The race for alpha: Varun Anand of Clay on inventing a new role and why GTM needs a new AI strategy
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What is Varun Anand’s political background and how did it lead to founding Clay?
Bye.
Let me give you a very clever, fun example, right? So one of our customers and the trash company we all know and love, and they use clay to look at Google Street View images of people's homes. Then they use AI to analyze that, and they look at the color of the dumpster outside your home. And then they're like, okay, well, what color is it? Which indicates what competitor they're using. And depending on the color, they use that to create an automated targeted direct mail campaign to convert the homes. That's a pretty end-to-end workflow.
Great to have you here, Varun. Yeah, thank you for having me. I just wanted to give a big shout out to your whole team. You know, Chris Ross, Jack and your team, they've been really great to work with. And I feel like HG has been, you know, on the cutting edge of a lot of this AI stuff in private equity and really being at the forefront of what AI can do on the application layer. And it's been great to work with your team. I love that summit we did for all your CROs in Vienna.
And yeah, excited to do way more with you guys. Likewise, the partnership with Clay has been incredible, and not only in the Vienna hackathon where all the go-to-market leaders were together using Clay hands-on, but also hearing the CEOs talk about it internally this week. You've had a very unique journey that brings you to Clay. Could you tell us a bit about that journey and what brought you to the role at Clay? Yeah,
well, I actually started my career in politics and government, so I worked for Hillary Clinton for a number of years. And ultimately, you may remember we lost a certain election in 2016, and that forced a pivot into technology. And I was at this insurance company where I was the GM of one of our business units, and our CEO wouldn't give me any engineers to work with. But it was like, you still got to meet these revenue targets. So I actually built a lot of product using no-code tooling, like Bubble and Excel and things like that. And it worked. But the bar in insurance is very low. So it's not so hard to win with things like that. But that's kind of how I got into this world. And Kareem actually had started Clay originally in 2017.
But they were kind of exploring a lot of ideas, hadn't really committed to a particular product direction. And I left New French to start a company, and I was in like eight different Slack groups about no-code tooling, because I had just spent so much time on it. And someone posted about a webinar for Clay. But at the time, they didn't have any customers or revenue, and so I show up to this webinar, and I'm the only one there. No one
else is there.
And they were gonna cancel it, but I'm like, okay, this is interesting, and I started using the product and this early prototype, and I was like, whoa. This is interesting. This is cool. And so I cold email Kareem, who doesn't respond because he's on a silent meditation retreat. But his co-founder at the time, Nikolai, responds. We hit it off.
How did the first Clay webinar (with no customers) spark the company’s creation?
Start spending more time together. Start working together. But then Nikolai leaves. Everyone else also kind of leaves. And for whatever reason, Karim and I decided let's work together and I kind of joined as a late co-founder and then we kind of reset the business, focus on go-to-market as our core use case and launch the product
and start going from there. And that refocus, that sort of resetting of the vision, how did that come about? Was it very clear that go-to-market was going to be the direction from that early on? I
think it was clear. I think there was a lot of pull that we were seeing. Now, where that pool was specifically, I think, was an open question because go-to-market is a massive space. But I think we always knew, and I think credit to Nikolai who had this insight originally, that salespeople in particular have this... you know, this real kind of manual work that they're doing and always in spreadsheets. But we actually started with cold email marketing agencies. Like we started with like, you know, these really small customers. And it makes sense because they actually, they're very technical, they're scrappy, they're entrepreneurial.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is Varun Anand’s political background and how did it lead to founding Clay?
0:00–2:48
2
How did the first Clay webinar (with no customers) spark the company’s creation?
2:48–5:27
3
Why did Clay choose go‑to‑market (GTM) as its core product focus?
5:27–10:29
4
What early customer use‑cases (e.g., trash‑can colour analysis) illustrate Clay’s end‑to‑end workflow?
10:29–16:42
5
How did the launch of ChatGPT and its API accelerate Clay’s AI capabilities?
16:42–22:38
6
What is a Go‑to‑Market Engineer and why is this role critical for modern revenue teams?
22:38–22:55
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