Samantha: And here we are. Okay. Hi Sid. How are you doing? Thanks for joining us. Okay. Welcome back to 8 Spotlight, the podcast brought to you by 8 Capital. This is where we sit down with our founders from across our portfolio to hear the stories behind the companies they're building, the pivots they've survived, and the lessons they've learned along the way. Today we're joined by Sid, co founder of Clodo.
Sid from CLODO: Excellent. Hey yeah, I'm doing good.
Samantha: Clodo is building a new kind of people discovery platform. Starting from a simple prompt, Clodo searches across hiring activity, blogs, public records, and countless other signals to identify highly qualified prospects and help companies find the right people at exactly the right time. But what makes this story especially fascinating is the journey. Less than a year ago, the company was operating under a completely different name, solving a completely different problem. After a difficult demo day, a tough fundraising process, and months spent operating in what Sid calls cockroach mode, the team has discovered a new opportunity that changed everything. Today, Clodo has become one of the fastest growing companies in its category, turning a painful pivot into a powerful business. Sid, welcome to the show.
Sid from CLODO: Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me, Samantha. ⁓ yeah, we we of course I think you you characterized it quite well. ⁓ we're we're ⁓ excited to be bringing this new kind of people discovery capability to to the world.
Samantha: Hell yeah. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about before you hit pay dirt. ⁓ so let's talk about the original vision. what was the problem you were solving and what made you passionate about it?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah, so I mean the the original problem that we were that we were solving ⁓ was essentially you could say at a high level it was helping real estate agents, residential real estate agents. ⁓ and kind of the reason we even entered that space and ⁓ kind of got pulled into it was because really just proximity, ⁓ in the sense that my mom ⁓ had been doing some real estate stuff ⁓ in in the Bay Area and then so kinda had some exposure to what was difficult there and what was ⁓ annoying in that space. And, you know, for some time for a couple of months, my co-founder Ritzbick and I, we basically, you know, went door to door ⁓ across the entire Bay Area on weekends. We basically spend our weekends like one to four PM every Saturday and Sunday driving around to open houses. We would just walk in, talk to real estate agents, be like, yo, like what's what's like annoying, like what's top of mind. Would you care about this? Would you care about that? And that would kind of that became kind of our formula for identifying, you could say, pain. And then once we kind of hit on this one problem, which was basically you could say being good at finding leads for real estate. ⁓ so like finding people who are maybe looking to buy or looking to sell, that became like a a very interesting problem that we wanted to solve because we felt that there were ways to do that. ⁓ that that had not been tapped into yet in in that industry. We had a pretty interesting time like bootstrapping that. We basically ran that for a couple of months. and then that was kind of what eventually led to us applying to YC.
Samantha: Nice. So during YC, what signals were you seeing that suggested things weren't quite clicking yet?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah, I mean I think one of the the biggest things with any startup ⁓ and and yeah, I think I think the biggest thing is like it's honestly just has to do with founder market fit. ⁓ in other words, like, you know, how you know, passionate or how ⁓ committed we were personally to the field, which I think ⁓ as the months kind of went on, you know, we had a great time scaling the real estate business. Like we were basically operational in Leave twenty one states. So we had real estate agents in all those states using the product and we get great feedback all the time. ⁓ but when we kind of thought about like, you know, the whole idea of like the infinite game and like this aspect of like, is this kind of the the place where we want to make our stand? ⁓ we increasingly were not that passionate about it, frankly. And like, I don't know, it I I think people have different perspectives on this, but our that was kind of our perspective. And then we we kind of felt, you know, let's actually try to take a step back here and and evaluate the entire field, the entire like reality as it is, and then ⁓ maybe find something even more an area that our we could we could force project way way s way more strongly. ⁓ that's kinda what ended up happening.
Samantha: Yeah, for sure. So you've been very candid about demo day not going exactly the way you hoped. What was that experience like?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah, I think so first I I should first preface it by saying like I think demo day is fantastic. I think it's great. In fact I think that's where I met ⁓ the Aid Capital team. and that being said, you know, it's like not everybody I think a lot of startups have have this experience of like not ⁓ having the best showing at demo day or like not reaching maybe what they had envisioned at the beginning of their YC experience. Or ⁓ should I like re say it?
Samantha: ⁓ y yeah, hold on. Give me one second. ⁓ I forgot to put myself on do not disturb rookie mistake. ⁓ so can you resay that?
Sid from CLODO: Okay, no worries. August. Yeah, yeah, for sure. ⁓ yeah, I mean I think a lot of companies ⁓ in YC will encounter a situation like this where maybe demo day doesn't go as exactly how they envisioned or how demoday is generally made out to be. The disclaimer, of course, is that demo day is great and is a very productive ⁓ you could say couple of hours. Like in fact that's where we met and and got acquainted to the eight capital team. but I think it's really important for founders, especially you know, folks in the current batch or, you know, future batches, to like understand that. Demo day is just not at all like a reflection of reality, straight up, right? And I can think of like a dozen founders in every batch who would agree with me on this. A lot of times they'll say that it was the moment after demo day that led to their greatest discovery or their greatest realization. In our case, it was maybe a little bit longer than that, and maybe it wasn't the day after. It was probably ⁓ a couple of months after after demo day, where we kind of really figured out. what was going on in terms of a a very interesting vertical for us. But ⁓ yeah, I think just not putting too much weight on demo day, just treating it as a as a spectacle because that's what it is. and then focusing on the business I think is really the key.
Samantha: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, demo day is in fact only a day. And then you have the rest of your time the rest of your life to build that business. So ⁓ okay. So after the batch and after demo day, you entered what I referenced as you calling the cockroach survival mode. Can you elaborate a little bit on this and what that kind of looked like day to day?
Sid from CLODO: Mm-hmm. Correct. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I mean I think my my co-founder has a pretty eloquent ⁓ write-up on this. after demo day, you know, we kind of already were pretty certain that we wanted to re-evaluate the areas that we wanted to focus on. So we kind of you could say maintained a some some semblance of discipline. Like I think I I would probably credit that to helping us quite a bit. Like we made sure to you know, keep each other accountable. I think that's like the number one thing that founders ought to do. ⁓ we got a lot of great advice from YC too, right? Like there's a common saying that from from from our YC partners, which is that most startups don't die of homicide, they die of suicide. and, you know, for any number of reasons that could be for any number of reasons. But again, Rythvik and I we've basically been friends since like middle school. So For us, you know, building a company, it's just like it's just like one aspect of our time together, right? So ⁓ as far as tactically what we were doing, you know, this basically every every day, Monday through well, even weekends, ⁓ we basically meet up at the library. So Cupertino Public Library ⁓ was where you could say it was our informal office. And ⁓ we s in some cases ⁓ would host other ⁓ YC founders, like if they wanted to come say hi and stuff, we'd be like, ⁓ yeah, like our office is in Cupertino. It's like, ⁓ this address looks like the library. Are you sure this is it? It's like, yeah, that's the one. And then ⁓ yeah. But yeah, I think just kind of keeping ourselves accountable and then sticking to a process, talking to customers all the time, and then just being curious, I think, was what kind of ⁓ helped us eventually uncover ⁓ a very interesting problem for us to solve. And I think I think most founders who go through something like this would agree with that. ⁓
Samantha: Huh.
Sid from CLODO: Maybe one last point on this too is that I think overall there are YC founders who who their pivot stories are, you know, sometimes years even, right? In terms of like how long it takes to really identify something. So in that sense I think we always felt supported and we felt like we we had like the Y C community ⁓ behind us ⁓ every step of the way.
Samantha: Yeah, for sure. So what kept you going during a period when things weren't working yet?
