Beat the Hype - How to Market AI with Diego Lomanto from WRITER

Speaker A: We're all deeply invested in our customer deals. Like, we're watching them, we're shepherding them. We're coming to the kickoff meetings, the QBRs, we're doing things like, you know, having kickoff meetings with their executives, helping them understand what role they play and how AI is different and how you, as an executive, you didn't just sponsor buying this technology. You got to be out there on the front line. So we're going to help teach you how to talk to the rest of your organization, how to tweet about it, how to write about it on LinkedIn. We do those things to really make sure that the customer gets visible, what they're doing inside their company, and that they're getting to success as fast as possible.

Speaker B: This is Next Gen Builders, the show for the growth and product leaders of tomorrow. These days, everyone's selling AI. Uh, your competitor, your cousin, maybe even your coffee machine. So how do you stand out when the whole market sounds like a pitch deck? Written by chatgpt well, today we're going behind the scenes at, uh, RYTR to see how they approach marketing with a focus on what matters, getting closer to their customers, understanding their needs, and building trust in a world that's changing by the hour. We'll talk about why the best marketing doesn't necessarily start with AI and how to reinvent your playbook when the rules keep shifting. Joining us today is Diego Lamonto, Chief Marketing Officer at rytr. Welcome to the podcast, Diego.

Speaker A: Thank you, Francois. It's good to be here. I appreciate you having me on and looking forward to our conversation.

Speaker B: Well, I'm really excited, uh, for you to be on, and maybe, let's just go right in, um, maybe for the audience. Can you explain what is rytr, what do you guys do, and how is it transforming the world?

Speaker A: Yeah, it is an agentic AI platform. What we do is we help companies build, activate, and supervise AI agents at scale in their enterprise. We have everything you need to bring an AI agent to life inside your business. And we're hyper focused on, you know, the biggest companies in the world. Most complex use cases. We have customers. Most of our customers are in the Fortune 500 Global 2000. We, um, know how complex it is to bring AI into a large business, um, what production workflows look like, how many people are involved in a different type of workflow, and how many different systems, how hard it is to implement and integrate. Um, and so we've built an agentic AI platform that's designed to work for those, you know, those enterprises um and uh, it's going really well so far.

Speaker B: That's awesome. And it can work on just about any kind of use case in the enterprise. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's, you know, it's very adaptive. Um, wide ranging. We go across front office, back office, middle office. Um, I think a lot of our successes in the early days was more in the front office in marketing. That's kind of where we got our start. But we've really expanded now within our customers to you know not just marketing but sales, customer, uh, support, hr, legal and even like back you know, background in like logistics and the supply chain. Uh, really across the, you know the workflows. We don't think so much about departments as we do mission criticality. Criticality how? Like what workflows are really important to driving and running your business. We want to help you bring AI into those workflows and help you build agents to uh, help you, you manage those.

Speaker B: That's cool. And you say the word workflow I think about automation. And you worked at UiPath at the height of the automation boom. Now you're working at RYTR during the height of the AI boom. Um, how do you compare those two moments for you? Like what's similar, what's different?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's funny, um, I actually try to not say workflow so often. Um, it's just hard. It's a hard, it's a good word to describe a lot a process inside of business. Right. Um, but yeah, I was at UiPath uh from 2018. Uh started in 2018. I was there for about four and a half, five years. Um through the real growth of RPA and automation. Uh, it was ah, quite an incredible and interesting time as workflows, sorry for using it again, um, became as automated as possible. Uh, but that market grew so fast. We expanded so quickly. Um, we went from you know, 5 million in ARR to over a billion in like five years. Right. So it was, it was a real, real fast growth and what we found was there was a lot of pent up demand for like if this thing happens in my business all the time the same way, how can I just make that streamlined? How do I automate that process? Because it's not really you know, benefiting from humans ability to think abstractly or creatively or make decisions. Like there's no variance in how that workflow in that process was accomplished. So RPA and automation came along and it was like yeah, I, you do ABC always and just automate that. And that's why that market grew really fast. I think the big difference now with AI is that you're able to address the type of work that is not so linear and predictable and low variance in how it gets accomplished. And so I see the aperture for that much wider than what we saw for automation. It's more complicated. Um, you know, AI that reasons and makes decisions and you know, is, is, is, it's more squishy. Right. And it's, it requires a lot more um, to get into production, but has a much wider impact, I think. And that's what we're seeing. That's why I'm so excited to have gone from automation to, to AI, um, with this move.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I totally agree with you. The potential is infinite. Uh, what's possible there? But how do you think through, you use the word squishy, which is uh, kind of an interesting one because you see the potential but being able to describe exactly what it does can be hard. And you think about the potential of AI as well. It's infinite. But how do you think about marketing know AI when it's really in many cases a dream, it's many cases this vision. And how do you connect it to the reality of what's on the ground today?

