The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including:
Emir Atli (Co-founder and CRO of HockeyStack) joins GTMnow to share how go-to-market is shifting in the AI era — from fragmented tools and GTM sprawl to unified, AI-native platforms built on a single data foundation.
Originally known for attribution and market intelligence, HockeyStack is evolving into a central operating system for go-to-market, spanning marketing, sales, and post-sales through AI agents, blueprints, and an execution layer.
We also explore weekly GTM sprints, founder-led content as a pipeline driver (even with <100 followers), and the long-game mindset behind building a generational company from age 20 after YC.
Discussed in this episode
- Why you can’t layer AI onto legacy GTM — you must rebuild GTM around AI
- The “sprawl crisis” and why siloed tools break without a single data foundation
- HockeyStack’s evolution from attribution to a unified GTM operating system
- AI agents, blueprints, and the shift from reporting to execution
- Why consolidation is moving from tools to full buyer journey control
- The case for a winner-takes-all GTM platform
- How AI increases leverage across reps, managers, and pipeline reviews
- Weekly GTM sprints and faster iteration cycles in the AI era
- Founder-led content as a core growth engine and pipeline driver
- LinkedIn as a top channel for MQL-to-opportunity and deal acceleration
- The 10-year mindset, YC lessons, and building a generational company
Episode highlights
00:00 – The GTM sprawl crisis and why AI breaks in siloed systems
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=0
01:50 – From attribution to a GTM operating system
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=110
02:41 – Launching AI agents, blueprints, and the execution layer in 2026
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=161
03:57 – Building a single data foundation across the buyer journey
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=237
05:09 – Why GTM must be rebuilt around AI (not layered with tools)
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=309
06:23 – Doing “more with more” and increasing management leverage
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=383
07:30 – Tool consolidation vs controlling the buyer journey
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=450
08:48 – 2026–2028: the great GTM consolidation wave
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=528
09:01 – The case for a winner-takes-all GTM platform
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=541
10:10 – Moat: data foundation + application layer
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=610
11:35 – Expanding horizontally across marketing, sales, and post-sales
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=695
14:28 – Running GTM in weekly sprints like an engineering org
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=868
14:46 – Content as a core investment and distribution strategy
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=886
15:26 – Why connected TV works for B2B brand trust
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=926
16:43 – Faster GTM iteration cycles in the AI era
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=1003
17:47 – LinkedIn as the top pipeline and opportunity channel
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=1067
18:12 – Product stories, personal stories, and data stories in content
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=1092
21:02 – How founders carve out time to create content
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=1262
22:43 – Generating first customers from LinkedIn with <100 followers
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=1363
23:45 – Founding journey: pivoting into market intelligence
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=1425
25:37 – YC lesson: make something people love before scaling
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=1537
27:18 – The 10-year commitment mindset from YC advice
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=1638
30:13 – Executive coaching and founder bottlenecks
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=1813
31:53 – In-person culture and competing in the AI era
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=1913
33:26 – Whiteboarding interviews vs AI-generated case studies
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=2006
34:35 – Final advice: build a good business and enjoy the process
Watch: https://youtu.be/qyneDuS0bkU?t=2075
Key takeaways
1. A single data foundation is the prerequisite for effective AI agents.
When marketing, sales, and post-sales data are fragmented, agents become narrow copilots instead of end-to-end operators. Unifying the full buyer journey in one system enables agents to execute multi-step workflows (forecasting, win-loss, expansion) rather than just generate outputs.
2. Consolidation is really about workflow control, not just tool reduction.
Buyers aren’t only cutting tools, they want platforms that own decision-making and execution across the revenue lifecycle. Expect 2026–2028 to bring a consolidation wave where buyer-journey platforms displace siloed point solutions.
3. Durable GTM moats = data foundation + application layer.
The advantage isn’t just owning data, but letting teams build agents, workflows, and custom applications on top of it. This creates compounding lock-in versus tools that only provide analytics or surface automation.
4. Founder-led LinkedIn can drive pipeline earlier than expected.
HockeyStack’s first customers came from LinkedIn with <100 followers. Emir focuses on product, data, and personal stories — turning content into pipeline, trust, and deal acceleration.
5. Run GTM like an engineering org: weekly sprints over long plans.
Instead of quarterly planning, the team operates in weekly sprints and fast feedback loops. In AI markets, iteration speed becomes a core competitive advantage.