Sid from CLODO: let's see. I mean I I I would say like honestly, like a combination of accountability to like you know, like between us as co-founders, like you know, we have like this responsibility to stay committed for the sake of the other guy, right? I think is kind of like our mentality, ⁓ at a lot of times. But I think also in some respect it's like we saw it as a as a privilege. Like we saw this opportunity to work on you know, like a company and and kind of do our own kind of startup and everything as a as a as a tremendous privilege and opportunity. So I think not taking it for granted is really what kept us going, right? Because like at the end of the day, sure, you might have like a your your, you know, ARR and stuff might be flat and and all these things, but ultimately it's still all in the context of this tremendous opportunity here, ⁓ to build a company and and kind of work on the on the frontier, right? So I think when we look at that looked at it in perspective at times, it was very easy for us to just like lock back in and be like, Yeah, hey, it's like it's no big deal. Let's just let's just figure it out.
Samantha: That's beautiful. So one of my favorite parts of your story is how your breakthrough to Clodo happened almost by accident. Can you walk through that moment?
Sid from CLODO: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. So essentially ⁓ this was one of the one of the evenings at the at the Cupertino Public Library. and as we were kind of evaluating ⁓ different spaces you could say for for some of our ideas, we were doing a lot of discovery. So we were doing a lot of outbound, right? Like I would, you know, reach out to people, like pester them on LinkedIn or email them in some cases like, Hey, is this like a problem? Like what like what do you think about this? And then like just like a lot of Outbound, frankly, right? Like a lot of like looking for specific types of people and then trying to reach out to them. And then that's when we kind of realized that in some respects, some of the technology that we had built for the foundations of during our real estate lead ⁓ lead gen activities ⁓ actually had a little bit of similarity to the problem that we ourselves were encountering here, right? ⁓ and so kind of on the basis of that, we built like a little Internal, you could say, like Skunkworks version of that kind of you could say ⁓ prospecting tool in some sense, right? Where we could type in the hypothesis or the idea of what you know we were thinking about. And then on the other end would basically come a list of people that I should absolutely be reaching out to and talking to. And that became like a pretty significant acceler our ⁓ discovery. Right. And eventually led to some of our first customers for our new ⁓ product. Right. And that's when we kind of realized like, hang on a second, like we might have, you know, accidentally created the thing that's quite useful to folks. And then we had shared it to some people that we worked with at at our previous jobs and were like, Hey, would this be useful for like, I don't know, prospecting or sourcing? And you know, pretty much like within forty-eight, seventy-two hours we'd get messages back like, Hell yeah, I'm ready to cancel everything and and just go with this. And then ⁓ s kind of took it from there.
Samantha: That's awesome. So what was going through your mind when people became more excited about the tool and that your product was actually becoming?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah. I I think ⁓ on some level Rythvik and I are our our base our base emotion is like some healthy level of paranoia. So we were always like, Are they messing with us? Like are they are they just like saying that to, you know, make us like feel good and stuff like that. So we'd be very relentless in our line of questioning, like how specifically is this better than LinkedIn recruiter? Like how specifically is this better than sales navigator? ⁓ even to the extent of like just watching them use the tool, like just sitting next to them and like watch them use the different platforms. And that's when we realized that yeah, like there is this tangible, like mega savings of time and effort ⁓ when you use Clodo to search for these people you're looking for. ⁓ and then from that point it just became like a you could say engineering problem, right? It's like we then started to worry about like, ⁓ how do we make sure it's reliable? Like how do we make sure that when, you know, for example our Some of our early customers, right? It's like they're on different time zones in some cases, like right. Like someone in in Paris is trying to use the product and then that's the exact moment when we're trying to redeploy something, right? So all these kinds of pains I think became very top of mind for us super quickly. ⁓ and kind of led to our ⁓ you could say ⁓ infrastructure being ⁓ top of top of focus all the time.
Samantha: So What specifically makes Clodo different from other traditional existing prospecting tools?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah. I break it into like two pieces. So the first is basically the experience that we deliver ⁓ to customers. So most tools traditionally involve you having to do some combination of like, you know, toggling a bunch of different filters and then maybe when at the end, once you've kind of configured those sixteen or seventeen different filters, you'll get a list of thirty two hundred people that the software is claiming are relevant to your search criteria. ⁓ and this is just the inherent problem with most of these ⁓ you could say structured database like people databases. But in our case, it's like we're providing this new capability where you can just prompt in very detailed fashion the exact criteria for what you're looking for, and just with a click of a button, Clodo is gonna surface up those people. No, you know, filter manipulation, no having to really investigate whether someone's a good fit, like it's going to be a good fit. the second thing I would say is of course the extent to which we're tracking signals and you could say indicators ⁓ for what a fit looks like. ⁓ for example, we have customers that will oftentimes be looking for very specific kinds of researchers, right? So these are folks who a lot of these researchers nowadays it's a point of pride to not have a LinkedIn presence. So a lot of times They might have like a super minimal like landing page, maybe, like, and then besides that, the only real indicator of who they are is their publication history. So our agents will basically sift through research history and identify and triangulate that in fact, yes, this is the list of the 25 dexterity researchers that you're looking for, right? So that's like an example of a type of signal that we tap into. We of course look at all kinds of things like ⁓ hiring activity, investment. ⁓ activity you will pay attention to things like GitHub contributions, ⁓ Google Maps. So really a a full fledged, you could say, search ⁓ for the people that you're looking for.
Samantha: Well. What do you think traditional lead generation lessons leave so much room for improvement?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah. frankly I think it's like there's a huge disconnect between the intent of a search and what the traditional tools make available. So a lot of times when you look at, say, recruiting, right? When you're recruiting for, you know, ⁓ like a member of technical staff role, a lot of times your your intent is to look for people who maybe would fit really well with this self driving project that you're doing and have a track record of like side projects and research that they've done. But on a traditional lead gen platform or prospecting or sourcing tool, you're really just restricted to things like maybe job title, maybe companies that they've worked at in the past. So there's this huge gap between what actually qualifies as a good fit for the type of search that you have in mind versus what you're kind of left with ⁓ to just fend for yourself with a bunch of filters.
Samantha: So Clodo doesn't just stop at finding prospects. It also helps to determine what to say to them. What helped inspire that second later layer of this product?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah, so I mean certainly I would say personal experience. So it's like once I was finding these people on our little internal discovery tool back in the day, I would spend a lot of time thinking about what to say. Right. So I would maybe research like their LinkedIn and I'm sure, you know, recruiters and and GTM operators have all faced this problem where like they'll look at this person's LinkedIn, they'll maybe like find their like Twitter and they'll kind of think about like what's something, you know, interesting that I can say without sounding like too creepy at the same time. and so kind of on the basis of that we made sure that our agents would be capable of doing the same thing where they're capable of producing tasteful outbound, but still not like creepy. Like maybe you don't want it to mention something that it would be really odd for you to like know about their like something that they had posted on Facebook or something like that. so yeah, keeping things tasteful, but at the same time implying ⁓ you could say relation to certain signal that we've identified in those prospects.
Samantha: So okay, let's clarify here. What does tasteful outbound mean exactly?