Speaker A: Yeah, I, I, I think, I think ultimately long term, um, you're going to see a wholesale change of how work is done thanks to AI. Right. And I'm not saying anything that, you know, others are, haven't said already much, probably better ways and, and much more vocally, but this technology has the ability to fundamentally change how work gets accomplished. Um, and I think we're a bit away from that. We're still learning how to use it for the work we do today, the work that we know already, there's a ton. Like even if we didn't have the ability to do new types of work or rethink work from first principles from the ground up, with AI just making what we do today faster, better, better for customers, better for the people doing the work, that itself is a huge marketing opportunity. But when you layer in on top as we learn and get to use it and see what it can do and become comfortable with it and trust it more and think about designing work after we have more experience working with AI, that becomes a limitless opportunity, um, for what AI can do to work. Um, but I think right now there's a lot of like, this is what we do, how can we do that better? And there's a huge opportunity around that. And I think the way you market that and the way you, you know, you really talk to, um, the world about it is through real stories, you know, talk about real roi. Where's the real change happening? Because that's what people are craving right now. It's been, uh, what, two and a half years? Coming up on three years since the ChatGPT moment. And what we saw in 2023 was a lot of experimentation and a lot, you know, like board saying, here's, you know, millions of dollars. We gotta, we need AI strategy. What, you know, go, go do stuff. So buying a lot of things and testing them out and trying things. I think, uh, 2024, you saw, okay, like now let's start, like, what do we, what do we learn? Let's start getting to, you know, some real, actual tangible benefits. And I think this year you're actually starting to see some, some real successes. And so what we do, what I like to do is focus on the human side of it. What kind of, what kind of value are we getting? What, what are the successes? And show, you know, a real deep customer story as opposed to just talking about the technology, um, and amplifying those stories. So that's what people are craving, the successes. How, what are people doing? How, how did they get success? How can I replicate that? That's what, that's what people are looking for.

Speaker B: Is that your approach to breaking through the noise? I mean, we're at the peak hype of the hype of the curve of the hype cycle. And like, is that, that, that strategy to really land it?

Speaker A: Yeah, it is, um, focusing on, on the, on the stories, focusing on the people. Ultimately, the people who are making these decisions are people. They are, they are human beings and they're facing uncertainty. They're trying to figure out what to do. So from a marketing perspective, I, you know, our company, and this is, you know, before I even joined, our CEO May Habib has, you know, really put a big emphasis on getting in the room, talking to people, helping them understand how this stuff works, hearing what their challenges are, you know, spending time. So it's amazing for, you know, a company, uh, we have our, you know, we have our own LL models, we've built the whole, this whole platform. It's very technically oriented. We have a very human centered marketing strategy. And I think that touch that, you know, we call it surround bound, we surround our ICP with rider both, you know, at the top of the funnel. But then deep into conversations, we do, we host a lot of dinners, a lot of events. We spend time with people facilitating conversations and getting deep into the power of what it can do and that's worked for us.

Speaker B: I love that. I mean we think a lot about agents in terms, in terms of removing humans, but many cases or augmenting the human. You guys have a very human led engagement model.

