$100M Backed AI AgentㅣDecagon, Jesse Zhang

My name is Jesse. I'm one of the co-founders here at Decagon. Decagon builds AI agents primarily for large corporations on the customer support customer experience side.

As a team, we're able to hit seven figures RR in about six months and have been growing quickly since then. We're always just looking for more customers, more folks to work with, and we're growing the team as well. I was born and raised in Boulder, Colorado.

I grew up doing a lot of things like math contests, science research, stuff like that, and I ended up studying computer science at Harvard. I would say I was very focused on trying to build something, and so most of the time I spent outside of classes was towards like learning how to build things, talking to my friends about building things. I finished college fast for a bunch of different reasons.

I thought that I had already gained what I needed to from from college, and I was excited to just start building things. And so at Harvard, there was a program that allows you to graduate a year early pretty easily. After Harvard, I started my first company.

It was a very different startup. We eventually got acquired by Niantic, then decided to start this company. So specifically, the problem we're solving is a lot of these companies have very large, not that efficient operations in terms of answering customer questions, looking up data, dealing with tickets, and many of them will outsource to large bpos and things like that to have a lot of human agents answering it.

And so if you're able to use some of the new generative AI technology, you're able to automate and just improve the customer experience by answering a lot of these questions, automatically, looking up data, automatically, doing all of the sort of things that a human agent would do. Every startup's biggest advantage is you're obviously able to move quicker. You can kind of cater towards the customers a lot more and make sure that you really capture their needs.

A VC might ask you, it's like, okay, what do you do when Google starts doing this? Honestly, a lot of our advisors or investors were telling us, hey, support is going to be too crowded. It's such an obvious idea.

But on the flip side, that's also a great good thing because it allows you to get to adoption very quickly because our customers also see the value when they start using it, they immediately get ROI. This is what our customers are telling us. Our customers are telling us that there's a need here, that they're willing to pay for a solution if it works.

And so that's kind of what led us there. That's also what's made us successful in terms of competing against the older generation of chatbots, because if our customers were happy with those, then they wouldn't have told us in the first place. They want to have even mentioned that, hey, we're willing to try you out.

And so we were able to basically capture a lot of the the newer needs and a lot of what was not possible before by building from the ground up, using generative models, a lot of older players, they will have a huge product built already, and they probably have hundreds of customers. And so when they're shipping new features, they have to build things that kind of satisfy the average customer. They're slower to adapt because they have to carry along all this product they've already built out.

So I think when you're a startup like us, we've done a good job at executing. And so we we moved really fast. There's been a new technology introduced.

Right. Large language models. If you just think about the more traditional chatbots where there's some intelligence built in, but it's not AI, it's not generative.

And if you're able to adapt faster, then you have a big advantage when you're competing against them. - I think we've just built a better product. - Hi, I'm Taeyoung from you.

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And thanks to hotspot for sponsoring this video. Now back to the story. When we first started, we were very open minded.

We were not super opinionated about like, this is exactly what we need to build. We kind of just let our customers tell us what the need is. When you're early, it's hard to have a very coherent strategy.

You're just trying to get as many customers as possible. And so in the early days, it was just us trying everything we could to get new customers, get new introductions, things like that. And with each customer, we would have the same process of going in and really trying to understand what they needed and what they wanted instead of trying to push our product vision on them.

For a lot of our early customers, Vanta would be a great example. Vanta was one of our first customers. We just kind of came in with the mindset of, hey, you may have some issues that you're dealing with, and we just want to see if we can solve them in a good way.

And I think if that's your mindset, then it makes it easier because you're again, putting the customer first and really being customer driven. Fortunately, at the time, they actually did have a very concrete situation, which is around having automation to answer customer problems. It's a complicated product.

And so when people come in, they have a lot of questions, and if you're able to answer them well, then customers are happy and they're happy. So that's how we got started. We were able to ship a initial version very quickly.

They liked it. And then we tested it out on on real customers and they liked it as well. And so we just went from there.

For the first six months, we didn't build anything that wasn't a direct request from one of our customers. And now obviously we're slightly farther along. So we we have our own views on what makes a good product, but we still are extremely customer first.

We really love talking to our customers. They give us a lot of direction and that's how we approach product building. My first company, Low Key, was very different from what we're currently building.

First of all, it was a consumer company and so we didn't have paying customers off the bat. We were much more concerned about getting users and getting a lot of them very quickly. What we did was we were building software for people that played video games to capture their clips, edit them, share them and just explore clips in general.

By far it was just being a new grad and not knowing much about stuff. I was a solo founder for most of it. I didn't really know, like what things were important to work on, what things weren't.

