sophie Buonassisi: 59:09

Mm-hmm. Do you find you retain the same amount? Like I found when I got into Blinkist, I couldn’t retain it the same from the long form.

Peter Grant: 59:15

Yeah, that’s a really good point. Um I think Noah’s probably the short answer to that. Do you other most books I read are actually special forces books? Because I I read about people doing extraordinary things and and and challenges because it is startup, it’s really, really, really hard. Yeah. Like really hard.

Sophie Buonassisi: 59:35

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 59:35

Yeah. I admire any founder that one attempts here at the second lease is successful, yeah. 90% are gonna fail. Like it’s just like special forces selection.

Sophie Buonassisi: 59:44

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 59:45

Yeah. They are gonna fail, right? And and unlike the normal military, special forces, no one’s shouting at you, no one’s telling you what to do and everything else. Like, turn up here tomorrow morning at 4 30 a.m. Wake up pouring with rain, it’s cold outside. Where’s the motivation? It’s got to come from within that you want to you want to go and do that. So I like reading those things, those extraordinary stories that people have done. And I like to apply it in just the the culture, the philosophy of what we’re trying to do and making the people that get in feel really, really, really special to be there and then trying to make them uh really successful.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:00:20

I love it. Great recommendations. All those will be in the show notes. And I have to ask you, because uh a common thread has been just the the absolute sheer hard work it takes to truly build a generational company, and it is true. And I know you uh are working incredibly hard at at you to do this right now. What are your thoughts on 996?

Peter Grant: 1:00:43

Disenfranchise. Disenfranchise myself here from a lot of people. Um Well, you mentioned it earlier. So I know, I know. It’s like it’s almost like you don’t have to say it. If you re if you if you have a really clear purpose and mission that you want to achieve, then people will naturally dive out of bed at 5.30 in the morning and that’d be dragged by their partner, kicking and screaming from their desk or whatever it may be, to stop work in the evening to spend some time with the family.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:01:15

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 1:01:15

Yeah. And I know that’s not the right thing to probably say and advocate for because you do need a good work-life balance. But, you know, an old boss of mine used to say sleep is for the afterlife. But the the reality is, right, I’m just talking about in our in our bubble.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:01:30

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Peter Grant: 1:01:31

You know, it’s going to create immense wealth. But that’s not how I do it. I I do it because I want to, I love, I love being part of a team that’s invoking change that affects other people’s business to make them more successful. That’s the real goal. You try I love building things.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:01:48

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 1:01:49

Right. And that is so exciting. I’m an entrepreneur, not an entrepreneur. I’m much better at taking other people’s ideas and executing, operationalizing them.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:01:58

Um you’ve done it over four times. Yeah, it’s not exactly.

Peter Grant: 1:02:01

It’s a whole team. It’s not I’m part of a team, right? So, so you know, you take praise from the back and criticism from the front. It’s so important from a team point of view. I’ve just been very lucky. Not no everything’s worked, I’ve done, but I’ve just been very lucky to attach myself to some very, very smart people that have been really successful and and ride ride with them. But yeah, I I I’ve learned so much on that journey and all I’m applying it now, and I try to pass down that knowledge as well to other people as well. But going back to the COP, but none of us did it easily.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:02:31

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 1:02:31

Right? No, no easy day. Another great book, a special forces book, no easy day, right? But there’s there is no easy day in what we do. And I look at one of my my mentors, a guy called Steve Garnet. Dr. Steve Garnett, doctor of uh of nuclear physics. He was employee number 20 at Oracle in uh Europe. He was the same at sales for a CBO, excuse me. And I met him at Seaboul, and he took me under his wing as a baby sales rep and seemed to like me. And he thought he could mould me and um, you know, very different backgrounds, but he’s the most humble, intelligent, nicest, ethical person I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with, and now one of my best friends. But uh his work ethic is what I remember. He was he was running Europe and I was in the UK, and he’d be up at 4:30 to go to Heathrow to get on an airplane, to go somewhere and then back. And he was a just phenomenal work ethic. And every time I look in the mirror, that’s what I want to be. Like I want to be, yeah. But you can’t say I want to be like you have to be driven by the mission that you’re on to do it. So if you haven’t got people that understand that, I do explain to the younger generation and in the company, I’ve never seen this opportunity in my life. Don’t take it for granted because you do not want to get to the end of your tenureship and fail and go, I wish I’d tried hard, I wish I’d done this, right? So give it all you’ve got if you believe in it.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:03:50

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 1:03:51

Right? And and then and then it becomes natural, right? So do you would I mandate going on the Saturday? Not necessarily. Do I work on a Saturday? Yes, I’m a Sunday, whatever, but I do it because I love it. I do it’s the right thing for the business.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:04:03

I love it. I love it. I I feel the same way as you shouldn’t have to mandate it. It should just be out of passion. Yeah, exactly. And that’s how you find those people and you run with them. Exactly. That’s fantastic. Is there anything that you want to talk about that we haven’t covered? Just off lying here for a minute, taking a beat.

Peter Grant: 1:04:21

Um I don’t think so. I think um I I think that the important thing I think is the learnings is is key, right? It’s the people who want to invest in themselves, right? And people that yeah, I I would I would say if I was starting all over again, uh I I was very lucky to meet Steve. How did you meet so I I joined Seball, he was head of Amir.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:04:49

Okay.