Speaker A: Absolutely. You know, I may be a, a techno optimist. I mean I know I'm a, I'm um, not. Maybe I am. And you may, you may say I have rose colored glasses, but I've, you know, I've studied. I know everyone says this time it's different. It's always this time it's always different. I mean if you study the, the, you know, technological history, society reshapes around the technology and we find ways in which to work that are supported by the technology that we can't even think of today. Right. Who would have thought of a gasoline station in 1640? You know what I mean? Like, who would have thought of SEO in 1955? Right. It's just the society changes and so our focus is, well, what does that say society going to look like, what is the business going to like, what's jobs going to look like? As this technology becomes more mature and starts to become adopted, there's a permanence to it or pervasive inside society. So focusing on the people is absolutely, you know, we feel like actually something we do better than a lot of others out there.

Speaker B: That's great. When uh, when you look at this space, right, the, the pace of innovation is unlike anything I've ever seen. It's moving really fast. Uh, as a marketer, how does that change how you approach marketing? Uh, whether it's the tactics that you use, the message that you deliver, or even like the innovation that you're able to deliver to the market. It's just seems crazy right now. It's amazing.

Speaker A: Yeah, this market's evolving faster and more often than any market I've ever been in. And like, like I said, uh, we, you know, at UiPath, we went from five to a billion in just a couple years. And this feels five times faster. Like it's, it's, it's so much like the whole world like is tuned into this. So much investment is happening here. So many people are, you know, engaged in what's happening with AI that it's just moving so fast. And so I think quite honestly it's a, there's a discipline that you have to have to act with speed, urgency and think about reinvention consistently. Like there's no, you know, you can't hold your priors too long, you have to continue to be looking at like what's really happening in the market. And I think, you know, at Ryder, we're proud to say, like we reinvented ourselves every six months. Like since I've been here, we've reinvented ourselves twice. The company itself, you know, we started as a Grammarly competitor. Our co founders had an AI translation company that was NLP oriented in the mid-2010s. And when they saw the Transformer white paper and they saw how, you know, so May and Waseem are our co founders one, they saw how impactful that took. Like they knew it right away. They read it. They're experts at AI. They saw, okay, this stuff is actually, this potential is massive. This will change everything. Uh, they had a lot of experience with enterprise. This is why Rider is so enterprise focused and why we've been enterprise workers from day one is, are their backgrounds. But they reinvented that company and pivoted to Ryder even though it was a good successful company. And we've continually done that. For the time I've been here and I look my time before then, the company has constantly reinvented relentlessly. Um, and that just, it requires a stamina. Uh, it really does. At a fortitude, you have to hire the right people. You have to hire people that are comfortable with that. You have to, you have to be comfortable with it. You have to constantly be asking yourself, you know, is this still the right way to do this thing? And, and, and that could be, that can get tiring. Um, but, but when, when you know that you're doing it because when you set a plan to do it, you could do it. Um, so you have to like go into, with open eyes on, you know, reinvention is the norm, not, not the, uh, extreme.

Speaker B: Can you, can you make that concrete? Like, how does that look like in practice? You know, if you're always reinventing everything every six months, uh, what does that mean for the team, for the work that you do?

Speaker A: Yeah, um, it means a lot of communication, a lot of alignment conversations. Um, and I think fortunately it's not like the leadership team goes in a room and comes out, you know, spends a weekend, comes out and says, guys, everything's changed. We're doing this thing. You know, it's not like that. Um, we have a really transparent, um, culture here. We have a very customer focused culture here. And so the teams are continually seeing what's happening. Like, we're sharing constantly. We're seeing customer results, we're seeing what's working, what's not Working. So the whole company is in the conversation and moving along with us. And so it requires a lot of coordination, but it is not top down amplification of that coordination. It is more like orchestrating is what I would say, as opposed to directing the change, orchestrating the change. Um, and honestly, I think you have to have people who are good at that, um, find people who enjoy, love living in that. I think we have a culture here. We've hired people who've been through these crazy growth spurts, um, and for some crazy reason come back to it. You know, everyone, everyone on the leadership team has had a success and an exit and, you know, and, and, and we came back and we're doing the build again. And, but we're all at personality where, like, this is. I would, I'd be bored if I didn't wake up every day thinking about the, you know, being able to think about the changing world and how, how do we need to adapt that? That's kind of like, we crave that. So I think it's a culture thing that's, that's a big part of why we're able to do it.

