#63 Throxy: The outbound company that ignored LinkedIn completely | Arnau Ayerbe

Speaker A: So I think pricing is one of the things that helps um, startups more than hurts them. Right. And um, in terms of our pricing, um, we do have a mix of like uh, a recurrent, uh, part of the revenue.

Speaker B: And then I'm your host. Vishesh building Neo voice control for your entire computer. No typing, no clicking. Curious. Check out Vishesh space. Arno Arbe left JP Morgan at 2320 build Troxy, an outbound company that ignores LinkedIn completely and sells into manufacturing, logistics and construction using AI agents and human cold callers. They just raised 6.2 million from base 10 after going through YC. Today we're getting into the contrarian bets, the co founder dynamics of building with your best friend since age 14 and why he thinks SaaS is already dead. Hey. Hi Arno, thanks for joining me on the podcast.

Speaker A: My pleasure to be here.

Speaker B: All right, so you are founder at uh, one of the co founders at Troxy. Still fairly young. You started at 23 at JP Morgan. What made you take this leap by Troxy from fintech, sorry, from finance to uh, outbound sales. How did you make that journey?

Speaker A: Look, ah, first, um, excited to be here. I think I was extremely lucky growing up, um, that I got a lot of early exposure to technology and how technology would shape the future of the world and specifically the future of work. When I was 20, I got the opportunity to be working in AI at J.P. morgan, um, inside the AI research team. Very early from the start, you could see hints that LLMs were simply this magical thing that were going to transform the way the world looked. Like back in the day we were playing with GPT2 and Bert, which were very small language models, but the paradigm was exactly the same as it is today. These models showed hints of what could look like agentic behavior in the future, which was something that had never existed before in computer science. And at that point I was working with extremely bright minds. But there was only one thing missing, right? And it was the ambition to build stuff, which was fast and, and a good way to express it is a startup, right? High growth, right. When you're working in J.P. morgan, the only thing you're optimizing is for not breaking things. So whilst we were working in AI research, we're just making sure, hey, this model won't break anything we have. And when you're 20 and when all you love to do is hack stuff together and try the latest open source model, but you need to wait for compliance to approve stuff, that's a nightmare. So my Best friend from high school, um, who's Pablo and now is one of my co founders, was working at a startup and a startup is the polar opposite of what banking looks like. And he was like, dude, startups are these really cool things where you could just do things. And that sounded in my mind like, wow, this sounds like a super nice place to do things. And I felt like, okay, maybe I'll go work at a, uh, startup in like a few years when, when I'm bored of banking or whatever. But he kept poking at me of like, hey, I'm doing sales at this startup and I do all of these repetitive tasks. So I was like, okay, let me build you something. So like, you're gonna, you going to be really like, impressed. And I built him a, ah, really quick prototype with GPT2 that drafted sales emails for, for his job and, and suddenly every week he started asking for more features. His team started using it and that essentially became what Roxy yesterday, which is like, um, Applied Research Lab where we build agents for sales teams and essentially we do something ridiculously simple, which is we book meetings for, for our customers using AI most of the time. That's a bit of like the backstory of how we, from JP to now working in AI for sales and so on.

Speaker B: Your LinkedIn, you've called it your life's work. I mean, you're fairly young, you have a deep research background. Is troxy actually the best use of your brain?

Speaker A: Technically, I really believe so. You know, back in the day when Pablo came to me in the first instance, I could not believe that people would still write emails manually by hand to do sales. Right? And if you look at many of these big companies, they have thousands and thousands of SDRs which go into work every day and all they do is click on a bunch of buttons on the screen, always the same pattern, and send us a bunch of messages with the goal of producing pipeline. Right. Um, and the reality of it is because this has a ton of value, companies need to do sales. That's their oxygen. And if it's not automated, you're going to have to put a human there to do it. And the reason why they do it is because there is roi. Right. But what if we could like, automate all of this with agents or at least automate the boring parts. Right. Our mission at Throxy is to like, relocate human capital to work on harder and harder tasks. And if we are successful, I really think we, we will have accomplished, um, a major milestone for, for humanity because that would unlock a plethora of possibilities in terms of what we can do as a human species.

