Stories of Inception; Zayd @ Valley

Volume I

TLDR: The first post in a series of stories on inception stage founders. Today, back the people not the idea, and sales technology is becoming customer-obsessed.

I’ve been posting a lot about inception vs. acceleration vs. early stage and the VC math and theory of it all, but it was brought to my attention that it may still be opaque and that telling stories of founders might be a better way to bring inception stage to life.

Enter Stories of Inception, a journey through time, space, and the life of a founder before anyone will fund them. We’ll see how this post does, and determine if we keep going.

I joined Antler halfway through a cohort back in 2022, and I was still learning just how early we were investing. Quickly thereafter I had a chance to lead my first residency from scouting through to investment committee.

My first two investments became Valley & Benjamin.

Both founders are maniacs.

Both growing 30%+ MoM for the past 10 months.

And yet, neither are working on the exact business they started with.

For Volume I, let’s deep dive on Valley.

Meet Zayd Syed Ali.

21 years old.

Sold his first company in high school for 7-figures.

We get on an interview call and immediately he is electric. That’s reason #1 to want to back him. You can just tell when you meet someone like this. They have the charisma, enthusiasm, optimism, and confidence that blends together into something that can only be described as magical.

I had the same feeling the first time I met Erno from Benjamin, Shash from Doorstep, David & Michael from Dune, Zach from HIFI, Caspar from AminoChain, and so many more that we’ll cover in future weeks of Stories of Inception. That is, assuming they’re ok with me exposing the exceptional execution and psychologically thrilling reasons why I love them. For today, we at least have Zayd’s approval.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, one of the major differences in what we do at inception stage at Antler is that we work with founders before we invest. That means we can give offers to work together without exchanging cash or equity upfront. That’s also why these types of interviews are immediate offers into Antler. I don’t have a crystal ball on the markets, and I don’t care what you’re building. If you can inspire, if you have wild ambitions, if you can build and sell, if you make me want to clear my calendar to jam with you on your business, you’re the kind of person I want to work with, and on those dimensions, Zayd demolished his interview in the best way.

He’s the kind of person who when you make an introduction, the connection who meets him actually texts you later and says “wow, I really love this guy.”

The problem at the time, he was still in college and I hated the business.

Me: “How are you going to balance this, are you going to drop out?”

Zayd: “I am more than full-time on Valley, school is easy.”

Later he transferred to Columbia and figured out a reduced schedule in order to put 100 hours a week into Valley. But that’s not how things started.

When Zayd joined Antler he was working on something called Fish, a social networking app for VC’s & founders to find one another.

Having worked in social media at LinkedIn for 9 years, I was pretty upfront with Zayd that I thought what he was building was a really terrible idea. At least as far as venture-backable businesses go.

That’s an important concept. Traditional VC’s and angel investors don’t back terrible ideas in small markets. Antler can work with that though because we’re not investing upfront and because big ideas are a labor of love. They’re not perfect at day zero, they’re wet clay that is formed as a byproduct of hard work, earned insights, and compounding efforts and ambitions. Said differently, we’re an inception fund, not an acceleration fund.

Despite my objections, Zayd had conviction. That’s reason #2 to back him, he has strong opinions and gets his information from taking action rather than taking advice.

That’s counterintuitive right? To like a founder who doesn’t take your advice? It’s about looking beyond opinion and observing action. You want founders who are self-reliant, who believe in a different kind of future, who don’t listen to every single piece of advice or opinion they receive. You want them to be independent thinkers. You want them to have resilience. You want them to make their own decisions.

Over the course of six weeks, Zayd builds a team, a beautiful/working product, gets users, raises some money, develops an amazing narrative and story about the future of the world and the place Fish has in it. People in the cohort are drawn to him. The speed and quality of his decision making and leadership are on full display. Despite being 10 years younger than our average founder, he’s running circles around many of them.

He comes to investment committee with this offspring of Tinder, Twitter, and LinkedIn below:

He pitches. The votes come in.

One person likes the idea.

Six others say “I don’t like this business, but wow, that’s a great founder.”

Most VC’s in a 6-1 vote decide not to invest, and send the classic founder rejection email:

“ Dear Founder, we really like you, but we’re not quite sure the market is big enough for what you’re building, so we’re going to watch this space and wait for a winner to emerge. Please keep us updated as we would love to back you in the next round.”

Not Antler.

7-0 “we love the founder” is an investment, regardless of the idea.

After we wire the money, we build for a few months. Fish grows a bit, it attracts a bunch of “we love the founder” investor meetings, but not the world domination type of energy Zayd requires for his life’s work. That’s reason #3 to back Valley. Level of ambition. It’s obvious when you talk to these maniacs that they’re not here to take part, they’re here to take over (Conor McGregor).

These people are here to change the world, and Fish wasn’t going to change the world.

