By The Time a Government RFP is Public, You've Already Lost

Monisha Saldanha: Welcome to Colorado Tech People, where we talk with the builders using technology to solve real world problems. Today's episode explores how to build products for markets that the playbook doesn't cover. I'm joined by Adam Zucker, CEO and founder of Cloverleaf AI. We dig into how AI can move beyond the hype to actually help small and medium sized businesses discover, understand, and win opportunities that were previously out of reach.

Welcome, Adam. Thank you so much for joining us today. Adam Zucker: Thank you, Manisha, having me. It's great to be here.

Monisha Saldanha: Let's dive in. question for you. What was the original problem CleverLeaf was created to solve and what is the solution? Adam Zucker: Yeah.

So Jeremy, my co-founder, grew up with him. I grew up together, went to Graceful together in the suburbs of Chicago. And his father worked in local government growing up and was a single father. So ⁓ went with him to a lot of the and he learned a couple of things.

He learned that they're long and boring, ⁓ but a lot of really interesting things and really important things that happen in them. And a of money that moves around. ⁓ Even our small suburb control the budget, in the hundreds of millions. Right.

So. He had this product idea of aggregating video and audio recordings of government meetings, running them through a specia text API, getting a transcript and then making that searchable. I spent my career as a software engineer prior to that. And so he called me one day and asked me if I could build it.

I said, I could. I don't know if nobody else was doing it because the idea seemed so obvious to me. And he said there was nobody else doing that at the time. So that was a little over five years ago now.

And where we've really found a lot of traction and a lot of really unique value is specifically in helping people get ahead of government funding, helping companies understand well before an RFP is released, what are problems that cities and these states are dealing with and what are the solutions they're looking for. And so it allows our customers to come to these communities and these government agencies as true partners and not just as people looking for dollars. Monisha Saldanha: How do you get the transcripts from the government meetings?

Adam Zucker: We have an army of scrapers that go all across the internet looking for ⁓ these publicly available meetings. So video audit recordings that are posted on a whole plethora of websites, run them through a proprietary speech text API that we built, and that gets us out the transcript, the text, and then from there we can index them into a search API. Monisha Saldanha: Really interesting you the topic of today is building products for markets where the playbook doesn't cover.

So what is playbook and how does it not cover government contracts? Adam Zucker: I think you can think about the playbook in two different ways that at a level, what we're delivering this competitive intelligence or buyer intent, intelligence, things like that. And there's been a lot companies that have existed for quite a while now doing this for the B2B market. So you can think about zoom or ⁓ six cents or demand base, Bombora, but the B2B world and the B2G world are pretty distinct ⁓ in how they operate, how buying decisions happen, how people go to find new products and services.

We figured out that you could build a vertical specific solution that leveraged some of the unique things about government decisions. One is that they happen in broad daylight as opposed to private companies, in city council meetings and county commissioner and board meetings, they're having open discussions about problems they're facing and how they want to allocate their budget and what problems their communities need to solve. That doesn't happen, you know. Amazon isn't publicizing their inner customer success, like, you know, vendor roadmap journey, right?

So there's a unique set of data to take advantage of. It's really messy and very So it's hard for these companies to understand at scale what's happening. And then think on the other end, that would be the other thing where the playbook is tough, you know, right ⁓ up until company like ours came along, to scale up your sales motion, you essentially just needed to hire more salespeople, find people who had connections and networks into these communities. Because it was hard to know, if I cover 200 cities in southern Indiana, I can't go to all the council meetings every week or every day, I can maybe go be at one.

Even that is a lot of driving, it's a lot of sitting around waiting for the three minute section that actually applies to your company or your product to come. So it's allowing them to scale efficiently, to let software do the hard work of helping point them in the right direction. week they know the five people to make a phone call to, and they're not just blasting out 500 emails to every city, hoping that one of them might care about what they have to say. Monisha Saldanha: Really interesting.

you mentioned that the governments are having these discussions out in the open. What is the process for applying a government contract and how does it differ from what happens in the B2B market? ⁓ Adam Zucker: There definitely some similarities. But some of the big differences is that government's going to have much stricter and much more formalized regulations around funding thresholds.

So for instance, and that's going to be different in pretty much every city or county in the country. you know, let's just take the city of Denver, for instance, anything over $500,000 is going to have to go through a formal RFP process. Underneath that, it can go through something a little less formal. But understanding that if you want your the government to buy something from you, might need to get lots of different approvals and that those buyers aren't going to be motivated by the same things that private buyers are.