6. Do things that don’t scale before automating.
A core YC lesson: over-automation too early is a trap. Find a small group of users who deeply love the product first, then scale systems and AI on top of real pull.
Brought to you by: Granola
We’ve got an incredible deal exclusive to GTMnow listeners.
It’s for Granola, the AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings.
We’re Granola users at GTMfund, and it has changed the way we work.
Granola takes meeting notes for you without any intrusive bots joining your calls.
During or after the call, you can chat with your notes.
Ask Granola to pull out action items, help you negotiate, write a follow-up email … or even coach you using Recipes, which are pre-made prompts.
It’s actually the same technology we use to create the notes for this very podcast. Once you try it on a first meeting, it’s hard to go without.
Head to granola.ai/gtmfund and get three months free with the code GTMFUND.
Follow Emir Atli
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emiratli
- HockeyStack – Website: https://www.hockeystack.com
- HockeyStack – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hockeystack
Follow Sophie Buonassisi (Host)
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/sophiebuona
- Website: https://gtmnow.com
- Newsletter: https://thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/
Where to Find GTMnow
- Website: https://gtmnow.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
- Podcast Directory: https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast
GTM 179 Episode Transcript
00:00
Sophie Buonassisi: To date, we’ve been in a lot more sprawl crisis where teams are just hopping between tools and trying to get them to talk and connect to each other.
00:07
Emir Atli: The problem is, you cannot add AI into an already built out core market motion. You need to build go to market around AI.
00:15
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s a mere app. Lee, co-founder and CRO of Hockey Stack. He’s betting on the death of GTM sprawl because I breaks when data, decisions and execution live in different systems.
00:26
Emir Atli: Go to market is a very interesting space because there’s no clear winner in AI right now. And I think architect will be the winner when you add those siloed products into an already built out core market motion. They don’t work well together because they’re all siloed versus if the platform covers the entire buyer journey, it’s virtually irreplaceable.
00:43
Sophie Buonassisi: We deconstruct the hockey stack evolution from trillions of rows of data to a central operating system for go to market, and why Amir spends one fifth of his time on content.
00:53
Emir Atli: Content is a big investment for our city, and it’s going to continue to be a big investment for architect, both for deal acceleration. Building a brand.
01:01
Sophie Buonassisi: Go to market is changing fast, and hockey stack is racing to define what the AI native stack looks like. Nir, welcome to GTM. Now.
01:11
Unknown: Oh!
01:19
Unknown: Let’s go.
01:21
Sophie Buonassisi: Thank you for having me. It’s an honor to be in the hockey stack office. And what an incredible setup that you have in the studio.
01:26
Emir Atli: Thank you so much.
01:27
Sophie Buonassisi: let’s start off with your product actually, because you’ve had a really big start to 2026 primarily to date. How is Dax then known? A little bit more for attribution analytics, but with your product launches, blueprints, AI agents, you’re now actually the decision and execution layer for go to market. So could you share a little bit more around the launches themselves?
01:50
Emir Atli: Yeah. So the last two years since we started, we have been essentially building towards this vision of becoming a central operating system for all to market teams. That includes pre-sales marketing, POS sales management layer as well. And we started that from the Data Foundation. So essentially when you look at it from the outside building and marketing teams product with that vision doesn’t make any sense. But market to build a really good marketing teams product, which we did. You essentially need every single data that is checked and recorded in a system across the entire buying cycle. So essentially, our customers want to know what is impacting new business deals, expansion deals, what’s the lift? All of those, to get to the outcome, you know, to build a very good data foundation, which we did, we scale that product. Right now we have some of the largest B2B companies on our platform. And in 2026, we release our go to market agent builder that is, one of its first kind, go to market agent builder that is that, that supports out-of-the-box agents as well as custom agents. And they work across your entire team. So essentially, if you want agents that executes multi-step processes and marketing sales post-sales on the management layer, if you want forecasting or bin loss analysis, sales enablement, it supports all of them, mainly because of the work that we put in in the last two years. And all of our learnings. again, this all sort of a decision, but marketing ties was the first starting point. And to support agents, we also released blueprints. Blueprints, essentially, we believe and know that there is a blueprint to break into accounts and closures, but it’s just virtually impossible with reporting. So we released blueprints, which is essentially you choose a segment, you choose geographies, and it shows you the blueprint of breaking into the accounts and closing those within the buyer journeys, everything from how many sales and, well, to what type of stakeholders to channels, assets, campaigns, and then gives you next steps. And you can also work on within our workflows, product.