Speaker B: Right. So we'll dive into um, specifics of Throxy in a minute. But before that, your co founder and you go back, go way back. You were both friends, Childhood friends. I, I read somewhere you and Pablo built a FIFA ultimate team. Was it a bot or a game?

Speaker A: Yeah. So I, from as, as young as I remember, I've just loved um, tinkering with, with computers. Right. Part of that tinkering when we were around 12 or for teen, was this video game which was really popular in Spain where we grew up, which was FIFA, which was a soccer video game. And you had to build your own team based on a market of cards and stuff. So Pablo and I discovered that essentially there was a marketplace of players where people could list, um, cards with wrong prices. We coded an auto clicker to buy, uh, cards at a really low price, which were obviously a mistake. So say like imagine someone selling a, a stock for a tenth of the price because they forgot to zero at the end. Um, and we would go and pick up those stocks really cheap and then sell them at uh, market value and essentially make a lot of money by doing this arbitrage and then selling the coins, essentially. I always knew since we were very young that Pablo and I left working together. And when we had the opportunity to go work on Throxy, it was like a no brainer.

Speaker B: So how long was this, like how long did you work on this project with him?

Speaker A: M. To be honest, it was more of like a side thing. So it was like for six months or so until we got bored because we just jumped onto the next thing that sounded like a little bit more shiny but just enough time to realize like this thing of like figuring stuff out and doing things is cool. Right.

Speaker B: And so you have a third co founder. How did you guys add him to the mix?

Speaker A: Oh yeah. So Bergen is also a co founder of Doxy and he's one of the hardest working persons I met during college. So we co, found, co founded Throxy when I was in my last year of college. And I used to like go into this computer room every day at like 9am and I would like be there till like past 9. And I was like the only one, except there was always this other guy, um, who was at the same time as me in the mornings and who was there also in the evenings. Right. And I was like, what is this guy doing here? Because I'm here building a company but all of these other people are studying And I understand they go home, they go party, they go do other things. But why is this other person here? Is he doing something or is he doing something interesting? And it turns out that Bergen was, was actually two things. He was insanely bright academically, he came second in his whole degree in college. And number two, he was working on launching his own company. Right. But luckily enough for us and for Throxy, um, and hopefully he will say luckily enough for him too. I convinced him to like come join us and that's how we all came together, right? Just by spending a lot of time together working in the same room.

Speaker B: And so are you, like you earlier, uh, defined yourself as an outbound automation platform, more or less. Do you want to expand on that a little bit? Like how would you explain this to your grandma? Do you just do outbound automation or is there more to it?

Speaker A: Yeah, no, absolutely. That's a great question. I think if I had to explain it to my grandma, I would say like, look, very simply, we help companies get more revenue, right? So if you're a B2B company that wants to sell more, you go and work with Roxy. And to dive a little deeper on what that looks like is we are name ourselves as a service. We, we don't say we're a platform. We are a company that will deliver for you meetings. So we deliver outcomes and we don't give you software, we give you results. Right. And that's the key here. So we use our own agents to deliver results for you directly. Um, and that allows us to do two things. Number one, have a really strong touch with the clients. So we are really, we have a small amount of clients but we are really responsive to them in that sense. And number two, we have a lot of clarity in what we need to build to deliver for them. So we consider ourselves in more of like a tech language like the Palantir for sale. So same way Palantir goes to a company and solves all their data problems with we go to a company and solve their outbound or top of funnel issues or not issues in itself, but just like give them more meetings with their ideal customers.

Speaker B: And so you are selling into right now manufacturing, logistics, constructions, um, at the beginning, often these sectors, the decision makers are not on LinkedIn. Why go after the hardest market when there is lack of data?

