Trilogy

This transcript was automatically generated and edited for clarity.

Welcome to Cloudbreak, where breakthrough innovation meets breakthrough growth.

Today, Chuck Stonecipher and Elisa La Cava of Trilogy Equity Partners, chat with Simon Skaria, co-founder and CTO of Vieu.

In a market where companies are using AI for “spray and pray” or unfocused but high volume outbound sales tactics, Vieu takes a different approach. They’re building a system to help revenue leaders and account executives pinpoint the optimal and until now often hidden relationships across your companies to target high ROI sales leads with laser-like precision.

Here’s their conversation.

Chuck Stonecipher: Good morning, Simon. Thanks for spending some time with Elisa and I this morning. I am wondering if you could just start by both introducing yourself and then introducing Vieu a little bit in sort of an overview fashion would be great.

Simon Skaria: Yeah, great to be here Chuck it’s always wonderful to spend the morning talking about the evolution of the company, especially with you both. So, I’m Simon Skaria, I’m the CTO and co-founder of Vieu. So I’ve been in the technology space for now almost two and a half decades. I’ve always worked on problems related to data and AI and especially its applications into business apps, the sort of trajectories that we have been able to come through in the last sort of few years of my career. When I look back at it, I feel like wow, that was kind of a little bit of a buildup to starting this company, right?

I had two, three startups before I joined Microsoft as part of semi acquihire if you will, and then at Microsoft had the great fortune of working in business applications later in core data in SQL and then had a very interesting tenure at office as we were transitioning from an on-prem software to a cloud software. And then the last seven, eight years of Microsoft was just so fortunate to be on the breeding ground of AI, computer vision, machine perception, those kinds of problems. While some of its applications was to mixed reality, but the core technology was just as great as being at school just when the AI thing was happening, right?

In 2013 when we were talking about 3D reconstruction or computer vision or something, it was just considered such a foreign concept at that point in time. And now looking back over the last four years coming into your question about Vieu, we originated at a time when we were starting to think about, hey, the current systems of engagement and how people really think about reaching out from their companies to their target accounts. We were like, no, this needs a radical rethinking. So Vieu was born to really think about if you are pursuing your strategic enterprise accounts, what is the dignified way for a company to make an impact in their first reach out with them? So Vieu was born and here we are. Our problem statement is that if you are selling to large enterprises, do not ever spam them. Go through an executive warm introduction and then when you get in front of them, we will actually help you create through what to talk about them and make that connection happen. That is the vision of Vieu.

Elisa La Cava: This is amazing. We met you and your co-founder Samir Manjure about a year and a half ago in January of 24. How did the two of you come together as co-founders to start building the company?

Simon Skaria: Samir has been a person that I’ve known for a long time. One of the things that we talked about, and most of this is credit to him, was this notion of a founder to founder fit and founder to market fit and then product market fit. This was one of the reasons that he shared very early and we spent a lot of time, if you will, really dating as co-founders, right? We kind of knew that’s what we wanted to end up in, but we created all kinds of excuses to work together.

So we had known each other for almost 25 years. He was an early starter at Microsoft. I joined in 2002 on and off both in social circle as well as in professional circle. He was in one area, I was in office. There were obviously shared projects between us and then he had an amazing exit in the 2021 sort of timeframe and I had left Microsoft and was thinking about, hey, I want to get back into the startup side of the scene. So I had these different offers from various different companies and I would go down and chat with Samir about Hey, what do you think about this company? What do you think about that company? And he would very sincerely advise me on it and at some point we started asking ourselves, Hey, why don’t we think about what is it that we could start together? And we turned through several ideas at that point in time and we will talk about the origin story of Vieu itself in a few minutes, but that is how it was born. To his credit, he jumped on it and to my good luck, I didn’t join any of those companies. I’m glad to be here doing this with him.

Elisa La Cava: The comment about finding excuses to work together is probably the highest signal possible. That’s amazing. I haven’t heard of anyone frame it that way before. Okay, well let’s talk about origin story of Vieu. So how did it begin?