Speaker B: Uh, that's really cool. Uh, are there competencies that you look for when you're hiring somebody who can manage this pace and manage the transformation?

Speaker A: I always look at how they approach the interview process. Um, we do a, uh, presentation, and I've had candidates that I was sure were going to be great. And when they come into, like. And we're not asking people to do work, right? Like, I don't want people like doing work before they get here, but I want to see how they think. Right.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And when. And, and you could really tell, like, how they approach the presentation. Like, are they proactive? Are they calling me, asking me questions? Are they doing, you know, are they, are they looking, you know, once again, it's not to do work, it's to see how they think. And you, you can kind of tell like, all right, this person is a driver, not a passenger, um, just by the way they approach the interview process. My shorthand is like, does this person always look how to move the ball forward? Like, because that's, that's the Persona that does really well. It's like, what can I be doing right now to move things forward as opposed to just waiting for the instruction. So I like the Frank Slooten book. Amp it up. If you haven't m. You know, read that, right? Like, like friends. Great. Like, that's like, read that. Look for people who fit that profile. That's what you need to m to win in an environment like this.

Speaker B: I love that you bring out that book because one of my favorite, you know, questions asked the team is what's the most important thing that you're doing right now?

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: The one thing we always try to spread ourselves super thin, do everything but reality. Like if you're not focused, you're not driving.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: You're not going to go anywhere.

Speaker A: And that's particularly hard for a uh, marketing team because you uh, don't have one thing that everyone's doing. Right. Like we're not all doing the same thing. We're like 12 little teams doing 12 different things in service of, of the bigger strategy. And so orchestrating and prioritizing to make sure that the teams are not doing different things and are focused around the bigger strategy is important. So prioritizing and getting the team aligned on the most important thing or two things, or three things, but no more than that are really, uh, key. I agree with you.

Speaker B: Now we've talked about how speed this industry is moving at a speed we haven't seen before. Uh, the company's constantly changing and evolving. How do you plan, build, create your bets knowing that you don't know what's ahead of you? You can't even plan for what's ahead of you because everything's changing every moment. How do you approach that? It seems really crazy hard.

Speaker A: No, I mean, I think we know our long term vision here is that we want to transform enterprise work with AI at the center. Right. We have good foundational direction that we're going in. It's how is the market changing, adapting, evolving is how do we execute. Um, but we like, we are focused on the enterprise. We know we're going after the most complex use cases, uh, workflows inside a business. We know that, we know that we're selling to CIOs, lines of businesses and the builders themselves. We have these general business principles well laid out like in our goal and where we're going. It's how do you execute that change a lot. What's happening inside the market that changes a lot. But, but we don't waver from our, our long term mission.

Speaker B: Are there signals that you look for to say that you're heading in the right direction or that you need to like change course?

Speaker A: Um, yeah, adoption, um, you know, you know the, the standard sort of like product signals, but then also market market signals as well. Like, you know, how is, are we getting pick up to people amplifying what we're saying? Are we getting invited to stuff? How are we doing with the analyst reports? There's a lot of still basic blocking and tackling that you do with the traditional marketing, uh, functions.

Speaker B: Right. So some of the traditional things still matter. Uh, but you guys approach things very differently. I know when we were talking earlier, uh, you told me about the human LED process, but also the sales process that you guys do is different, I think, than most other technology companies. What does that look like in practice?