Speaker A: I think that's exactly why Throxy worked the start. So the reason why we went for markets where there were people were not on LinkedIn was because everyone was focusing on LinkedIn. Right. And if everyone is trying to do one thing and you're the person who's trying to do the other thing. There is a lot of alpha, uh, in taking a contrarian bet and just solving that problem. So the origins of Throxy are that we essentially worked with a couple of companies that wanted to sell into manufacturing firms and, but couldn't find these manufacturing firms anywhere. Um, and we just went and scraped all of this information using agents, because these manufacturing companies are either on Google Maps or in directories on, like, in basically obscure places of the Internet. And we map them out and then we have this information, this data moat that then we can serve these companies that have been historically abandoned in that sense. Right. Um, and at the start it was extremely hard and extremely contrarian, but as you build a critical mass and you start getting more customers, it starts paying off.

Speaker B: Yeah, makes sense. And so you've got 50 human cold callers as well, sitting somewhere in London, Cape Town.

Speaker A: We have offices both in Cape Town and London. And our idea behind having a human in the loop is that essentially sales are human and we do with agents, all of the dirty work, all of, like, the heavy loading in terms of like, hey, mapping, hey, scrolling, crawling, the Internet, scraping, qualifying. But at the end of the day, we are a data company that delivers results for customers and that last mile is delivered through humans. Whether that's the service, that's the touch point, that's the strategy we iterate together on, hey, this is the market we're going for, or this is the strategy we're taking this week, or we're going to pick up the phone and call these people with human dialers because that's what makes the difference between good and great.

Speaker B: And so you call yourself service as a software and you compare yourself with palantir. But most VCs run away when they hear the word, or at least used to. Maybe that has changed what kind of time you had during fundraising in terms of explaining your, your model with such a heavy headcount.

Speaker A: I think at the end of the day, every investor, um, wants to make money. That's what they're here for. And traditionally you're absolutely right that, um, a company like ours wasn't going to be scalable because for every customer you added, you had to add human headcount. What we're doing at Throxy is we're building technology and we're building AI agents that for every customer we add. We don't need as many humans because we essentially develop technology that serves all of these customers and that's the magic here? I think it was Sequoia that did an essay uh, a couple of months ago saying that for every dollar spent on software, the world spend spends $6 on services, whether that's human capital or that's outsourced labor. And we are capturing part of those $6. Right. And a very interesting part and shift we see in with like new models coming out. Like I think it was Opus 4.5 that was the turning point in my opinion is SaaS is kind of dead. If we go and look at Salesforce, HubSpot, all of these um, stocks like Atlasian, they've just like dropped over 50% in the last year because anyone can go into cloud code and by code their own SaaS solutions. That is essentially like a much harder position to be as a founder than in a more defensible place where we are then we are very hard to replace for a company because we are delivering value. Right. A company that's selling software is very easy to replace because you can just bytecode that software and make it specific to your company. And as a founder you have little defensibility, if that makes sense.

Speaker B: What about pricing? You charge per meeting booked? Um, did that throw off investors and how does that scale into the headcount mathematics?

Speaker A: Um, in terms of our pricing, um, we do have a mix of uh, a uh, recurrent part of the revenue and then a performance based. And the most interesting part of like having performance based revenue is that we have a unlimited ceiling if we are doing really well for a company and incentives are aligned. What we never want it to be is like hey, we're working with this company, we're delivering a lot of value but we're not capturing the value that we're doing the same kind of way. Many AI, uh companies nowadays do usage based pricing because like the tokens you use are the tokens you pay for. That's where we are here, right? For the value we deliver, for the meetings we accomplish for a customer, that's what we charge. And that means if a customer is not receiving as many meetings as they'd like to, they're not going to be unhappy because they're only paying for the value they're getting. And if a company is getting a lot of meetings we're capturing a lot of that value. So I think investors are seeing that shift and in a way it's a really strong position to acquire more customers, which is essentially what you need to do as an early stage startup.