Simon Skaria: This is my second favorite question after what is Vieu up to and what is next? So we were really deliberate about landing on the problem statement that we landed on. There are a few rubrics through which we decided to look at what do we want to work on the next, I dunno, 7, 10, 15, who knows years, right? So the rubrics we thought about was that one, we want it to be an oxygen problem. This is very important to us. And every single time when we reminisce our man, what are the things we got right? We are so glad we picked an oxygen problem. You cannot miss a CEO or CRO when you ask them, Hey, do you want to increase your top line? Yes, the answer is yes, has been an operator long and you see these companies all the time, CEO or CRO says, no, I don’t need more revenue.

And so whether the economy is bad, you need that question whether the economy is good, you are hiring, you are firing, you’re letting go, you’re expanding, you just raised some round, you’re just running short on cash in every single scenario, small company, big company. This is a great oxygen problem. And in all due respect, six years into building core AI, a little bit more on the science side than I would like and mixed reality, HoloLens, et cetera. One of the things that was very important to me was that I never have to explain to a customer why you have this problem. That was number one criteria for us.

The second thing was where do we have asymmetric advantage? As founders, we could have picked all kinds of random problems out there. Some of them were probably interesting, but it was very important to us that we have an asymmetric advantage around it. Do we understand the problem space that we are going after both the problem and the solution space? And Samir has been the single largest quota carrying AE at his previous company and continues to be that. Here I was on my side, the director of office customer advisory team, and I always made a reason to go pick up an executive briefing while I was in the product side. And so sales and customer development go to market has been a problem that is very well familiar to us and we have something to offer. So that’s kind of the second thing.

And the third one was that, hey, what is a problem space where when you ask why now just the trifecta of we are the right people, the technology is just coming up with a problem space that is oxygen was very alluring. I remember in 2021 late when I said the word LLM, not trying to be voiceful or anything, people thought it was some protocols from transport TCP or something. So we had just taken a bet on it and Google doesn’t get enough credit for it, but BERT was just had come out and it was actually one of the foundational things we bet on. Back then we didn’t have OpenAI as an open this thing. We bet on both at that point in time and we lucked out manufactured our luck as our culture principles would say, and we bet on AI that became a hundred x cheaper and 1000 x more powerful. So we wanted to bet on an oxygen problem where we have the main expertise and passion on a technology that just facilitate us and Vieu was born to go after the B2B sales problem.

Chuck Stonecipher: Thank you Simon for that history. Before we move on, I’m going to double click a little bit on one thing you said. You talked about you’d known Samir for a long time, you were sort of dating a little bit, I think you use that word now that you sort of moved beyond that and are co-founders together. What’s that journey been like of having taken that step and then you talked about this is a decade, decade and a half journey or a few years into it, what have you learned about working together and strengths and weaknesses and how is that journey going?

Simon Skaria: It’s a very deep and a very personal question and I would be vulnerable and very authentic and transparent about. And we are very similar and we are very different. So we are past our honeymoon phase. So, what we are right now are not just because the initial aura or whatever it be, the evolution of it is to understand when you are in a founder-to-founder dynamics, it’ll be complimentary skills and point of views that each founder should seek out in the co-founder and not detest it, right?

As in he’s extremely frugal. I really want to have a little bit more space in my infrastructure spent, but seek out that difference. Understand where that is coming from. He wants to have nearly zero cost motion for sales and marketing while it is customary for companies like us to spend 60 70% in SNM expense. And so see, why is he saying this? And similarly on his side when I sit him down and tell him about here is where the technology is going and here’s why we need to skate to where the puck is headed, and he seeks out that point of view.

So one of our cultural principles is seek differing angles, go looking for differing angles so you are not in your echo chamber of your own sort of self-assured statements. That was the thing that we are similar in where we wanted to get to. We are very different in how we approach problem spaces and just embracing that difference, especially as co-founder since it’s one of the most leveraged relationship in the company, is very important. And it’s one thing I would advise every company to do, whether you are small or big when you have opposition from especially senior people in your network, don’t run away. Embrace it.

Chuck Stonecipher: Great, thanks for sharing that. Let’s go just one click deeper on what Vieu does. You talked a little bit about the space you’re going after, but I think it’d be helpful for the audience just a little deeper on what Vieu does.