Sid from CLODO: Sure. Yeah. So I think the the main kind of realization for us is that the biggest driver of taste is relevance. And the biggest driver of relevance is really timing. So because we have the signal on whether someone is they're looking to buy a certain product, right? Maybe that's because they put out a job posting for a, let's say, event manager, right? That's like a great signal if you're a like a like a company that makes like merchandise, right? Like so if you make like t shirts or socks, things that companies generally give out at these ⁓ conferences, that would be a great time to write in a really simp really simple email where you don't need to go overboard and just like regurgitate the person's LinkedIn history back to them. But you can simply ask a question like, ⁓ hey, are you thinking about going to the Databricks data and AI summit? ⁓ we can hook you up with like five hundred pairs of socks to give out at the booth. And it's like the only reason that outbound will work is because of the timing and because we know with a reasonable amount of certainty that they will respond and react to that outbound. ⁓ it's kind of a different paradigm I would say to like traditional prospecting tools because I think for the longest time the paradigm has been spray and pray, right? It's like, can we how can I how can I make you think that a lot of work is going on? Well, ⁓ look, I've sent six thousand emails today, right? So a lot of ⁓ activity going on but not a lot of productivity going And that's kind of I think where we're we're trying to flip the script on that.
Samantha: Okay, so how this sounds like a dream to be honest, like it sounds extremely useful, but how do you maintain personalization at scale for all of these people without falling into what one might call AI generated slot?
Sid from CLODO: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so I think ultimately if it's the right time and if it's the right person, they actually don't care all that much. Because at the end of the day, I think people are like at least what we've observed, is like if it is an automated email, and even if it does, you know, have your your ⁓ your ⁓ dashes and your it's not this, it's that, like it even if it has all those markers. If it's something relevant to the problem that they're facing at that moment or an opportunity that they're looking for at that moment, all all bets are off. And that's kind of, I would say, our our main strength. And is a trade-off, right? It's like on Clodo, we're not going to be helping you send six thousand emails a day, right? We're going to maybe help you send a hundred emails a day. But those hundred emails, we can make certain inferences about how productive those are going to be in comparison to Let's say the six thousand. So it's really about timing and relevance. And then of course in the email itself, you know, we'll try not to do things like, Hey, saw that you're a insert job title at insert company. it'll be a lot more actionable, a lot more direct, which I think ⁓ overall I think the culture just just yearns for. So yeah.
Samantha: I love that word, yearn. So, okay, since launching in January, Clodo has grown from zero to significant, let's just say, ARR, in just a matter of weeks. What do you attribute that early growth to?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah, I think ⁓ I think in fact you kind of hinted at it earlier, ⁓ which was when people hear the idea of the product and they hear the concept, right, of like what Clodo is presumably promising, they basically think it's magic, right? They think it's like, yes, that's like the dream scenario. ⁓ that's exactly what I would want. And I think there are a lot of tools that in the past I think have promised this capability, but when people see it happening just within the first one hour of using Clodo, it we basically get messages from people within the first hour saying like this is insane. This is like absolutely nuts. I just got a meeting booked in like two two hours with like two CFOs ⁓ in the Fortune five hundred. And that just leads to a lot of word of mouth. Like in fact that's probably our biggest driver right now. ⁓ I would say we also did like, you know, we we do a healthy amount of, you know, posting on LinkedIn about like cool use cases that people are doing. That's been one pretty big driver of ⁓ of ⁓ sign ups and and ⁓ inbound but yeah honestly like I I couldn't tell you where the you know w where where these people are all meeting up but they are but they are meeting up somehow and ⁓ and we're getting them to kinda reach out and they'll say like yeah I heard about this from ⁓ my friend at this conference. ⁓ and yeah that's kind of I think we we think we think the product is is the main thing and when we do that then it kind of just sells itself.
Samantha: So did the speed of growth surprise you at all?
Sid from CLODO: ⁓ Kind of. Like I think w I think I think we had a pretty good sense that this is just a capability that so many people have always wanted that we kind of had a good sense I think already that ⁓ it would it would work out this way. Like we had pretty good conviction about that. but yeah I think I'm s I I think one thing that has been surprising is the variety of use cases. Like we now have, you know The same tool is being the same tool that's being used by YC founders and recruiters is also being used by you could say ⁓ elements of our national security apparatus, right? Like they're using it to maybe find certain kinds of ⁓ you could say talent for certain projects and and things of that nature, ⁓ certain kind of expertise. So there's an extremely wide gamut of ⁓ of use cases for for people discovery. ⁓ and I think that's if anything been the most surprising thing.
Samantha: That's really cool. So how different does the company feel today compared to where you were immediately after demo day?
Sid from CLODO: ⁓ yeah. Yeah, d I mean definitely ⁓ qu quite a quite a difference. ⁓ I think after demo day we certainly were, you know, a little bit ⁓ you know, s sad, you know, by by maybe how how things ⁓ went and stuff, but I I think we we pretty much like you know, continued on ⁓ from there pretty pretty easily as well. ⁓ I think the biggest thing nowadays is like You could say a sense of responsibility, right? Like we now have customers in, you know, national security, ⁓ in in the d in the defense space, in you could say some of like the expert sourcing ⁓ type ⁓ type type ⁓ industries, large recruiting firms. So there's just a sense of I think responsibility that maybe ⁓ we weren't ⁓ you could say acquainted with in the past, but ⁓ I think now We we definitely feel that way.
Samantha: Okay, rewinding a little bit. What's the craziest thing you had to do to keep your company going when you were still pivoting?
Sid from CLODO: Let's see. I mean, my my like the th there's certainly things like that I c that I can th if I think a little longer I can think of. But I mean, we basically met at the library from open to close for like a hundred like a hundred and twenty days straight, right? So I think I think in some sense maybe that's like a a a crazy one. ⁓ like we're we're on a first name basis with the librarians there, right? Like 'cause they we're like the la literally the last people to leave. every night. ⁓ so I think we're we're like part of the cast of characters at at that public library and ⁓ I that's that's the really the only thing that comes to mind right now.
Samantha: That's okay. Okay, so let's go to what you learned from the pivot. Your story is a great example of why founders shouldn't let a difficult demo day define them. What did that experience teach you about persistence?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah. I I mean I think on some level, like Ritzvik and I ha have have sort of dealt with stuff like this before, right? Like we've had our fair share of ⁓ you could say like things that we've had to work for a couple times before we got it. like in in my case, right, it's like I I really wanted to go to a a certain university. I didn't get in the first time, I eventually transferred to that university, right? So it's like I think we It's not it's not uncommon to us. I think overall, ⁓ I'd say yeah, persistence is definitely definitely one thing, but I think adaptability too, right? 'Cause it's like you want to make sure that you're not like being too stubborn to the point where you're committing to maybe like an idea and trying to make it work. But I think in our case we made sure to always, you know, talk with customers, talk with people, stay curious and and kind of ⁓ be open to what the world is asking from us.
Samantha: So that leads to my next question, actually. How did you know when to keep pushing versus when it was time to pivot?
Sid from CLODO: Mm-hmm. ⁓ That's good question. ⁓ I think I think really the the test is like when when we were speaking to for example like our customers ⁓ i in in in the previous iteration ⁓ or the previous product that we were working on, you know, we would oftentimes do things like, Hey, if if this product was to like go away, right? Like if it suddenly if something were to happen and like it just got completely ethered, like what like what how would you react to that, right? so heuristics like that. I think we're very helpful. And then I think once we kinda learn like, yeah, it's more of like a nice to have, not a need to have. That's when we kind of were like, Okay, yeah, I think objectively speaking, we can say that, you know, we should we should try to change direction here. So we did put ourselves to the test in that way, like objectively, trying to put some metrics to it and and measuring it that way too.
Samantha: What advice would you give to founders who are going through their own pivot?