In the business world, everything comes down to ROI. And then some level in the government world, it's ROI too, but they might measure ROI differently, right? As city council people and county commissioners aren't elected based purely on the profit they pull back to their community, but based on the quality of life that they're able to provide to their citizens. The agreements or the moral character of the community that their citizens are looking for.

So it's understanding that and it's also understanding that in the government world by the time that RFP hits the streets, very often they have a preferred vendor in mind. Getting there right before the end, waiting for the RFP to get released, there's actually a stat that says it's around 4 % of cold RFPs. So if your first time seeing this when it hits the open market, you have about a 4 % win rate. But that win rate jumps to over 60 % if you're there early.

And at the end of the day, that's not that different from the corporate world, right? If I'm a director of marketing and I go to my CMO and I said, want to buy a new account based marketing tool, they might ask me, what other ones have you looked at? Have you done your due diligence? And if maybe I've only looked at the one vendor, I might go out and check another couple, but I already have the vendor I like.

It's gonna be really hard to sway me off of them. But getting there first, getting there early, being able to partner with somebody, and know that they're not just looking to win your dollars, but they're a true partner to your community. In the government world, contract terms are much longer, kind of a base level. So a lot of them are five or 10 years.

⁓ not just signing up for a one-year service where can switch. You're a big commitment, both in terms of time and dollar amounts. Monisha Saldanha: Yeah, and I can see the value in finding out early what the problem is that the government wants to solve, but also you know who wants to solve it, don't you? You get a name of a person who is discussing it.

Adam Zucker: So absolutely. We like to say that government sales is all about relationships. At end of the day, it's people buying from people, kind like I just mentioned. For governments, you know, when you're making a purchase for $500,000 and the next vendor in and says we can do it for $480,000.

Now $20,000 is a lot of money, but the real thing is, do I think this vendor truly understands my community, what our problems are and what we're looking to solve? Because as we talked about kind of the incentive structure for government versus private, if they don't think it's the right partner, regardless of the dollar amount, if the rollout goes poorly, if the services aren't done well, I'm not getting elected next time. So it's really important to know who's the right person to reach out to, who really owns this decision.

And much like the corporate world too, just because it's a marketing purchase doesn't necessarily mean the CMO, the CMO is the signer. CMO only go under their budget. It doesn't necessarily mean they're making every single decision on what kinds of software. They have trusted people underneath them.

They delegate. And it's the same thing in the government. It's understanding, you know, who exactly is the person who's driving this decision? Who's my champion?

Who's my economic buyer? Who's my budget holder? Who maybe has veto power, right? Who's a city council person who has a really outsized voice?

And they maybe hate my problem. Or they hate my company and I need to know that and I want to start, you know, being able to reach out to them and make sure, hey, I know you've had a really poor experience in the past with, you know, lot of cable providers have quite a bit of bad publicity, right? So, you know, hey, I know our internet's gone down a couple times over the years, like I'd love to talk you about what we've to improve that, right? So what can you do to kind of intimate and suggest and convince them that you truly understand their unique problems and them as a person?

not just, I'm with ⁓ AAA and for an IT manager to sell to. Monisha Saldanha: What was the process that you took to understand this market in depth? So in order to build software that's going to solve this problem, how did you get close to your customers? Adam Zucker: Jeremy had some of that personal experience growing up from his dad.

His dad was a comptroller for various communities around where we up in the North Shore. But other than that, it was the really unglamorous and dirty work of spending a lot of time talking to a lot of different people, workshopping the product, tweaking it, listening to customer feedback, keeping a really tight feedback cycle ⁓ so we can iterate quickly and stay convinced on why there's a quote that I love from Henry Ford. It's a one, but he said, if I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

And so ⁓ we always about that, that customers understand their problems very deeply, but they don't often have the right solutions. They're not technologists. They're not product people. So our job is to listen very deeply their problems ⁓ and then translate into the right solutions.

I don't think there's any replacement for customer discovery. We're listening with an open mind and an open heart and really trying to get close to as many people. Just tactical thing was conferences were also massive for us. They just get into a room with a lot of people.

We would have like really have a lot of those customer discovery conversations in a really quick succession. Monisha Saldanha: How did you convince potential customers to talk to you before you had a product in the market? Adam Zucker: We were able to build a product pretty quickly. So within about a month and a half of starting the company, I had a working MVP up and running that initial search database with being able to show off you can look up terms.