Simon Skaria: So one of the things that we had penciled in October, 2021, and I still have it in my whiteboard in my office and I haven’t erased it, was that we were very convinced on day zero that we want to have a resident value in the network that we build. So the way we like to say is Facebook meta, the combination of it is your personal graph, who knows who on the personal front, LinkedIn is your, if you want to call it your professional graph. But we also see there’s a lot of our connections in LinkedIn, but it is at least a reasonable semblance of professional network. But we wanted to build a commercial graph in its core, the commercial graph is a combination of a billion plus technology decision makers with 50 to 60 million, medium to large size enterprises with business intent connecting those people together.

And that’s what we call the commercial graph, right? Commercial graph is an expression of business interest from two office entities. If I am an account executive at Snowflake and if I am talking to a VP of data at KPMG, then there exists a commercial intent signal between those two people. And there are many, many, many different signals, patents and presentations and conference entities and investor relationship. Our relationship is one of investor and on and on and on. There are about 40 to 45 and growing number of reasons that we find to capture the commercial intent between those two entities. And we built a commercial graph that is a huge technical asset that we were able to build pretty early and we were very convinced about the need, the resiliency and the defense it gives us as a business not just for our immediate customer but for the long-term longevity and value of the company.

So then when you ask me, Hey, how do we do this or get one layer below this is that we thought about the first application, which likely we are going to be solving the first problem for a very long time to come maybe five, maybe seven more whenever. But there is plenty of business in there around I am a business to business enterprise salesperson and I actually want to know my top hundred people in the buying committee because large companies make decisions with multiple stakeholders in here and how to get connected in here. The graph becomes a very stable way to actually do that. Travelers sell and say, Hey Snowflake, here are the 20 people that we believe you are connected to through your investors, through your existing employees, through your champions who used to be previously at Airbus, now at Boeing and so on and so forth. That underlying graph becomes the facilitator of chasing the business in it.

Chuck Stonecipher: That’s helpful. As you alluded, you’re going after an oxygen problem, everybody wants to grow revenue, which is great. That being said, you’re not the only ones to think about business that way. There are plenty of very, very large incumbents who go after that space. You under are continuing to invest there. I think there are more startups and probably more venture capital dollars being invested in the sales and marketing stack than anywhere else over history and continued. And then we’ve got a whole new world coming on of AI and agents and all that technology investment as well. Talk a little bit about how you think about competing in that world and creating and maintaining some sort of durable differentiation where you can continue to add value and grow your business.

Simon Skaria: Yeah, that’s a great question. Thank you for asking. So first of all, the thing I would say, Chuck, is I was leaving the company and I was fortunate at that point in time to talk to the president of Microsoft business divisions, James Phillips. And he asked me, Simon, what are you going to go do? And I said, I’m going to do something in the sales and marketing space likely. So he was like, how can I help? And I said, I’ll come back to you when I am ready to ask for help, but I have one question for you, which is it’s a very crowded space, James, it worries me. There are big people like you guys and then there is every small startup out there want to do something in here. And James gave me an amazing advice at that time. He said, Simon, A players pick A plus problems. A players are never afraid of competition. You guys should go pick an A plus problem because I trust that you will be able to solve it. It was a very, very deep advice I got. I tell this to my kids, I tell this to everyone when they ask me about like, oh man, I’m afraid. So this whole big fish, smart pond, whatever. So that’s kind of one of the driving ethos of the company. A players pick A plus problems and not worried about other competition, but how do you really solve it?

And one thing I always tell folks is that customers want to solve problems. When I am an AE and I have a patch of 35 accounts, the only thing they care about is that can you get me into those fights? And as long as you are laser focused about that, you win where it matters the most, which is you win with your customers. So that’s the most important thing is chase value and not hype, right? That’s number one. And it sounded cliched, but it’s very difficult to do in this world where everybody is making such so much noise and hype around it.

The second thing is think technology as a tool and not as a destination itself. And again, it is counter-cultural for a CTO to say this, but think about this as a tool. At that point in time it becomes very useful versus looking we are a technology, it’s not what we would like to come across. That’s kind of the second point. So there is a lot around what we can do with LLMs both in the construction of the graph but as well as in serving the customer that we are able to.

And then the third thing I would say is that the whole noise is actually helping us. There is about 60 to 70 20 AI SDR type companies out there. They’re all running this bandwagon of, hey, I can write better copy emails, I can blast this thing and the noise is actually helping because we stand out and say, well you used to send a thousand emails, now you send 10,000 emails that is laser focused on whatever your problem is. So we welcome those things, right? So to summarize, we like problems where there is competition, we talk to customers where their real value is and not talk about technology, talk technology as a tool internally and not think about technology as a destination itself, especially when you’re solving an oxygen business problem. And then finally the noise is very useful when we get up A CRO, the first question we ask is, I bet you are sending out a bunch of emails using this thing. How is the conversion on that thing for your strategic accounts? And so it’s actually a very useful conversation starter.