Sid from CLODO: I think I think I think a great thing is ⁓ and I think Paul Graham has a little piece on this too, which is like I think curiosity is a really, really good thing to have, right? It's like when you're curious, then it's like you kind of maximize your I think the exact words that he uses are like it maximizes your surface area for luck, right? ⁓ because when you're curious and you kind of optimize for doing and witnessing interesting things, you open yourself up to maybe noticing like a problem that you can solve, right? Or maybe ⁓ a relationship that then leads to you finding a problem that you can solve. ⁓ so I think as long as you optimize for that throughout the process, then it kind of keeps you in the game, so to speak. I I think that would be kind of like my like learning and also ⁓ like Rhythmik and I's advice on this.
Samantha: Okay, I like it. How okay. We've traveled ten years in the future. Where do you see Clodo?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah, so I I think ⁓ yeah, we we've we've certainly thought about this quite a bit, both ourselves and also with with some of our customers. And I think we're already seeing shades of it where increasingly, particularly, ⁓ I would say in the ⁓ like you could say larger ⁓ recruiting agencies and and sourcing agencies, we're now seeing not a majority, but like a growing proportion of Clodo usage coming from agents and not Folks operating our platform. And that kinds of, you know, if you just follow that trend line, we can kind of imagine that in the future, when software collapses, right, ⁓ there will only really be maybe a handful of core primitives that every agent and every organization needs to have, right? Maybe one of them would be ⁓ authentication and like identity verification. One of them might be something related to payments. And it's our belief that one of those core primitives will be people discovered. Right. This ability to find your next hire, the ability to find your next buyer, right? Or maybe anybody else in between. So if you if you think about like what proportion of the human economy is dedicated to just finding the right person, it's a big amount, right? So it's our view that in the future it'll be agents basically ⁓ committing themselves to this primitive and Clodo's the way the data layer and the the ⁓ operational layer that they're gonna be able to get this thing done.
Samantha: Okay, interesting. Okay, five years from now, we're going a little bit, we're rewinding again. How do you see prospecting evolving within the next five years? Because we talked a little bit about long term.
Sid from CLODO: Sure. Sure. Yeah. I so I I I think so I think there's gonna be ⁓ so right now, right, if you see like the types of signals that we're picking up, a lot of it is in some sense like unintentional signal, right? It's like we're picking up the breadcrumbs that a person or an organization is maybe unintentionally leaving behind, right? ⁓ in the sense of like maybe they've, you know, interacted with something on LinkedIn or maybe they've ⁓ contributed to a certain repository on GitHub or things like that. But our kind of hypothesis is that we're gonna see a lot more willing, ⁓ and almost intentional ⁓ breadcrumb leaving. And and the reason I say that is because in the same way that we're seeing things like AEO and GEO kind of take over for products, the same thing is likely going to happen with people too, right? Because if you want to make yourself legible to the systems that are looking for potential candidates or looking for potential vendors, you're gonna have to make yourself really known in this kind of ⁓ network, right? And make yourself legible to agents. And so when that happens, we think the fidelity of the Clodo search, right, which right now you could say is operating on a handicap, which is that we're only looking at unintentional signal, ⁓ is only gonna get so much better and so much more higher fidelity. and I think it's gonna lead to a lot of efficiency gain overall, like in markets like labor and ⁓ and vendor ⁓ like vendors vendors distribution, things like that.
Samantha: Interesting. That's pretty cool. Okay, I always like to ask this one, just because I always think it the answer the answers range and I think that's interesting. What is the favorite way you've ever seen anyone use your product?
Sid from CLODO: Mm-hmm. ⁓ That's good one. ⁓ ⁓ yeah, yeah. Okay. So so there was one ⁓ there's one particularly funny one where basically one of our customers, ⁓ this is a in the manufacturing industry, so this is ⁓ company that makes like very expensive ⁓ CNC machines and and stuff like that. ⁓ they primarily use our product for prospecting and vendor sourcing. And essentially one of our users met someone at a conference, right? ⁓ and was yeah, that's a great conversation with this person, but forgot to get their name and like forgot to get their even LinkedIn or anything really. And also, to make matters worse, didn't fully remember their name as well, right? Like all they remembered was that their first name was like Mike, and then the last name was like they just remember how it was pronounced, roughly speaking, right? Like it was like Balin or Waylin or something like that. And that day, like once he returned to the hotel. Typed into Clodo, like I'm looking for someone that I I met at this conference. I think they work at three ⁓ Their name is like Mike Balin or Waylin or something like that. I don't remember. Like can you find it for me? And it found the guy. And it turned out that the name was actually spelled B it's like it's like B J E L L A N D. So it's like it's it is pronounced like Baland, but it's it's it's just like a different kind of unconventional spelling, which w really would have been impossible to do otherwise. ⁓
Samantha: ⁓ my gosh.
Sid from CLODO: So I think that was one that definitely made us ⁓ quite excited.
Samantha: Okay, yeah. That's both funny and encouraging. So I can see why you went with that one.
Sid from CLODO: Yeah, yeah. It's it's kind of like it's kinda like how people were trying to find music like before Shazam, right? It's like they would try to like ⁓ like enunciate the the music in the Google search and then Google would just be like, Yeah, you're like losing your mind and then so it's kind of ⁓ you could say we're we're solving that.
Samantha: Very, very cool. Okay, so is there anything that you would like to talk about that I have missed?
Sid from CLODO: let's see. Yeah, I guess I guess I can like briefly give a little spiel on like the the types of say like use cases that I think we're seeing on on Clodo, like maybe just like enumerate some of them. Okay, cool. Yeah, well Yeah, I mean because Clodo is is this extremely powerful people discovery tool, right, for finding and reaching ⁓ these exact target personas, we're seeing people in defense use it, intelligence use it.
Samantha: Yeah, for sure.
Sid from CLODO: ⁓ we're seeing people in the recruiting space use it to find these exact candidates based on maybe GitHub contributions, publishing history. ⁓ and it's really powering some of the most specific people sourcing workloads ⁓ in the world today. ⁓ and that's kind of I think what gets us really excited about not only our product, but ⁓ about how a lot of these high friction spaces like labor and sourcing are are gonna get a lot more ⁓ effective for sure. And I think also something that gets us quite excited as well is ⁓ we're seeing a lot of these this this is a particularly interesting one that that's come up too is like we're seeing a lot of the reinforcement learning ⁓ environment companies, the companies that produce some of this very curated expert niche data using our platform today as well to find those experts, to find those people to curate that data, which then ⁓ of course gets ⁓ you know, pumped back into the model labs ⁓ and you know ⁓ ultimately improves the AI models that we benefit from and use all the time. So I think certainly the the reinforcement learning ⁓ use case is one that gets us quite excited. And then certainly we see a lot of ⁓ expert networks, which I'm sure perhaps you guys might have used in in the VC capacity, but a lot of these expert network firms that are you know servicing PE and hedge funds, they're using Clodo to find those exact experts that their clients want to talk to. I would say those are the those last two use cases are the ones that we're most excited about ⁓ and spending the most time on, I would say.
Samantha: Okay. Well, I can't wait to check it out.
Sid from CLODO: Absolutely.
Samantha: Alright. Well, thank you, Sid. Your story is a reminder that some of the best companies don't emerge from perfect plans. They emerge from listening closely to customers, adapting quickly, and staying in the game long enough to discover something that people truly want. So thank you for joining us on 8 Spotlight.
Sid from CLODO: Yeah, for sure. I think ⁓ on on that note, like I think ⁓ a great quote is ⁓ Mike Tyson's. It's ⁓ Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. So I think ⁓ you just gotta get that that's an occupational hazard if you're a founder in twenty twenty six. So
Samantha: Mm-hmm. You just gotta get punched in the mouth.
Sid from CLODO: Indeed, yeah, repeatedly.