03:48
Sophie Buonassisi: That is incredible. A busy start to 2026. Yeah. And I mean if we’ve got the the decision layer from attribution to that’s already been intact for quite a while now. What was the layer necessary to actually layer in the execution layer.
04:06
Emir Atli: So in 2025 we released and a contains products. We weren’t very public with it. But it’s essentially right now it is 35% of our revenue within two and a half quarters. So it contains releases as, like an execution layer on top of market intelligence. So it has first party and third party signals, supports workflow management. And we saw great momentum with it. But then the problem was marketing dollars now contains like two different reasoning layers within one data foundation. So we had to build Essential Application Builder which is our agent builder. That would have essential reasoning umbrella across both of our products. And right now we package marketing context as one core product, which is go to my intelligence and we have execution layer with our agent builder. And it’s again one platform. And under that you have entitled execution working together. So to answer your question, we had to build a single reasoning layer across all teams within a single data foundation.
05:03
Sophie Buonassisi: And if we zoom out, what is this changing for? Go to market. What’s happening at the macro level?
05:09
Emir Atli: Yeah. So the core hypothesis that we have is you cannot add AI into an already built out core to market motion. You need to build go to market around. I what it means in practice is so for example, we work with very large companies, including fortune 100 companies. And what they were used to do is essentially you have a go to market motion, thousands of sellers and hundreds of marketers and management layer, and they adopt AI tools like I want to shift emails faster. So I’m buying an AI tool that would allow me to draft emails faster. I want to do, I don’t know, get at ten KS. Thank you from public companies. Include them in my own research. AI, their tool for AI, can research. I want to find expansion opportunities. I’m buying another tool for expansion opportunities. But when you add those siloed products into an already built out core market motion, they don’t work well together because they’re all siloed and don’t work on a single data foundation. So I think we are still early. Go to market is a very interesting space, because there is no clear winner in AI right now. that’s why we are working so hard. And it’s a race. But essentially we are working towards a future where we can build, go to market around AI versus the opposite, which is happening right now. That is one. And then the second is we are working towards a feature where I believe and we believe as a company that actually, what are you not going to do more with less? You’re going to do more with more. What it means in practice is if you’re adopting AI in the correct ways, you don’t need to add a manager every 5 to 7 reps. You can add a measure every 20 reps because AI will allow us to do things more consistently every single time. So if I’m learning a deal, if I can guide me end to end versus being a very small part when I’m writing an email as a copilot, then I don’t need one half hours of pipeline reviews every week to ask my manager, what should I do? Because I have, I will guide me with my own data foundation, with the weaning patterns. And then the measure doesn’t need to go through hundreds of hours of pipeline reviews every month. Just giving. Like, did you ask this stakeholder if they want to be involved? Because we have the data foundation to allow us to not have those conversations? So yeah, overall, building down the AI, doing more with more, and also having a single data foundation that everything works across.
07:29
Sophie Buonassisi: Incredible. And one thing having that single layer at you touches on is consolidation. To date, we’ve been in a lot more, especially in recent years, but almost a sprawl crisis where teams are just hopping between tools and trying to get them to talk and connect to each other. And now we’re moving towards consolidation, where platforms are serving a lot more end to end. How are you finding that from a customer perspective after these launches? Because you are suddenly taking way more of the customer journey and AI capabilities under you?
08:02
Emir Atli: Yeah, there’s a very big appetite towards consolidating tools. Not just tools, but processes. So I think the fundamental shift that I see in the market and with our customers is, as you said, they don’t look at it from like a tool perspective. I’m consulting tools. It’s more like I’m controlling the buyer journey. And not just buyer journey, but, essentially a workflow. So for example, buyer journey from the outside is like marketing sales or sales, but from the inside it is baked into an account running that you’re forecasting that you’re making sure that within that you’re on time and then expanding that contract and also keeping that customer as well. So our customers and our buyers are more looking at it from that perspective versus tool consolidation. But also I believe that 2026 to 2028, we will see a great consolidation of tools.
08:53
Sophie Buonassisi: And how does the go to market landscape shake out.
