YouSaid · the spoken record

Kareem Amin

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59
first
2026-06-16
most recent
2026-06-16
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “I think courage because one thing that I think a lot about is I think capitalism rewards risk more than anything else. I think a lot of people think it's like meritocracy or hard work, which I think is silly. There are a lot of people working really hard and not making a lot of money. So it's not hard work. There's some correlation there, but it's definitely not just that. It doesn't just reward skill. There's a lot of really skilled people. There are people who do things that I can't even dream of. You're eating a sword or you're like juggling and they're not making as much money as someone doing a YouTube video. It's clear again that that's not the case. I do think it rewards risk, which makes sense. I don't have like a strong comment on whether that's good or bad. I'm just trying to figure out what's actually happening. There's a lot of people who think they're taking risks but aren't taking real risks. I talked to one family.”

    2026-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “People don't talk enough about the things that actually matter in building a business. I had this dream actually where it was kind of like a vision where I saw lots of statues in a modern city, but I was wondering, oh, we don't build statues anymore. But I'm like, if you look at old republics, they would have statues for concepts like courage or integrity or justice and there were like gods for these different things. And I feel like we've forgotten these abstract kind of ideas that matter in the moment when you're building a company. It was actually, hey, you need courage to make a leap and commit to these ideas and then see what is the logical conclusion if we take these ideas seriously all the way to the end.”

    2026-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Kind of role when we're going to call the subset or the word jobs to be done go to market engineering to give it a framing this is the tasks to be done are all the things that you need to do the activities to grow your business remove any obstacles to growth the last part was we're going to charge for usage instead of proceed because we're trying to get more productivity so if you have fewer people we didn't want that to be something that isn't anti-incentive for us If you just look at those three decisions, almost every other decision in the company falls immediately out of those that anyone can come up with what we should do next if you believe these three things. That's the best way also to run a company that's growing really quickly because I have to just communicate to you these are the three things that we're assuming. And whenever you're making a decision, check to see if it works within these three concepts. I feel like”

    2026-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “LLMs in clay because one we were set up to allow any integration to anything and two we were a coating like product just designed with go-to-market primitives. As soon as we had LLMs, it just boosted everything. So for clay, there were three core assumptions that we made. And I actually think this is how to build a really big company and one that grows really quickly. So we went from 1 to 100 in two years, but that wouldn't work if we weren't pointing in the right direction. So you need to kind of set everything up so that you're pointing in the right direction so that when the wave comes, you go with it and you're not fighting it. For us, we made a couple decisions. One, people in go to market are creative. And so we're going to give them the most powerful tool. If you were going to give the most powerful tool instead of the simple out-of-the-box tool, then you need to find the right customer or user for it. For that, we said, okay, we're doing it for RevOps, which is an existing.”

    2026-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “What's interesting in that story that is maybe worth talking a bit more about is that this was back in 2022, we had made a decision to say, okay, we are targeting go-to-market teams specifically sales, specifically we're going to start with Outbound, specifically we're going to start with people who want to get data from lots of different data providers in order to do outbound. In fact, it's going to be agencies and not startups. And we're going to do a lot of what we're doing and support them in public and build a community. So we took a lot of decisions that I think were non-obvious. The main thing that happened was really the courage and commitment, I think, to making those decisions that actually allowed the company to take off. Because the company was already taking off before ChatGPT came out. We were well set up to include”

    2026-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Code, but it was how do you systematically think about a problem and break it down and then execute it? We've also kept that ethos in the company. That's what makes us really different than everybody else in our space. There are simple things that we've been saying out loud, but I think people don't really believe that that's why it works. So one is it's a creative task. So if it's a creative task, we need to leave it somewhat open-ended. A lot of companies that counter position to clay or in the space are like, hey, What you really want is salespeople are people have literally used the word coin operated. So what you need is something that's super easy to use. It gives you the answer. It tells you who you're selling to and what you're saying, and it just works. Whereas we think you always need in sales to find go-to-market alpha. How are you different than everybody else? Otherwise, it's just noise in order to do that. You need to have a really powerful tool that allows you to...”

    2026-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Ton of ideas but isn't able to execute them and landed on sales and marketing where we think people are really creative, but they don't have the ability to turn a lot of their ideas into reality. I'll give you one example that's real today that is kind of wild. But we have one company that sells to businesses that have a lot of garbage. So now they're using Google, what's called satellite view to see which areas have a lot of accumulation of garbage. And then they figure out, okay, that's a good business to sell to. That's an idea that you might have, but it might be super hard to execute that at scale. And now something like Clay can actually translate that for you. Because of that, because the whole intention around Clay was how do we give the power of programming to people, that's kind of how the name came because we're like, okay, it's go to market, but now you're an engineer. We came up with that before. It was really possible to use LLMs to fully.”

    2026-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And because we were coding, we felt that adrenaline that everybody's feeling right now, which is, hey, I can tell the machine to do something and it does. In the 21st century, the material is computation. If in the past it was oil or steel or whatever it is, today it's computation. So the more we can give that to more people, the more interesting things happen, the more egalitarian it is. It's kind of interesting because that was our desire and there were no LLMs, which we started off by thinking about the terminal and we're like, how do we reinvent the terminal where engineers are spending all of their time? And then we're like, well, that's just going to speed up engineers. We need to find something that gives that power to more people. In 2017, we started thinking, do we give it to engineers or non-engineers? Do we give it to consumers or business users? We ended up deciding business users for a variety of reasons. Within that, we were like, okay, which department in a business actually has a”

    2026-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “We started with the really abstract ambition of how do we give the power of programming to more people. My co-founder Nicola and I, we worked in product, even though we both studied engineering. I think it was really just, hey, you're in the 21st century. You have computers that can do things for you. And if you can't tell them what to do, then you can't capture any of the value that's being created. We had a lot of ideas and we wanted to build them. And every time we tried to build something, it was taking so long. I was also starting to play around with producing music. And I really like tools like Ableton Live. I have an idea I can extract it from my mind and into the machine. And we were also in this kick of like looking at the history of computation, things like in the 1960s, the mother of all demos, just seeing the fluidity of the interaction between you and a computer needs to be super fluid for it actually to lead you to the next stage of thinking. You need low latency between, I have an idea.”

    2026-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source