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Who you’ll learn from

George Kurdin was a professional poker player, then CEO of a company that sold to Logitech for around $100M, and now he’s the CEO of Monk, an AI company automating accounts receivable.

Monk solves the other side of the ledger from Ramp: getting B2B invoices paid. George gets candid about the go-to-market mistakes he made (“50 more than I expected”), why vertical companies win on in-person workshops, the proprietary “harness” that he argues is the real moat in applied AI, the extreme-accountability culture he runs with 16 people and almost no meetings, and his sharpest tactical advice on fundraising, websites, and co-founder relationships.

What you’ll learn

  • Why sales and marketing is “tier zero,” and why he used to believe the opposite (“if you build it, they will come” is wrong)
  • Two lessons from pro poker that transfer to building: stay disciplined through variance, and adapt or get destroyed

Why GTM has never been more nuanced, and why vertical companies are winning with in-person workshops and lunch-and-learns over cold email

  • The pre-seed website bet: why spending big on a cohesive visual identity early lifted one company’s close rate ~50%
  • The “harness” thesis: why owning your own evals, guardrails, and tests (not just calling the models) is the moat in applied AI
  • How to run extreme accountability: everything in Slack, blameless retros, almost no meetings, 16 people
  • Why they reverse-engineered into a huge-TAM problem on purpose (recruiting, and not getting disrupted by the frontier labs)
  • Why hard ROI (dollars in your pocket) now beats “time savings” as an AI value prop
  • Fundraising: compress the process to create FOMO, and why how you run the raise signals how you run the company
  • Why the co-founder relationship matters more than the idea, and how to invest in it like a marriage

Episode highlights

1:12 – Welcome, and George’s path: poker, operator, exited CEO, founder

1:57 – What pro poker taught him: variance, discipline, and adaptation

3:57 – The Streamlabs journey and the sale to Logitech

4:46 – What Monk is: AR automation, the other side of the ledger

5:37 – The go-to-market learning curve, and why sales became tier zero

7:25 – The pre-seed website bet, and how it lifted close rates ~50%

10:13 – Building Monk’s culture: speed, ownership, clarity

11:23 – How they operationalize accountability (everything in Slack)

12:08 – Sponsor: Nooks

12:42 – Hiring, and why the people are the biggest input

13:07 – Blameless feedback, and writing it down fast over polished later

16:18 – Why solve accounts receivable, and reverse-engineering a big TAM

18:31 – Why the frontier labs won’t disrupt them

19:53 – Why invoices get stuck: the nine-variable problem

22:06 – The harness as the real moat in applied AI

24:58 – Why precision and security are tier zero in finance

25:31 – The state of AI and finance: hard ROI over time savings

26:50 – Internal AI adoption, caps, and model routing

27:55 – Hiring now, and where Monk is based

28:09 – Finish the sentence: sales and marketing is tier zero

29:00 – Fundraising advice: compress the process to create FOMO

30:19 – The best advice he got: invest in the co-founder relationship

31:52 – How he and Joe met, and where to find George and Monk

Key takeaways

1. Sales and marketing is “tier zero,” and the engineer’s instinct is wrong.

George’s biggest reversal: a decade ago he believed product and engineering were everything, that if you build it they will come, and that beautiful design was the whole game. He now says that’s wrong on two counts. Shipping something that works and looks decent has never been easier, so product alone stopped being a differentiator. And enterprise sales is genuinely hard, harder than he gave it credit for. Asked what nobody tells you about founding a company, his answer was that sales and marketing is tier zero. Always was, and it matters more every year the cost of building drops.

2. Two poker lessons that transfer to building: survive variance, and adapt or die.

Five years as a pro, and he skips the obvious one about reading bets. The first lesson is about variance. You can make every correct decision and still get hit in the face. You’re entitled to nothing. So you stay disciplined, keep making correct choices, and eventually you beat the opponent. That’s what people call getting lucky. The second is evolution. A good opponent watches your patterns and adapts. If you don’t adapt back, they take you apart. Building a company works the same way. Stand still and a competitor kills you.

3. GTM has never been more nuanced, and vertical companies are winning in person.

The old world let you carry one playbook from company to company. Now every company sits on its own pile of unique data, which makes go-to-market specific to a degree it never was. That’s the opportunity and the problem at once. The pattern George keeps seeing: vertical companies are winning less on cold email and more in person, through workshops, lunch-and-learns, hands-on education. Customers want someone to lead them into the AI future, and these companies are the ones positioned to do it. Education-led, in-person motions are driving outsized pipeline. He admits Monk does none of this today, a learning in real time.

One tactical note worth its own line: spend real money on a cohesive, premium website at pre-seed instead of crawling your way there with DIY. People read product quality off design quality. He cites one company that lifted close rate by roughly 50% on a website overhaul alone.