Speaker B: And how did you guys end up setting up a team at Cape Town. That seems like a fairly offbeat place to set up a team given you are based in London and you went to yc.

Speaker A: Absolutely. We were extremely lucky to have a very strong contact in Cape Town who was previously general manager for a great company. Um, and she was um, essentially based in Cape Town and we were in contact and when we were floating around with the idea of like, hey, expanding to having more cold callers, Cape Town was a very attractive place in the sense of there's a lot of talent that can be arbitraged because the essentially conditions worked very well for us as a company. And number two, we obviously had this great contact that knew how to set up um, an SDR motion and forward deployed SDRs, which is what we call them, and that's essentially what you want to look for. And Cape Town is a unique place in terms of like time zone too. We didn't want to have a trade off in that sense. And Cape Town sits in the same time zone as London. Um, so that's where why we decided to take the bet. And we originally started with only having five SDRs there in December and we are now over 50. Um, fast forward three months.

Speaker B: Right, we've reached, uh, lightning round. It's um, small round with peppered questions, hopefully straightforward.

Speaker A: Love it.

Speaker B: Um, uh, aimed at learning from your journey. Best hire you've made at soxy. What did you see that others missed?

Speaker A: I think it was, it was Al. Uh, so Al was our first investor and then he joined us, uh, as a, as one of our first hires. And Al has this like social radar that can help you find your next best hires. And as an early stage startup, that's super important.

Speaker B: So you hired your investor. Early investor.

Speaker A: Exactly. Al wrote our first check, um, and then he wanted to go into working at a startup instead of being in the investing side of things. And as soon as we, as soon as he told us that, we were like, hey, why don't you come join us? And he was, I'd love to be with you guys if you have me. So it went pretty fast.

Speaker B: That's an interesting story. Worst money you've spent on the business so far.

Speaker A: That's a great question. I mean, look, we have uh, a very interesting story which is I remember when we finished yc, we had to leave the US fairly quick to come back to Europe for visa issues. And um, we arrived to the airport and our flight was canceled. So we were like, wow, we need to get out of the US in the next two days. And the Only flight available to come directly to London was a, um, flight which was like around 5k per seat. We just had to like, instantly drop that money, which, um, I, I regret.

Speaker B: Immigration is a pain for sure. Yeah. Speaking of yc, most overrated piece of advice you've got at yc.

Speaker A: Honestly, I'd say YC is very underrated in terms of the advice you get, but potentially one of the advice we didn't take, I don't think it's overrated, but one we didn't take, and it's very specific to people, is that you need to stay in SF to build a great generational company. And I think now you can build a generational company everywhere around the world. You just need to have the mentality that you're an American company or that you operate like an American company and you operate for the American market. Um, but potentially one of the best advantages Roxy has is that we're able to hire talent outside of the bay, um, where everyone is competing for the same talent inside the bay. We can get great talent in London or great talent in other places that these companies are not seeing.

Speaker B: One tool you can't live without that isn't your own product.

Speaker A: I think nowadays that question is very easy. And I would say it's Claude. I don't think it would. I would know what I would do without Claude or Claude. Code, like, honestly scares me if they took that out from me.

Speaker B: How did you deal with outages? They've been having so many outages these days.

Speaker A: No, that, that is true. And I feel like that's my time to get some fresh air. Whenever there's an outage. I think maybe it's time to go on a walk.

Speaker B: You blog about Paul Graham's essays. Which one changed how you operate the most?