Speaker A: Yeah. So, um, we invest a lot in customer success and adoption. And, like, I mean, maybe that doesn't sound like something that is different. Um, and it's hard because, like, it is one of our differentiators. But everyone says they love their customers. Right? Everyone says that we ensure our customer success. Like, so you can't really advertise that. Um, but you feel it. You definitely feel it. And myself may CRO, like, we're all deeply invested in our customer deals. Like, we're watching them, we're shepherding them. We're coming to the kickoff meetings, the QBRs. Um, we have a lot of executive presence in our customer. Like, not just closing the deal. I'm talking post sales and getting them launched. We have this idea of sort of the crawl walk run where we want to make sure that they're successful. So we, you know, we really nurture, uh, that early adoption while we get them to their own building over time. We're doing things like, you know, having kickoff meetings with their executives, helping them understand how they, like, what role they play and how AI is different and how you as an executive, not just. Not, you didn't just sponsor buying this technology. You got to be out there on the front line. So we're going to help you, and you're going to teach you how to talk to the rest of your organization, how to tweet about it, how to write about it on LinkedIn. Like, we, we do those things to, to, to really make sure that the customer, um, it's visible what they're doing inside their company, um, and that they're getting to, um, success as fast as possible.

Speaker B: Oh, that's cool. So you're teaching them how to talk AI, how to evangelize AI.

Speaker A: Uh, exactly.

Speaker B: That's really cool.

Speaker A: Exactly. Like that. That. That's. Companies need to see their leaders talking about it, otherwise they're not going to change themselves. Like, don't get me wrong, 10% of your workforce is, like, tinkering and thinking and they, you know, trying to constantly grow. But, uh, the majority is. They just want to do their jobs and they're, you know, they're looking to get the day done and you know, they, they, they're going to do what they're signal to do. They're going to focus where they get their signals. And so we work with our customers to help them set the signal for their company. Which is another reason why companies really like working with us is cause we're a partner in that journey for them. I mean, I don't know, uh, like when you go, we have countless pictures of us at the whiteboard with the senior leadership of you know, a uh, cpg, big CPG company or retailer like mapping out the workflows with them and then you know, getting them engaged in the process. It's our DNA and the way we've, we've always been. So it really helps us drive that adoption.

Speaker B: That's amazing. How much does culture play a role in a successful deployment with a customer? We know that a great product is required, but is culture the necessary ingredient to drive success here?

Speaker A: Yeah, you need both, um, both are requirements to a successful um, AI adoption. So on one hand you need the, you know, technology has to be near perfect. Can't hallucinate, you can't get into production at a Vanguard or Prudential. You know, like you can't get into production workflows with it being like 95%. Right. It has to be like you know, four nines and it has to be tight. Right. So it ha. Like the technology is absolutely vital. But unless there's a culture of progress and reinvention, as we were just talking about, you know, one workflow, two workflows, five workflows, 10 workflows, like it just, it just will stop there. It has to be where we are helping the organization think about not just this particular agent, but what are the next 10 agents, what are the next hundred agents? And so that culture, you need both, otherwise you're a point solution and you're a one off. Um, so it's really important for that, for both sides of the equation, the technology and the cultural, um, permanence is really huge.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean that makes total sense because you do need the whole organization to embrace this change and make it become the norm of how we work.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.

Speaker B: Now let's switch gears and talk about you and your team and the impact that AI has had on the marketing function. Uh, it seems that marketing is one of the early adopters of AI. What does that look like on how you do your job today compared to maybe five, ten Years ago.

Speaker A: Yeah. Um, I think what I love about what AI has done both for my team and the high performing teams that I've gotten to work with as customers is it helps people and companies get started and it helps them scale. And that, that middle part where the magic happens, you're giving the humans much more time, bandwidth and opportunity to focus on the magical part of marketing, the creativity, um, the story that you want to tell, the people oriented parts of the job. And you're able to do that because AI is giving you the tools to generate a lot of ideas. And then when you find what needs to be done and you are ready to take something to market, scaling it is so much easier and faster than before I could create. You know, when we have a great piece of content, we have a great campaign and we have great asset, we're able to take that, you know, so much wider and to more markets. And that's just on my, you know, my team of marketers at a series C company. When you look at some of the biggest retailers in the world that we work with, you know, they'll take a product to market and what would have taken them, you know, millions and millions of dollars and, and, and weeks of time to take one product and take it to 200 countries and thousands of retailers. You know, the classic example is the product detail page. You know, that's the, you know, the manufacturers, you know, way of doing business. I have, I write it the primary product detail page and then I need thousands of iterations for all the different retailers I work with. Right. So being able to scale that super fast, nearly instantaneously is giving them much more time to focus on the product. The first one, right. The main one, the one that is sets the, the sets the, the context for all of the iterations to come. I love that we're getting more time on that because that's where the differentiation comes and that's where the heart of the product and the heart of the function really lies. So I love that part of it. It's giving us much more ability to take the scaling and make the scaling faster and easier.