4. The “harness” is the moat in applied AI, not the models.

Everyone has roughly the same access to the same frontier models. What separates winners from losers, beyond taste, judgment, and UI, is how you wrangle them. Monk built its own harness for accounts receivable: proprietary evals, guardrails, and tests for collections and cash application, with each customer’s rules and policies layered on top to steer the agents. In finance this matters more than anywhere else. Precision, accuracy, and security are tier zero, and one mistake with a customer’s money earns him a furious message from a CFO. So they don’t just throw compute at it. It’s also why the frontier labs don’t worry him. The data is too sensitive, the integrations too hard, the no-mistakes bar too high. He figures that buys roughly a decade to build something big, and points to ElevenLabs as the applied-AI company that owns its space.

5. Extreme accountability, and a TAM they reverse-engineered on purpose.

Monk is 16 people running on 3 values: speed, ownership, clarity. In practice that means near-total transparency. Everything lives in Slack, praise, feedback, investor updates, code, wins and losses. Almost no meetings or standups, so people stay in flow. Retros are blameless, written fast and imperfect rather than polished later. The standard enforces itself: nobody wants to be the one who let the team down. Worth noting that George and his co-founder Joe reverse-engineered their way into AR deliberately. They wanted a massive TAM, which helps recruiting, a problem that’s genuinely AI-native, since AR is unstructured conversations and email, and defensibility against the labs. No heartwarming origin story. Just disciplined opportunism.

George Kurdin

Sophie Buonassisi (Host)

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GTM 209 Full Episode Transcript

00:00 – 00:01

Sophie Buonassisi: Why does it get stuck? Why aren’t they gonna pay?

00:01 – 00:13

George Kurdin: You can just, like, flex at me. Like Nike or Walmart can just basically be, like, 180 days. It sounds like a very archaic system to design for, like a person talking to a person. But why can’t it be like.

00:14 – 00:15

Sophie Buonassisi: How does Monk do that?

00:15 – 00:30

George Kurdin: We have a harness for account receivables with our own set of emails, our own guardrails, our own tests that does collections, that does cash application, which is colossal problem in business. Unsolicited messages from customers that are like, oh my God, this is insane.

00:30 – 00:36

Sophie Buonassisi: And so you built your own proprietary harness. What are your thoughts on how that creates differentiation moving forward?

00:36 – 00:38

George Kurdin: I mean, we should hire you as a marketer.

00:38 – 00:49

Sophie Buonassisi: I’m already all in. If you’re a professional poker player, you were an operator. You were the CEO of a company that sold and now you’re a founder. Like George Kurdin, the co-founder of Monk.

00:49 – 00:58

George Kurdin: I think in like building a company, you have to be adaptable. Otherwise, you know, obviously competitors will destroy you. Our space doesn’t have a winner yet, so people are pushing really hard.

01:12 – 01:14

Sophie Buonassisi: George. Welcome to GTM now, Sophia.

01:14 – 01:15

George Kurdin: Thanks for having.

01:15 – 01:16

Sophie Buonassisi: Me. Absolutely.

01:16 – 01:25

Sophie Buonassisi: It’s always so fun to see all of your progress at Monk, and extra fun to be able to sit here and talk about it in person and hit record in doing so. So really excited for the conversation today.

01:25 – 01:27

George Kurdin: Thank you. And the progress is all the team.

01:27 – 01:57

Sophie Buonassisi: So I love it. Well, we’re going to dig into all those areas around how you’ve built, how you’re building Monk. But a huge part of a building journey often starts off with the founder’s background and journey there. And before we get into Monk, which is a topic everybody loves because Monk helps you get paid, helps invoices get paid faster. Let’s start with your background. You were a professional poker player for around five years. What did being a professional poker player teach you about reading? A bet that maybe a traditional finance environment wouldn’t have?

01:57 – 03:16

George Kurdin: Yeah, that was that was well, back. But I think I think a ton of lessons. And I think that as with most things, you can cross supply a bunch of things. So poker finance, you can apply that to building a company. I’m not going to talk about bets because that’s kind of obvious. I’ll give like two quick ones that come to mind. One is about evolution, one is about pain. So in poker, SIM isn’t trading. You can kind of play your best game. You can make all the right decisions. Like Sophie’s playing. You’re being so sharp, so disciplined, which like things don’t go your way because of variance. And so you have to just know that that is life. And even if you make all the right choices, you get hit in the face and you’re entitled to nothing. And so one lesson is just prevail and stay disciplined and just keep doing all the right things, and eventually you will beat the opponent. That’s actually getting lucky. So that’s one lesson. And I was hit in the face with like a ton of in poker it’s called a bad run or like a bad streak of luck. I think the other quick lesson is just evolution. Like if you play with poker with someone who is quite good, they will adapt. And so I’m playing with you. You know that I’m bluffing a little bit too much in this specific sequence. So then you become more conservative. And then if I don’t adapt, you will just destroy me. And so a smart opponent will like, keep changing your game as you play with them. And I think in like building a company you have to be adaptable. Otherwise, you know, obviously competitors will destroy you.

