(26) Elaine Zelby on AI and Marketing: Lessons in Operational Scaling - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_YNICORIro

Transcript: (00:00) You put the goalpost as meetings booked, you're going to get a ton of meetings and those meetings are not going to be good. The only reason we have so many industries, legal, cyber security, I can go on and on, is because people suck. We are trying to take down Marquetto, Salesforce, HubSpot. (00:17) You know what's the ambition? The ambition for us is to build the next Salesforce. These are some hot takes. Hey everybody, it's Sam Jacobs, host of Topline, and today you're going to be hearing a different kind of episode. Over the next couple of weeks, uh, we're going to be rolling out a show that is actually hosted on the Otter AI, uh, podcast channel, and it's a show called Revenue Blind Spots that I'm producing in conjunction with Otter, where we're interviewing prominent revenue executives about blind spots that they had in their go-to market motion and (00:55) what they did to overcome them. And of course, Otter is a platform that helps you record uh, conversations and manage meeting intelligence. And as a consequence of that, eliminate blind spots, which is why we called it revenue blind spots. So, I hope you enjoy. They're going to be short episodes. (01:15) Today, we're going to be hearing from Elaine Zelby, the co-founder and CRO of an incredible company called Tofu. You'll hear from a bunch of great people over the course of the next couple of weeks, including AJ Bruno and Ka Colestein and Austin Zaman. Uh, so I hope you listen and I hope you enjoy it. And for now, without further ado, here's episode one of Revenue Blind Spots. (01:34) Hey everybody, it's Sam Jacobs, uh, CEO of Pavilion here, and I'm really excited to welcome you to a new monthly podcast, uh, that I'm producing in conjunction with Otter AI. It's called Revenue Blind Spots. And every month, we're going to explore the pivotal moments in the careers of top revenue leaders. (01:54) Our focus is to dive deep into the blind spots that have shaped leadership strategy and growth, uncovering lessons that can help the next generation of revenue executives. And every month, we're going to bring on a new executive. And we are kicking off the entire show with a woman that's become a friend of mine. (02:11) She's a powerhouse, a former venture capitalist, and now the co-founder and CRO of Tofu. I'm talking about Elaine Zelby. And uh Elaine runs Tofu and with with her partner with her co-founder. It's a generative AI platform that helps scale and automate go to market for B2B marketing teams. It's essentially an AI co-pilot for B2B marketing. (02:32) Prior to TOFU, she was a partner at SignalFire, an early stage VC where she invested at the intersection of AI and SAS. And before she investing, she built and led marketing teams at early and growth stage startups like Slack and Consensus. Elaine has two small humans and spends as much time as she can outdoors, trail running, cycling, hiking, or doing other active endeavors. (02:51) We love active people here on Revenue Blind Spots. Elaine, welcome to our first ever show. I am very happy to be the very first guest. I feel honored. Thank you, Sam. You should feel honored. Um, we are so excited to have you. So, I gave a little bit of the background on tofu, but it's not really fair to bring on a co-founder of a fast growing business and not give them an opportunity to tell us what that business does because somebody out there is listening and needs to as a solution. (03:15) So, in your words, what does Tofu do? What does what does the company do? I love when I was on the VC side, I saw two things converging at the same time. The first one was I kept talking to revenue leaders, CMOs, CRO, and everyone was telling me the same story. Too many tools. we are toolled out. I want less tools. It was very clear to me. (03:35) We were entering a new bundling phase. We had gone through 10 years plus of this proliferation of SAS, the unbundling. So I was like, huh, okay, there's going to be a bundling of go to market tooling. The second wave I saw kind of hitting at the same time was I actually built my first generative AI product in 2018 called SoundSpot that could turn any blog into a podcast. (04:00) And I started getting pitched in 2022 around all these kind of rappers around open AI specifically for marketing and sales. And I was like, "Huh, this has now gotten good enough." And AI is really good at a few things. This was in 2022. It's good at content creation. It's good at synthesis. It's good at research. A lot of the things that are the building blocks for go to market teams. (04:18) So, put our heads together, me and my co-founders, and we're like, what is the big swing here? The big swing is to rebundle the martekch stack, reduce all of this bloat, make it so it's a single platform where revenue teams can do all of their workflows, create all of their content, execute and then measure. (04:36) So we are trying to be the unified platform for today marketing teams to create execute and measure campaigns across channels that can take the form of anything from onetoone ABM campaigns which can truly scale now to life cycle campaigns such as nurture that's personalized by persona or industry upsell cross-ell campaigns prospecting campaigns webinar campaigns truly trying to be both omni channel but also touch all the different aspects of a marketing or I mean this is uh really exciting So, first I just want to double click on one thing. By the way, isn't it funny like in a hundred years people are like, why did you what did you mean when you said double click? But anyway, uh (05:09) it's true. That's