Samantha: Mm-hmm. Until you know, you find something that makes it stop. All right, Sid, have a great one. Bye.
Sid from CLODO: Yeah, exactly. Awesome. Thanks Samantha. Bye.
Sid from CLODO: Excellent. Hey yeah, I'm doing good.
Samantha: Clodo is building a new kind of people discovery platform. Starting from a simple prompt, Clodo searches across hiring activity, blogs, public records, and countless other signals to identify highly qualified prospects and help companies find the right people at exactly the right time. But what makes this story especially fascinating is the journey. Less than a year ago, the company was operating under a completely different name, solving a completely different problem. After a difficult demo day, a tough fundraising process, and months spent operating in what Sid calls cockroach mode, the team has discovered a new opportunity that changed everything. Today, Clodo has become one of the fastest growing companies in its category, turning a painful pivot into a powerful business. Sid, welcome to the show.
Sid from CLODO: Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me, Samantha. ⁓ yeah, we we of course I think you you characterized it quite well. ⁓ we're we're ⁓ excited to be bringing this new kind of people discovery capability to to the world.
Samantha: Hell yeah. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about before you hit pay dirt. ⁓ so let's talk about the original vision. what was the problem you were solving and what made you passionate about it?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah, so I mean the the original problem that we were that we were solving ⁓ was essentially you could say at a high level it was helping real estate agents, residential real estate agents. ⁓ and kind of the reason we even entered that space and ⁓ kind of got pulled into it was because really just proximity, ⁓ in the sense that my mom ⁓ had been doing some real estate stuff ⁓ in in the Bay Area and then so kinda had some exposure to what was difficult there and what was ⁓ annoying in that space. And, you know, for some time for a couple of months, my co-founder Ritzbick and I, we basically, you know, went door to door ⁓ across the entire Bay Area on weekends. We basically spend our weekends like one to four PM every Saturday and Sunday driving around to open houses. We would just walk in, talk to real estate agents, be like, yo, like what's what's like annoying, like what's top of mind. Would you care about this? Would you care about that? And that would kind of that became kind of our formula for identifying, you could say, pain. And then once we kind of hit on this one problem, which was basically you could say being good at finding leads for real estate. ⁓ so like finding people who are maybe looking to buy or looking to sell, that became like a a very interesting problem that we wanted to solve because we felt that there were ways to do that. ⁓ that that had not been tapped into yet in in that industry. We had a pretty interesting time like bootstrapping that. We basically ran that for a couple of months. and then that was kind of what eventually led to us applying to YC.
Samantha: Nice. So during YC, what signals were you seeing that suggested things weren't quite clicking yet?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah, I mean I think one of the the biggest things with any startup ⁓ and and yeah, I think I think the biggest thing is like it's honestly just has to do with founder market fit. ⁓ in other words, like, you know, how you know, passionate or how ⁓ committed we were personally to the field, which I think ⁓ as the months kind of went on, you know, we had a great time scaling the real estate business. Like we were basically operational in Leave twenty one states. So we had real estate agents in all those states using the product and we get great feedback all the time. ⁓ but when we kind of thought about like, you know, the whole idea of like the infinite game and like this aspect of like, is this kind of the the place where we want to make our stand? ⁓ we increasingly were not that passionate about it, frankly. And like, I don't know, it I I think people have different perspectives on this, but our that was kind of our perspective. And then we we kind of felt, you know, let's actually try to take a step back here and and evaluate the entire field, the entire like reality as it is, and then ⁓ maybe find something even more an area that our we could we could force project way way s way more strongly. ⁓ that's kinda what ended up happening.
Samantha: Yeah, for sure. So you've been very candid about demo day not going exactly the way you hoped. What was that experience like?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah, I think so first I I should first preface it by saying like I think demo day is fantastic. I think it's great. In fact I think that's where I met ⁓ the Aid Capital team. and that being said, you know, it's like not everybody I think a lot of startups have have this experience of like not ⁓ having the best showing at demo day or like not reaching maybe what they had envisioned at the beginning of their YC experience. Or ⁓ should I like re say it?
Samantha: ⁓ y yeah, hold on. Give me one second. ⁓ I forgot to put myself on do not disturb rookie mistake. ⁓ so can you resay that?
Sid from CLODO: Okay, no worries. August. Yeah, yeah, for sure. ⁓ yeah, I mean I think a lot of companies ⁓ in YC will encounter a situation like this where maybe demo day doesn't go as exactly how they envisioned or how demoday is generally made out to be. The disclaimer, of course, is that demo day is great and is a very productive ⁓ you could say couple of hours. Like in fact that's where we met and and got acquainted to the eight capital team. but I think it's really important for founders, especially you know, folks in the current batch or, you know, future batches, to like understand that. Demo day is just not at all like a reflection of reality, straight up, right? And I can think of like a dozen founders in every batch who would agree with me on this. A lot of times they'll say that it was the moment after demo day that led to their greatest discovery or their greatest realization. In our case, it was maybe a little bit longer than that, and maybe it wasn't the day after. It was probably ⁓ a couple of months after after demo day, where we kind of really figured out. what was going on in terms of a a very interesting vertical for us. But ⁓ yeah, I think just not putting too much weight on demo day, just treating it as a as a spectacle because that's what it is. and then focusing on the business I think is really the key.
Samantha: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, demo day is in fact only a day. And then you have the rest of your time the rest of your life to build that business. So ⁓ okay. So after the batch and after demo day, you entered what I referenced as you calling the cockroach survival mode. Can you elaborate a little bit on this and what that kind of looked like day to day?
Sid from CLODO: Mm-hmm. Correct. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I mean I think my my co-founder has a pretty eloquent ⁓ write-up on this. after demo day, you know, we kind of already were pretty certain that we wanted to re-evaluate the areas that we wanted to focus on. So we kind of you could say maintained a some some semblance of discipline. Like I think I I would probably credit that to helping us quite a bit. Like we made sure to you know, keep each other accountable. I think that's like the number one thing that founders ought to do. ⁓ we got a lot of great advice from YC too, right? Like there's a common saying that from from from our YC partners, which is that most startups don't die of homicide, they die of suicide. and, you know, for any number of reasons that could be for any number of reasons. But again, Rythvik and I we've basically been friends since like middle school. So For us, you know, building a company, it's just like it's just like one aspect of our time together, right? So ⁓ as far as tactically what we were doing, you know, this basically every every day, Monday through well, even weekends, ⁓ we basically meet up at the library. So Cupertino Public Library ⁓ was where you could say it was our informal office. And ⁓ we s in some cases ⁓ would host other ⁓ YC founders, like if they wanted to come say hi and stuff, we'd be like, ⁓ yeah, like our office is in Cupertino. It's like, ⁓ this address looks like the library. Are you sure this is it? It's like, yeah, that's the one. And then ⁓ yeah. But yeah, I think just kind of keeping ourselves accountable and then sticking to a process, talking to customers all the time, and then just being curious, I think, was what kind of ⁓ helped us eventually uncover ⁓ a very interesting problem for us to solve. And I think I think most founders who go through something like this would agree with that. ⁓
Samantha: Huh.
Sid from CLODO: Maybe one last point on this too is that I think overall there are YC founders who who their pivot stories are, you know, sometimes years even, right? In terms of like how long it takes to really identify something. So in that sense I think we always felt supported and we felt like we we had like the Y C community ⁓ behind us ⁓ every step of the way.
Samantha: Yeah, for sure. So what kept you going during a period when things weren't working yet?