03:17 – 03:57

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, those are great lessons, super, super interesting. And you have one of the most fascinating founder backgrounds, I think, and not just because you’re a professional poker player. Everything, you know, you moved from a different country when you were 13 from Russia with your sister to the United States. You were a professional poker player, you were an operator. You were the CEO of a company that sold, and now you’re a founder, like you really worn a ton of different seats and sat in these different perspectives. One of those that I mentioned, you were the CEO of a company. Tell us a little bit about that journey. I believe you sold for about 100,000,000 in 2019. What did you learn from that experience that translated over to Monk?

03:57 – 04:46

George Kurdin: Honestly, I was fortunate to be in some of these positions. I think the teams were all exceptional and it was really cool to support them. Streamlabs wasn’t the company that I founded, but there was a need and I had to step in. I think the team has Streamlabs and the business is quite healthy and is still going well. We sold the Logitech was phenomenal. Like really good consumer. Jean. I think one thing that we do really well that we do today is just how fast we ship. And I think we were obsessed with shipping and committing literally daily like we would not. Some of us would not leave if we would not, you know, submit at least like a couple of good PRS that day. And in consumer or, you know, stimulus is a prosumer company. But like releasing quite quickly is is sort of how you win. And I think now it’s obviously in vogue like velocity etc.. But that’s that’s one lesson just like ship quickly.

04:46 – 04:46

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.

04:46 – 04:57

Sophie Buonassisi: For anyone unfamiliar I know, you know, monks been been, I would say fairly visible. You were on TBN and everything around your series arrays, but for anyone unfamiliar, give us a little background on Monk itself, right?

04:57 – 05:25

George Kurdin: Yeah. Um, we are an API company that solves accounts receivables for businesses, and accounts receivables is the other part of the ledger. So Ramp does AP primarily and that’s payables expenses. Ramp obviously is an inspiring company and we do AR and AR is is more relationship based. And it’s just how the money flows between businesses. And yeah, we’re a team of primarily engineers based in New York that does this for B2B.

05:25 – 05:37

Sophie Buonassisi: Brilliant. Like you said engineer, you have a product and background yourself. Now, if we think about your build story at Monk, like what has been your go to market coming from this edge background yourself.

05:37 – 06:25

George Kurdin: I think everyone says they made a lot of mistakes, and I think I made like 50 x more mistakes than I thought it would make. Um, it’s my like second series, B2B, SaaS business. And I think now more than ever and actually I think, like you do a great job of highlighting folks in this pod that like talk about growth, but building a go to market function is hard for my co-founder and I. It’s like it doesn’t come naturally to us. I can walk you through all the mistakes that I’ve made. But I was lucky to have some good friends and obviously listen to you and other folks. And now I’m, like, obsessed with building, like, the best GTM machine. But we’re really early in that journey. Like, our team has lines hard, but like, folks are just ramping. Candidly, maybe a decade ago, I was thinking that sales and marketing is just not that important. And now I think it’s like, you know, we’re the most important.

06:25 – 06:27

Sophie Buonassisi: P0 why did that change?

06:27 – 06:49

George Kurdin: I was young, I was naive about how things work. I felt like product and change is the alpha and omega. If you build it, they will come. Product and engine. Gorgeous design is all that matters. And um, what I’ve learned is a that’s wrong. B now it’s too strong because it’s quite easy to ship things or to make things look decent.

06:50 – 06:50

Sophie Buonassisi: Hmm.

06:50 – 06:51

Sophie Buonassisi: Super super interesting.

06:51 – 06:55

George Kurdin: And also enterprise sales is really hard is what I’ve learned also super hard.

06:55 – 07:25

Sophie Buonassisi: And I mean, like you said, that was a lesson learned along the way. And for a lot of founders, especially founders listening to this, they’re always trying to learn from other people. Because typically there’s two different ways to learn, and one is by doing firsthand experience, and the other is from learning from others like yourself right now. You mentioned you’ve made a lot of, you know, pseudo mistakes or perhaps learnings along the way. What have been some of the key ones that you would tell founders about other founders, because you want them to learn from their critical ones that they can learn from?

07:25 – 08:12

George Kurdin: So one and I learned this from a very good friend that runs a company called profound, and they’ve done a really amazing job. They’re inspiring. But I think having an insane website with a gorgeous esthetic that is consistent with your product, but also with your sales collateral and everything is mega buttoned up as if you’re like, seriously? But really, your seed is the way to do it at seed or even pre-seed. And you know, I was trying to make my own website myself, doing everything myself, not inviting someone who is much better than me at this. And that was a big mistake. And I think you just get a leg up. And I think the traditional school of thought is like crawl, walk, run. And I would just like spend the money and be bold right away with the website.