You can jump right to the moment of the video, see that little section. And that gave Jeremy something to be able to demo something and be able to push. Then other than that, again, unglamorous, unsexy, but is lots of cold calling, lots of cold email, and just trying to find people not being too proud initially of who will talk to us, know, push on existing networks and people who know, people you think might solve your problem. We were lucky in a sense where I think our product was pretty easy to understand, even for like, if I explained to my parents, you know, who are not technology people at all, but they can, that's interesting.

⁓ You know, like to know what was happening in the city council. So people of hard at first in that sense, because people would pull you in lots of different directions, because everyone can kind of see some way to apply it to their life from a product angle. But just ⁓ yourself, allowing people to map the product onto their needs, ⁓ and then as many of those conversations to try to understand where's there a through line, who's the most excited about it. ⁓ And then more so, and I tell this to friends of mine who are founding companies, who's willing to for it?

Because there is no feedback, like paid feedback. Everybody else, they can be the that get you up in the morning that somebody liked your product and thought it was interesting. ⁓ until somebody pays you for it, it's hard to know. If not willing to pay you for it, then they're not a customer.

They're a potential one. But obviously, ranked much lower in the grand scheme of things. Monisha Saldanha: Yeah, you know you're solving a painful problem if they're willing to pay for you to make it go away. Adam Zucker: Yeah.

And, and I also would say early on, don't worry about the price as much. Like you just want to find people. went all over the place. We ended up lowering our price a lot very early on just to see, you know, just to get people in the door and to start getting some real feedback.

People who are really at least willing to put up, you know, put up a hundred bucks a month, 200 bucks a month, ⁓ even it wasn't really what we wanted to do long-term, but just least to get some money in the door and to prove, they're willing to pay at least that much to us for access to the tool and this isn't just a nice to have. Monisha Saldanha: Yeah, and were there other directions in the beginning that you considered but decided not to take? Adam Zucker: Yeah, you know, we have a small segment of our customer base that is more affairs.

So like government affairs, public policy, regulatory, that sort of world. And still have those customers have been so much for some of our longest standing customers, some of our biggest contracts actually. But, and we're actually planning on going back to them eventually. Like we, the long-term vision of our company is less about government sales and it's more about government engagement.

⁓ So about being an intelligence layer for in a one-stop shop or understanding what's happening at the government at any level. And being able to track it, whether it's just the raw discussions. Over the last year, we started pulling in things like agendas and minutes and packets and legal notices. And we're always expanding our data set to things.

Soon we'll have regulation and legislation in there and budgets and procurement rules and permitting and anything that related to the government. But early on, we were trying to get pulled and we were trying to serve as both of them at the same time. You know, there's the, I love, I love a good cliche. There's like, can't boil the ocean is a big one.

And I think, I think there's something really hard, especially, you know, we're a venture backed company. You have to sell the brand vision. That's the only way to get funding. And especially early on, you saw a grand vision and then you have to go back to think like, all right, I have three customers.

Like, how do I get three more? How do I get three more after that? You know, how do I get from zero to a million and one to five and five to 10 and do that you have to be really, really focused early on. And so I think where we started having more success is when we started to narrow it and say, let's try to be the best for one segment of this market and over time we can grow, be able to satisfy a wider and wider audience.

Monisha Saldanha: And how would you describe the segment of the market that you're focusing on now? Adam Zucker: We've found a lot of traction with GovTech companies. We other segments as well that we've found, like I mentioned the government affairs, some of favorite clients fall in there too. So, you know, no shade to them.

We found a lot of success as well with architecture, engineering, construction firms, of ⁓ that world. we have really focused in with currently on going after those technology companies. ⁓ They understand, they have a little bit more usually of a mature rev ops motion ⁓ and the a mature sales technology staff being companies themselves. And so we're able to fit into there a little bit easier rather than trying to get them to take a new route to solve an existing problem.

Monisha Saldanha: Earlier you mentioned that it took you a month and a half to get the product up and running. What was your process and were you relying a lot on AI to support the development efforts? Adam Zucker: I mean, no, I, built the first version myself. I'm a, you know, was finding a career as a software engineer.

built it almost five years ago now. So it was well before any of, Cursor or Claude Code or anything like that existed. So really it was me. We were, we did a Techstars program in Indianapolis.

And for about a month, I just sat on the porch of our Airbnb and just coded for 10 to 12 hours a day. Building as much as I could. Monisha Saldanha: Good for you. And did you have any support in terms of user research or design?

Adam Zucker: I had Jeremy out there talking to people, doing customer conversations, doing that. It's, funny. We talk about it, you know, we went to that Techstars program. spent the first two weeks doing like all the workshops together.