Chuck Stonecipher: That’s helpful. Thank you.

Simon Skaria: Great question. Thank you.

Elisa La Cava: There were so many good nuggets in that I think talking about rising above the noise, there is so much noise in the category and to the how do we be a tool, not a destination, but at the same time you’re trying to prove that ROI for customers and showing them they can get to the various destinations they want to get to every single day faster and better with your product. How did you know you were onto something in the development of your commercial graph? This was a very intentional high investment effort to build Vieu in the way that you and Samir chose to build it. How did you know you were on something with your approach and then how does the strength of your commercial graph deepen that ROI for customers as you continue to fortify it?

Simon Skaria: It’s a great question. You folks have come up with something amazing. There is a product and technological, what I would call a local maxima or an inflection point that we witnessed. And then there is a business and customer acquisition side of something that we witnessed and unsurprisingly they kind collided at the same time feeling like man to pour gasoline on it. And we both were like, we are not going to raise money until we feel we are ready for that moment. And that’s when we kind of came together and that was the kind of the time to actually start that nonlinear growth phase.

The technological side of it is, we call it the graph connection density. It’s a mouthful. It’s a term from I think Metcalf’s law or intercommunication where the power of a graph is proportional to the square of the number of edges. And so we started measuring it and I was very ambivalent that we will hit that deadline or that moment anytime soon. There is 8 billion people in the world close to that. There is a billion digital decision makers out there in one form or another. And then when you talk about from point A to point B, nobody’s interested in a five hop connection. People want a direct or at least one hop connection maximum. And so what would be that time? And we measured something more sterile and scientific internally to see when can we get to, and we had this one laser focus goal, which was take that top 1000 technology companies and take the global 10,000 buying companies. So think the standard Databricks to the standard P&G. And so we actually choose to focus further into that and say, can we create a graph that is no more than one hop away and people talk about six degrees of separation, but who cares? It needs to be either direct or one degree separation. And we hit that time sometime last March, April, and I want to be very clear, this is going to be one problem. We are going to work until the end of the company, so this is a problem we got to continue and sort of strengthen the graph around it. So that was one moment.

The other problem was as we just briefly talked about it, the onslaught of spray and pray systems and the sheer scale of it hit the market in such a wonderfully blessing way for Vieu. I’m very respectful of the technologies that are built by the ZoomInfos of the world, the Outreaches of the world and so on and so forth. And it’s all respectable companies, but the sheer onslaught of cold unsolicited email and phone numbers. I look in my LinkedIn and there is focused and the other is the spam one. And just before this call I went and looked at it and there is probably in the last one year, there is about 600 messages that somebody is claiming that they have reached out to Simon and I’m waiting to hear back, I never looked at it, no disrespect to anybody. They’re all doing honorable things in their own career, but I’m not going to look into them.

So that two things collided on one front now talking about the business and the customer side of it, that frustration if you will, lack of dignity as a business to business sales person. Look, I’m a person who’s trying to do a 25 million contract or Databricks with name your company. There’s only so many of this SDR-ADR type operation I want to do on behalf of my Coca-Cola. So when you talk to a CRO VP of sales at that time and continue now and say, hey, here is 1000 of your target accounts, 60% of them without doing anything by you guys, the Vieu graph has already identified an executive introduction to them. Do you want that call was very fast. The answer was always yes. As Samir would say, we would move into pricing discussions in the first 30 minutes. So when those two things came together where we found this GCD graph connection density hitting the goal where we wanted to get with this onslaught of ZoomInfo outreach type unsolicited email inroad, when VP of sales, the CRO started seeing lesser and lesser ROI on their investment, they were very eager to hear what we have to say. Then it all became whether we can deliver on that promise and we sure hope with our renewals and the stuff that we are doing it. But those were kind of the two moments we were like, this is good to go. Let’s pour gasoline into this fire.