08:12 – 08:25

Sophie Buonassisi: That is a great piece of advice, something I think any founders felt before, because sometimes it’s it’s a little bit easier to take kind of the less expensive routes, and then you realize the impact of these things and it’s just quicker to, to kind of invest.

08:25 – 08:38

George Kurdin: Yeah. And just like I think like having a cohesive visual identity and design system through everything, including the sales collateral that, you know, it matches the product and it doesn’t it also doesn’t look like clod slop. Now is also very important.

08:38 – 09:42

Sophie Buonassisi: Super important. I actually spent many years in the conversion optimization space, full funnel with software companies, with AI companies, with software companies. And there were so much interesting data about the quality of your website and the impact that that has. Interesting, because at the end of the day, you know, now we’ve got agents and humans browsing websites, but we still have humans. And humans are humans. We impute the quality of something from the design of it. That’s what we have accessible. Yes. And we ran an experiment. One company we were working with Ran. This experiment completely transformed the website, similar to what you were saying, really amped up the visual identity itself and the close rate went up. And there’s many different variables. And they said, look, there’s so many different possibilities, but we have not changed a single other thing than this big project around the website itself. And we truly believe that it has been the cause, or at least the primary cause of our sales closure rate increasing by 50%, because people just have a greater perception of us and they mention it on calls. We’ve got this kind of qualitative, slightly quantitative attribution to it.

09:42 – 09:47

George Kurdin: Yeah, it tracks it makes a ton of sense. At least now I’m like mega website pilled.

09:48 – 10:13

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, I love it. That’s a great learning. Super interesting. And let’s talk a little bit about how you’re building Monk, because I talked to a bunch of people at Monk prior to this, every single person called it the most unique and thing. One of the most unique things that they appreciate about Monk is the culture, and they describe the culture as extreme accountability. Tell us about that. What does that mean?

10:13 – 11:22

George Kurdin: There’s really three key things that we believe in at the company. And we work really hard to make sure that these things are not just like a slide that we put up or some poster or some like B.S. page in our careers website, but like actual values that are like imprinted in our hearts and minds. And those three things are speed, ownership and clarity. And so I think when if you’ve spoken with the team, if they speak about accountability, that’s just everyone is trying really hard to produce world class work, and everyone is pushing super hard to the point where they know that a like, I’m not going to produce anything but world class work, otherwise I’m going to let Sophie down. And that’s kind of the mindset on the team today. And everyone really wants to win because I think people understand nothing that I’m doing really well. People understand the like the finite nature of this moment. Like I think people feel as if at some point the music will stop playing or like the winners will be declared. Our space doesn’t have a winner yet, so people are pushing really hard. And now it’s like, for me, it’s almost the dream because I don’t even need to necessarily obsess. Every day is hard about the culture. I still do, but it’s like self-perpetuating at this point.

11:22 – 11:23

Sophie Buonassisi: Mhm.

11:23 – 11:27

Sophie Buonassisi: Tell us how you operationalize that. I’ve heard little things about slack, for example.

11:27 – 12:03

George Kurdin: Yeah. Slack, you know everything is an open praise feedback. Everyone sees everything from investor updates to to to code to sales wins and losses. We’re quite anti meeting. So we don’t really have any meetings. We don’t have stand ups for any for example at all we do something called whiteboard writing. It’s like a way to I guess it’s too nuanced. And we have we have, we have, we have an all hands meeting every Monday at 9 a.m.. We’re like we discuss everything in the company. We have a sales meeting and a customer meeting, but generally speaking, no meetings. Just so that people can be in flow and build or like spend time with customers.

12:03 – 12:05

Sophie Buonassisi: How many people total at the company?

12:05 – 12:06

George Kurdin: 16.

12:06 – 12:08

Sophie Buonassisi: 16? Yeah. That are involved in these little hands.

12:08 – 12:08

George Kurdin: Yeah.

12:08 – 12:11

Sophie Buonassisi: A quick pause. If you run outbound sales, this.

12:11 – 12:40

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12:41 – 12:41

Sophie Buonassisi: AI.

12:42 – 13:07

George Kurdin: So quite small, and I think the last piece is tons of mistakes. Like mainly on me just because I’m a bit older. But our hiring process, like the big thing and the big the biggest inputs and why it’s working is the people. And the reason for why we have these people is because of the recruiting piece. And a lot of it is led by my co-founder, Joe, who is like an end of one human being. But I think we’ve been very fortunate to attract the kinds of people that are on the team today.

13:07 – 13:26

Sophie Buonassisi: Very cool. Tell me a little bit more about the slack piece, because I think a lot of people want to emulate that overall mindshare around teammates, but it’s a lot harder to operationalize. So let’s say I’m a teammate of yours, and maybe I do something not in the finest way. You know, there was a better way.

13:26 – 13:27

George Kurdin: To do it.

13:27 – 13:33

Sophie Buonassisi: How do we actually share that learning with the rest of the team? Does it just go in slack? Somebody types it up in slack ideally.

