Applying Agentic AI to the Supply Chain, Building Systems to Withstand Chaos, and Leveraging your Curiosity w/ Pooja Brown @ Inventry.ai

Speaker A: This episode is brought to you by Sidero. If your team runs Kubernetes, chances are upgrades can feel risky. That's what the Telos platform is for. It's built on immutable minimal OS designed for Kubernetes. Immutable means clusters cannot drift so they stay identical and upgrades are a non event. Minimal means there is almost Nothing to attack. 50 binaries, no shell, no ssh. So it's secure by default. Upgrades get boring, security gets boring. And that's exactly the point. Check it out@siderelabs.com that's S I D E R O labs.com every engineer is

Speaker B: going to become a product manager very soon. So I think if you're a leader who's constantly thinking about that. I had a boss a long time ago, um, who said, is that all I want from my people is to be much more curious. And that's where, you know, I don't know if I was shopping for problems. I was just curious about why things were done a certain way. People love to talk about problems and you know, and people want to share them. They're not looking for a resolve. Right. Uh, because as an engineer you want to go solve it right now. They're not looking for that. You need to give space to actually indulge yourself in the problem and then something will strike and then you'll find the passion to go solve it.

Speaker C: Welcome to Engineering Founders, the show for engineering leaders making the daring leap to start their own company. Pooja Brown joins us from founder at Inventry AI and she shares her founder journey applying modern technology and agentic AI to the overlooked world of mid market manufacturing and supply chain problems. Pooja deconstructs the dynamics of bootstrapping an applied AI company. We talk about the lessons applied from family run businesses using customer willingness to pay as the ultimate business validation and applying a beginner's mindset to find high value customer problems. Pooja also breaks down her product focus and strategy around building a value layer over legacy Systems and using AI agents to automate operations like SDRs and customer support workflows within a small startup. Let me introduce you to Pooja and Infantry AI. Pooja Brown is a technology executive and founder focused on building AI native platforms that power real world operations across industries. She's led engineering at scale at uh, companies like Stitch Fix and DocuSign. Her experience spans multiple verticals including retail, enterprise, SaaS, education technology and real estate where she's consistently focused on embedding AI directly into core business systems rather than layering it on top. Inventory is the AI operating layer for procurement and mid market manufacturing. Its flagship agent, Jonah, is an autonomous AI buyer already running in production, negotiating with suppliers, anticipating disruptions, and making real purchasing decisions. Enjoy our conversation with Pooja Brown. Pooja, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us in person.

Speaker B: Loving it, loving it, being here in person.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker B: Uh, so thank you for inviting me. I'm happy to be here.

Speaker C: Well, I was trying to think about how to frame our conversation for the people listening and why I've been really excited. And so there was a couple descriptors that came up about maybe some of the themes that we'll cover. And so when I was thinking about some of your journey so far, there's this story around disrupting an industry and sort of jumping into some of the things that you're doing in supply chain. There's this pattern of bootstrapped. There's being in a problem space that you're familiar with and applying new tools and technology to really impact it. And on top of this, it's applying all of your technical and leadership skills to really dive in, be curious about, about a space, and help, uh, change the way of doing things. So, to me, I think that's really interesting because this is the type of shape of a founder journey right now that I find really interesting. And to me, seems like one of the unique opportunities of being an engineering leader turned founder is this unique position to apply all of these technical skills, all of these leadership skills to different problems that maybe people aren't looking at or have been underserved in different ways, like different markets. So to me, that was kind of like framing of like, uh, oh, what am I excited about? So there's a lot of ways we can explore this. I think maybe it might be interesting to dive into the origin story. And I know you and I have talked about maybe three angles of what this origin story looks like. Maybe we go back to your pursuit of entrepreneurship in the first place and some of the things that have shaped you to want to go down that path and some of the things that shape your approach as a founder. Um, so bring us to that story.

Speaker B: Well, I'm glad you didn't start with AI and tech, because every podcast today is about that. Uh, but to me, business is as deep and as your origin story in terms of the context that you're exposed to.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: Is that, you know, I grew up in a family. I'm from India. I'm an immigrant from India. And, you know, my father ran a business and there were aspects about the business that were very clear, right? Is you have an idea, you solve a problem for somebody and they pay you to solve the problem, and then you figure out how to scale the idea, how to solve bigger problems. But the mechanics and the math were always the same, right? It's like you're making money because you're spending less, but you're adding value to somebody else and that's why people are paying you. You know, my family, I was always surrounded by entrepreneurs who thought that way, right? The VC land, the investment land is new in general, right? But like, those are just fundamentals of business, of good businesses. So I always knew that eventually I'm going to end up there. Now why, you know, why becoming a founder in tech was the right path to it, why I didn't go to a more brick and mortar industry, I don't know. No matter what, everybody shows up with a set of skills that you learn, right? And I think I enjoyed the skills of being in technology. I enjoyed the skills of building solutions for businesses. I've always been the boring side, right? You know, I almost call it like, I'm, um, the brand of the boring side. Because, you know, I ran engineering for Docusign for years, right? DocuSign wasn't a sexy company until everybody just knew that signature was DocuSign. Those words were interchangeable. But what it was, Docusign fundamentally is getting two businesses to agree on something in a frictionless way that was exciting. It, uh, wasn't your social media product, it wasn't your Instagram product. It was a very useful product that people found got in the way of them doing business. Right after that, I went to Stitch Fix, right? And Stitch Fix Outside was this personalized fashion, highly sexy company out there. But what was intriguing to me is when I ran technology, there was the supply chain side of it, right? It's like, how does this all come together? We've been living in this SaaS world, but then there's physical constraints, right? Stuff has to be ordered, people have to manufacture stuff, things have to be delivered, things have to come to the warehouse, they have to be packaged. Humans are handling it. All of that was so intriguing to me, right? So that's sort of like, you know, you bring the context that you're exposed to. But ultimately, like my journey to becoming a founder, I feel like I was born to be that, was trying to find the right problem to go solve. And some of that was the context that I built working with these companies. And that led me to inventory, right? Is that, you know, there was a real problem that nobody was focused on. It wasn't painful enough to them. They were continuing to work despite it. And for me, that was the place to decide is like, look, I'm going to go solve this problem. And what ended up being an, uh, itch or like a nuisance ended up being a huge problem. A huge problem for an industry like manufacturing, right? That there are humans that are doing these things purely through an intuition. Excel files, phone calls and are not able to actually use technology for what it's good at because they don't have the tools, they don't have the systems to do this.