so true. When you say ABM can truly scale now, I'm really interested in what what does that mean? Tell us a and I would love to unpack a little bit about the workflow that underpins that statement because I'm sure it's quite exciting. So, there's two pieces of this and I'm glad you asked this question. (05:26) There's the workflow piece, but there's the mindset shift piece. And that is actually even more fascinating to me because here's the thing. I talk to call it five to 10 revenue leaders a day. And everyone's like, we're starting an ABM program or we're kicking off our ABM program or we're scaling our ABM program. (05:48) But when they get into the nitty-gritty, there's still this mentality of we can do a couple key accounts onetoone. We do a bunch of them one to few and then we have some of our one to many buckets. And to me, it's kind of a misnomer if we're using the term account-based marketing. That literally should be at the account level. I just never understood the whole concept of one to few and one to many. (06:06) For Tofu, our product, but also just what generative AI can do today, we can take the same amount of effort that it would take to do one account at 1 one and scale that to a thousand accounts one. So, there truly is this you have to get out of this headsp space of we can only do it for our top three prospects. You can now do it at scale. (06:25) The second thing when it comes to the workflow part is it's really about understanding the who. I would say this is the biggest barrier people come in is like who is your target audience? Is it people that are cold prospects? Have they engaged with you in some way? What is the entire purpose of your ABM machine ABM program? The second is how do you make this repeatable and scalable? Part of that is understanding what are the channels that your audience lives on. So what are the different places you want to be in front of them? ABM does not just mean display (06:51) ads. That is one small aspect of it. It also means landing pages, email experiences, decks, one pages, thought leadership content. It really should span the entire channel mix. But the first thing is who are we targeting and why? The second thing is where do they live in the physical and digital world. (07:08) Then the third thing is let's create comprehensive content touching all of those those places and make it truly onetoone. One of the other pieces that comes into play that AI is exceptionally good at is the research piece. So it's not just enough to say we have some information in our CRM. (07:26) We want to go now and crawl the entire internet to understand what are they, you know, what are the all the nuances of this account that we might care about. How do we go and then turn that into pain points they're facing, value propositions we should use, full-on messaging, and then the next piece of that is turning it into the content. (07:43) All this is automated, but those are just the sequential steps that have to happen in executing a scaled program. So, correct me if I'm mistaken or misunderstanding, but maybe there's a world where Tofu uh knows the thousand accounts that I want to get into and automatically creates a thousand different uh landing pages that are customized to that company, maybe that are even bringing in pain points that are relevant to that company, maybe scraped from like a 10K or 10Q or some kind of publicly available information. (08:13) So like with the click of a button, Xerox can get a landing page that's totally specific to Pavilion. Uh you know, HP can get a landing page that's totally that's again all of these companies, all these prospects are I'm selling to them, but I understand their pain points and therefore I'm presenting that information back to them in a way that feels completely personalized and contextual. That's possible now. (08:31) It is. And not only that, it's crawling the 10Ks, 10 Q's, crawling their websites, crawling the internet, crawling their press releases. It's also pulling in historical context you have in your CRM. So it's this pairing of the public and private data with your own core messaging and the combination of all that together that can really craft that powerful onetoone messaging. And to your question of is it possible? 100%. (08:54) And that's the piece where it's almost a bigger hurdle to get over the mind shift piece as opposed to the workflow shift piece. Amazing. So one more question then we'll coach dive into the to the topic at hand which is you know blind spots and uh really career evolution, company evolution and and how you overcame it. (09:12) But um there's a whole conversation about kind of platform companies. You talked about bundling versus unbundling and there's one world almost exactly to the point there's the Parker Conrad rippling style approach which is we're going to build a platform from the very beginning. (09:29) you know, from the very beginning of this company's inception, we believe that the world is bundling and we want it to bundle towards us. And then there's another world which has sort of been conventional wisdom for the last, you know, 1015 years, which is yeah, you you do have to start with a point solution because you want to get really really good at delivering exceptional experiences. (09:51) And that point solution should be the tip of the spear or the the tip of the wedge that you can then use to expand into other use cases. But you kind of take it one step at a time. Are you all uh you know is Tofu firmly in the camp of we're trying to build product as quickly as possible. We are trying to take down I don't know Marquetto, Salesforce, HubSpot, you know what's the ambition? We we took the rippling approach. (10:15) We