13:33 – 14:20

George Kurdin: Like, you know, if it’s constructive feedback, like if you have something for me, just about something that I like, sort of like a better word fucked up, then it’ll probably be a private conversation, but then we’ll try to have a retro or a conversation about this in the open. And I think that like a fast in the moment, hey, like, what went wrong? How can it be better? Like, what’s at least one action we’re taking based on this is better than some fancy retro and like a G doc. And, you know, it takes like five people in a meeting just like, ride it out. And now with quad, obviously it’ll parse everything and becomes part of the knowledge base. So I think do it fast, write it down something, even if it’s imperfect, write it down is better than something more polished tomorrow. And doing the open that’s that’s what does it generally.

14:20 – 14:38

Sophie Buonassisi: So let’s say somebody, for lack of a better word, made an error or could have done something in a better way. So somebody provides constructive feedback. They would type it up quick, throw it in slack everybody. The company has visibility to this. And how do people react. Are they celebrating like kind of emojis. Do we have in the slack.

14:38 – 15:21

George Kurdin: Oh crazy I think emojis is like I think you’ve seen it. But I think emoji is like kind of indicative of of company culture. I think like some of the best cultures that I’ve seen, crazy emojis, people have emojis will have like, you know, five emojis for Sofia with like laser eyes and lots of like unique things. I think defaults like emojis kind of, you know. Yeah. Um, but but I think it’s, it’s it’s looked at as like, hey, we’ve leveled up like we’ve made this mistake. Now what is our response? Like, hey, we’ve lost a deal. Like, how will we do better? Going forward, it’s kind of used as fuel, and I think it’s very important that it’s blameless and everyone understands that it’s blameless. And yeah, we’re so tight knit that it’s now like, cool. We got this opportunity to learn from this mistake. Let’s get better.

15:21 – 15:22

Sophie Buonassisi: Mhm. Yeah.

15:22 – 15:33

Sophie Buonassisi: A very I would say that translates well to a culture of experimentation because typically you’re celebrating the wins or really any kind of constructive feedback as a data point used to help redirect and help everyone level up.

15:33 – 15:34

George Kurdin: Yeah. Yeah.

15:34 – 15:53

Sophie Buonassisi: Super interesting. That was uh, yeah, one of the biggest things people called out, actually, of just appreciating the culture of accountability and, and perhaps like having it to another degree where people really celebrate these learnings. Um, and if you do anything, the whole company will know and the whole company will celebrate that learning. So that’s very cool and very special how you’re doing that.

15:53 – 16:13

George Kurdin: Yeah, it’s all a team. We’re trying. I think it is. It is quite special and I’m super energized mainly by the team these days. Like, yeah, I cannot let them down. Uh, I think when we speak again, I hope we retain this like it’s quite magical. Now it obviously gets really hard once you’re like 100 to 100 people. So think some of it is just our size too.

16:13 – 16:17

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, yeah. It’ll be interesting to see how you scale that just as the team scale.

16:17 – 16:18

George Kurdin: Yeah, hopefully we can do it.

16:18 – 16:34

Sophie Buonassisi: Let’s talk a little bit more about the product itself. You gave us a quick summary, but talk a little bit about the problem. Like why solve this problem. Accounts receivable. So essentially people send invoices. It takes them a long time to get paid. Why did you decide on that acute problem to solve?

16:34 – 18:31

George Kurdin: There was another company that was building out of South Park Commons with, um, a different co-founder who’s incredible. His name was Anton, and, uh, we’re doing YOLO models, which is like it was a way to test mobile apps without an SDK. So like computer vision based testing. And we were doing okay. But quite quickly, we learned, is going to be a very small market. And then we basically shut down the company and return the money. And one big reason for why this to your point, like everyone has this, it’s just massive, Tam. Yeah. And so, um, and the reason for why we wanted to build in the space that is massive is it’s good for recruiting. Like, people want to work with fast growing companies. They want to work with fast growing businesses. And we couldn’t really come up with anything less like a larger Tam than fintech. Yeah. And so our founding principles were like, Big Tam, let’s actually be in a fly company. So like no gimmicks have to actually use LMS to solve the business. This core problem and like it’s beautiful for unstructured data in AR because AR is just conversations, emails, um, phone calls, data like LMS are amazing at wrangling that. And then our other big thing last year was let’s let’s not get disrupted by, um, uh, Satya and Sam. And so and now obviously it’s like Dario and Claude, but we really want it to be to the extent that we could, like, fight against primarily other founders, less so the Frontier Labs. And we have this belief that this problem is like so nuanced. Data is so sensitive, the integrations are so hard, you cannot make a mistake. You have to have your own harness that like, yeah, I think eventually the labs will come for this. But we have like a decade to to really build a big business. Yeah. And so then we kind of reverse engineer our way into this problem. Like, I don’t have a story about how my parents in Russia were not paid for some milk that they sold. Like, we don’t have that. It’s just kind of like opportunistic reverse engineering into, like, what would be a good business.