And then at that point I was like, Hey man, I'm going to go like into, was joking, like into the code mines and I'm just going to write code all day and he's going go to all the workshops. And every day he'd go into the tech, like the the office where Techstars was, he'd come home every night and he'd have like some, I want to build this new thing, let's do this instead. And it was like every day was like a new him because he talked to 15 different people and all these different ideas.

And I would be like, all right, man, but I'm I'm going to stay focused on what we already decided. I'm just going to get this first version out. Our dynamic, a lot, I always joke. I've told them since we started and it hasn't changed.

He's the dreamer and I tell him, just want what you want and don't worry about what's possible or what's easy or difficult. Like I just want you to want what you want. And then my job is to take that and try to translate into how do we build something as quickly as possible, you know, within a budget. Cause I tell them and I tell the rest of our team, the beautiful thing about code is that anything's possible.

The only question is how much time and money is going to take to build it. But that's our job as engineers, as product people is to figure out how do we distill down what they want into something that we can get to market quickly. Cause I'm a huge believer in the concept of an MVP, right? In my career, I found that no one really did that minimum part that we would build products.

And I was a part of teams where it's, we take six months to get the first version of the product into people's hands. Being on the team where three months in, we gave like a demo to a customer and they gave us a list of like a hundred missing features and bugs. It was like, that's just, we just built the wrong thing, you know? How are you three months into a project before you realize you built the wrong thing?

Like you didn't have a tight enough loop with them. You didn't understand exactly what they were looking for. The beautiful thing about software is we can update it a million times a day if we want to. gives us a unique ability as software companies versus a hardware to be able to iterate.

Right. And so let's, take advantage of that and let's figure out what's the smallest thing we can build that delivers real value to a customer. Let's get into their hands and then let's iterate from there than trying to build the complete vision all in one go. Monisha Saldanha: you built it all yourself with you did the front end you did the back end ⁓ did ⁓ did it all Adam Zucker: ⁓ yeah.

⁓ yeah. I did the design. Yeah. You can tell the design was me, you know, it's, ⁓ I'm a minimalist on some level, at least in design.

So, you know, it was simple and easy to use. At least I hope so, or like to think so. But, ⁓ yeah, you know, we, were a two person company, you know, in a metaphorical garage, just trying to get the thing off the ground. And I'm lucky enough now to have a great team of engineers and a lot of design partners and all, you know, all these different kinds of resources that we didn't have, but.

you know, we, we have a, we have a silly saying internally we use a lot, which is nobody cares about you stupid F in product. And the general idea there, you know, and I'm sure you've heard this one too of people don't buy products. They buy solutions. There's an old marketing adage that ⁓ people want quarter inch drill.

They just want a quarter inch hole and they don't care how it's created. And so with the product that the question is, is are we delivering real value? Does it really solve a problem? And if it does, people will be, you know, maybe not happy or grateful about it, but they'll accept flaws and they'll accept a little bit of clunkiness early on.

It's, we them the superpower that they didn't have before? Are we solving a real pain point for them? That's the important thing rather than are we building the perfect product? Monisha Saldanha: And how do you see development going forward?

Are you using AI now to support your development efforts? Adam Zucker: Yeah, absolutely. We, uh, we, we, as a company became like full converts last summer. Uh, I was, I had heard about it from some investors and friends of mine and, know, we had used, like Copilot has been around for a couple of years now, kind of, uh, you know, you'd ask your questions, maybe have it write some tests for you, stuff like that.

And then Cursor came out. I started hearing about that. We had a board meeting about a year ago. One of our board members a company of his was using it and it was like five X ing their development speed.

And I was like, can you put me in contact with that guy? Cause I just got to see how they do it. Like I got to see it happen in order to believe it. And I sat down him and by the end of that 30 minutes, I was, I was a convert.

I was like, does this make sense? I get it. So it's really cool. There's a lot of stuff you can do here.

And for us our hiring, it's, it's a mandatory requirement now as we hire engineers. For me, it's less about replacing engineers or whittling down your team. And it's more about, what could we do if every engineer was 50 % more productive or 75 % more productive? Think about, heard somebody say this a couple of months ago, I thought that was great.

Where they said, the AI powered coding allows you to be more ambitious. We've seen that already. when we have a new feature, a new product we want to build, we can go and test out like two or three POCs in half the time it takes us to build one. And that's so as you can think like, what are some different ways we could do this?