08:56
Emir Atli: an interesting question. I think. I think again there will be a vendor in this space which will be AI native, which will be built on data and which will cover the entire, go to market buyer joining. And I think as AG will be the winner. It’s just my personal opinion, but I think even if I zoom in, I think the winner is going to be a platform that’s built on data and that covers the entire buyer journey. They’re working towards that feature. it’s going to be a winner takes all kind of space. Because if we quickly execute this and other companies correctly executed, it’s going to be very, very hard to replace. So that’s also why we see a lot of churn in very small point solutions. Because like if you can draft an email faster and for 10% cheaper, you would move to another platform versus if a platform covers the entire buyer journey, it’s virtually irreplaceable.
09:50
Sophie Buonassisi: Absolutely. And we see that on the investor side to a GTM fund when we are making them as men and also our existing companies, is what is it low? What is the differentiator now in the horizontal space? Because suddenly if you don’t have that already baked in, it’s really hard to have a moat. Yeah. How are you thinking about your moat? You’ve talked about data a lot.
10:11
Emir Atli: One is Data Foundation, and two is being able to build applications on top of that data layer. Yeah, because even if, for example, we don’t support a application out of the box, you can build that application within architecture. And we have the resources to support enterprise with either forward deployed engineers or implementation support to be able to build those applications they need in production. The other thing that we did very successfully is all to go to market applications that we have right now. They’re like legacy tools. They have been relying on Salesforce Underlying Data Foundation. So that is objects, fields, actions that type of model which doesn’t work right now 20 years later. And we kind of like slip that into an action based buyer journey, which essentially means no matter what the action is, if it’s an offline touchpoint, if it’s an email, if it’s an expansion opportunity for the website visit. Everything is in action in our buyer journey. That is how we power our tools are built. An architect. So that is also part of our data foundation AI based model.
11:11
Sophie Buonassisi: And that’s what we’re seeing tremendously being the differentiator in data. And the way that you’re building on top of data. That’s fantastic. Now You’re building in the horizontal space. Which comes inherently with its moat challenges. You’ve talked about data and differentiation. When did it make sense for you to actually expand beyond the attribution analytic side and take more of that buyer experience, end to end?
11:35
Emir Atli: Yeah. So if you look at the journey of architect, 2024, we saw a change in the market where flexibility was really important. So all the tools like visible and other platforms are legacy platforms where like templated. So we started making architect very flexible and worked in 2024 2025. What we have seen in market was buyers didn’t want to look backwards. They wanted to look forward. So what that means in practice is 2020, when everyone was coming to architect saying, I want to know what happened last quarter, why is my pipeline down 2025? There is going to be sexing next quarter. I won’t hit my pipeline. What do I need to do? So we built a ontologies, our first AI product, or an AI analysts. Then. And we made lots of UX improvements on live reports and flexible and everything else. And then second half of 2025, the shift that we saw was they want to execute the data within the same platform, release a conference, and 2026 is making a vertical application, which was like focus on AI a little bit more horizontal across core market. Why that’s important is if you focus on one team, you’re able to cause a feedback loop. So if you focus on marketing, marketing cannot reach their goals without sales enablement, and sales cannot hit their goals without CSS involvement. So then we made it a little bit more horizontal. It’s still a vertical application within go to market, but it’s expanded to other teams within go to market. And I think 2026 our big bet. Is that correct? Application layer, which at this point I don’t think is going to change in 2027, I think is going to be more. So right now. We are focused on five core industries. And we are seeing early signs of other industries as well. 2027 it’s going to be an expansion across different industries.
13:20
Sophie Buonassisi: A quick pause for company where a huge fan of yours. If you run go to market, you already know the problem. Your data lives everywhere. Spreadsheets, CRM, sales, calls, ad platforms. Yet you’re still guessing what to do next. Hockey stack is the AI platform for modern go to market teams, unifies all your sales and marketing data into a single system of action. Built in AI agents help teams prospect the right accounts, improve conversions, close and expand deals, and scale what works. That’s why teams like RingCentral outreach, Active Campaign, and fortune 100 companies rely on hockey stack to eliminate wasted spend, take better decisions and make space to think. Learn more at Hockey stack.com. That’s hockey y esta SI.com. And you talked a little bit around people coming to you and asking what the future holds. How can I predict my pipeline? So you’re pivoting based on customer feedback, which is fantastic. When we think about predicting what happens quarters down the line, it comes down to go to market iterations and sprints when you run your go to market sprint at hockey. What did those look like?