18:31 – 19:04

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, yeah, 100% not. I like it. I mean, it’s brilliant. It is. And like you said, even if the Frontier Labs do try and comfort in ten years, there’s a lot of applications that because they process so much sensitive data and, um, just by nature of needing to be like the top 1%, like we believe are going to be just fine. So yes, there may be the capabilities, but will it make sense for someone to build through a frontier model, or go with an application layer that is building like the top notch capabilities? Probably the latter.

19:04 – 19:26

George Kurdin: Yeah, yeah, especially something as sensitive as your revenue or cash flow. I would agree. I mean, 11 labs has done. I mean, obviously I wouldn’t put us in the same bucket. They’re also an incredible applied AI company. They have their own models, but they’ve done an incredible job of building a phenomenal business. Right. Yeah. And at this point, it’s just it’s just theirs. Yeah. And so yeah, we aspire to be the same.

19:26 – 19:27

Sophie Buonassisi: Super cool.

19:27 – 19:53

George Kurdin: And yeah, I think to your second question, you know, if we can put money into your pocket that’s really yours and accelerate cash flow for you and front load the money. We believe we can meaningfully help your business. And that is hard ROI that is measurable dollars necessarily like time savings, like nebulous efficiency. We are motivated by that and we’ll stop at nothing to achieve that. And that is why we think this is what businesses need.

19:53 – 20:05

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, 100%. Take us through. Almost as if somebody isn’t in the founder seat or isn’t running are like what actually happens? Maybe I’ll give like the very high level for my end. And you can fill in the gap.

20:05 – 20:07

George Kurdin: Yeah. You mean like, why does it, like, get stuck?

20:07 – 20:18

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Why does it get stuck? Like so business. Yeah. Sends an invoice. It’s net 30 days. Yeah. The recipient has to pay it within 30 days. Why does it get stuck? Why aren’t they getting paid?

20:18 – 20:59

George Kurdin: Amazing question. Imagine like an equation that has like nine different variables, like x plus y plus z. Then a del like theta. And like each one of these variables is a reason. And so it’s very important. It’s a good question because we cannot impact some of these variables. So like one very obvious reason for why I get stuck is you’re broke if you actually don’t have the money. Cash flow. That’s not something we can do today. Like you know, you don’t loan etc.. Another reason why it gets stuck and I’ll get to the parts quickly, like where we can actually help. Another reason why get stuck is like, Sophie, you’re just so big. You’re just such a big business that you can just like flex at me, like Nike or Walmart can just basically be like

21:00 – 22:06

George Kurdin: 180 days. And also when it hits, I’ll be like another 30 days late because they can because everyone wants them as a supplier and they have like little people that will exercise the might of the firm and like increase the cash conversion cycle. And so these variables are somewhat immovable. Then there’s a bunch of other variables like uploading invoices to app portals, making sure that upstream and downstream the invoice have no mistakes, uh, interfacing with the teams on the other end, which is ultimately a communication like, oh, hey, like, pay me this thing. Actually, no, I have this question. Actually, you know, I cannot pay because I left for paid leave and now and so there’s there’s a bunch of reasons for beyond those two that, that I think impacts the delays, mistakes, admin, clerical talking to someone else. It’s ultimately like a very archaic system to designed for a person talking to a person. But why can’t it be like. Like Venmo? Like, why can’t you just like. Message me and be like, hey, man, like send the money. Hey. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so that’s what we’re striving to.

22:06 – 22:08

Sophie Buonassisi: Okay. And so how does Monk do that?

22:08 – 22:53

George Kurdin: We obviously use the labs, but we have we’ve built what’s now colloquially known as the harness. We have proprietary harness for account receivables with our own set of evals, our own guardrails and our own tests. That does collections, that does cash application, which is a colossal problem in businesses. This is a mechanism of figuring out what of the deposits on your bank account should be matched to what invoices. And it’s a hard problem because there’s many reasons why it cannot be a match like FX or short pay, etc.. So we have a a harness and then we we layer your rules, your policies, your business guardrails, etc. to guide the agents to perform on your behalf. And there’s a bunch of other modules in the platform, but that’s how we do it.

22:54 – 22:54

Sophie Buonassisi: Mhm.

22:54 – 23:04

Sophie Buonassisi: And we’re talking like the implications for some businesses is astounding. Thousands tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands and millions.

23:04 – 23:32

George Kurdin: Yeah I think uh well that I think we see in our customers numbers or like unsolicited messages from customers that are like, oh my God, this is insane. But it’s it’s very much one of those where it’s just a hard fact, like the world has accepted that the way that the money moves, which it doesn’t really move, is okay. And the the delays are okay. You know, these issues are okay. And so when there is like an actual legitimate antidote to this problem. Yeah, it’s it’s a huge impact.