Chuck Stonecipher: Let’s segue away for a few minutes from product and technology and talk about building a company. I know you’ve been an entrepreneur, you’ve started other companies, but as you work with Samir on building the business organizationally, building the team culture, those sort of things, talk a little bit about your thoughts there.

Simon Skaria: It’s so underappreciated, Chuck. I do not know how to say this. With even more importance than the revenue machinery or the technology, I never understood the depth of that statement about the team and the company until we started the company. It actually just makes me so appreciate all these big technological institutions that we take for granted. I think the company at our stage is not constrained, thankfully for folks like you, not constrained by capital, it’s also not constrained by good quality ideas or vision of what we need to go to. It’s not a vision. We know what needs to happen at the next 10 levels of detail. So Samir and I could sit down and say, okay, if we need to do this particular motion, we can get down into the nitty gritty detail of this is what needs to happen.

Then comes a very interesting problem. How do we make sure we have a non-loss transfer of our vision, our ideas, our dream, our playbook into the 10x leaders in the company? It’s so underappreciated. The company needs those people who can just take from your brain, get that idea, they make it even better than you had thought about it, but they’re nothing about the conversion didn’t have a loss. They understood the intent of what you’re trying to do. So then that’s kind of number one. That’s really the thing that we are so invested on these days. So how do you build that team, the next layer of leaders who can generate that firepower without losing something? The second thing is masters of their craft. People who are truly wanting to do this because they actually care about the success of what you’re trying to do. They truly are masters of their craft.

And then the term culture gets so overused and it becomes five things that you write on some webpage or something and you, and I don’t want to say that we are a perfect 10 hour 10 in our culture or anything that is always work in progress as they talk about human culture itself. From the day you are born to the day you die, you are working on yourself to actually become hopefully a better human being. The same for a company, but that machinery that comes together to deliver on something where from the AI team to the technology team to the sales team is the real asset. So if Samir and I could take our IO from some problem for two weeks and come back and look at it and it is so refreshing to see it in a completely world stage is what I would say.

So if the founders are not spending at least 40 to 60% of their time constantly thinking about who are our 10x scalers, how do we hire, how do we train them, how do we bring them inside into the decision-making, then the company cannot scale. We can get to a certain place, but it just cannot scale beyond that. So it’s a long answer, but it is something very close to my heart as you can see, and it is kind of do or die for a company, especially at our stage now. We are past the place where what we can do by pinch hitting by the founders and we are very fortunate to have the next layer of leaders who are just truly, Samir has this term onus of their swim lane. They own their swim lane and they make it happen independent. It is very, very important.

Chuck Stonecipher: Thank you.

Elisa La Cava: That’s so inspiring to hear kind of the focus on team and growing the team the past few years.

Simon Skaria: Actually one other thing, sorry if I could co said. The genuine curiosity and obsession with the current problem is more important than adjacency and familiarity from experience, which is kind of a very deep way to say hire for hunger than hire with domain expertise or proven track record. And as a startup is incredibly valid. Obviously you want to hire a deep researcher, you obviously you want to hire a deep system. It doesn’t mean that you want to just hire college grads only, but that one point is very, very important for founders to think about because the startup is an ever evolving ecosystem. So when you hire something for a very custom thing or where you are within three months, the company changes. You are evolving. And so you want these continuous learners who are not looking for a playbook or an existential proof if you will, but they are constant innovators who are actually really hungry to solve and surrounding yourself with that talent is very, very important. And when you think about company building at our stage,

Chuck Stonecipher: Yeah, it’s interesting to hear you reflect on that. Back in the day we used to always talk about the three E and our three E’s were energy excellence and experience and we always said the order mattered.

Simon Skaria: Oh nice. The order mattered and that you just basically said exactly the same thing.

Chuck Stonecipher: I love it. I’d start saying that thing now

Chuck Stonecipher: Feel free.

Elisa La Cava: That’s amazing. Okay, well we talked a little bit about team and what’s next on team. We’d love to hear your thoughts on what’s next for the company and product. Before we hit record on this conversation, Simon, you came in glowing, kind of hyped up from a customer call that you had just ended just kind of fully amped and so would love to hear what’s most top of mind for you right now for the months ahead or the year ahead.