did the platform from day one and it was a very conscious decision that followed exactly the logic you laid out. It's so much easier to build a wedge point solution and then know where you want to expand from there. much harder to take the platform approach from day one, especially when we're targeting enterprises. For us, we work with public companies all the way down to growth stage companies. (10:33) But when you're building for public or large enterprise, there's a lot of nuance that comes with the requirements to serve those customers, especially given the nature of how many people they might have on their marketing team. One of our larger customers has over 120 users, cover all different types of marketing functionality. (10:50) Now, the ambition for us is to build the next Salesforce for marketing. So build a company that is truly trying to bundle all of that stuff together. I would say even if you look at Marquetto, I'll take an example that's different from HubSpot. Marquetto is marketing automation. They send emails. That is the functionality that Marquetto serves for people. (11:07) HubSpot has actually slowly they started as that for SMP and they have now I huge as like I love HubSpot. I just think we use it. I just think it's a fantastic company. But I would like to follow in the path of them. Like they've now gone and built the CRM. they've built a bunch they have the landing pages they do all kinds of functionality I think they now serve ads that is a different approach because they have bolted it on uh but one that we look to we aspire to replicate I mean the degree of difficulty there feels higher but also if you can do it especially at the enterprise level then (11:39) that itself is an is a moat right your ability to build product quickly and penetrate organizations particularly now I'm wondering if you're seeing this because you've got so many great logos already that what I'm hearing ing from CRO's uh is procurement processes have slowed down not just because of economic volatility but because everybody's got new legal uh language and new you know red lines around what you're doing with my data if you're using AI in your product and if you're using it to train (12:07) your models are you seeing something similar yeah and it's a little bit of the wild west in that nobody knows what they should be asking for and sometimes I feel like I have to play lawyer as a side project Because sometimes we'll get and this is actually interesting. (12:24) The size and scale of a company is not indicative of how many red lines we get back which is weird to me. I would expect it to at least follow in some kind of linear path. So we'll get language that lawyers will try to throw in there that if they understood at all how this stuff actually works, there's no way we can possibly agree to it. (12:42) And then sometimes people clearly get it and they're they're baking in language that has some understanding of how these underlying models work and are trying to protect both sides. And I think that's the right approach. I'm excited to hopefully have some more standardized language. There's the DPA concept which I think most people are trying to move towards although we get asked for that very infrequently which is interesting. (13:03) But I will say feels like people are trying to protect themselves in ways that they don't understand yet. And uh it's you know it's annoying. I don't there are two parts of my job that I don't love. One is invoices. Chasing down invoices. Man, I did not know how long I would spend doing that. (13:22) The second thing, and everyone's on a different cadence and different payment schedule and everything. The second thing is all the legal stuff. Just the amount of little like, do we really need to change that one word? Is that really that important? Apparently, it is. It's it is not fun. And you realize that like the reason these contracts are like this is because one time this thing happened to one company and therefore it became part of you know the dogma the entire so I always use this phrase I'm like the only reason we have so many industries legal cyber security I can go on and on is because people suck that is (13:54) the only reason the entire industry exists if people didn't suck we would not lead all this we would not need security we would not need lawyers I agree with you 100% Um all right let's so actually one last thing so that we can contextualize tofu and then I want to dive into this blind spot but uh where are you in your journey so you know nothing confidential but I do believe that you just announced a series A or recently so let's celebrate that you know how much money have you raised who are your investors where are you on (14:22) your growth trajectory well thank you for that we did uh so we are we just celebrated our two-year anniversary of incorporation so we're two years old as a company we've been in market selling for about a year and a quarter, we'll call it that. (14:40) Um, we raised a series A, we raised a $5 million seed a year ago and then we just closed a series A, a $12 million series A. Have amazing investors and partners. We have Index Ventures, Signal Fire, HubSpot Ventures, Stage 2, Liquid 2, Correlation, a bunch of other great names there. So, we feel very lucky to have some awesome partners. That's awesome. Congratulations. Okay, so let's dive into the subject at hand. (14:58) This is the prompt. Uh, you know, you are an AI yourself, Elaine. So the prompt I'm typing is think of a time in your career when you had a significant blind spot in your approach to revenue leadership, go to market strategy or operational execution. Those three things mean basically anything. What was