23:32 – 23:52

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And so you built your own proprietary harness. What are your thoughts on how that creates differentiation moving forward? Just as the models get better, people are building more application layers. There’s been a lot of discourse around harness lately. And just to how important it is now as that differentiating piece. Curious your thoughts?

23:52 – 23:55

George Kurdin: I mean, we should hire you as a marketer. You just have.

23:55 – 23:59

Sophie Buonassisi: It. There we go. Um, I’m already all in. I’m like.

23:59 – 24:19

George Kurdin: Yeah, yeah, no, we think we think it’s a big deal. We think that it’s not like, ultimately everyone has the same keys to the models. Like, everyone roughly has the same access. What separates the winners from the losers, besides their tastes and their judgment on the client and the UI is how they wrangle the models. And that’s that’s that’s the harness.

24:19 – 24:20

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

24:20 – 24:57

George Kurdin: And I think like. Yeah, at least at least in our space, I can’t speak for any other domain. But in our space, um, precision and accuracy and security are like tier zero. And, you know, if we make a mistake and a CFO will message me and they’ll rip my face off if I get something wrong with our customers and their money. And so we don’t just try to, like, solve the problem by just throwing compute or inference right at the problem. We have a lot of guardrails and logic and, um, procedures to make sure that things go exactly how Sophie wants. Right. And that’s the really hard part.

24:57 – 24:58

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.

24:58 – 25:06

Sophie Buonassisi: And the stakes are so high in the finance space. Like you said, somebody will rip your face off, as you said. Um, which if something.

25:06 – 25:10

George Kurdin: Happened and I’ve learned. And I try not to do that again.

25:10 – 25:31

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Gotta protect the goods. Um, but the finance space truly is, like, very, very high stakes. And so it’s challenging for people to build in the finance space sometimes, which you’ve been doing an incredible job at actually circumventing and being able to build if we zoom out. What what would you say the status of finance and AI is at an intersection right now.

25:31 – 25:34

George Kurdin: From the conversations that we’re having with customers.

25:34 – 25:35

Sophie Buonassisi: Mhm.

25:35 – 25:36

George Kurdin: It’s now

25:37 – 26:30

George Kurdin: no longer about hey, let’s try some AI and let’s pilot a thing. I think like we’re way past that stage and it’s obviously also mass media. So that means that like we’re definitely past that stage. And it’s very much about hard ROI and hard ROI is is bottom line or top line of margins. I could make the case that time savings or efficiency isn’t even that impressive anymore because like, hey, we saved. We made George ours more efficient. But now he’s on Reddit. Like, what? What has he done with these five hours? Yeah. And so yeah, I think it’s which in, you know, we love our position because we help you grow your top line. Yeah. Um, and then the other big piece, I think it’s just it’s no longer about just, like, procuring a solution. It’s also like, how do you get, like, the company to actually use the solution? Uh, and that’s something that we’re growing into.

26:30 – 26:50

Sophie Buonassisi: Um, yeah. The latter is a huge one. Right now we’re seeing I mean, there’s tons of reports of people not seeing ROI from AI, and, uh, we’re seeing a tremendous spike in for deployed engineers because it is really hard to adopt. And so companies are having to go in and physically help companies adopt AI and understand the use cases.

26:50 – 27:27

George Kurdin: Okay, zooming out, more macro. In my experience, I think that these things like margin optimization or like in this case, model costs internally are like really easy, solvable problems in the future. And so like I just have a wavering conviction that we can we can, we can tune the costs. But right now we have to grow. And so I’m not and we’re like quite small. And we’re very fortunate where the talent density is so high that one person can do like five things plus Claude. And we should like, invest in our best people. And so I’m not really thinking too much about like, internal inference or like our anthropic bill beyond like a few caps.

27:27 – 27:30

Sophie Buonassisi: Is it going up your anthropic bill? Yeah, yeah.

27:31 – 27:55

George Kurdin: Nothing like certainly not nothing I’ve seen, but I think. But in the hands of the right people and like, there’s a lot of people in the team that are smarter than me. I mean, it’s incredible, like how much we can do and also, like, we’re not the first company in our space like, we’re actually quite, you can say, late to this space, but it’s a huge advantage for us, a huge edge, because we can just leapfrog people because of the models?

27:55 – 27:59

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, definitely. Let’s see. And are you hiring for any roles right now?

27:59 – 28:09

George Kurdin: Hiring for all the roles, as you can imagine. All in New York if possible. But yeah. Engineers sales, post sales ops, recruiters.

28:09 – 28:14

Sophie Buonassisi: Finish this sentence for me. The thing nobody tells you about founding a company is.

28:14 – 28:26

George Kurdin: The thing that nobody tells you about. Founding a company is that sales and marketing is tier zero. It was always tier zero, and it’s more important than ever right now.

28:26 – 28:29

Sophie Buonassisi: That is a very cool perspective to hear from someone with an edge background.