Simon Skaria: So the three things that top, top, top priorities in the next 12 months, startup years are like dog years. One year is like seven years. So number one is continuing to dial our customer with value that they realize. So sales one amazing thing about is that there’s nothing subjective about sale. Did you close or not? It’s a number. So that as a transitive nature of it Vieu’s impact is very measurable. So we want to be relentlessly focused about not whether Thomas Martin, our AE is happy with us. Yes, obviously that too, but is the impact something that is measurably perceived by both the AE and the buyer? So that’s our number one priority for the coming 12 months and it always is, but I wanted to sort of restate the second thing is we have now reached a place where we are ready to open the floodgates, the customer acquisition, the sales process both among medium-sized companies but also among large logos we are, and we will be picking them at an astonishing rate.

Samir and I were talking about some really gutsy things to go after and we feel that confidence coming in because we now know this works, the thesis works, but more importantly we also have the playbook to make them successful. See point number one, because you don’t want to take on 20 new customers if you are not confident to actually take them to the ultimate success of this engagement. So the second thing is that we are ready to go guns blazing in customer acquisition and I don’t see those things lightly, right? We are really ready and we will be picking up big and small logos at an astonishing rate in the coming six to 12 months.

Which brings me to the third point, which is more internal looking. Every startup has one secular thing that they work on. They work on it until they’re done. Hopefully Tesla has a secular thing about full self-driving. Hopefully Google has a secular thing about index freshness. I don’t know. So every company has a thing that they are working on. Secularly for us, that commercial graph that we started this conversation with the next 12 months, we will build something and we will continue to evolve within a way that mark my words will be the envy of the industry. So that’s like the LinkedIn will look at us and say, wow, how would they do it? The LLM providers would look at us and the big CRM vendors would be like, this is customer relationship management. I think the graph is growing 10 to 15% month over month. My goal is to get that to 30 to 40% and that I’m a big fan of things that compound as we talked about in a different context. That is a huge compounding factor.

So three things continue to excel in realizing value with our customer in a measurable top line way, number one. Number two, on that successful playbook, think about winning medium to large size logos at a different rate than what we have done in the past. And then three, it helps us to audition to build that 10x graph and we have built some amazingly more efficient technology in the last one or two months that is both efficient and effective and high scalable. We want to go out there and people will be like, man, if I want to know how to get connected to my next vc, my next market, my next hiring thing in my next buyer, the place to look for is in the Vieu graph. We’ll get that.

Chuck Stonecipher: Thank you Simon. It’s exciting looking forward and Elisa and I are so excited to be a little part of that journey with you and Samir, thanks for your generous use of your time this morning. As we sort of move to close out, anything you’d like to add that we didn’t touch on?

Simon Skaria: Yeah, we touched on a good set of topics, but I think you folks were too humble to not ask an obvious question. The venture capital scene, right? Everybody sort of associated with the Silicon Valley and so on. So one of the things that Samir and I were very particular when we started this company was that the partner that we are going to pick, we would like it to be somebody in our own neighborhood and many of us, we live within like 10, 15 miles of each other. And I truly enjoy my morning ride on my bike to JI’S office where you have very courteously given us a facility where we could come together in a physical space, which obviously matters.

And I actually wanted to say in closing, and I genuinely hope you don’t think about it as a courtesy praise, but I genuinely mean it is that this partnership exceeded our expectations. Every venture partner likes to come in and say, we are more than the money man. You are on the money with that statement and I genuinely mean it and you can see it. It’s a good partner to us, polite but tough, which is exactly what we need at this point in time. And hopefully we are deploying your capital both in a responsible and efficient sort of way as we have talked about multiple times. And to anyone who’s actually looking, especially Seattle has a big growing tech scene, is that it’s very easy to forget what is available in your own home yard, if you will. So thank you for this partnership. Thank you for the trust in us for all we would like to claim. We were still very early when you folks took a bet on us and I do not take this partnership for granted. We’ll go on to do bigger. Thanks. So you look forward.

Chuck Stonecipher: Well thanks for the kind words and as I said, we’re so excited to be partners with the both of you on an exciting journey indeed. Thanks Simon.

That’s a wrap on today’s episode of Cloudbreak. Learn more about Vieu visit try.Vieu.com. And if you’re an entrepreneur building an early stage software or AI startup in the Pacific Northwest, visit Trilogy Equity Partners to get in touch. If you liked what you heard today, subscribe, rate, review and or share this podcast with your friends. Until next time.