the blind spot? Let's talk about it. (15:16) Oh man, I have so many of these. So um I'll start with the first one which I think is the most important and we can dig into a few others. The first one is incentives matter more than anything else. And that's a broad statement, but I can get very particular about this. I'll give you one. I'll give you many examples. (15:38) First example, when I first joined an early stage startup out of college, I had never I was a biomechanical engineer. I was so far not on the track of going into go to market or revenue at all. I just started figuring things out. Company selling to 55year-old CIOS. Like that was our our target audience. I started building out the SDR team. no idea what I was doing. I learned so quickly how wherever you put the goalpost in terms of compensation, that is the results you will get. You put the goalpost as meetings booked, you're going to get a ton of meetings and those meetings (16:09) are not going to be good, right? If you start to play with how you create incentives, where you draw the line for how people achieve those incentives, you will 100% shift behavior. And I think what that means is as a revenue leader, you have to think two steps ahead and you have to think through the butterfly effect of it. (16:27) What is the implications of this? Okay, what is the implications of that? That's where you need to think. It's not just one step ahead. It's actually two. And I think if you can do that and then work backwards, that is how you can align incentives well. But I learned this early in my career is that incentive alignment is the most important thing you can do with your team, with your prospects, with your existing customers, with your investors, with your co-founders. (16:51) It is truly all about understanding what is driving this person and it's at the person level, right? What is driving this individual person and how can I make it such that my incentives of what I am personally driven by is also aligned with theirs. And I think that once you un understand this as a blind spot and have it as a constant mirror, you start to change the way that you do everything from how you build a team, how you compensate the team, how you forecast, how you deal with the handoff between different people. This is another piece too also comes back to incentives. (17:27) Handoffs happen probably five times in a B2B go to market world. You have a prospect who is being touched by marketing in all kinds of ways. You typically have some kind of SDR function, BDR function, qualification function. You then have a handoff to sales. You then have a handoff to customer success, which might be like more of an onboarding or implementation. (17:51) And then you have an account manager. That is a lot of different people who are all involved in the revenue function. Now, understanding how the pieces tie together and how you actually make them work as a team and not against each other is how you have a much easier time generating more revenue, predicting that revenue, and just creating a much more peaceable org in general. So, I would say that is my number one thing is just always remembering incentives matter more than anything else. (18:16) Did anything emerge in terms of like principles be obviously the butterfly effect that's an important one, but when you think about incentivizing go-to market organizations or sales teams, are there other principles to keep in mind like simplicity like one thing that comes to mind for me is just to your point incentives drive behavior and also outliers and ex you know we have to understand that we can't we have to solve for the mean I don't know if you agree with this I would love your reaction but we have to solve for the mean not for the outlier in the sense (18:46) that oh this person broke the comp plan or this person did this thing but we have to look at the aggregate behavior and understand we're never going to perfect it and in my experience simplicity is still a more powerful le lever than trying to incorporate every possible iteration and incentive to driving a specific outcome. But I don't know if anything emerged from that over your time leading and running revenue teams. (19:09) I think people over complicate stuff all the time. Simplicity absolutely also even from a like right now real situation we're scaling up our team quite a bit and I am a firm believer that all re all marketing sales and CS should be comped variably. (19:31) It's boggled my mind how we've comped sales variably forever, but marketing and CS typically is just base salary. They are still driving revenue. They're still very much touching customers and should be compensated accordingly in my opinion. So, everyone at TOFU that is on that that side of the house is comp variably. Now, where you put those stakes matter a lot, but you can over complicate it to the nth degree. (19:51) For example, if we wanted to comp our SDR team on second meeting, which is what we're doing, first meeting, cool. It might not be that qualified. If they get to a second meeting, we know that it's actually qualified. Now, marketing is going to also be in the mix, too, and touching those leads. (20:09) Like, how are we going to parse out who was responsible for what, I'm not over complicating it. It's quite simple. And so, for me, it's like, if you had a hand in this that is visible that we can track, we are going to track an attribute. we're not going to go back and retroactively do all this kind of stuff. Like that is not that also is not the right incentive. Meaning if you want to get comped on that, make sure you have a way to attribute it. (20:29) So that is putting in all the right tracking parameters, making sure