14:28
Emir Atli: I don’t come from a engine background, but we run go to market very similar to an engineering organization. We have very regular stand ups. We have very good task and project management passion, marketing and sales. So we do weekly spins with very regular stand ups. And then a core big part of our economic strategies content. So we rely heavily on content. I mean, you’re in our studio. We do a lot of content here. We do commercials. We have two videographers working in-house. So content is a big investment for our key. Second, it’s going to continue to be a big investment for our, one thing that we double down on is essentially we create unique theories with data. And then we amplified it with funder voice. So what it looks like in practice is we release research reports and then we create content around it. And then we amplified that final voice and then we amplified it across different channels. One big bit of we made in second half of 2025 was connected TV. That is, surprising to our funders. I talk to our go to market leaders. A connect TV works extremely well for us, and we’re doubling down on it.
15:32
Sophie Buonassisi: Why do you think it works really well for you?
15:33
Emir Atli: So, like, when you think about it, if you see a company on like, TV, it is stood still. Feels like it’s a big thing. if you to say it’s 7 p.m., you’re watching my show, your favorite show and easy access commercial feel siloed is it feels like it’s important because it’s on TV versus if you’re seeing it on Instagram or TikTok, then it’s just like right now it’s more normal versus TV feels like a big deal. that’s my hypothesis. I don’t know for sure, but I think that’s why it works really well.
16:03
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. I mean, I would, I would say it is a fantastic hypothesis. One thing t that we’ve noticed trend around is there’s a saying people bet their careers on a product procurement process. And so anytime that you’re procuring or purchasing a software, you’re putting your job on the line. So any operator wants to have high trust in any product that they’re doing. And by seeing the brand associated with something that is perceived as like really high quality, a very highly legit brand like TV also reinforces that.
16:34
Emir Atli: Yeah, 100%.
16:37
Sophie Buonassisi: Before we go into content, the go to market sprint side, we are seeing from our side the iteration cycles are actually speeding up. what used to then be quarterly. We’re now seeing monthly or biweekly changes on the go to market side. Are you seeing that across your customer base and also in hockey stock.
16:53
Emir Atli: In Ocasek 100%. Video. That’s why we do weekly sprints and we never accept like Prague lunches or like a, I don’t know, fundraising announcement or anything like that. We never plan anything two weeks ahead. So right now, for example, I only know what we are going to do this week, and by Friday I will know what we’re going to do next week. I don’t plan to exact three weeks ahead because everything changes so fast. Customer base and enterprise? No, it gets better to mid-market SMB, but enterprise is still broken quarterly. An annual. But I think that’s going to start shifting as well.
17:26
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. We’re definitely seeing a shift though slower.
17:30
Emir Atli: Yeah.
17:30
Sophie Buonassisi: And on the content side obviously we’re sitting here in the beautiful hockey stack studio. Your LinkedIn hockey stats LinkedIn I’ve heard you say generates an incredible ratio of mql to opportunity. Probably the highest that you have of all your channels. Can you talk a little bit about your LinkedIn strategy?
17:47
Emir Atli: Yeah. I so I post five days a week most weeks, and then recently got my co-founder and CEO to post 2 or 3 times a week as well. And then we have couple other internal influencers that are hopefully going to post similarly as well. Some of them already started this year. My head of sales and Jim James, I’ve been posting pretty frequently and drives good results as well. So we’re going to continue doubling down on that. My strategy personally is essentially, telling good product stories, as you said, especially if you’re working with enterprise who are also on LinkedIn. They want to bet on a unique puree and a hypothesis that they can put their shops online for. If it’s like something’s V2 or V3 iteration, like if he said agents is V3 of dashboards, no one wants to bet on that. They want AV0. That will work well and it will make them look good and devel essentially bring their careers forward. So by implementing a tool or a platform, I will be able to advance my career as what they want. So I’m trying to show different ways of doing innovation within my posts. To essentially show them the the V0 is something entirely new. Two personal stories. This is, a category that is a little bit uncomfortable for me still. So for example, yesterday I made it possible, like how I’ve had panic attacks for most of my life. that is a very uncomfortable thing to share as a leader especially. But I think what I see in cycles, as well as people kind of like, for example, yesterday I showed this morning one of our largest prospects, like a CMO at a very, very large enterprise company that is still in pipeline. DM me completely irrelevant from like the deal that we’re running just by like how her daughter is also struggling with something similar. And and thank you for sharing this. I learned a lot something like that, that just makes, toxic as a company more personal. It also helps me personally as well, because one, it makes me more vulnerable, it basically pushes me to put my thoughts into words. So it’s personal growth for me as well. And then the third layer is telling data stories. So there’s something that we have done very well in 2024 and 2025. Especially the first half of 2025, releasing a lot of data. And then we slowed down a little bit with AI initiatives. But 2026, we will double down on it again. So essentially we’re sitting on top of trillions of rows of data every single second are processing 10 million rows of data from customers. And how can we tell better stories around that? What is working? What’s not working? What’s going to work? What’s not going to work? And in 2026 I want to bring more qualitative data as well. So essentially we are seeing this in data. But how can we explain better with operators who bring us that data. For example we have customers that do really well in healthcare. Saying like these channels and diseases work really well in healthcare and you should do that. More is one thing. But if I can bring an operator before my customers who are behind that data, then I think it will make a better story. So that’s what we can double down on in 2026.