Speaker C: I like to. What I'm reflecting on as you're sharing that is the things that you're exposed to early on, how it can shape the problems that you get involved in or even the types of paths that you pursue. Because it sounds like with your family starting a business, that experience shaped, I think, opportunities that you saw available for yourself or you started to see yourself as, oh, I will start a business, because I come from a long lineage of family members who have done this. And you've seen the skills at work. And I think it's really interesting when it comes to then a lot of folks in our community that are making this transition. It's like finding the right problem is first step. And there's a lot of different challenges to do that. Um, and it seems like you were looking for the right problem for a long period of time. I don't know if that's a fair assumption or.

Speaker B: Look, I really believe in. Sure, you're shopping for problems, but I look at it from a technical, uh, leader perspective. You're always focused on the how. Somebody else is deciding the what and the why, and you're focused on the how. But for me, it was always more important. The what and the why and the answers were there, but people weren't asking those questions, right? If you, if you imagine leading teams of engineers, your best engineers are the ones who are thinking about the what, why and how, right? And now with AI and all these coding agents and LLM M tools, even more important. Somebody read a quote the other day is like, every engineer is going to become a product manager very soon. Ultimately, you're focused on the what and the why, right? And the how is becoming easier. Or, you know, you're guiding the how. You're not spending a lot of the time on the how. You're spending the time on the what and the why. So I think if you're a leader who's constantly thinking about that. I had a boss a long time ago who said, is that, you know, just be curious, that's it, right? It's like all I want from my people is to be much more curious. And that's where, you know, I don't know if I was shopping for problems. I was just curious about why things were done a certain way. And you'll be more than surprised where, how people love to talk about problems and you know, and people want to share them. They're not looking for a resolve, right? Because as an engineer, you want to go solve it right now. They're not looking for that. You need to give space to actually indulge yourself in the problem and then something will strike and then you'll find the passion to go solve it, right? For me, like I didn't grow up in supply chain. I didn't grow up imagining supply chain is going to end, much less mid market manufacturing, right? We were at Stitch Fix. We had purchased millions of dollars of ERP software, right? Yet businesses were still running outside those systems, right? Businesses were running in human intellect. Anytime somebody quit, that was not just somebody leaving, that was business leaving. Because the decisions they were making were locked in their head and they hadn't taken time to train the rest or document this whole like the last two weeks before you exit, you're going to write down what you do. Nobody does that, not because of anything else, because you're just buried in the tactics. All the. So how are you training the workforce? How are, how is the business actually capturing what decisions you're making? How are we evaluating if these were the right decisions for the business? All of that was just entirely intuition, right? And to me, that was the place where like, okay, I think there's something here, there's value you can provide both to the business as well as the people in it. What I'm not, I'm not trying to take away their jobs. I'm trying to unlock the time that they can do more strategic thinking. Like, tell me how many times people have said it's like you're too tactical. You've not thought, you're not thinking strategically. You can't think strategically if all of your time is block and tackle. You actually need to make room for that. And that's where I think like, you know, this whole agentic revolution has brought in is that what are things that are taking away times from humans that don't enable them to actually think in concepts, in bigger strategic thinking. Inventory is a lot about that. Is that how do you enable humans to be their best selves by taking away a lot of tactical block and tackle stuff from their hands?

Speaker C: When I think about the world of supply chain, I can't imagine more complex space to start to streamline. To me it just seems like there's so many different variables and inputs that people are constantly analyzing and assessing. It just seems like there's a lot of opportunity in that space.

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Speaker C: wanted to dive into like the identifying the problem point that you're talking about. Can you tell about the moment when you I think really connected with the problems that you were seeing around supply chain? Like I know you mentioned you were at Stitch Fix and this emerged and there was like this deep sense of curiosity. What was the moment like? And what did, what did you do to kind of test or validate that there was an opportunity there?