So Zayd calls me one night:

Zayd: “Hey let me run something by you. I know what you’re going to say, but hear me out. AI SDR”

Me: “Ok, you know what I’m going to say. Tell me why I’m wrong.”

Zayd: “Ok well first off sorry I’ve been MIA, I was in the hospital last week with kidney stones. But dude, I have to tell you what I built while I was in there.”

Me: “Hang on, what? The hospital. Are you ok?”

Zayd: “Yea, I’m fine, listen to this though. I think I’m going to pivot.”

Me: “You built his while you were in the hospital?”

Zayd: “Yea, that’s not important, hear me out. We always talk about first principles. 1) There will be a winner in this space, it’s inevitable, why not me? 2) My first company that I sold was in appointment setting, this is a pivot closer to my founder market fit, and I know this space better than 99% of founders. 3) A lot of people are going to try to build a mass email & Outreach.io killer, no one is thinking about it like a top performing salesperson. 4) The market can have multiple winners, think Apollo, ZoomInfo, Gong, Outreach, Salesloft, etc, etc, etc, this market is orders of magnitude bigger compared to what Fish is going after…”

This conversation went on for a few hours debating the merits of a full on pivot into the meme world of AI and trying not to build another outreach automation wrapper.

Reason #4 to back Zayd, he builds even on his death bed. Kidding, it wasn’t thaaat serious, but still you see what I mean about the maniacs. And the more interesting piece is that he’s first principled in decision making. In other words, emotionally detached from subsystem, cerebrally attached to the system.

Building a massive company is more important than building a specific idea.

Making “one-way door” decisions requires deep thought, intuition, and data-driven decision making.

Many founders are emotionally attached to the subsystem—the features and functions and the stories they’ve told themselves. They over-build with a ‘more is better’ mentality, but it becomes an Achilles heel.

Instead, first principled decision makers zoom out to optimize for the system—the business, the customer, the real-world problem and the real-world value.

Ultimately, being a founder, undergoing a pivot, spending money and investing time on the unknown, it’s all a risk. Balancing the amount of time you invest in thinking about those problems versus taking action is always difficult.

As Brian Armstrong, the founder of Coinbase, often says:

“Action creates information.”

When you spend time with 100+ founders in an intense 8-week environment, there are always standouts in terms of execution. Reason #5 to back Zayd, speed. Yes, a few hours debating the merits of pivoting into shark-infested waters may seem like time wasted, but in actuality, and in hindsight, it was a measure twice cut once moment.

From the moment we hung-up until today, the windy path through the dark and dangerous product-market fit forest has cleared into a paved road of progress.

Let me back up, before getting into Valley, let’s talk about sales tech more broadly.

I was in sales for 10 years. I’ve sold $100m of software across spaces like printing, recruiting, advertising, and sales tech. I’ve led teams across sales development, acquisition, retention, and up to key accounts where we consulted the world’s largest and most important companies on their sales strategy and tech stack. The idea of investing in any tool that augments this work comes with infinite objections from me because I know an unhealthy amount about the function, culture, and nuances of the roles it impacts.

Of course this wasn’t part of the decision making framework at inception because Fish wasn’t sales tech. But this is the world of inception, the world of the unknown future, and the world of backing the people not the product. But now, riding shotgun as his deal lead and first investor, we get to shape the future of sales.

I won’t take any credit for the product direction because Zayd sees it himself, but importantly, we definitively agree on what the future of sales should be, and together, it’s a lethal combination.

It mirrors LinkedIn’s high-performing culture and mission critical value of “Members First.”

Importantly, Valley today does not mirror the rest of sales technology that focuses solely on the volume of activity that produces funnel metrics. This is the way of old, and this is what Sales Navigator has rightfully and adamantly been trying to change about sales culture—prioritizing warm introductions, mutual value, buyer experience, or “deep sales” as LinkedIn calls it.

Other sales development engines focus on scale, they deteriorate the brand of a company by mercilessly firing messages into the inboxes of the masses. We see it in response rates over the past decade, from 30% down to sub-1%.

This is not how the best salespeople operate. This is how average sellers operate.

The best salespeople illuminate real problems, they focus on customer value, they lead with insights, they build relationships, they find opportunities to help customers make good decisions, they know, understand, and act with a “what’s good for you is good for me mentality.” And yet, this is the antithesis of nearly all sales tech.

The current landscape is primarily focused on volume, and unearthing opportunities to improve influence, manipulation, and coercion in order to drive ROI in the form of revenue and operational efficiency instead of true Customer Value. What a mistake that is, and yet still, massive companies are built on the backs of that approach.

A new world order in sales is on the horizon.

A new bar for how salespeople represent their brands and how customers expect to be approached is coming. It starts with training Valley on your best reps, automating the personalization of outreach, and then leaving those messages as drafts in an approval flow so that reps are spending time approving and editing, rather than researching and writing. I mean you wouldn’t go to math class without a calculator would you?

