Clay is an AI-powered platform for sales prospecting that gathers data from over 75 sources to build lists and help growth teams send personalized outreach messages. Recently valued at over $500M, Clay has several high-profile enterprise customers, including go-to-market teams at Intercom, Ramp, Notion, Anthropic, Verkada, Vanta, and more.

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Kareem Amin, CEO and co-founder of Clay.

Join us as we discuss: 

00:00 Preview: Picking the right customer

1:53 Lessons learned from Kareem’s first startup, Frame

4:54 Decision behind choosing acquisition for Frame

7:10 The founding insight behind Clay

9:20 Fundraising for Clay

11:52 Narrowing down the ICP for Clay

17:21 Clay’s decision to focus on growth marketers

21:12 Product feedback from early adopters

22:27 Picking the right strategy to monetize

28:37 Building the early team

32:14 Integrating GPT-3 into the product 

34:38 Clay’s product roadmap

37:00 Advice for new founders

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at sandhya@unusual.vc.

Kareem Amin is the CEO and co-founder of Clay.

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.