Peter Grant: 1:04:49

Yeah, and I was a sales guy, and I was like one of the top sales guys of the company. So the first thing I did when I joined SIBO is there were three salespeople that were like the big guys doing the big multi-million dollar deals.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:05:00

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 1:05:01

And I’m so competitive, I wanted to beat them. I wanted to be one of them. Uh John Annstey’s no longer with us, unfortunately, but Steve Meek, Steve Miller, and I basically befriended them. So even though I was a baby rep when they were more senior to me, you know, went to the bar, got to know them, and I just peppered them with questions. You know, what does it take to be like you, be successful, what do I need to do? And everything else as well. And I went on to be the top sales guy in Europe for CPO one year. But Steve Garnet saw me and he was running Europe. He’s running partnerships and he picked, plucked me out to go and do a specific job for him. That job wasn’t right for me. It’s partnerships, and I I would disenfranchise from the end customer, and I found that hard to do. It wasn’t uh my skill set. But what it taught me is this having a mentor was so important to keep me on the straight now. My my compass for success, I guess. And that’s what I look for now, and that’s what I try and pass down to. So the people coming through now, go and find someone that’s exceptional, someone that’s been there, right? Someone that’s got that proven track record, right? And you know, be a sponge to them, right? Be subservient to them, go in there and learn as much as you can, as fast as you can, right? To take it on. And now I have engineers coming to me and younger people that want to be entrepreneurs, even at you.com. You shouldn’t be worried about that, right? You think it’s great. If you want to go set your own company up one day, I’ll I’ll pass all my knowledge, all my workings, and everything else on to you because it got passed on to me. Right. Paying it for it. You’re paying exactly, you’re paying it forward, right? And then if that person can go on and be successful, that is so rewarding for what you’re doing. So, yeah, I would say to a lot of people, like, find some really, really, really good mentors. And if you’re young founders, definitely find some really good C CEO mentors that have been there, built it, been through the hard yards that you’ve done, because it’s really tough. I’ve been a CEO, it’s really lonely, it’s really tough. And that’s why I think we’re talking off camera, but um, I’m a go-to-market advisor for Broadwave.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:06:58

Yeah.

Peter Grant: 1:06:58

So Broadwave is a digital version, I guess, of um different groups you have in Silicon Valley. So Silicon Valley is 40 square miles, roughly. It’s the third largest economy, the color of California, but especially a lot of that comes here from Silicon Valley. But we have a great culture of sharing meetups, you know, CRO meetups, CEO meetup, whatever it may be, right? Just helping the VCG lead this, right? It’s really, really cool. You don’t have that in Europe.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:07:24

Really?

Peter Grant: 1:07:25

Yeah, you don’t. And a lot of it’s because it’s fragmented, different languages, different cultures, and everything else. So Phil Robinson, he’s another great friend and mentor. Um, he set up Boardwave a number of years ago with this vision to be how could we be like the value and bring people together and have these sharings basically. And took, you know, a lot of older people, grey haired, white males like me and females, right? They basically say, How can you help this zero to one, one to ten, and everything else coming through? And that’s been really rewarding. We do podcasts, they do meetups, they just had their third annual, big annual meet, briefly Bryan over there last year. We get more licenses to help them. They’re coming on Silicon Valley tours.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:08:03

Amazing.

Peter Grant: 1:08:03

Um, yeah, it’s all those sorts of things, right? So anything can do help to pay forward, as you say. Um, but the important thing is you’ve got to be coachable. You’ve got to be, you know, recipient to it. These people have been there, they’ve done it, right? Yeah. Yeah. You of course you have your own way, but yeah, don’t think you can do it alone.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:08:19

No, never. Been there, done that. Yeah. As we say, as you’ve just said. Absorb from those who have been there, done that.

Peter Grant: 1:08:26

Yeah, exactly.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:08:27

I love it. And where can people find you? You know, you’re advising startups through Boardwave, you are getting at you.

Peter Grant: 1:08:34

Yeah, my I’ll my whole my whole focus now is on you.com. That’s what I was doing before I joined you.com. Obviously, I’m I’m I’m linked LinkedIn, they can find me there. But uh yeah, I I everything I do right now is u.com. If you want to u.com, come come and see me, Peter, at u.com. But um yeah, love to love to have a conversation with you if you’re interested in bringing Genesis VAI to your business.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:08:55

Wonderful. Well, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much, Peter.

Peter Grant: 1:08:57

I really appreciate your time. Thank you.

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Sophie Buonassisi

Sophie Buonassisi is the SVP of Marketing at media company GTMnow and its venture firm, GTMfund. She oversees all aspects of media, marketing, and community engagement. Sophie leads the GTMnow editorial team, producing content exploring the behind the scenes on the go-to-market strategies responsible for companies’ growth. GTMnow highlights the strategies, along with the stories from the top 1% of GTM executives, VCs, and founders behind the strategies and companies.

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GTMnow is the media brand of GTMfund – sharing insight on go-to-market from working with hundreds of portfolio companies backed by over 350 of the best in the game executive operators who have been there, done that at the world’s fastest growing SaaS companies. GTMfund is an early-stage VC fund focused on investing in the most exciting, up-and-coming B2B SaaS companies across the world. The LP network consists of VP and C-level Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success leaders from companies like DocuSign, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Snowflake, Okta, Zoom, and many more.

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