Let's play around a little bit. It allows to ⁓ get more And ⁓ for me a business owner, it's thinking through what are all the incredible things we could do if everyone was more productive, you know? And yeah, so that's I think about it. Monisha Saldanha: And what is the tooling that you use?

Adam Zucker: We recently moved over to Claude Code. For a while we were using Cursor. I believe some people might even still be using Cursor just with the Claude Code running through it, then we have Copilot for, for our pull requests and, reviewing code and stuff like that. But yeah, I'd Claude Code is the big one.

Monisha Saldanha: How big is the company now? Adam Zucker: We are 16 people growing. We'll be over 20 in the next couple of months here. We're closer to 30 than 20 by the end of the year.

It's kind of the way we see ourselves growing. Monisha Saldanha: Well, it's really exciting to see that kind of growth. looking ⁓ towards how has it been growing your company in Colorado? You mentioned you took part in Techstars.

⁓ How you see it building a company outside of traditional tech hubs like Silicon Valley? Adam Zucker: Yeah, you know, I'm not from here. I moved here for the company. Jeremy's been here for over a decade now.

was living in a small town in Oregon before we started the company. so a lot of reasons for me to come here, very few for him to join me in Oregon. Denver is great place for a lot of reasons. I ⁓ wasn't, ⁓ it's kind obvious hindsight, but it's a lot more of a tech hub than I thought it was before I moved here.

You have the huge Google campus. You a lot of the big defense and space companies are out here. You have Boulder, Colorado University. You DU, you have a lot of schools out here.

And one the great things about being here as far as a company in general is that we're essentially located at airports. So flying around the country, going to different events, we're never too far from anything, which is nice. But I found to be a great place. You know, a lot of people want to come here.

It's a big city. We've been able to find a lot of great talent here. People living here and working here and the state seems pretty amenable to wanting to grow the tech community. So yeah, it's been a good place to be.

Monisha Saldanha: Have you seen an impact on your business from the AI bill that recently came out? Adam Zucker: We have not yet, you know, Being part of Techstars they've been a vocal, voice for reconsideration of the bill. I know in reading it, it definitely seems to be onerous and, the little bits I've read about it seems to a huge burden on companies in a way that maybe is, impossible in a more practical sense for them to stay compliant with. But I haven't seen any effects yet.

It hasn't, you know, There's been no restriction on tooling. haven't had any complaints or, influence from, state or local government here trying to get us to change the way we do things. It's interesting. I understand the impulse.

The want to pieces of technology that could be potentially destructive. On the hand, you're trying to draw that fine line between that and allowing innovation and rapid development, requires allowing for fact that mistakes might be made, but do the benefits outweigh the ⁓ damages. So respect that legislators are working hard to to figure out that right balance. Monisha Saldanha: What advice would you give someone who is thinking about starting their own business now all the AI tooling that exists?

Is there any advice that you would give them? Adam Zucker: AI tooling changes a lot of things. I think it opens up a lot avenues for people to, to build quicker and iterate quicker. I think it can wash things out a little bit, right.

And it creates this world where everybody's building everything. And so it's kind of hard to stand out in that, but I'd say you just got to start from, ⁓ from a problem, something. you feel passionate about something you're willing to work really hard at for a long time without really making money, because that's most likely where you're going to be. I know that's where we were for a while.

If you're willing to do that, that's going to keep you through, I think, finding a great community. And can you find mentors and advisors that have been there before and ⁓ can talk you through some things? And then just working really, really hard and heard a great thing, which is like, you know. something like expertise versus volume.

In lieu of expertise, just working people can get you pretty far in life. And so I think AI suggests that everything can be done really easily, you know, or like with minimal effort. I know you go on Lovable or, you know, one of those platforms and just like build me that today and it'll throw a whole thing together. You're not to throw a whole company together in a day.

It's going to take some time and it's going to some effort. It's going to fall down on your face and get back up again. So yeah, I think just resilience and consistency. Monisha Saldanha: And what does success look like for the end users of your platform?

What real world outcomes are they looking for? Adam Zucker: More revenue, you know, for government sales teams, it's ⁓ pipeline, more closed deals, ⁓ renewal, retention upsells. if we could just sell our customers more revenue, we would do that. What we do instead is we sell them a product that allows them to make more money.

And it's just being for the end seller, the account executive, the in the field that's using our tool, it's allowing them to own their territory and know, what are my accounts are ready for to be sold to today, what are the ones that, maybe I just reach out to and strengthen the connection because they're going to be six months away from a buying cycle. And ultimately it's, for a sales intelligence for an layer, the goal ⁓ is the outcome of any sales department. either you make more money or you don't.