Speaker B: Yeah, that makes total sense. Have you seen different parts of marketing having either higher impact or higher value than maybe in other places?

Speaker A: Well, I mean, I think it's, you know, clear in content creation. That's the initial part. You know, I can create so much more content so much faster. So that's like the easiest, the fastest place to start. Um, I love the edge cases. When you give people inside the company the ability to build Their own agents is when you really start to see the interesting use cases come out and the magic happens. I have an awesome, um, use case with my head of demand gen, actually. Um, you know, so like VP level person, you know, responsible for pipeline demand generation, saw a way to do pipeline generation better and built his own agent to do it specifically.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, like so specifically. I'll, um, give him a shout out. Andrew Racine. He's awesome. What we were talking to our sales team on improving our outbound pipeline generation. Right. You know, eternal struggle between sales and marketing. How do I enable sales to do their own outbound? You know, it's an important part of the equation. We have a great relationship with our sales organization. And so we sat down and they said, well, look, you guys, you guys create great content and great assets, but we like so much of it and we don't know how to actually take what you've done and outbound with it. So we know we do these pipeline generation kits. We're really good at that. Um, but Andrew said, you know what, I'm going to create an agent that allows the rep to upload an asset that we created, give a little bit of description of what he's trying to do, he or she is trying to do, and we'll create a custom pipeline generation kit around that particular asset and topic for them. Uh, and so they're able to do their own. And like, even if they know they're going to talk to a specific customer or a specific, you know, person, they can customize how they're going to do outbound conversations based on that asset. It's all customized as an agent that does it for you so that we have, you know, all of our reps now aren't able to do that. And we don't have to do a, you know, we do, we do three kits a month. Right. Like, there's just so much bandwidth that we can direct them. But those, all those long tail opportunities, we're, we're equipping and enabling them to have those conversations through the agent that we created. And that was Andrew, you know, not a technical person. Technical enough. Not a technical person knew like, knows the problem to solve better than anyone in the company and was able to build his own agent and give that off to sales to do it. Um, so I, I forgot the question, but that's the, that's, that's an example, that's an example of how we're using AI to, to really like just do marketing differently here.

Speaker B: No, I love it. And it Also, you know, shows like the hyper personalization that you can get through because now you have an NF1, right. Any rep, any opportunity, any account.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: You, uh, can make it feel so tailored to them without necessarily requiring an army of people.

Speaker A: That's right. Writes the email, you know, all the stuff that you want to, you know, start that connection. It even gives them a script if they, you know, when they get on the phone they, you know, they want, they want to have that in front of them, uh, all around the asset that they wanted to talk about and the topic and the theme of the conversation and the person itself.

Speaker B: That's great, cool stuff. Now that's a good example of marketing working with sales and like driving productivity and ultimately driving the outcomes we all want, which is more pipeline, more successes. Uh, what about working with product? How does marketing and product work together? You know, what are some things that you've seen work really well or. Yeah, really poorly?