Speaker B: You know, I don't think there's like one moment ever, right? Like I think you're living the moment every day, right? And as you said like supply chain is a complex space but to some extent it is and it isn't. So like if you look at the supply chain industry, it somewhat is fairly linear, workflow driven. You have demand, you have custom. Well, you have customers, you have demand. You need to, to manufacture something to Meet the demand. You need to buy parts, you need to have relationship with suppliers to purchase the parts to manufacture this thing and you need to pay them. And like if you really try to distill it down, like that's what you're doing, right? The people want something, you're building something, you're buying stuff, you're selling it on your platform and then you have to pay the people that you bought stuff from. On one level it's somewhat straightforward, right? On the other level, every step is a multi, multi step thing, right? And it has humans, it has software, it has context, it has decision making. Each step is important, right? And each step impacts the other step. So you're right, it is, it ends up being super complex. Like for me, you know, everybody woke up during COVID Supply chain was like the thing to be talking about, right? Um, it wasn't actually Covid that led me to it because I think, look is you have to recognize like if you imagine building a system that is perfect, you've already failed, right? It's like as an engineer, right? As like an engineer, the thing that you always think about is like you build systems that are reacting to chaos and continuing to operate. That's just the way you think of distributed systems, right? Is that the minute you imagine that you know all the conditions will be met and there'll be no issues, you failed, right? You have to imagine what is chaos monkey chaos gorillas, what was that? It is imagining existing and distributed world with all signals coming your way and how the system continues to operate. It was the same thinking, but now in supply chain that is not in distributed systems and servers and transactions that is stitched together with some software. A lot of human, A lot of action, a lot of activity, right? A lot of spreadsheets and emails and always chaos and interrupt driven. To me that was sort of like this realization that this is no different than that. And if you imagine supply chains to be not these linear workflows, but to be these systems that are running in a distributed world with various signals coming your way, how are you able to manage that? How are you able to succeed in that, right? And if you design systems that way, you won't end up with a relational ERP system and a workflow because the minute you end up, minute you think that's the world, you've already failed. So we just. So I think that was the sort of, the moment of like, okay, this is no different than a distributed systems problem, right? Now imagine it to brick and mortar and humans and processes and Workflows and software. How would you design a world that way? That was the realization that led to inventory. Where I think this, you know, the agentic AI world has actually really helped. Right. Is that being able to interact in that world through natural language has changed the adoption curve significantly. Right. Is any. People talk a lot about agentic architectures, but, like, the biggest unlock they can learn as they go. They can ask things and get answers and then apply their intuition and then have these agents get smarter and then ask more questions and give it more data. And that is a natural process. That's the biggest unlock for companies of our age now, right. Is that how do you bring this retirement clip that doesn't want to learn new stuff? Right. They're probably not going to be the industry in the next four to five years. They don't want to relearn their toolkit. What they know is their intuition. They have their skills and they have ways to share those skills through natural language. And how do these agents capture that and help the businesses to move forward and unlock time and productivity?

Speaker C: There's a couple other different directions I want to go with.

Speaker B: I threw a ton at you, man.

Speaker C: There's a lot. So in a second, I want to dive deeper into this pattern, around this opportunity to enter into some of these industries and tap into those types of customers maybe that don't always have people building modern tools for them. And the adoption curve of those products are maybe different, but I wanted to dive into a, uh, couple different other elements of this. First. So one of the things that you and I were talking about was this idea of approaching this with the beginner's mindset. Were there certain patterns or frameworks or ways that you embodied that in that early exploratory phase? Like when you were thinking, I guess, what did the beginner's mindset look like for you? And I guess, were there certain activities that that generated or questions that then that allowed for the beginner's mindset and what that looks like.

Speaker B: I've always been a believer in, like, if you show up with your toolkit, everything is going to look like a solution based off. What is that? That hammer nail thing? Right. It's like you show up with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. For me, like, the biggest unlearning was to not to show up. As a technologist, I really wanted to understand how this business works. What does it mean to pick, pack and ship? What does it mean to actually cut a purchase order when you're on the phone with the vendor? What does that conversation look like when you are trying to negotiate terms, net 30, net 60, when you're trying to build that network with a vendor, but then, um, also give them a little bit of accolades, but a little bit of a slap in the back for not delivering something. What does that feel, feel like you can look at everything in bits and bytes and try to solve it like a distributed systems problem or you can really understand what humans are doing to move that business forward. And to me, that was a large part of my sort of like beginners mindset, right. I was at the warehouse, I was boxing, uh, at Stitch Fix, right. I was on these conversations with vendors. Now this is where Covid helped, right? Where everything went remote, which meant that the conversations that buyers and vendors were having were on zoom calls, which means I would read transcripts of these zoom calls. I would be on the calls in these conversations. So all the wining and dining went digital. So now you had corpus of information that you know what's happening, right? What POs are being cut, why are they cut at what site, what are the relationships? How are the vendors actually doing? The vendors themselves needed technology solutions. You look at EDI Systems and it was clear that they were done with that. Right. It's like it was so hard to work with those systems. Right. If you're not naturally coming from a technology background. So I think that was a big part is like actually understand, like what are the fundamentals of the business. That's a big part of being a founder. Because until you understand that, everything will look like a technology business to you and you're going to miss the nuances and the reasons why people will come to you for your product. Right. And I think that's one. I think the second one is that flip from a founder to a technologist, where you want to think in platform. Right? It's like I want to build one thing that applies to everybody and that way that's how we scale, et cetera, et cetera. Agreed. Right. Um, and you know, if I was running a technology team today, I would give you that answer as a founder. I think there's a lot of discovery to be made when you're putting your version one out. And you shouldn't be shy of doing bespoke things. Palantir got it right With a forward deployed model. What did they do? They understood that every business has the last mile that is somewhat bespoke, and they took on the cost of that last mile in order to get a product adoption moving forward. Right. And I think as A CEO. Right. It's like being able to let go of the platform mindset in the beginning and really understand is like, what is the customer's problem that I'm trying to solve. Right. And then patterns will emerge. Then patterns will emerge for reusability. Then patterns will emerge for what are things that live together as a workflow that need to be separated differently. But I think if you walk in early with a technology mindset of building things for scale, I think you'll fail as a founder, at least for me, is that Ben, I just don't think you're going to actually get into the weeds of why you're going to solve somebody's problem.

Speaker C: The way you framed both sides of that equation, uh, is excellent clarity. I love that. I, uh, want to deconstruct a little bit about your fundraising journey and some of the thought process or choices around that, because the story you and I were talking about was you'd built that first product, and then people started buying, and that then informed some of the early pathway in terms of the type of funding model that you were interested in. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what was that fundraising journey like, and then from there, people started buying the product. Like, talk to us about, like, your world of fundraising and, you know, the choices that you're making and why and the thought process behind that.