I didn't really know how to evaluate if a good idea, if an idea was good or not. Every day you're working hard, but maybe you're not working on the right thing and just after a few months go by, it just feels like a lot of the time was wasted. So I think that's very natural for first time founders, because especially younger ones, because you don't really have that perspective.

What kept me going was more just, yeah, being young and having a lot of energy and being a little bit naive is also helpful, because you don't really have that much perspective on how hard things are or how hard things can be. So that was by far the hardest part for me. I think being a consumer, exaggerated that a bit because there is not really like customers paying a lot of money that you can talk to and like, all right, what do you need?

I'll build it. So that was by far the hardest. Once you start scaling, of course you know what you're building.

But there's still that element of, okay, you know, you're at 10,000 users. How do you get to 100,000? And then once you're at 100,000 users, how do you get to a million?

And the answer for those might not be the same. And you have to keep figuring out new things to try and things like that. And then for that company, you eventually have to figure out how do you make money.

So that's a whole nother phase. Yeah, for me, the first part is definitely the hardest. As a founder, you can always overthink things and you can always rationalize different things, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter.

You just have to get to a point where you have customers that really appreciate and value what you're doing, and that speaks for itself in terms of the growth of the business. So this time around, when we were in the very early stages of building Decagon, my co-founder Ashwin is a very similar background, also successfully sold the company before we just decided, hey, let's not overthink it. We just want to go out there and see what people actually want and what they're willing to spend money on, and that just made the initial ideation phase much easier.

And we really did not want to spend too many cycles, you know, going back and forth in that, in that stage. So I think, number one, you need to line up a lot of customer calls. And so you can get those from asking your friends to introduce you, asking investors to introduce you, reaching out cold.

And once you have them set up, you want to make sure the calls are very structured. And after you leave the call, you feel like you learned something concrete. And so part of that is, you know, you have an exploratory phase where you're kind of just listening to their problems and seeing like what could possibly be solved.

And then the next phase of the call is you're generally talking about hypothetical solutions. And then the last part of the call is super important to get a sense of like how much people would pay for it, because many times you could get in a conversation where people are telling you, oh, this would be super useful. But at the end, you know, there's no budget or they would only be willing to pay a decent a little amount.

And how much are they willing to pay for? It is the only real metric for how useful it is to them, really. And so if you're able to have a call like that, then after the call you're like, okay, well, we talked about these things and I feel like this would be really useful to them or it'll only be kind of useful to them.

And once you've had enough of those calls, that's like the real signal. And as I mentioned before, people were telling us at the time that customer support agents customer experience is super crowded. It's like too obvious of an idea.

But when we had a lot of these calls, that's what people were saying. So it just means that there's a need and people feel like there's ROI there for them to adopt something. I think when you're young, the biggest disadvantage is you just don't know how things work, really.

You might feel like you're very smart, or you can work really hard, but you don't really know, like how you make revenue or you don't really know how companies work in general. So I think the biggest thing is just staying patient with that and trying to talk to as many people as possible to get that intuition. The biggest advantage you have when you're younger is you just you can put a lot of hours in and work really hard.

I think for me, I would just describe the difference between, you know, a lot of successful entrepreneurs that know and not so successful ones is mainly just intensity. So I think a lot of our friends who have built huge companies or a lot of our advisors or investors, they all have intensity. I think it's impossible to build a big company without intensity, and intensity just kind of means like, you know, you're always going, you're always pushing.

You have a very like, no excuses attitude where you just get things done. And that's what we admire about a lot of the folks who help us, and that's what we want to have in our DNA as well. I don't know if we have the best perspective to give advice on, like a global sort of eye space level.

I think for us, the way we think about it is there's like the core fundamental players who are building new language models and building new infrastructure. We of course, sit on top of them. We are an application.

We interface with our end customers. If you're building in a space that is deep enough and is complex enough to have like a bunch of features, a bunch of product decisions and a just like a pretty big and deep product, no one really is going to be able to replace your Application because, you know, the big players are building models, right? They're not in the business of building customer support agents.

So I think that's one piece, which is what you're building has to be deep enough and complex enough for it to like, be its own product and be its own company. And I think there's a big advantage when you are the one interfacing with end customers, because when you're interfacing with end customers, you're the actual one that understands their needs. And this goes back to what I've said many times, which is you have to have a good relationship and a deep relationship with your customers, like, really understand what they need and everything they say and everything they do gets baked into your product.

You're the only one that has that right, because all the big players, the Googles of the world, the cloud providers, like you're building on top of them, but they're never going to have that access to the exact customers. I think if you're building an application, then that's important. If you're trying to make sure that a big a big player doesn't come around and just replicate your product.