Speaker A: Yeah. Um, so I have a product marketing background. Um, I grew up in product marketing. So this is near and dear to my heart. Um, I love product. Yeah, exactly. There you go. I love product. I love, I love, I love product managers, I love engineer, I love that whole side of the, the house. Right. Um, uh, we work with the product and engineering teams to help them take the raw innovation that they're building. You know, very customer centric. We're building, you know, with customer needs in mind. But there's like some really raw innovation there. We, we are now, you know, we're an LLM provider. Right. And so we, and I can get into the whole reason why I think that's important. But we, you know, we have our own core foundational technology and then we package it up and we have uh, you know, the product and features and stuff that people use every day. I am, um, a huge proponent of product and marketing. Need to work together to figure out how to tell the story of why this product is going to change or enhance the way companies are working and take the steady stream of innovation and turn it into a meaningful M series of moments for the market. So we work with them to understand what's coming, what the roadmap look like, how is it organized and what are the themes there that you're, you're developing to like, what are the three themes that support the broader vision that we're developing this technology to? Because if you don't do that, then you're just releasing feature after feature after feature. And so we've built a very close relationship with the product organization to Sit down, understand the roadmap and then create, you know, themes around the different innovations and then work towards, you know, a, a moment where the, we bring it all together in a big launch, so to speak. Right. It's not always a launch, but you know, I, I'm a big believer in like launches. I think launches are, you know, just unless you, they bring the company together like they're, they're good in so many ways. They get the attention, they force the company to work much more closely and nothing makes shit happen. Sorry for the right language. Nothing makes stuff happen.

Speaker B: Boring. We'll bring up some oh shit moments in a moment.

Speaker A: There you go. Nothing makes, nothing makes it happen more than a date on the calendar that everyone is working. Like, it's just amazing. I'll, I remember getting here and I'm like, all right, we are going to do a launch early April. Let's, let's, you know, let's see what's coming. Sitting with product, you have all this amazing stuff coming. Let's bundle that up and let's, you know, let's tell a story around it. And we have a make now. So now we do that. We have release cadence, we have major moments. Um, so I work, you know, my teams work very, very closely with product to help tell the story of what they're building much more crisply.

Speaker B: I think that's great and I totally agree. Launches are these beautiful galvanizing moments for the company where everybody knows exactly what they need to do.

Speaker A: I love it.

Speaker B: It accelerates pace. Right, because you have this hard milestone.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's great.

Speaker B: Now let me, let's ask a, uh, question about you. You know, you're, you said you came up through the marketing ranks from the product marketing lens. Uh, and now you're a CMO and you've been a multi time cmo. Tell me about that journey. How did that progress and you know, is it typical to go from product marketing to cmo?

Speaker A: Um, I think it's more and more common these days. You have different eras in tech. I mean, I'm gonna speak specifically for the tech marketer. Um, and when, if I look at like the early days, um, demand gen, you know, tends to have a, a whole, you know, and some in some companies it is a demand gen, gen oriented world and that's, that's fine and right for a lot of companies. Um, but what I found recently is that because the market is so competitive and product differentiation is getting harder and harder to achieve, product marketing orientation in the leadership role has become more important. Because storytelling and positioning is a bigger, uh, facet of how the marketing organization helps the company win. And so I have found through my last, you know, my last roles that I was brought in because of that bent and that's the pain that the company had was we have a great product, we have a machine and an engine. And Andrew, the person I just, you know, referred to, he built the machine before I got here. Like our demand gen organization is, you know, as good as I've seen. Right. But what we need is to figure out how do we tell the story in a differentiated way. Who we are, how we do what we do, why we're different. So I've seen the product marketing CMO rise, um, because of that for sure.

Speaker B: I love that. Uh, and what makes a good story, like if that's that key thing, right. As the storyteller in chief.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, what is a great story?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I, I think a great story, like the overriding principle is simplicity. Um, I always go back to trying to think about, you know, the human brain. Like, okay, we can pontificate here, human brain evolution. You know, our brains have not evolved from the primal days. Right. So we're still trying to simplify everything as much as possible and burn as little calories as we can inside our brain. Right. The base level human, um, position is I, uh, if it's too complicated, I'm gonna move on. So what I am always seeking is how do we simplify what we say? Early on I. You asked what RYTR does and I said we help companies build, activate and supervise AI agents at scale. Right. Like Build, activate, supervise. That folds up so much m. More stuff than that we do, but it's like three words. Simple, build, activate, supervise. It's uh, for my builders, it's for the adoption across the business, the end users working with it. And then it's for it being able to really understand and look at what's happening. Like, I can go deeper in each one of those pillars. Right. But what we crave is just like that one liner, simple way of understanding what you do. So from a storytelling perspective, it starts with the simple, like, what is the one line that you can say about what your company does? And that's where we spend weeks or months trying to figure out what that is. Um, but that's, that's the, that's the most important part of storytelling.