Speaker B: Yeah, look, I think it goes back to some of, you know, my original sort of context. Right. It's just like, if people want what you. What you're building, they'll pay for it, and that should flourish, the business. Right. It's as simple as that. Right. Otherwise, go home. Right? It's like, why are you doing it? Right. It's sort of like. Like very old school, right? You have stu stuff in a. You. You're. You're selling something. If people want to buy it, that money will help you expand the business. So, like, it's as basic as that. I saw my father build businesses that way, I saw my family build businesses that way. And that was. That was always, like, first principles, right? It's like sort of like the math doesn't lie. When I started this journey, that was the way I wanted to go. Right? Is that okay? You know, I'd like to build something that people want. Most of us start with an idea. And I. It's funny, I read a LinkedIn post the other day, but I think the CTO of HubSpot is just sort of like, look, it's hard to take full risks sometimes, and you Start with Moonlighting, and you start. And no different than myself. It's like, I have an idea and I have a family, I have other needs, and I'd like to start at least playing around with it on my own time. And then that's what I did. The investment started with my own time. And then I got two people that I'd worked with over years who were troubled enough with this problem and had wanted to solve it at Oracle at their times, but the tech really wasn't there and they started doing the same, right? And then, you know that. So it started. The investment started with just time. And that was where we got lucky, is that, you know, time with technology and you can. You can move mountains. So that was sort of the first place. And then, you know, when we, when we got a very early version of our product together, right, when we looked at it, we felt like, okay, now is the time when we can actually start testing it with a real customer, right? And I think that's the place when we decided to go all in. Because when you're working with a customer, they're not going to bet on you if you're not betting on it, right? And that's just. That's the first signal that they're looking for. I was lucky enough to have Otis Elevators as a early design partner, right? And they're like, all right. Like, I think this, you know, we had, you know, the Chief Transformation officer is an amazing, amazing man. And, you know, he was like, look, this is a problem that we, that we want to see solved, not just for Otis, but for this industry. You guys have done a lot of thinking in it. You're bringing in a very fresh technology, a technical approach, but you also understand the business. But then there's the Otis's business. This is how we work, and we'd like to build this together, right? And to me, that was the point of like, yes, uh, we're all in. We're going in and we're going to make this use case really, really successful. That itself kept us sort of alive, you know, and through that process, we got to a really strong version one of the product. And that was when, you know, I feel like I have, like, these flashes, right? It's like, you know, I belong to a very good woman in technology network. These are all very accomplished women that I've built strong relations over the years, right? We've all stayed in touch. And they're GMs or SVP's or CTOs at really large companies. And there's also an ally of male networks or ally of investors that are a part of that. One of the investors had seen me in one of these, uh, in one of these occasions and he called me out of the blue and he was just like, hey, I think you're onto something. I believe in you and I believe in what you can bring. If you're ever looking for funding, give me a call. And at that point I was still in the. Very much like, I'm going to run the business without any external funding. I'm going to do it right? And then you realize that the market that I'm in is a very reference selling market. They're not just going to bet on an idea, they want to bet on a relationship. They're basically outsourcing technology to some extent to you because they know that you're, you know, you know what's happening in the technical space. You can bring it to them, right? We're sort of almost like their forward deployed team. They want to see longevity with it. Plus they want you in conferences. If Otis is talking about us, then two other people will be interested to talk to us. So that's when I called, uh, Michael Heroic Investor. I called him up. What I loved about it, this is the one thing I would tell any person considering is find the people who believe in you, not the product, because the product's going to change, but people who believe in you and your potential and your ability to adapt with changing circumstances. The ones that you should bring into your circle, right? And I was lucky enough to have Michael from Heroic Ventures believe in me and my potential. He told me he was like, I don't know enterprise, I don't know supply chain. But I think you have a strong point of view. And I can tell that the way you're approaching it is back to first principles, which I appreciate. So he's like, you're going to need money to scale yourself, scale your message out so you can get more data, more customers, and when you need it, I'm there. And that was it. And I still remember like it was. I was at a conference in uh, at, in Vegas for Manifest, where all the supply chain geeks hang out. And I got a call from Michael and I was like, well, let me think about it. Call them in the morning. And I got my first seat, right? And that was, to me, that was like the moment of like, okay, right, These are the, this is the right type of investment. This is the right type of investor to bring on. And then let's see how far we go, right that has been the only money we've raised so far, right? And right now, you know, we're getting close to a million dollars of ARR. Ah, we're profitable and it's been, it's been amazing to. Right? Is that the right time, the right capital, the right advice, the right network? Right now again I'm considering a larger round and part of it is the same thing, right? Is that now we have 10 big customers, right? We want to amplify the message. Everybody is crowded with the message of AI where again I go back to the boring companies, right? And I hate to say that about my customers, I find them really exciting. The mid market manufacturing industry is ignored today. The big ones ignore them. They're not going and selling against them. They're not in a place to rip and replace their software. They have folks who are retiring that are walking away with all the knowledge that I've gained and they're the ones that are looking the most towards how can they, how can they do more with their current staff? They're not talking about layoffs, they're talking about doubling their revenue with the same sizes of the teams. And that's where we show up with our enterprise agentic fleet and say hey, let's arm your teams with our agents. So that way your team is actually teaching these agents, these agents are able to look at so much complexity outside and inside and assist your teams to do more.