28:29 – 28:31

George Kurdin: I’m glad you’re on this podcast.

28:31 – 28:53

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, I mean, on the go to market side, we obviously are true believers in that. That was the impetus for starting GTM fund and GTM now is how do you help support more people with go to market? Because as tech modes decline, like that really is the the catalyst and differentiator for growth. But it’s interesting to see that kind of permeating more mainstream now since that was pre ChatGPT pre AI kind of when we first started.

28:53 – 29:00

George Kurdin: Yeah you guys were early and were very fortunate that you support us. And uh yeah it makes a ton of sense now. But yeah this would be my message.

29:00 – 29:04

Sophie Buonassisi: That’s a great message. Uh let’s talk a little bit about fundraising advice, you know?

29:04 – 29:04

George Kurdin: Okay.

29:04 – 29:23

Sophie Buonassisi: Um, you have raised a series A, you’ve raised about 28 million total. And we were fortunate to meet early on in your journey. So you’ve got some experience fundraising. You’ve got some experience leading a company that has venture backed as a CEO. Also for any founders, a couple steps behind you looking to successfully raise funds, what advice would you give them?

29:23 – 29:55

George Kurdin: I think the best the best one, and this is not something that came to me. I learned this from someone else who was way better than me at this James, but compressed the process. I think that running a tight process is so important because then you generate heat around your round at the extremes. If you are casually seeing a number of VC’s and going to dinners, and then you take some meetings and then you’re like, don’t take some meetings, and then it’s like three months or even maybe a month. It’s too long. I think it’s too long. I think that it will hurt your round.

29:56 – 30:15

Sophie Buonassisi: A lot can confirm that. We would also echo that piece of advice and agree with you on that. At the end of the day, you want to elicit FOMO from an investor, like an investor should feel like there is a hard deadline and that there’s demand for that and want to get in before that deadline. And so if you’re elongating a process, you remove an element of that FOMO.

30:15 – 30:19

George Kurdin: Yeah, that’s well said. Hard deadline. Even better than I said hard deadline. Precisely.

30:19 – 30:32

Sophie Buonassisi: And stepping away from the, uh, maybe the go to market side, the building, the founder side, it could be that, but it could be anything. What is the best piece of advice you have gotten and who gave it to you?

30:32 – 31:14

George Kurdin: I would say like, one thing is to invest in your founder relationship and to spend a lot of time really, if you don’t have a co-founder trying to find the right co-founder, I think that is so obvious as like most obvious advice, like, oh, drink water. Well, duh, like you’re going to die like, but that’s why it’s so important and it’s like scientific improvement. And so I think it’s like even more important to have the right partner than, than having a great idea, because I think most companies will just fail because you get into a fight or like, you know, caffeine. I run out of energy and that’s why the company dies. And so find the right person and then continuously invest in this relationship the way you would like a marriage.

31:14 – 31:25

Sophie Buonassisi: And the divorce rate, if we can use that, you use that word in this context of of co-founders is quite high. I might be misquoting this, but I’ve definitely read something around the 50% mark I think.

31:25 – 31:52

George Kurdin: Yeah, it’s quite hard. And I had a co-founder breakup with someone that I’ve known for seven years. Um, and we’ve built a bunch of things together. And because you’re under so much stress that even with the best intentions, which is also why, like, you have to, I think, invest in the fabric of this relationship like a lot like consciously do it. And and it can be just like, oh, let’s just have like a recurring, you know, half an hour on Friday. That’s not enough.

31:52 – 31:52

Sophie Buonassisi: Mhm.

31:52 – 31:54

Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely. How did you and Joe meet?

31:54 – 32:02

George Kurdin: Uh, introduced by Dillon, who is a partner at South Park Commons because he said we’re both hardcore and you guys should chat

32:03 – 32:04

George Kurdin: both hardcore.

32:04 – 32:16

Sophie Buonassisi: I like that. I will say you did get the description for multiple people as being one of the most direct and kind people combination that they have ever met, which is a very unique, beautiful combination.

32:16 – 32:19

George Kurdin: I don’t know if I deserve it, but thank you. Go. Go people.

32:19 – 32:31

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, well shout out Paul is one of those people that this is fantastic George. This has been really, really helpful. Thank you for sharing your journey. If anyone wants to follow you, follow Monk. Where can they find you?

32:31 – 32:33

George Kurdin: Yeah. Thank you for having me, Sophie. We are at Monk.

32:34 – 32:39

George Kurdin: Uh, and. Yeah, you can find us at Monk’s. Or you can just find me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

32:39 – 32:39

Sophie Buonassisi: Perfect.

32:39 – 32:40

George Kurdin: First name, last name.

32:40 – 32:43

Sophie Buonassisi: Beautiful. And those will be in the show notes. Thank you.

32:43 – 32:44

George Kurdin: George, thanks for having me.