you're updating the CRM if it's not getting updated. So I agree in simplicity generally. I also agree in trying to be as comprehensive as possible, if that makes sense. (20:48) Meaning, I want to make sure that we're trying to analyze the big picture, break it down into bite-sized things that are attainable, but also measurable, and then figure out how do we create a system that I don't have to keep tweaking every month. That's the other thing that I also see revenue leaders do all the time is they're constantly tweaking their system. (21:05) Everyone's constantly redoing their lead scoring, redoing their attribution models, redoing their what whatever the benchmark for compensation is. And I think that's another huge trap that people fall in is constantly thinking they need to optimize it when to your point oftentimes doing something that's simple but feels fair is the best best point of action. (21:22) Uh I mean you you're these are some hot takes uh actually. Uh so so marketing I love it. I love it. That's why you're great podcast guest. Um, so marketing uh should be comped variably and to the point you said if I'm hearing you correctly, hey, it's not first touch, last touch. It's any touch attribution. We're looking at like if you touched it, we're going to attribute that revenue to your goal, your you know, whatever your KPI is. (21:54) Does that uh do you worry that you're double counting, overounting, that you don't have clear signal? You know, if you're thinking about, and this, by the way, this is a this is for every company, but especially true for Pavilion, right? We're highly word of mouth driven. Uh, at the same time, we run ads and we run different kinds of demand genen campaigns and we go to trade shows. (22:11) And the reality, which is the reality of all like attribution conversation is that everybody's quote unquote touched multiple times in multiple different ways. And that's how humans make these decisions and make their determinations. So the consequence of that potentially could be like either overindexing on a specific channel of growth and saying like hey this was really performant because any touch and therefore we want to spend a hundred more dollars or a million more dollars on that channel. (22:40) Do you worry about that attribution question or not really not not really and the way I think about attribution in general is I work backwards. So I work backwards from what are the goals that I'm trying to achieve. So let's say it's a revenue goal. I can say okay here's our ACV here's our revenue goal that means we need X number of customers to hit the revenue goal okay let me go and look backwards in the funnel so for us we have six stages of our funnel and the two that matter the most is what I call like the evaluating stage so that's post second meeting where it's like a true opportunity and then the one right before it where it's that like second (23:09) meeting so those are the two where it's like we're creating real opportunities I also can see the falloff from demos created through all of these different stages so I know what we need to hit to do Now, I don't care if I'm giving multiple people the same, you know, compensation incentives as long as I know that, hey, for every person that we're hiring, here's how much revenue we're going to generate because that's the company goals and we're hitting them. (23:35) I would rather have a team that feels supported, that feels like they have the freedom to go and do a bunch of stuff. Now, you brought up one other piece which I think is also important is you could be running all kinds of campaigns, which means you're touching everyone. Now, are all those a good use of time and money? Probably not. (23:52) So, is there a way to also create the incentives where you're actually measuring those pieces, too? And making sure that people are also in line on that. So, from a marketing perspective, maybe it's not 100% on just like did you have any touch point whatsoever. (24:12) It's actually also figuring out, okay, what was the cost per demo and are we making sure that we're keeping it under a certain amount. Now, what that might mean is, hey, we're actually doing ads, and ads can touch everybody, but our ads are really expensive, so we're not getting below that mark for cost per demo. Now, I have to go and reconfigure my channel mix a little bit. (24:30) And so, I think that there's ways to do it, which also hopefully don't feel over complicated, but I'd rather have people feel like they're not having sharp elbows against their team or constantly fighting for a lead. I just don't like that dynamic. No, I I tend to agree with you. You have to be careful about like efficiency, meaning spend. But generally speaking, like I'd rather overattribute in a way so that people are high-fiving and thinking that they're working on things together. And anyway, the the point is like, you know, an SDR sends an email after after your prospect has seen a few (25:02) ads, heard you on a podcast, met you at a trade show. So, is that SDR attribution? Is that trade show attribution? It's it's really hard to tell. It's better to just be somewhat generous as long as you can afford to be generous. Here's my other Well, yes, another hot take, but also a comment on that. (25:19) It's not even that afford to be generous. It's put the benchmarks at a place where it actually financially makes sense. So, you always can be generous. I think that's also the other thing, meaning let's make sure that everyone is still aligned with the company revenue goals and that it puts you in a position where you're actually able to do that. (25:35) That's another thing I've seen people make the mistake of is that they put the