Speaker C: As you describe that to me, that kind of captures the opportunity I think right now for engineering leaders, that pattern of deeply curious about a specific industry and you have background in that supply chain problem space. But even then the curiosity, but then also sort of the humility to be like I really need to deeply understand how these businesses work, what they think about and the conversations that drive them and then externalizing your thought process and your problem discovery in a way where somebody like Michael can see, I can see the way that you're thinking about this. Whatever results from that is going to generate something highly impactful. Uh, I think is a really interesting pattern to then generate almost a million dollars in ARR with a small limited amount of funding to then strategically, then they have the opportunity to strategically think about the purpose of this next round of capital and what that would um, unleash and I think that's the pattern of business right now that I think is a huge opportunity for engine and leaders is to find that space, have a lot of deep curiosity and then to take on strategic capital in a way that I think helps unlock scale in an interesting way, but it's like you've unlocked incredible results just from the story alone. I think that's an incredible business alone. And then now you kind of have this cool opportunity to figure out what's next and how do we strategically deploy things after our next race. I think that's really exciting.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think the challenge right now is this is where the duality of becoming a founder and a technologist is like. It is easy to get lost in what AI can do for you now. It is an amazing world to be a technologist in. You know, things that were hard. How do you operationalize agents, how do you productionize agentic architectures? Right. Those are great problems to go solve. But the thing that you have to keep remembering as a founder is that those problems are to be solved in service of a business, in service of an actual pain point. Right. And to continue to straddle in that, I feel I'm able to do that. Right. Given supply chain, mid market management, manufacturing, brick and mortar, I have to keep reminding myself that's their world. Right. I can OD on Claude tokens all night and I can build LLM judges and whatnot. Right. But fundamentally, what am I trying to solve for the business? And where I'm seeing is that every day I read news about an LLM or a frontier model doing something amazing. And the thought that I have is, how can I bring that to an actual real business problem to go solve? I don't believe we're in a bubble. I don't believe this is a hype. I actually think these technology advancements are solving real problems. And it is on founders and operators like us to bridge those developments to real businesses. And that's what gets me excited every day.

Speaker C: I want to switch to early customers. Some of the observations around customer psychology and sales, and I think specifically one of the things I thought was interesting was some of the observations you've seen around purchasing behavior, say maybe pre AI, and how maybe some of the new AI integrated products are shifting some of that pricing behavior. I'm not really sure the direct way to phrase it, but your observations on how customers maybe have previously made big tool and platform decisions, how tools are being made, and how there's kind of a gap between the pricing behavior beforehand and the opportunity now for new companies to come in. Can you help lay the landscape of that a little bit in your observations?

Speaker B: There's a. I don't believe rip and replace is a strategy. Right. Uh, and I think like, you know, that's why I keep going Back to this customer segment. You know, if you're going to walk in and say, hey, your world's going to look entirely different, you're going to forget what you have, try this brand new thing. I think you're going to fail, at least in the industry that I'm in.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Right. And that's why like very from the very beginning, our strategy was not rip and replace. Our strategy was how do we add value on top of the procurement decisions that you've already made. Right? It doesn't matter what software you run, running, running J.D. edwards, no problem. You're running Zoho, no problem. You got netsuite, you got SAP, no problem. Right. It doesn't matter what is the landscape behind the scene. What matters is what you expect now from these systems. And that's the layer we can essentially enrich on top of your current investments. To me that has been the easier switch. Right? Is that okay? I've already spent X million dollars in it. I have a bunch of people trained around this. I'm not going to rip and replace that. But if I can add value on top of it by either unlocking, locking time, making lesser mistakes, telling them things that they didn't know of, I can enrich information from macro signals and micro signals onto that. That's an easy win. Right? And I think that's the place, at least for me, has worked better. Right. Versus coming with something entirely brand new. There's a lot of like, you know, AI native systems, AI native ERP systems, et cetera. I think those are amazing. But my customer today, the idea of ripping what they've done and invested in over five years is not an appealing idea to them. Right. There's a lot of newer sort of, I uh, would say the down market side, right. Like CPG customers, the new age manufacturing customers, they're looking for much more native solutions, right? But this industry is not looking for that. Uh, this industry is saying I've invested people time, process money in this system, can this system do more for me? Right? And I think that's where I think I've seen a change with their purchasing behavior is that uh, what can you do that can augment this? This? The second purchasing behavior change is more around their expectations, right? Where they're not willing for a two to three month deployment cycle. Again I'm saying two to three months. Most of these live in two to three years, right? An upgrade to Sage X3 is a year long process. SAP S4. Hana, you're talking 24 months and millions of Dollars spent on professional consultants not talking about that. They're looking for, hey, can you come in and augment us and enrich this experience for us and decisions faster and easier? And how quickly can you be running? And what we're able to say is that within a week, we're up and running for these systems. For our agents to understand your system without having to read manuals and figure out APIs. You're talking hours right now before you even know these agents are up and running on your infrastructure. And now they're starting to taste it, they're starting to see value in it. It's funny as somebody just sent me a text saying the idea of POCs is dead, right? Because you don't need that time now. Now, right? It's like with the tooling and the tool sets that you have now through coding, agents, et cetera, you don't need to do a POC phase. I can stand up three versions of this thing for you within a week, and then you can actually use it with real data and pick which one that works for you. These technology advancements are forcing the procurement process of new software to think differently when they go through these long RFP processes. I understand that that's, um, important. There's departments that do that. But wouldn't it be awesome to have a bake off of products come and try it out within a week and I give you a sandbox and data and my people are going to try this out and the ones they'd love win. That's your rfp instead of like this document that is like lines and lines of like, do you do this? Do you do that? It'll take time, right? It's like we can just immediately accelerate into the future all the time, right?

Speaker C: I immediately imagine jumping in. Like, I immediately am imagining like the government request for proposals for all different types of projects and solutions. Because my, my wife was in. She worked for the federal government for a little bit. My friends work in tech implementation in the federal government. And I'm like, wow, can you imagine if it was like, instead of like you said, the checklist of things, but everybody sharing parallel products for people to actually test and apply to their specific use cases. That's kind of exciting. It's like a industry hackathon. It's like we're looking to solve these problems. Who can do that best? Boom.