Importantly, as a VC, I consider this an “adjacent possibility.” Something that wasn’t possible to automate with exceptional quality before. Bringing personalization at scale, bringing insights and customer value, replicating top performing reps through action-observed machine learning, it’s all here, and it’s coming for every customer facing role in the world because people do business with each for two reasons:

1. When working together is a good business decision and creates material value

2. When they like the people they’re working with

Your best reps take the time to ensure both are true. Your average reps skip both and play the volume game because of the tech they’ve been taught to use and because their managers have coached them to do so.

There are some exceptions of course to the “nearly all sales tech is deteriorating the profession” comment, but most of these tools that managers are driving with their teams are built to save time, increase pipeline, speed up sales cycles, and close more revenue. These outbound sales technologies are not truly built to improve the customer experience.

Most all sales technologies are not built for the customer of their customer, and CEO’s should care deeply about this because it impacts how the brand is received and built over time.

This is where Zayd’s level of thinking outpaces his peers. Reason #6 to back Zayd, his first principle thinking extends into system-level thinking. It’s not enough to be emotionally and objectively self-aware enough to discontinue a product, you also have to build the systems that makes the new product work. You have to find the asymmetry, and the areas where you can be right when others are wrong or average.

“Competition is for losers,” as Peter Thiel says.

Zayd saw this opportunity, and the ethos of the product resembles that level of system thinking. The attention to detail that results in training Valley on your best salespeople’s work, adding in approval flow to allow sellers to retain control is one of the best examples.

CEO’s and CRO’s do not want machines prospecting on behalf of their brand. Allowing reps to retain control is the equivalent of giving each of them an executive assistant who researches and writes targeted and impactful messaging to every single potential customer and user of the product. And for a call-back, it’s like handing a calculus student a calculator.

For that reason, and many others you’ll see if you use the product, Valley enables every seller to become customer-obsessed rather than volume-obsessed, and that’s also why it has become such a deeply technical product and a hard-to-replicate user experience. It’s also why the results at the customer and customer-of-the-customer level are unmatched. See for yourself, these response rates are 10-50X what you would get from cold emails and drip campaigns.

You get these kinds of results, not by letting ChatGPT run your sales process, but by coaching Valley on how to sell and speak like your best salespeople. It takes who you already are, what works well, and abstracts the friction of research, writing, tone, response times, and scheduling.

People wonder if AI is coming for our jobs. Maybe it is, but for now, it’s simply augmenting the work.

Think about a salesperson today—most of their time is spent on low-value activities. In fact, in the sales profession, there’s an inverse relationship between time spent and money generated.

Things that take forever: research, writing, following-up, inputting information into CRM, building decks, calculating ROI.

Things that generate money: building relationships, talking to customers, asking for the business.

But reps spend 10X the amount of time on the former, when it should be inverse. Tools like Valley are coming, and they will enable that change. They will allow reps to be 80% customer-facing instead of 80% system-facing.

Onto execution.

Fundraising. You need money to build a team and to create leverage. We backed Zayd in the depths of the VC correction, and at a time when AI was getting hot, but everyone thought everything in AI was a wrapper. There was deep and theoretical conflict amongst VC’s over what differentiation meant or what kind of durability would be possible in AI.

Remember what I said though, Zayd is electric.

It took 136 meetings to get the first yes, and a few more to eventually raise 2 million.

But compare that to his last “round” when he emailed his investors and asked if anyone wanted to double down, and between Wednesday and Friday that same week, he had signed another $1.2m.

Reason #7 to back Zayd, “failure is not an option.” Most founders give up at 50 or so meetings, but Zayd is a cockroach. If you pushed him, if you told him fundraising would be impossible, he’d probably tell you something like, “well there at 8 billion people in the world, there have to be at least a few that will say yes.” With people like this, it’s not really a matter of “is it possible?” it’s actually a matter of “how do we make it happen?”

These kinds of people see obstacles as opportunities. The walls are high to see how well you climb or how creatively you can move through and around them. It may be obvious, but the people who live this way and who succeed at overcoming obstacles eventually leave the narrow-minded and pessimistic people back on the other side of that wall. Competition lessens because just the act of climbing over that wall becomes a competitive advantage.

How many AI SDR wrappers couldn’t raise because of perceived competition and gave up? How many persisted and played the mainstream game of mass outreach and will be competing with each other on who can deteriorate the sales function fastest?

Valley is on a different path, not because of the idea, but because of the founder who has a true set of core values, and an operating cadence to win.

Taken together, it’s not always clear at inception what the business will be, but if you invest the time and work closely with the founders, it’s often very clear who the outlier operators are. At inception stage, this is the center of bullseye.

See you Monday.