And that's our goal is to be, is to be kind of another ⁓ arrow in their quiver to help them beat with confidence and scale confidence. Monisha Saldanha: Can you share a story of a business that was able to win a contract because of Cloverleaf? Adam Zucker: Yeah, I mean, from very early on, it was kind of like a big aha moment for us. In the Techstars program, we piloted with a big telecom company and they found a $3 million RFP down in Southern Indiana that no idea existed.

And they were able to win it a couple of months later from just being first to deal. We also have a pretty cool case study we just put out with Uber. Less about close revenue, but for Uber, the sales reps using the tool, because Uber does a lot of transit partnerships with local communities for like paratransit, microtransit. They call it like first mile, last mile.

So for especially like more rural communities, maybe, or places where just there isn't as much access to public transportation, or it's not able to do the entire job, will come in and partner. For the sales reps there were able to add a million dollars to their pipeline per quarter per rep. Pretty outstanding ROI there. And ⁓ obviously can't close deals for people.

So we still rely on the sellers to be the experts they are, but able just being able to service that many opportunities and ⁓ give them advantage. And that sort of coverage has been pretty awesome. And for me, in career, I just wanted to build products that solve real problems. I didn't grow up, ⁓ I'm pretty passionate about, government for people, but I didn't grow up wanting to be the government data expert, but I always wanted to build things that I knew felt real problems and really, you know, that gives me the confidence to go out there and work hard every day and charge people money for something, which is their hard earned money.

⁓ respect that. We value that. And so we want to make sure we're providing service that greatly outweighs the investment they're making in us. Monisha Saldanha: Looking ahead to the future, if everything goes well for Cloverleaf where do you see the company in 5 to 10 years?

Adam Zucker: Yeah, you know, just trying to essentially double every year. You know, if we can do that, we'll be in a great place. But I think, you know, that's a more like hard numbers. I think for us, it's ⁓ of what I said earlier, which is ⁓ that de facto one stop shop for government engagement.

it's this is, you know, from a product vision, it is for people who want to engage with the government companies and even private citizens one day, because that was the original idea we had was more about selling it to governments as a way for, the single mom who couldn't make ⁓ the school board She could go on and just kind of see what was happening. I have heard the topic she carried her life came up, but, I think it's ⁓ that people who want to engage the government aren't constrained by their ability to understand what's happening in the government.

Because ultimately, when we started, I would have said the word lobbyist was a dirty word and a dirty profession, but ultimately, know, ⁓ and government officials are not experts in everything. They rely on private citizens and companies to educate them on best use of their money and how to solve different problems. And we want strong partnership and a strong conversation, healthy tension between private and public, to make sure that we as citizens are living in the best state we can.

Monisha Saldanha: Fantastic. Last question for you. What is one book every builder should read and why? Adam Zucker: I'll go with one.

we actually read as an engineering team a couple of years ago, but it's called Build. It's by Tony Fidel, who was the, designer behind the iPhone and the iPod I thought he did an incredible job of talking about the life cycle of a company all the way from product idea all the way towards ⁓ huge bustling company. I also just thought he did a great job of having a narrative. find sometimes with nonfiction books is they have a really cool idea in the first 50 pages and they just of repeat that idea 10 more times for the next 200.

I think kind of struggle to finish the thing, but his was ⁓ he has good humor and ⁓ think a lot of really, great insights. We still use a lot of them. There's one I'll share, but he talks about the difference between data-driven decisions and opinion-driven decisions. And he says a mistake a lot of people make as they try to take.

an opinion-driven decision and turn it into a data-driven decision. when you do that, you end up picking essentially arbitrary or irrelevant data points to fuel it. And you have to be honest with yourself as a builder and as a startup founder that ⁓ going to be a lot of times where you don't actually have information, the information you need to act on something and you still need to make a decision. To go open eyes into that and say, hey, is opinion driven and we know that and we're just gonna go for it and see where it takes us.

Monisha Saldanha: you, I'll have to put that on my list. Thank you very much, Adam. This has been a great conversation. ⁓ Adam Zucker: Thank you, Manish.

It was great to talk to you. Monisha Saldanha: I'd like to thank our listeners for listening to this episode of Colorado Tech People. If Adam's story resonated with you, consider sharing this episode with someone interested in how we build for markets where the playbook doesn't work. Don't forget to subscribe so you can hear more conversations with the founders and leaders shaping Colorado's tech ecosystem.

Until next time, keep learning, keep building, and keep creating technology that makes a difference.