Speaker B: And then you're off to the races, right? And that's kind of like, I mean, if you really, like, you know, if I had to dream and think about, like, what 2030 looks like? It's like, you know, why do you need ERP systems, right? If the world, if we've built this much trust in enterprise agents, right? And now I'm glad that, you know, the industry is, is supporting these agents as not just these things that can go autonomous and do things without your permission and whatnot, but like, what is an actual productionization look like, right? Who understands constraints? Who has guardrails? Who has humans in the loop, right? Who learns from its past behavior once these agents are out there that are running so much of your business, what are ERP systems, right? Are these essentially just flat files with, with full audit trails of access? Because guess what? That's the world that agents live in. Imagine like your supply chain becoming as simple as just agreements between identities to do something and do a, uh, transaction and then some accountability framework around it and some historical analysis based off of future. It's an exciting world to think about, which is why then I'm like, what is the RFQ process? That process is fundamentally dead. Why are you buying, buying billions and billions of dollars of software anymore, right? If agents are going to be running your businesses? But again, those are huge leaps to make. I don't want to make them yet. The industry that I'm in has not made this type of compounding leaps ever. But a way to get in there is that how do we add value today? How do we add value in the next 48 hours to your job? And then how do we secure the business decisions that have made this business successful for the next generation?

Speaker C: Uh, I love the framing of like thinking about building in. How do we add value immediately then in terms of the product usage behavior, how do we already integrate it into the types of things that you do anyway? Some of the tools that I've loved experimenting with right now are ones where I'm not learning a whole new platform or like importing a lot of different things, but rather it's connecting to a lot of places where I'm already doing work anyway and it's helping me make sense.

Speaker B: Meet me where you are.

Speaker C: Yeah, and I found that. And so it's like I've actually enjoyed using those tools way more than. And that's like the human psychology.

Speaker B: Human psychology. Like, why do we love Claude? Like, it's just sort of like, I don't have to learn to work with Claude, right? It's easy, it's easy to ask questions. It's easy to ask questions about my stuff and work with it, right? And I think like this industry and especially supply chain is the same thing is like don't walk in going back to your beginner's mindset, right? Don't walk in assuming that you know how they work. Let them teach you, let them teach you. Let them teach the product and let the product adapt for their needs. And slowly you shift, slowly their some things that they start relying on you for. Well, maybe these emails that I send, the agent can send because they know the context, they know the data, they know the tone, they know which vendor they're interacting with and how the vendor responds. Why not? That's hours off my plate to maybe do something else. So you start getting comfortable with that. But you got to meet them where they are versus take them to a completely different universe.

Speaker C: I want to talk about selling into an industry like mid market manufacturing. What is it like to sell into that type of industry in terms of how do they make purchasing decisions? How do new players, how are new players in these types of spaces disrupting this or changing pricing or changing how decisions are made? And I guess how does the mid market manufacturing industry make decisions around what they buy and how are new players entering in this space, maybe challenging the way that they think about buying software.

Speaker B: Once you've identified your sort of your ICP or ideal customer profile, right. And you have to be clear about who are your buyers, who's making, who's the decision makers. You hear this question a lot like who's making the decisions? Right. You have to really narrow that down because you can get lost in the titles, right? Is that the, you know, the CIOs or the Chief Digital officers, et cetera. But like you really have to get to like who's feeling the pain? That's one. And then who's making the buying decision? I think those are typically two different personalities. And what does the talk track look like for both? Right. You can't walk in to an executive and talk about the drafting emails because then they'll just be like, well, I'm just going to outsource that problem. They're not feeling the problem, but you can talk about how they can do more with the same number of people, the procurement person, who's actually going to be using this tool. You talk to them in terms of their pain point. How many hours are you spending on this? How many hours are you looking through each in these Excel files and asking for an update? So you have to first identify who's the person who's feeling the, the pain and who's the decision maker and how to talk to both. Once you've identified that, I think then no different than most industries, you have to understand the signals that they react to. And those signals can be varied. Their signals are in different industries. I was talking to you about this. The outbound SDR agents that we've built, they're basically scoring against a variety of signals. These signals can be human signals. For example, example, you know, somebody got promoted or they're expanding their team, their port closures, tariff changes, commodity pricing changes. These signals could be internal signals. Right? Is that, you know, this thing that takes five days is now taking 10 days and that's a signal. Now you're looking at essentially so many different signals to corroborate and you do a lot of outbound. So I think that's, that, that's, that's a large part of mid market manufacturing. Like they still believe in outbound sales. That's important. They also make decisions based on reference selling, which means they congregate on conferences and ACSM supply chain management chapters, things like that. You got to meet again, same principle. You got to meet them where they go. Right. And have those conversations with them. Right. And that's a large part of running businesses for enterprises. They're not the ones who are going to go and respond to a billboard or an ad on YouTube and click on it and try it. They're just not that person. A lot of outbound, a lot of conferencing. And I think the last one that maybe I underestimated that I, you know, I'm making mends around that is that when AI and technology's effect is compounding so fast, they're looking for people that they can trust that can bring those advancements in their four walls in a business compliant way. Right. And I think that's a really important piece because you know, I can go out and sell inventory, but I can also talk about how this technology can bring you leverage and they will trust a lot more. Right. Than the face of just the technology. So what does that look like? That looks like speaking at conferences, that looks like doing podcasts, that looks like getting your message out there. That looks like thought selling about what's happening in the industry and how these businesses can actually leverage that. Those are channels where I've seen the most success in being able to find customers.