21:02
Sophie Buonassisi: And how do you carve up the time to write on LinkedIn? Because a common thing that we hear from founders is I don’t have the time. I don’t have the time, and everybody says it until you see the results. Yeah. But how do you actually carve out the time?
21:16
Emir Atli: You’re on like one and a half years ago. So I started working with Alec. Paul. I kind of know him. He works with 5 or 6 other founders. Is great. When I got to, like, I basically got to 5000 followers or so, and, like, a year, it wasn’t great. It was impressive. And then we went from 5 to 40 K after a year, with him. So is essentially not ghostwriting. I write everything myself. But we idiot once a week. So essentially how we do it is we sit down for an hour every week on Tuesdays, and then before that I have like an hour on Sundays. Just like thinking about what’s interesting, what’s going on in my life and business, what I trends that I’m saying. And then we turn them into interesting stories that people would stop and, read. So it’s purely investment and I think if your audience is on LinkedIn, there’s no better channel than just your own social media and your own profile. So it was just a no brainer decision for me, especially when I first started two years ago. We don’t have a lot of capital. We were just going through, I see, like you cannot invest knowing those. And that’s so I needed something that’s more long term. But I also would try results immediately. And one misconception with LinkedIn, in my opinion, is it doesn’t drive results for a very long time. If you use it quickly, which essentially means not just posting, but also messaging people and commenting on their posts and all that stuff. Like, if you can get on calls from LinkedIn, that brings me to results. Our first customers. But from LinkedIn when I had 100 followers.
22:51
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Wow. And are you still leveraging LinkedIn in a similar way?
22:55
Emir Atli: Yeah. It changed a little bit over time. As you get more scale, it changes. But we are using it very similarly. One additional layer that we added as we use it for like multi setting and things like that, as well. And deal cycles before it was just purely for pipeline. Right now it’s both for deal acceleration building a person brand. Having opportunities like this or like keynotes and things like that. But definitely it’s still probably if you look at it on a weekly basis, it’s probably like 20% of my time just purely creating content.
23:25
Sophie Buonassisi: Creating pipeline. before we even get to like you didn’t crop in Silicon Valley Texas time your chili grew up in Turkey. Yeah. And moved to California. And you were quite young when you founded hockey stock. Love to hear a little bit more about your founding journey and how you actually made the move before you entered, y’see?
23:45
Emir Atli: So hockey started as a product. Alex company four years ago. And before we had another startup, it was a B2C company. And we had it was a viral app and it had thousands and thousands of users. It was scaling really quickly with one of my co-founders and our CEO. And our challenge was essentially we didn’t really know how we can understand what is driving retention. Why do we have so many people not staying on the app for like two weeks and longer? And then we built like an internal, product for ourselves, probiotics to. And then naively, we thought if we cannot do it ourselves. And we also couldn’t find a good solution. There’s probably a market gap here. Long story short enough to work on for, like, a year and a half. We found out that there are great solutions like Mixpanel and Pritchard Heap, which all of them are now launch companies. And then after one half year, we decided to pivot into marketing because we thought, like most optimizes marketing. So if you turn pragmatics into making analytics, it would work better. And at the same time, Google Analytics four was launching or like it was a couple of months after it launched. And then in Europe, a lot of countries is basically not allowing you to use Google X on your website if you have European visitors. And then we thought, if we can make this more like privacy friendly, an insight into Europe and in Europe, we can make it successful. And then we worked on it for like a year and a half as well. we had a lot of customers. We made a lot of money with it. It was bootstrapped. It was great, but we wanted to build a generative company. An enterprise software company. We were lucky enough to have a few luxury customers. So we pivoted with their feedback into market intelligence. And then we started getting our first customers. And then in the meantime, we moved to San Francisco. And then shortly after we got into see,
25:34
Sophie Buonassisi: And what were some of your biggest learnings from going through? See?