bar too low where it feels like it's a pie. You have to you have to allocate the pie as opposed to the pie is a little bit bigger. And again, you're you're kind of pushing people in that direction. Um other hot take. Oh, wait. (25:53) Where'd it go? I'll think of it. I had another hot take for you. I'll uh I'll think of it. I'll think of it. I can I can set up some Z balls for you. Oh, did the person with the tote bag left? Yes. better lighting. Here we go. Is that is that is that a relative of yours or you're in like a co-working space? Oh, I'll give you my my crazy story. (26:11) So, I am in Florida right now, which is not a place I love, but um uh it is my older child's spring break and I needed child care and my mom is down here. So, she told me if I showed up in Florida that she would help watch my daughter. So, yesterday, we get up at 6:00 in the morning from California. We fly to Dallas. (26:29) That part was fine. Have 2-hour layover in Dallas, get on our second plane. We're on the runway and they make an announcement that the flight is canceled. We go back to the airport, have an 8-hour layover, get in here at it finally left. That flight scenario, three years old. Oh my god. Is your husband? No, it was just me and my older one. My husband's at home with the baby. (26:56) Uh, we get into Florida at 2 in the morning, so I am now in in Florida in a in a family room. Well, there we go. You're a rock star. Um, I'm sorry. I really am sorry. That's Oh, wait. I have my hot take again. Okay. Okay. Bring it. So, here's my other hot take. Um, it's less of a hot take. It's more like a as we became more data driven as go to market people. (27:20) It actually complicates attribution more. The more data we have, the more complicated it gets. And this is something where I don't even know how to unwind it. But I am finding that everyone wants more data. figuring out how better to attribute a dollar or to attribute, you know, touches to various people. But the more data, the harder it becomes. (27:40) And I actually think it's doing a disservice to people trying to figure this out and correctly attribute stuff. On top of that, there's dark everything. People talk about dark social. There's dark word of mouth. To your point, I'm sure 50 plus% maybe 80 plus% of all your stuff is word of mouth. Like that's so hard to figure out. I'm sure they saw maybe they listened to your podcast, maybe they follow you on LinkedIn. (28:04) They've probably never interacted with your stuff before, but that's where they heard about it. There's dark web, you know, web searches. So, I think that there's also so much dark data where now we collect all this data for data sake. There's so much stuff that we actually have no data to fully put our hands around and now we're trying to make sense of that. And I don't know if it makes sense to do that. (28:26) I think sometimes you have to a little bit go with gut and intuition paired with the data that makes sense. I mean, I think that that's where it all comes out. Like my experience in marketing specifically because I find sales just so much more discreet and binary. It's so much more understandable. And marketing is really getting inside the human mind and figuring out like how do people make decisions and why. (28:49) And my experience is that they make decisions for a lot of different reasons. And you have you can't circumvent logic and uh you know like common sense like you come to a website and people are going to want to know more about your product and if you don't share that information you just put up a lead form it's not going to convert very well and there's no science behind that. It's like well who would want to buy something that they don't know anything about. (29:15) So my point is long-winded which is I agree with you that there has to be a healthy amount of intuition and empathy because everything cannot be distilled down to like a small number especially when it comes to attribution especially when it comes to well what was the last thing that happened that made you finally make the decision to buy tofu and it's like well it's a prepoundonderance of a million things over the course of the last six to nine months. So, at any rate, 100% agree. Last question before we get some (29:40) influences, we get some uh we get some books that you want us to read. You mentioned that you listen to podcast. Did you say at three times speed? Yes. Hence why I also talk super fast. I'm trying to do my best to slow it down. You literally listen at 3x speed. I literally listen at 3x speed. You're insane. Okay, so that is true. Also, before we get there, one last question. (30:02) operational biggest surprise you were you were in product and marketing actually uh before you went to Signal Fire you were then a VC for a while now you're back as an operator what's the biggest surprise like what's the biggest thing that caught you off guard back in the operator seat I like this question like what did you not have a full enough appreciation for as a VC the thing that I did not have we'll also say not just operator but founder I think there's a difference between just being an operator and being an actual founder of a company. There are so many (30:38) little things that it takes to run a company that nobody sees. I mean, I was mentioning before like invoices. Dealing with invoices is so much time and effort that I never expected to have to do. Literally, it's not even just creating them. (30:57) It's that every single one of our customers is on a different cadence and a different schedule. and you know people want to get paid here or there or credit card or bill.com or whatever that part or like HR little the little things like I have to