Speaker C: One of the other dynamics of this, I mean you're an incredible technologist, so you're also tinkering with all these things on the side and then also strategically integrating the them into your business strategy. What are some of the early signs that you're getting integrating tools like that to sort of augment different business functions and capabilities for what you're doing.

Speaker B: My technology background helps me a lot in there, but I'm not the no human compute company. I don't believe that. That's not the people I'm selling to. People that I'm selling to need people on the other side, actual humans that they buy software from that they can call and get an answer, et cetera. But then there's so much around it, whether it's outbound marketing, whether it's sd, these are things that when, when you can augment, right. I have a, I have a great head of sales and now my SDR agent army augments his effort. So when he's creating sequences, when he's creating what is the right message, what are the personalized messages that needs to happen? I will tell you, there are no tools out there that do a good job, at least in this industry, that can look at so many signals and actually build a personalized message to the right buyer that will get them to open the email and engage or book a job demo. Very different world that happens every day, all the time that's happening while I'm having this conversation. And these agents are getting smarter, right. It's like every feedback, every open, every tracking pixel is giving them the eval loop for them to understand if this was the right message, this was the right buyer, and what the next. The next message looks like. Amazing. You would have to buy software. You have to hire a team of salespeople. My head of sales is like, I don't need anything right now. This is all I need to. And again, these are things we're learning in terms of what are aspects of our business that, that, that can be identified. Right. And I think this is a big one. Customer support, again, the, you know, enterprise. These businesses need white glove treatment when they run into problems. Absolutely. Understood. I will augment that with humans. For me to do that, give me all the context that you have. What does that look like? You know, we have an agent today that you can. That any customer can invoke. And the agent will capture all the context that is needed to understand the issue. Right. And give the customer success person enough information that they can get customer across the line. Very different world, right? Versus like the back and forth, get an engineer involved, look at the log, whatnot. Every morning we get a report of tickets with screenshots with sometimes even a PR that tells you how you actually fix this issue. All I have to do is hit approve and commit this. These are the type of things that like as a founder you would have teams of people doing this today. If you are applying these agentic technologies towards those problems. Unbelievable space time to be in.

Speaker C: I was talking with somebody three weeks ago where I was like, can you imagine a world in which, you know, you get this ticket submitted from customer success and then it automatically through a system of agents feeds into your roadmap and you can just hit approve like it's already the recommendation. So as you're traveling, stuff like that,

Speaker B: it's not that far. I wouldn't take feature requests yet from that. Right? But bug fixes, bug fixes with screenshots and a human in the loop pr, why not? Right? Is like again, like we're not far away from self healing system systems, right? These are customer like you know the world of like, why do customers have to tell us about bugs? We should be able to identify them and fix them. We're not far from that, right? If you've invested well in your harness loops and now like harness loops is a fancy way of you're saying your regression loops, but sure, you have a really good harness loop that is evaluating and fixing. Imagine that world. Those are, those are people you don't have to go hire who actually don't even like doing that work. Right. So now agents can take care of that while you can actually think about how do you create a product like growth movement out of your product, Much

Speaker C: better time spending spend you and I were talking about. There are some patterns that you observed in terms of working through problems that serve you really well as an engineering leader that have applied really well to the customers that you're working with. So what are some of the skills that you've picked up from engineering that you've seen apply really effectively to the sales process?

Speaker B: It's funny, the thing that comes to mind with me is debugging and troubleshooting. That's just like naturally, right? If you're running system, then I ran systems at scale for DocuSign for Stitch Fix. If you're running systems at scale, the thing that you get very good at is looking at a problem, understanding, understanding all the context that they operate in and then fixing the problem. That's what you're good at, right? And you know, it's usually the more complex the system, the more signals you need to figure out that actually led to that issue. And I think that's my skill too with customers, right. It's like to some extent, I think it's good and bad, right? It's like sometimes you want to debug it and then just go fix that. You have to stop yourself and say, okay, I can fix this problem, but how do I fix this family of problems? And, you know, what is the solution that I bring that actually maybe eradicates this problem ever happening? But I feel like that's just my natural instinct is that, you know, I want to get into it, debug it, troubleshoot it, ask questions, understand the context, and go try to fix it. And I think that's the same in my mind in terms of, you know, when people say these discovery calls. In my old school whale, if I was just like. I was like, I don't understand what these discovery calls are, right? They're like matchmaking calls to be fair, right? Is like. And I. And I learned it from my, you know, my head of sales today, right? Is, you know, what we're doing is like screening for a pattern, right? And, like, it's as important. It's two things, right? It's like you're walking into this conversation, you think that there is a problem, but then you're trying to really narrow down what is the actual problem. And that's no different than debugging and troubleshooting. At the time when you identify the problem, that's the place where I think it takes a lot of courage for founders to say, that's a problem we can't solve. And I'm getting more and more comfortable with that. Or versus that's the problem we can solve. And this is how. Right? And I think the same thing with, you know, with it, with. With engineering, right? Is that, you know, you can get to the problem, and then you have to really figure out is like, is this a problem you can solve? You need to bring other people into it? Do you need to be the subject matter expert? What does that look like? The same thing in sales, right? It's like that discovery process is as important because no matter what, if you don't get to, like, the actual pain point and if you don't believe that you can solve the pain point, you're going to end up paying the cost of it down the line, right? You're going to have mismatched expectations. What they're going to see is not what they're going to get, you might as well just break up then. I think that's probably the skill that I'm still working on.