25:37
Emir Atli: So first is making something people want, like to make something people love. one of the great traps of being a founder is scale and automation, especially right now with everything that exists automate and scale and processes and everything else. It is where is it? Think I will scale everything and automate everything that actually teaches you to do things that don’t scale. So what it means in practice is finding ten people who love your products, who will tell ten other people, and then once you get 200 people who love your product and use it every day. Then it gets raised. Scale to 20 10,000. We made this mistake many times and Sykes journey where we tried to scale something very fast and then people didn’t love it. But it’s the core. Learning of C is just building something that people truly love and cannot live without. And then until you get to a certain scale, not scaling anything, that is one. And second thing is this happened on the first day of VC. One of our partners, Michael Michael Seibel, was co-founder of Twitch. I mean, sometimes people I know in my life, he’s, like, truly the smartest person I know. This is a time where we were kind of like building the future of architecture. What is the roadmap look like for the next year or two years? And then this was the first time that we actually on the idea of having access to a multiple, multiple company, a core platform for our entire go to market team. Not just my intelligence, but we knew we need to scale Macintoshes first, and then we were always thinking about like in one year would with CSA, two years would register spaces with a CC, and then it would be done and it would be easy, kind of like mindset that most wanted sap as well. And he said, if you don’t want to do it for the next ten years, you should quit right now, and you can take 500 K that we gave you and then spend it. That’s what he said. So he said, you can take the 500 K split into three, and you can do whatever you want to do. But if you’re not going to be here for ten years, it’s not going to be successful. That was a life changing moment for me. And then taught me a lot. And then when you left me and my coven, as we kind of talked about it, then we made a promise that we would stay for ten years and see it all the way through versus focusing on serious A0 speed milestones, which, as you know, as a VC. Yeah, funding runs for most founders seems like a milestone, But it’s mostly just more runway. It doesn’t mean it’s a milestone. It might seem like a milestone from the outside, but from the inside, a funding run doesn’t solve your core business problems. So it really made us focus on business. Make building a good business with good people. And playing the long game.
28:17
Sophie Buonassisi: That is great advice. And it is very true that there’s always a congratulatory notion to any funding milestone. But as you said, as a VC, like we all know it, funding comes from different reasons to a lot of the time. Sometimes it’s strategic, sometimes it’s pure runway, sometimes it is congratulatory and you’ve hit a certain milestone. You need to extend that runway even further. So there’s so much context to fundraising. Yeah. And it also comes with dilution and other things too, that, you know, played factor. How old were you when you were going through y seeing he said that to you?
28:49
Emir Atli: It was right when I turned 20.
28:51
Sophie Buonassisi: Wow, to hear that as a 20 year old is is pretty incredible. I think a lot of 20 year olds would have just split the 500.
29:00
Emir Atli: Yeah.
29:00
Sophie Buonassisi: It’s amazing.
29:01
Emir Atli: Thank you.
29:02
Sophie Buonassisi: And, Amir, you mentioned you got some really great advice throughout the process from Twitch’s founder. And, I mean, anyone else in your circle network? How do you gather inspiration? Are there any books, for example, that have particularly guided your career?
29:16
Emir Atli: Yeah. So, one is Steve Jobs biography, and I was very, very young. I read that multiple times. I still open it up like a couple times a month to get inspiration. Two more recently and put up by, suffixes x CEO.
29:34
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.
29:35
Emir Atli: That was a great book too. And I gave it a lot of, my early employees as well. And then the third one is I’m blanking on its name, but it’s the book from stripe SEO. The stripe SEO is one of the probably best leaders of all time. And scaling a good company with good people. And it taught me a lot about recruiting to managing performance, to scaling as a leader. And outside of books. One thing that I’ve started doing last quarter is exec coaching, and I would recommend that do pretty much all Founders Post series AB. That is a very, very healthy thing to do. And it’s an investment. It’s not cheap, but it’s very, very helpful.