Sid from CLODO: let's see. I mean I I I would say like honestly, like a combination of accountability to like you know, like between us as co-founders, like you know, we have like this responsibility to stay committed for the sake of the other guy, right? I think is kind of like our mentality, ⁓ at a lot of times. But I think also in some respect it's like we saw it as a as a privilege. Like we saw this opportunity to work on you know, like a company and and kind of do our own kind of startup and everything as a as a as a tremendous privilege and opportunity. So I think not taking it for granted is really what kept us going, right? Because like at the end of the day, sure, you might have like a your your, you know, ARR and stuff might be flat and and all these things, but ultimately it's still all in the context of this tremendous opportunity here, ⁓ to build a company and and kind of work on the on the frontier, right? So I think when we look at that looked at it in perspective at times, it was very easy for us to just like lock back in and be like, Yeah, hey, it's like it's no big deal. Let's just let's just figure it out.
Samantha: That's beautiful. So one of my favorite parts of your story is how your breakthrough to Clodo happened almost by accident. Can you walk through that moment?
Sid from CLODO: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. So essentially ⁓ this was one of the one of the evenings at the at the Cupertino Public Library. and as we were kind of evaluating ⁓ different spaces you could say for for some of our ideas, we were doing a lot of discovery. So we were doing a lot of outbound, right? Like I would, you know, reach out to people, like pester them on LinkedIn or email them in some cases like, Hey, is this like a problem? Like what like what do you think about this? And then like just like a lot of Outbound, frankly, right? Like a lot of like looking for specific types of people and then trying to reach out to them. And then that's when we kind of realized that in some respects, some of the technology that we had built for the foundations of during our real estate lead ⁓ lead gen activities ⁓ actually had a little bit of similarity to the problem that we ourselves were encountering here, right? ⁓ and so kind of on the basis of that, we built like a little Internal, you could say, like Skunkworks version of that kind of you could say ⁓ prospecting tool in some sense, right? Where we could type in the hypothesis or the idea of what you know we were thinking about. And then on the other end would basically come a list of people that I should absolutely be reaching out to and talking to. And that became like a pretty significant acceler our ⁓ discovery. Right. And eventually led to some of our first customers for our new ⁓ product. Right. And that's when we kind of realized like, hang on a second, like we might have, you know, accidentally created the thing that's quite useful to folks. And then we had shared it to some people that we worked with at at our previous jobs and were like, Hey, would this be useful for like, I don't know, prospecting or sourcing? And you know, pretty much like within forty-eight, seventy-two hours we'd get messages back like, Hell yeah, I'm ready to cancel everything and and just go with this. And then ⁓ s kind of took it from there.
Samantha: That's awesome. So what was going through your mind when people became more excited about the tool and that your product was actually becoming?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah. I I think ⁓ on some level Rythvik and I are our our base our base emotion is like some healthy level of paranoia. So we were always like, Are they messing with us? Like are they are they just like saying that to, you know, make us like feel good and stuff like that. So we'd be very relentless in our line of questioning, like how specifically is this better than LinkedIn recruiter? Like how specifically is this better than sales navigator? ⁓ even to the extent of like just watching them use the tool, like just sitting next to them and like watch them use the different platforms. And that's when we realized that yeah, like there is this tangible, like mega savings of time and effort ⁓ when you use Clodo to search for these people you're looking for. ⁓ and then from that point it just became like a you could say engineering problem, right? It's like we then started to worry about like, ⁓ how do we make sure it's reliable? Like how do we make sure that when, you know, for example our Some of our early customers, right? It's like they're on different time zones in some cases, like right. Like someone in in Paris is trying to use the product and then that's the exact moment when we're trying to redeploy something, right? So all these kinds of pains I think became very top of mind for us super quickly. ⁓ and kind of led to our ⁓ you could say ⁓ infrastructure being ⁓ top of top of focus all the time.
Samantha: So What specifically makes Clodo different from other traditional existing prospecting tools?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah. I break it into like two pieces. So the first is basically the experience that we deliver ⁓ to customers. So most tools traditionally involve you having to do some combination of like, you know, toggling a bunch of different filters and then maybe when at the end, once you've kind of configured those sixteen or seventeen different filters, you'll get a list of thirty two hundred people that the software is claiming are relevant to your search criteria. ⁓ and this is just the inherent problem with most of these ⁓ you could say structured database like people databases. But in our case, it's like we're providing this new capability where you can just prompt in very detailed fashion the exact criteria for what you're looking for, and just with a click of a button, Clodo is gonna surface up those people. No, you know, filter manipulation, no having to really investigate whether someone's a good fit, like it's going to be a good fit. the second thing I would say is of course the extent to which we're tracking signals and you could say indicators ⁓ for what a fit looks like. ⁓ for example, we have customers that will oftentimes be looking for very specific kinds of researchers, right? So these are folks who a lot of these researchers nowadays it's a point of pride to not have a LinkedIn presence. So a lot of times They might have like a super minimal like landing page, maybe, like, and then besides that, the only real indicator of who they are is their publication history. So our agents will basically sift through research history and identify and triangulate that in fact, yes, this is the list of the 25 dexterity researchers that you're looking for, right? So that's like an example of a type of signal that we tap into. We of course look at all kinds of things like ⁓ hiring activity, investment. ⁓ activity you will pay attention to things like GitHub contributions, ⁓ Google Maps. So really a a full fledged, you could say, search ⁓ for the people that you're looking for.
Samantha: Well. What do you think traditional lead generation lessons leave so much room for improvement?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah. frankly I think it's like there's a huge disconnect between the intent of a search and what the traditional tools make available. So a lot of times when you look at, say, recruiting, right? When you're recruiting for, you know, ⁓ like a member of technical staff role, a lot of times your your intent is to look for people who maybe would fit really well with this self driving project that you're doing and have a track record of like side projects and research that they've done. But on a traditional lead gen platform or prospecting or sourcing tool, you're really just restricted to things like maybe job title, maybe companies that they've worked at in the past. So there's this huge gap between what actually qualifies as a good fit for the type of search that you have in mind versus what you're kind of left with ⁓ to just fend for yourself with a bunch of filters.
Samantha: So Clodo doesn't just stop at finding prospects. It also helps to determine what to say to them. What helped inspire that second later layer of this product?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah, so I mean certainly I would say personal experience. So it's like once I was finding these people on our little internal discovery tool back in the day, I would spend a lot of time thinking about what to say. Right. So I would maybe research like their LinkedIn and I'm sure, you know, recruiters and and GTM operators have all faced this problem where like they'll look at this person's LinkedIn, they'll maybe like find their like Twitter and they'll kind of think about like what's something, you know, interesting that I can say without sounding like too creepy at the same time. and so kind of on the basis of that we made sure that our agents would be capable of doing the same thing where they're capable of producing tasteful outbound, but still not like creepy. Like maybe you don't want it to mention something that it would be really odd for you to like know about their like something that they had posted on Facebook or something like that. so yeah, keeping things tasteful, but at the same time implying ⁓ you could say relation to certain signal that we've identified in those prospects.
Samantha: So okay, let's clarify here. What does tasteful outbound mean exactly?
Sid from CLODO: Sure. Yeah. So I think the the main kind of realization for us is that the biggest driver of taste is relevance. And the biggest driver of relevance is really timing. So because we have the signal on whether someone is they're looking to buy a certain product, right? Maybe that's because they put out a job posting for a, let's say, event manager, right? That's like a great signal if you're a like a like a company that makes like merchandise, right? Like so if you make like t shirts or socks, things that companies generally give out at these ⁓ conferences, that would be a great time to write in a really simp really simple email where you don't need to go overboard and just like regurgitate the person's LinkedIn history back to them. But you can simply ask a question like, ⁓ hey, are you thinking about going to the Databricks data and AI summit? ⁓ we can hook you up with like five hundred pairs of socks to give out at the booth. And it's like the only reason that outbound will work is because of the timing and because we know with a reasonable amount of certainty that they will respond and react to that outbound. ⁓ it's kind of a different paradigm I would say to like traditional prospecting tools because I think for the longest time the paradigm has been spray and pray, right? It's like, can we how can I how can I make you think that a lot of work is going on? Well, ⁓ look, I've sent six thousand emails today, right? So a lot of ⁓ activity going on but not a lot of productivity going And that's kind of I think where we're we're trying to flip the script on that.