deal with our office space those things you know it's just things like that are required to run a company and so I think that I did not have enough appreciation for that kind of stuff um the one thing that I'm really excited about that I would say not necessarily caught me off guard because I wrote about this in my newsletter four years ago But I am now seeing this be the true year where B2B (31:32) influencer marketing takes off, which I knew was coming. It just kind of I wasn't sure when. And I feel like I I saw the signal last year like that that ship is is sailing. So that one is kind of like a fun one and I'm excited to also take advantage of that. Well, uh and this podcast is sponsored by Otter. (31:50) So you are actually participating in B2B influence. This is true. Happy to be serving meta. Um all right. Before we go a couple things to learn a little bit about you and just to pay it forward where what are the you know the ideas it could be a mentor it could be a famous CEO could be a book you've read a podcast a movie but there are ideas there are memes that are metriculating and floating through the atmosphere that have you know planted a seed in your mind that we should know about. So when you when I phrase it in that way, which is a little bit, you know, um I don't (32:24) know, uh whatever, what comes to mind? Like what are some ideas that are interesting to you? What are some books that you think we should read? Give us some ideas. Well, I talked about the whole butterfly effect thing before. Um, one of my favorite books that I actually read twice just because it was that fascinating is a book How We Got to Now, and they go through seven massive butterfly effects, starting with the invention, the discovery of glass and all of the different things that that led to the creation of ice and all of the new industries that unlock. It's just for people that like that kind of (32:55) stuff, it pairs history with a way of thinking to really wrap your head around what are the implications. To me, it's always about what are the implications of things that are happening now, three clicks down the road. So, I really like that one. That was a more recent one that I I just thought was amazing. (33:12) I listen to a ton of podcasts and for me it's just a way of consuming a ton of information and trying to balance that information out across all my different social diet. Um, one hack I have for people is if you ever wanted to read a book that's a mostly non-fiction book, but every time the authors are publishing their book, they go on a little podcast tour. (33:36) If you don't want to read the whole thing, you can literally just go and listen to them on a podcast and you're going to get all of the meat in 30 minutes. Yeah. But they're going to give you the best. Like they're going to give you the top 10 things from that. That's one of my life hacks. And then All right. So, what's your favorite podcast you're listening to right now? Or what's a great podcast? A great one that's under underappreciated is called Throughine. (33:56) Uh it's in the NPR family, but their entire thing is going back in time to understand the present. And they go really deep in one story that's very topical right now. It could be cultural, it could be political, it could be something like that, but it's extremely topical today, but they go and explain through time how we got there and give you a lot of the historical context, which I think is very cool. (34:15) That one is great. I'm trying to think if there's any other ones. Oh, another one for marketing folks, sales and marketing folks under the influence. It's a Canadian podcast and it's all about brand marketing and it is amazing. They go through all kinds of stuff from like the history of jingles and why jingles stick in our head to uh one of the more recent ones that was so fun is this type of brand marketing where you actually go they called it hugging the cactus. (34:40) So, it's all the haters. Whenever you get a lot of haters, like how do you actually go and like embrace them so much that it wins you brand affinity? This is a fantastic podcast. I love that. That's awesome. Okay, good. So, Under the Influence, uh we've also got Through Line and then the Steven Johnson book, which is how we got to now, you know, one of the great sort of like popular science popular uh writers. (35:01) Um if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way if they want to purchase tofu, they want to ask you a question about what you said, how do you prefer to be contacted? I am on LinkedIn a lot, so feel free to find me on LinkedIn. Elaine Zelby, also Elaineto tofuhq.com. I love engaging with people. Honestly, I love learning from other folks. (35:20) For me, I probably one of my major personality faults is I have trouble saying no to anything. So, when people want to talk or give this I would have done anyways, but I really truly am an extrovert. But I love I love understanding people and understanding what is top of mind for them and using that information to help us build product. (35:40) Like for us, everything comes down to I want to build something that is actually providing true utility to a lot of people. And the only way we're going to do that is to really get in the minds and get in the day-to-day of what it looks like to be them in their work and how do we help? And so I love talking to people. That's awesome. (35:56) Elaine, thank you for being the guinea pig and the first ever guest on revenue blind spots. I appreciate it. Otterai appreciates it. Uh and congrats on building a great company with Tofu. Thank you for having me. Excited to also continue to be a big part of Pavilion. You guys are amazing. Thanks, Sam.