30:20
Sophie Buonassisi: How did you decide to start doing that?
30:22
Emir Atli: so we have, like five hour meetings on Sundays with my co-founders. Yeah. At the office. And then that’s like a time where we process the week and then think about, like, what’s next for the business and then go into, like, really deep, topics like usually pick 3 or 4 topics and we go really deep into those versus during the week. You just like pacing and you’re trying to say day in and co-CEOs and the product and ship and everything else versus that time is just built for us to process to. We can again think about the future of architecture at some point. One of the topics was what are going to be the bottlenecks in our company, because we have really high talent density. We have a repeatable sales motion. We have good marketing, good customer success, good product. So then it feels like if you just keep doing what you’re doing, then it will get better. if we hire to X more sales reps but good process, good pipeline, then we can scale to X. But at some point we kind of realize that we might be the biggest bottleneck of the company. Versus again, like we work very hard and we don’t really take time to reflect sometimes. And we need a way that would force us to grow as leaders and as people. And then one of our board members actually, to come into the company for is a coach, and we start working with them.
31:39
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s fantastic. We know a lot of founders who do executive coaching and speak the world and echo your same sentiment about it, just making a huge difference. Yeah.
31:47
Emir Atli: It’s great.
31:48
Sophie Buonassisi: And we’re sitting here in the hockey stack office. You got about 65 people. Everybody’s in five days a week. How do you feel about an office versus office? Obviously you’re skewing towards an office because we’re here. But I’m curious your thoughts. We’re five days in the office also.
32:01
Emir Atli: I think it’s definitely needed if you want to build right now in AI. And if you want to build a giant company, I think it’s course impossible to compete against teams who are in person whiteboarding and talking and all that stuff. So it’s 100% needed, especially like for core roles of the company. I mean, every role is very important, but like for example, for certain roles, you might think it’s better to be I don’t know if you have a lot of customers in a certain city, you can have a team there, but not in an office and all that stuff. Excluding all of those outlier scenarios. I think for 90% of designers in person, it’s definitely needed and it’s impossible to compete. We also got better at making people feel comfortable. Which essentially means, for example, some people might work better at home from, I don’t know, 8 a.m. to 12. You can totally do that if that’s going to make you more focused. And then you come into the office and spend time with us. That’s so normal. Or if you have other commitments, you should totally do that. Essentially, it’s important to balance in person office environment with the zone of genius. So you need to find that balance. And I think we have gotten better over time with that.
33:11
Sophie Buonassisi: It’s a very empowering way of running a business too, because you’re everybody operates differently and you’re really giving everyone that autonomy to be able to operate. However, they’re going to do their best work while still having the proximity of in person.
33:23
Emir Atli: Yeah. One last thing about that is, I think it is very important to interview in person because right now, even like exec hiring, for example, exec hiring runs on case studies. So you like send a case to the prompt and then they bring it back in and they do a presentation. I am shifting more and more towards whiteboarding sessions for execs because I’ve had scenarios where the case that it looks perfect and it’s completely I yeah, that is very, very scary. You never know what actually went into that case study. So I’m shifting more and more towards life working sessions for hiring as well. And that’s something that I missed previously where we had in-person office culture. But then we interview on zoom and only the last step is in person where we talk, but I don’t know, offer terms or whatever. I also believe that interviews should be run in person.
34:12
Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. That’s a really interesting belief, especially now with AI, and it’s also representative of how business actually gets done at the end of the day. There’s whiteboards everywhere. You’re probably whiteboarding for a lot of the time in office. And it was representative.
34:27
Emir Atli: Definitely.
34:27
Sophie Buonassisi: Fantastic. Well, if you could leave listeners, particularly founders or anyone thinking about founding a business, one piece of advice, what would that be?
34:36
Emir Atli: Good business and enjoy the process.
34:39
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s incredible. And stay ten years.
34:41
Emir Atli: Say, to.
34:43
Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. I mean, I thank you. This has been wonderful. Appreciate you sitting down and the time and all of this information and hosting us in the office.
34:50
Emir Atli: Thank you so much. Great. Thank you.