Speaker C: One of the things you and I were talking about was the ability to listen to customers like you were talking about and then have this mentality of building with people and also the ability to communicate priority in sequence of we'll tackle this problem in this sequence. How do you approach doing that? Because I think I have a hard time telling people no. So I think imagine m with of a couple customers, if they're like oh, we have this problem, I default to be like yes, we can absolutely do that. But what you and I were talking about was being able to triage that and to talk about, well, here's maybe the priority or uh, to get to better understand their problems so that you can provide some type of prioritization or sequencing. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Speaker B: You know, I strongly believe that they are not looking for an answer and a solve right in the moment. And I think you just have to understand that as an engineer, you don't believe that you think you're in this conversation because you want this fixed right now. And nine times out of 10 I will tell you when I've actually said is like, well, how important to you is this? Is this more important than this other thing? The conversation changes the shape of the urgency. Right. And again to get there though, you have to establish their trust. Right. Which means that you're on their side. That's one. The questions that I am leading them through are questions that even I'm thinking if I was in their shoes, very different mindset versus I'm optimizing for me and my team. That is a relationship that comes from trust and delivery. You must have jumped a few hoops for them previously when it really mattered and you knew that and you understood it, you asked the right questions and you delivered because it was so painful that they couldn't wait. That buys you enough credibility to actually have that conversation first and then get to a joint understanding and then you, you deliver. Like I don't think it's any different from honestly even running technology teams. Right. Is that credibility? It's that conversation, but it comes from established trust, but then also making room. And trust me, I've been in that engineer role. Who wants to solve it now and ship it and be done with it. But then think of the things that won't get done if we went and did that, the opportunity cost of it. And I just don't think customers realize that. Right. And it's kind of your job. You are a solutions consultant too. As you're working with, with them. It's their job to realize the trade offs that they're accidentally might not be aware of. That they're making.

Speaker C: I've seen that pattern get applied, but only in conversations with folks within our community. Get applied between engineering and sales, or engineering and product and some of these other different functions to talk through opportunity costs and trade offs and to sort of surface. Here are the things that are possible. But we have to prioritize. What would you choose as a pattern? The way you described it, I think was a lot more nuanced and a lot more cloud collaborative. Pooja. We've covered a lot, enjoyed, uh, every minute of it. We've got some rapid fire questions if you're ready for those.

Speaker B: Let's go.

Speaker C: Okay, so the first one, what are you reading or listening to right now?

Speaker B: The two podcasts are my most favorite right now. And there are two extremes. One is acquired and the other one is latent space. It's this duality that I live in, right where acquired is all about businesses that were successful. And latent space is all about how AI are disrupting how business businesses think. And to be able to live in that duality at this time and age every day and understand how Hermes became the top business in the world and how Ikea and Costco, where they started their origin stories and how they were able to scale and then how AI and development in that space is changing how businesses need to think for the future. It's just fascinating.

Speaker C: Mhm. To me, I see like almost this whole arc of like you see, you get a deep deconstruction of the rise of a company and then you're now at this next point, this like full cycle. It's now how those types of companies are reimagining what's possible. It's like, it's like a full extension. That's incredible.

Speaker B: And both of those podcasts are amazing. They do a fantastic job.

Speaker C: Next question. Yes, Founder resources that you found most helpful.

Speaker B: The best learnings I've gotten are, ah, people who have been in the war and felt the scars and have actual experiences to rely on, actual stuff they did, actual nuances to share. I just think the founder network is strong. It's almost therapeutic at times too. Like, being a founder is a lonely job. It's hard. There are days when you're like, why did I walk away from that cushion job and why did I choose this route? Right? And trust me, you're not the only one. Honestly. It's not the therapeutic side though, trust me, there are days when I rely on it. On the other side is like the tips and tricks that they learned at the stages that they Were in that you are also going through. Those are huge. So I would say is like build your network, build your founder network, Keep those connections, um, rely on them. I think that has been the most helpful for me.

Speaker C: What's a trend you're seeing or following that's interesting or hasn't hit the mainstream yet?

Speaker B: People are talk talking about losing jobs, et cetera, et cetera. The retirement cliff. And I think that's. And you know, and I really think retirement cliff in the industry, in any industry right now. And I don't, I don't see that being talked about, being captured. Right. Is that, you know, I talk to customers that every day. One, they've got a population of workers that are retiring and they've made decisions and they've done things that will not be available once they retire. Right. No matter what documentation is. And then you have the younger talent force, the Gen Z that's entering. They don't understand the business, they don't understand the context, they don't understand the ways that worked. That is a reality. Right. I think we need to stop talking about like how laying off people and reducing company sizes and whatnot. But also I don't think people are talking about these gaps in generation are happening. Right. And they both are as valuable. You want young talent to be excited to be working in this business. You want to honor the people who are retiring and understand how they kept the business alive.

Speaker C: Last question. Is there a quote or mantra that you live by or a quote that's resonating with you right now?

Speaker B: You got to get close to the problem, not the solution. Right. And I think that's still the same thing. Like beginner's mindset. You call it whatever you want, but like don't show up with a solution. Don't show up with your solution. Show up with a point of view but not a solution. And get close to the problem. Keep reminding myself every time I open a conversation, right. Is like as much as I want to sell my product and inventory and that's what I exist about, they're not going to buy your product unless they trust that you understand their problem and you're not just pushing for your solution. Again, like I keep saying, like Palantir got it right. Right. Is that sort of this forward deploy movement, what is that? That is exactly that. Right. Is that people who are deployed in the field with customers understanding their PA and morphing their solutions to solve their plane. I just feel if nothing else now that cost of that is becoming lower and lower and it's every founder's responsibility to really take that.

Speaker C: Pooja, uh, thank you so much. This was a ton of fun. Thanks for joining us in person. I think just showing the opportunity for founders right now in some of these spaces for people to build. Um, and I think the journey that you've been on, it's been really inspiring to hear the way that you're applying technology in terms of how you're building, how that's building out the different functions and your business. It's been a ton of fun.

Speaker B: So thank you. I enjoyed every part of this conversation. Thank you very much.

Speaker A: Patrick.

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