Samantha: Okay, so how this sounds like a dream to be honest, like it sounds extremely useful, but how do you maintain personalization at scale for all of these people without falling into what one might call AI generated slot?
Sid from CLODO: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so I think ultimately if it's the right time and if it's the right person, they actually don't care all that much. Because at the end of the day, I think people are like at least what we've observed, is like if it is an automated email, and even if it does, you know, have your your ⁓ your ⁓ dashes and your it's not this, it's that, like it even if it has all those markers. If it's something relevant to the problem that they're facing at that moment or an opportunity that they're looking for at that moment, all all bets are off. And that's kind of, I would say, our our main strength. And is a trade-off, right? It's like on Clodo, we're not going to be helping you send six thousand emails a day, right? We're going to maybe help you send a hundred emails a day. But those hundred emails, we can make certain inferences about how productive those are going to be in comparison to Let's say the six thousand. So it's really about timing and relevance. And then of course in the email itself, you know, we'll try not to do things like, Hey, saw that you're a insert job title at insert company. it'll be a lot more actionable, a lot more direct, which I think ⁓ overall I think the culture just just yearns for. So yeah.
Samantha: I love that word, yearn. So, okay, since launching in January, Clodo has grown from zero to significant, let's just say, ARR, in just a matter of weeks. What do you attribute that early growth to?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah, I think ⁓ I think in fact you kind of hinted at it earlier, ⁓ which was when people hear the idea of the product and they hear the concept, right, of like what Clodo is presumably promising, they basically think it's magic, right? They think it's like, yes, that's like the dream scenario. ⁓ that's exactly what I would want. And I think there are a lot of tools that in the past I think have promised this capability, but when people see it happening just within the first one hour of using Clodo, it we basically get messages from people within the first hour saying like this is insane. This is like absolutely nuts. I just got a meeting booked in like two two hours with like two CFOs ⁓ in the Fortune five hundred. And that just leads to a lot of word of mouth. Like in fact that's probably our biggest driver right now. ⁓ I would say we also did like, you know, we we do a healthy amount of, you know, posting on LinkedIn about like cool use cases that people are doing. That's been one pretty big driver of ⁓ of ⁓ sign ups and and ⁓ inbound but yeah honestly like I I couldn't tell you where the you know w where where these people are all meeting up but they are but they are meeting up somehow and ⁓ and we're getting them to kinda reach out and they'll say like yeah I heard about this from ⁓ my friend at this conference. ⁓ and yeah that's kind of I think we we think we think the product is is the main thing and when we do that then it kind of just sells itself.
Samantha: So did the speed of growth surprise you at all?
Sid from CLODO: ⁓ Kind of. Like I think w I think I think we had a pretty good sense that this is just a capability that so many people have always wanted that we kind of had a good sense I think already that ⁓ it would it would work out this way. Like we had pretty good conviction about that. but yeah I think I'm s I I think one thing that has been surprising is the variety of use cases. Like we now have, you know The same tool is being the same tool that's being used by YC founders and recruiters is also being used by you could say ⁓ elements of our national security apparatus, right? Like they're using it to maybe find certain kinds of ⁓ you could say talent for certain projects and and things of that nature, ⁓ certain kind of expertise. So there's an extremely wide gamut of ⁓ of use cases for for people discovery. ⁓ and I think that's if anything been the most surprising thing.
Samantha: That's really cool. So how different does the company feel today compared to where you were immediately after demo day?
Sid from CLODO: ⁓ yeah. Yeah, d I mean definitely ⁓ qu quite a quite a difference. ⁓ I think after demo day we certainly were, you know, a little bit ⁓ you know, s sad, you know, by by maybe how how things ⁓ went and stuff, but I I think we we pretty much like you know, continued on ⁓ from there pretty pretty easily as well. ⁓ I think the biggest thing nowadays is like You could say a sense of responsibility, right? Like we now have customers in, you know, national security, ⁓ in in the d in the defense space, in you could say some of like the expert sourcing ⁓ type ⁓ type type ⁓ industries, large recruiting firms. So there's just a sense of I think responsibility that maybe ⁓ we weren't ⁓ you could say acquainted with in the past, but ⁓ I think now We we definitely feel that way.
Samantha: Okay, rewinding a little bit. What's the craziest thing you had to do to keep your company going when you were still pivoting?
Sid from CLODO: Let's see. I mean, my my like the th there's certainly things like that I c that I can th if I think a little longer I can think of. But I mean, we basically met at the library from open to close for like a hundred like a hundred and twenty days straight, right? So I think I think in some sense maybe that's like a a a crazy one. ⁓ like we're we're on a first name basis with the librarians there, right? Like 'cause they we're like the la literally the last people to leave. every night. ⁓ so I think we're we're like part of the cast of characters at at that public library and ⁓ I that's that's the really the only thing that comes to mind right now.
Samantha: That's okay. Okay, so let's go to what you learned from the pivot. Your story is a great example of why founders shouldn't let a difficult demo day define them. What did that experience teach you about persistence?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah. I I mean I think on some level, like Ritzvik and I ha have have sort of dealt with stuff like this before, right? Like we've had our fair share of ⁓ you could say like things that we've had to work for a couple times before we got it. like in in my case, right, it's like I I really wanted to go to a a certain university. I didn't get in the first time, I eventually transferred to that university, right? So it's like I think we It's not it's not uncommon to us. I think overall, ⁓ I'd say yeah, persistence is definitely definitely one thing, but I think adaptability too, right? 'Cause it's like you want to make sure that you're not like being too stubborn to the point where you're committing to maybe like an idea and trying to make it work. But I think in our case we made sure to always, you know, talk with customers, talk with people, stay curious and and kind of ⁓ be open to what the world is asking from us.
Samantha: So that leads to my next question, actually. How did you know when to keep pushing versus when it was time to pivot?
Sid from CLODO: Mm-hmm. ⁓ That's good question. ⁓ I think I think really the the test is like when when we were speaking to for example like our customers ⁓ i in in in the previous iteration ⁓ or the previous product that we were working on, you know, we would oftentimes do things like, Hey, if if this product was to like go away, right? Like if it suddenly if something were to happen and like it just got completely ethered, like what like what how would you react to that, right? so heuristics like that. I think we're very helpful. And then I think once we kinda learn like, yeah, it's more of like a nice to have, not a need to have. That's when we kind of were like, Okay, yeah, I think objectively speaking, we can say that, you know, we should we should try to change direction here. So we did put ourselves to the test in that way, like objectively, trying to put some metrics to it and and measuring it that way too.
Samantha: What advice would you give to founders who are going through their own pivot?
Sid from CLODO: I think I think I think a great thing is ⁓ and I think Paul Graham has a little piece on this too, which is like I think curiosity is a really, really good thing to have, right? It's like when you're curious, then it's like you kind of maximize your I think the exact words that he uses are like it maximizes your surface area for luck, right? ⁓ because when you're curious and you kind of optimize for doing and witnessing interesting things, you open yourself up to maybe noticing like a problem that you can solve, right? Or maybe ⁓ a relationship that then leads to you finding a problem that you can solve. ⁓ so I think as long as you optimize for that throughout the process, then it kind of keeps you in the game, so to speak. I I think that would be kind of like my like learning and also ⁓ like Rhythmik and I's advice on this.