Speaker A: I actually think one of the best essays from PG is one that goes along the lines, startups equal growth. Because essentially what a lot of people forget is how intense startups are. And like, the definition of a startup is a really fast growing company. And all I wanted to optimize when I left JP Morgan was having a, uh, steep learning curve, essentially, like having growth as a person, person professionally. And when people ask me, hey, what are you going to do if Soxy doesn't work? It's like, Roxy is working already. Roxy is making me grow. Every day I go to the office, every day I take decisions, every day I go and put myself out there. We're growing either as a company or personally, and we're pushing the boundaries of what is possible. And I think just rewiring your brain every Monday, every month, every quarter to know like, hey guys, we were here last week, we need to be here next week. And the same with any period of time allows you to like grow so much that in normal world that's like kind of not given in the sense of like you. You look back at six months in, in a corporate company and not much has changed. You look back six months in throxy and it was a completely different company.

Speaker B: Right. You DJ on the side.

Speaker A: I personally don't, I personally don't dj. Uh, Bergen does, but not myself.

Speaker B: Oh, okay. So I misread. Have you, have you seen him perform?

Speaker A: I, I vaguely uh, stepped on like one of his performances, but I'm, I'm not a big party guy, so I, I leave that to him.

Speaker B: You guys have been around for a bit. What have you gotten completely wrong in the last couple of years that you haven't talked about publicly?

Speaker A: I mean that's, that's a great question. I think, um, we made a lot of mistakes since we started Foxy. Potentially the biggest one when um, is the thought that we are going to build a software platform that was initially what we thought people wanted to do. And we were like when Pablo and I came together like hey, let's build this platform where like SDRs are going to use and we're going to make them be so good. And we started with like thinking hey, we should do product led growth. We should. We essentially. I think when you're a first time founder and you see all of these like companies which uh, you use, you're not very used to Enterprise B2B sales. You try and stay away from them when the reality is that you should force yourself to go directly into them if you're selling a product for companies. Right. So I think the biggest mistake we made was trying to like do a platform that SDRs were going to use instead of going directly to BPs of sales, to founders, to CEOs and be like, hey, we're doing a service for you guys to get you meetings. And when we did that change in mentality in Thoxy, everything started clicking and that's when our growth started.

Speaker B: Yeah. And probably that allowed you to dog food your own stuff, right?

Speaker A: Absolutely. So that's when we said like, hey, this is really a company that we think we can take to like a trillion dollars instead of like, we don't know where this is going.

Speaker B: Yeah, you don't want to be a PLG led company when you are in a Hot bond and you're selling. Exactly.

Speaker A: And I would say, like, most of the times, PLG is just brutal. It's extremely hard to understand your customers in the early days when you have a very low touch point with them and there's very little essentially, investment from their side. Because anyone can sign up to something and then stop using it and then never come back. But if they go through a motion of buying a product and, and going through, uh, a payment, then, hey, they want this to work. Or at least they have the pain and they care about what you are building. And that's the magic about, like, B2B sales is that, you know, you have a problem. I know. I want you to. I want to solve your problem. Let's work together to make this work. Right. And that allows you to have that flywheel of things working.

Speaker B: Yeah, makes sense. And so that was, that was pretty much it. Um, like, in terms of right now, where are you guys at? What's the biggest challenge right now?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great question. If I think would make the company 10x bigger, it's just having more rockstar engineers. Right. We're a very small, dense team where the bar is extremely high. Um, to get into Thoraxi, I think we've done more than 300 engineering applications, um, and only hired, um, one of the last 300, um, since we opened, um, that position. We just need to find better engineers every time, because what we're doing is really pushing the boundary of what's possible in the sense of agents. And we're just hiring great engineers. So if you're one of them, come join us.

Speaker B: And is this remote or, um, in London?

Speaker A: It's fully on site in London. We do sponsor visas and relocation, so that's not a problem.

Speaker B: And where can people find you? Um, and reach. Reach out.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So T H R O X Y dot com, that's our website and would love to hear from you.

Speaker B: Well, Arnau, thanks for joining me on the podcast. It was a pleasure talking to you and my pleasure.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me.

Speaker B: Awesome. Uh, if you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever your favorite podcast app is. See you in the next episode.