Speaker B: Yeah. And there's some repeatability, some consistency and scale, quite frankly, which is great.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.

Speaker B: That's right. Yeah. So, uh, looking back on your career, you've had a lot of, uh, successes, a lot of learning through that journey. Uh, can you share one of your favorite oh, shit moments?

Speaker A: I think the biggest one was, uh, Covid, uh, when lockdowns started. And, and I know this was like an ocean moment for like the whole world. Um, and then in tech, you know, everything like, you know, like everyone, it's like work stop for a week, two weeks, like just what are we doing? What's happening? And then I remember very distinctly, you know, that quarter was not great. Right. Because people stopped buying, they didn't know what to do. So. And we weren't alone. I was at UiPath at the time. And what I think came out of that was a recognition that this is actually a transformative moment for the world that is actually a tailwind for us. It's sort of like fuel for our growth that. I don't know if you remember that meme of like, who's responsible for our digital transformation strategy? And it was like cio, cto, Covid.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And it was like Covid really? Yeah, kicked digital transformation to super high gear. And we quickly regrouped and were able to say, okay, like if we're gonna move to digital transfer, digital transformation is now in Aperture. What does that mean for us? And so we uh, took a step back from like, this could be catastrophic for our business to. This is actually something that will, you know, and I don't wanna come across too much like opportunistic on Covid because it's like a horrible, tough time. Um, but from a business perspective, it was like a real opportunity for, for our business. And we were able to figure out how to, how to, how to, you know, how to turn that into, um, momentum for us.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, for sure it was a hard moment, but also created a forced moment for people to change, to see the world differently. And you know, there's been great things that's come out of it. Yeah, there's been other things that's come out of it. Uh, but I think uh, change and opportunity is to me the biggest learning.

Speaker A: Right. And I think the other thing that I would, I took away from it and I, you know, unless it, I think that I try to, you know, share with my teams is there's always an adaptation to what becomes present or challenges or roadblocks or the evolution of things. Like now with AI, it's changed a lot. And we just talked about that earlier. Society will progress, jobs will progress, people will progress. Like take a long term view, not in the moment, try to, like, lift up 50,000ft and say, what has. What does this look like for, like, in the past? Like, let's find comparable moments. Let's see how society adopted, like, get above the fray and just think. And I think that's what, like, the smartest and best people do. And so I'm trying to always think of, let's divorce ourselves from the emotion of what's happening and think about historically, how does this usually play out? Or what can we learn from history? And this might be different, but they'll probably get clues from history. And so I think that was another thing that, like, the, oh, Covid moment was like, all right, well, okay, there was the pandemic in 1918. We had, you know, how does society, like, wait a minute, we, you know, we. We're 100 years later and like, everything, you know, so, So I don't want to minimize the short term, but, like, society gets through things and just evolves and adapts and be ready for that. Like, that becomes opportunity for you, that evolution, adaptation. If you could put yourself in a good place for that, like, for all these financial crisis in 2008. Right. You know, great companies were born out of that. And if, you know, if you're, if you deserve, you know, it's painful, but, but like, look at some of the great companies and, you know, that came out of that, like, was a whole new era. Web Web 2.0 came out of that, and a whole new era of the startup world grew out of that. So much, so much grew from that. And then, like, the death of, you know, zero interest rates and, you know, the whole 20, 21 meltdown. Just gotta, like, it's painful in the moment, but divorce yourselves from it. And look at how society typically adapts and adjusts. Um, that's. And that's where you could look for opportunities to lead as well. Coming out of that.

Speaker B: I mean, that's great advice. And we are now leading into an amazing opportunity with AI agents, enabling every company to succeed and do more. And I think that's a really unique time and you're in a very unique company, uh, driving a lot of change. So, Diego, uh, thank you so much for joining the podcast. Uh, it was great to learn from you. Thank you all for listening to Next Gen Builders and look out for our next episode wherever you get your podcasts. And please don't forget to subscribe.