Samantha: Okay, I like it. How okay. We've traveled ten years in the future. Where do you see Clodo?
Sid from CLODO: Yeah, so I I think ⁓ yeah, we we've we've certainly thought about this quite a bit, both ourselves and also with with some of our customers. And I think we're already seeing shades of it where increasingly, particularly, ⁓ I would say in the ⁓ like you could say larger ⁓ recruiting agencies and and sourcing agencies, we're now seeing not a majority, but like a growing proportion of Clodo usage coming from agents and not Folks operating our platform. And that kinds of, you know, if you just follow that trend line, we can kind of imagine that in the future, when software collapses, right, ⁓ there will only really be maybe a handful of core primitives that every agent and every organization needs to have, right? Maybe one of them would be ⁓ authentication and like identity verification. One of them might be something related to payments. And it's our belief that one of those core primitives will be people discovered. Right. This ability to find your next hire, the ability to find your next buyer, right? Or maybe anybody else in between. So if you if you think about like what proportion of the human economy is dedicated to just finding the right person, it's a big amount, right? So it's our view that in the future it'll be agents basically ⁓ committing themselves to this primitive and Clodo's the way the data layer and the the ⁓ operational layer that they're gonna be able to get this thing done.
Samantha: Okay, interesting. Okay, five years from now, we're going a little bit, we're rewinding again. How do you see prospecting evolving within the next five years? Because we talked a little bit about long term.
Sid from CLODO: Sure. Sure. Yeah. I so I I I think so I think there's gonna be ⁓ so right now, right, if you see like the types of signals that we're picking up, a lot of it is in some sense like unintentional signal, right? It's like we're picking up the breadcrumbs that a person or an organization is maybe unintentionally leaving behind, right? ⁓ in the sense of like maybe they've, you know, interacted with something on LinkedIn or maybe they've ⁓ contributed to a certain repository on GitHub or things like that. But our kind of hypothesis is that we're gonna see a lot more willing, ⁓ and almost intentional ⁓ breadcrumb leaving. And and the reason I say that is because in the same way that we're seeing things like AEO and GEO kind of take over for products, the same thing is likely going to happen with people too, right? Because if you want to make yourself legible to the systems that are looking for potential candidates or looking for potential vendors, you're gonna have to make yourself really known in this kind of ⁓ network, right? And make yourself legible to agents. And so when that happens, we think the fidelity of the Clodo search, right, which right now you could say is operating on a handicap, which is that we're only looking at unintentional signal, ⁓ is only gonna get so much better and so much more higher fidelity. and I think it's gonna lead to a lot of efficiency gain overall, like in markets like labor and ⁓ and vendor ⁓ like vendors vendors distribution, things like that.
Samantha: Interesting. That's pretty cool. Okay, I always like to ask this one, just because I always think it the answer the answers range and I think that's interesting. What is the favorite way you've ever seen anyone use your product?
Sid from CLODO: Mm-hmm. ⁓ That's good one. ⁓ ⁓ yeah, yeah. Okay. So so there was one ⁓ there's one particularly funny one where basically one of our customers, ⁓ this is a in the manufacturing industry, so this is ⁓ company that makes like very expensive ⁓ CNC machines and and stuff like that. ⁓ they primarily use our product for prospecting and vendor sourcing. And essentially one of our users met someone at a conference, right? ⁓ and was yeah, that's a great conversation with this person, but forgot to get their name and like forgot to get their even LinkedIn or anything really. And also, to make matters worse, didn't fully remember their name as well, right? Like all they remembered was that their first name was like Mike, and then the last name was like they just remember how it was pronounced, roughly speaking, right? Like it was like Balin or Waylin or something like that. And that day, like once he returned to the hotel. Typed into Clodo, like I'm looking for someone that I I met at this conference. I think they work at three ⁓ Their name is like Mike Balin or Waylin or something like that. I don't remember. Like can you find it for me? And it found the guy. And it turned out that the name was actually spelled B it's like it's like B J E L L A N D. So it's like it's it is pronounced like Baland, but it's it's it's just like a different kind of unconventional spelling, which w really would have been impossible to do otherwise. ⁓
Samantha: ⁓ my gosh.
Sid from CLODO: So I think that was one that definitely made us ⁓ quite excited.
Samantha: Okay, yeah. That's both funny and encouraging. So I can see why you went with that one.
Sid from CLODO: Yeah, yeah. It's it's kind of like it's kinda like how people were trying to find music like before Shazam, right? It's like they would try to like ⁓ like enunciate the the music in the Google search and then Google would just be like, Yeah, you're like losing your mind and then so it's kind of ⁓ you could say we're we're solving that.
Samantha: Very, very cool. Okay, so is there anything that you would like to talk about that I have missed?
Sid from CLODO: let's see. Yeah, I guess I guess I can like briefly give a little spiel on like the the types of say like use cases that I think we're seeing on on Clodo, like maybe just like enumerate some of them. Okay, cool. Yeah, well Yeah, I mean because Clodo is is this extremely powerful people discovery tool, right, for finding and reaching ⁓ these exact target personas, we're seeing people in defense use it, intelligence use it.
Samantha: Yeah, for sure.
Sid from CLODO: ⁓ we're seeing people in the recruiting space use it to find these exact candidates based on maybe GitHub contributions, publishing history. ⁓ and it's really powering some of the most specific people sourcing workloads ⁓ in the world today. ⁓ and that's kind of I think what gets us really excited about not only our product, but ⁓ about how a lot of these high friction spaces like labor and sourcing are are gonna get a lot more ⁓ effective for sure. And I think also something that gets us quite excited as well is ⁓ we're seeing a lot of these this this is a particularly interesting one that that's come up too is like we're seeing a lot of the reinforcement learning ⁓ environment companies, the companies that produce some of this very curated expert niche data using our platform today as well to find those experts, to find those people to curate that data, which then ⁓ of course gets ⁓ you know, pumped back into the model labs ⁓ and you know ⁓ ultimately improves the AI models that we benefit from and use all the time. So I think certainly the the reinforcement learning ⁓ use case is one that gets us quite excited. And then certainly we see a lot of ⁓ expert networks, which I'm sure perhaps you guys might have used in in the VC capacity, but a lot of these expert network firms that are you know servicing PE and hedge funds, they're using Clodo to find those exact experts that their clients want to talk to. I would say those are the those last two use cases are the ones that we're most excited about ⁓ and spending the most time on, I would say.
Samantha: Okay. Well, I can't wait to check it out.
Sid from CLODO: Absolutely.
Samantha: Alright. Well, thank you, Sid. Your story is a reminder that some of the best companies don't emerge from perfect plans. They emerge from listening closely to customers, adapting quickly, and staying in the game long enough to discover something that people truly want. So thank you for joining us on 8 Spotlight.
Sid from CLODO: Yeah, for sure. I think ⁓ on on that note, like I think ⁓ a great quote is ⁓ Mike Tyson's. It's ⁓ Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. So I think ⁓ you just gotta get that that's an occupational hazard if you're a founder in twenty twenty six. So
Samantha: Mm-hmm. You just gotta get punched in the mouth.
Sid from CLODO: Indeed, yeah, repeatedly.
Samantha: Mm-hmm. Until you know, you find something that makes it stop. All right, Sid, have a great one. Bye.
Sid from CLODO: Yeah, exactly. Awesome. Thanks Samantha. Bye.
