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Demystifying the conversations we're already here at RRE and with our portfolio companies. In each episode, your hosts, Will Porteous, Raju Rishi, and Jason Black will dive deeply into topics that are shaping the future, from satellite technology to digital health, to venture investing, and much more.
Raju: Plus that logo. People can’t see it on this podcast, but that logo, I think it’s going to go viral. I was promised a t-shirt. I’m just telling you, I was promised a t-shirt.
Ron: [crosstalk 00:00:08]. It’s the softest thing you’ll ever feel. I promise you.
Raju: Okay. Oh, my God. I have a very fluffy dog, is it softer than my fluffy dog?
Ron: We’ll do a comparison.
Raju: Okay, fine. I’m going to—like, on the next podcast, I might pet the fluffy dog and the Avina shirt simultaneously, see what happens. I’ll give people—the listeners deserve to know. The listeners deserve to know.
Will: I’m Will Porteous.
Raju: And I’m Raju Rishi. Welcome to RRE POV, the show in which we record the conversations we’re already having among ourselves, our entrepreneurs, and industry leaders for you to listen in on.
Raju: Hey listeners. This is Raju Rishi, and thank you for joining us for yet another episode of RRE POV today. My partner Will Porteous and I are joined by Ron Fisher, CEO and co-founder of Avina, one of our newest portfolio companies. Ron has a super interesting background: a BA from Tufts, and MBA from Cornell, two years as a non-commissioned officer of the Israel Defense Forces, four years at Nielsen, CEO and co-founder of a super early AI company called Bowtie, which was acquired by Mindbody, Stint at Mindbody, and finally, CEO and co-founder of Avina. So, thanks for joining us, Ron.
Ron: Thanks for having me, guys.
Raju: All right, Ron, kind of a crazy background spanning from government to large enterprise to startups. Not sure there’s a category left untouched. Maybe pro athlete. If you were a pro athlete, what would what sport would it be, Ron?
Ron: I guess soccer. It’s a nod to my international roots.
Raju: Okay, fantastic. All right, so maybe that’s next on the resume, but I’m going to hold you to getting Avina public before then, so… you know, why don’t we start with the Israel Defense Forces role? You know, I heard you were responsible for growing the social media elements of that organizations. What was the goal there? What was the goal?
Ron: Yeah, so I was the first soldier under the first non-commissioned officer to build out the new media desk. We were the first army in the world to realize that the next battleground, in terms of arenas that we need to be competing in, is the arena of public opinion online. So, we were the first army to actually take combat footage and put it directly on YouTube, take maps of drone footage and put it on our blog, put it on Twitter. So, we really had to educate online platforms to actually allow that type of activity and redefine their policies to be able to allow us to make our case. Because, as we know now, there’s a huge power in having a direct connection with your audience.
And the mainstream media is always going to have their own agenda and their own perspective, and if you’re going to leave it to them to take your materials and present them in a certain way, then you’re going to lose your case, especially if they’re after their own narrative. So, it was a really important thing that we’re doing—we did then. And we were two soldiers then. Now, it’s a unit, I think, of 30 to 40 people, just that division, with a budget of millions of shekel. Back then it was, like, me and my laptop and one officer.
Raju: [laugh]. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. I mean, you know, I saw someplace that you grew it pretty substantially in terms of number of participants, clicks, users, any tricks to getting that done?
Ron: Yeah, I mean, definitely, I think there’s two things. So, one is authenticity. I think you have to play your strengths, and your voice, and don’t pretend to be anything they are not. I think the second part is, rigorous attention to detail because people will pick apart any small thing that you put out there without going into specific details, but if you forget to change the settings on something, and you upload a picture, let’s say, for example, with something that you left on that you shouldn’t have, then they’re going to find that in the metadata. They’re going to tear you apart, and that’s something that you never even meant to put out there. So, just really making sure everything’s at the highest level, that it reflects who you are, and it’s a message you can stand by.
Raju: Awesome.
Will: Wow, that’s fascinating, Ron. You must have developed, like, a pretty rigorous process for the way you qualified stuff that was going to be released, but also you probably had a pretty big bureaucratic organization behind you that had to sign off. Sounds like you were very much an entrepreneur in that world. So, lessons from that you brought forward to this company?
Ron: Yeah, so I think one is, when it comes to wartime, it’s very much a lot of the process goes out the window, actually. So, in that arena, it’s very much like a startup in terms of act first, ask questions later, with a high degree of trust and confidence in the team. So, I think that’s definitely something that I take to this startup and to the previous startup, which is, okay, if we have an idea, let’s just try it, you know? We’re going to actually waste more time discussing it than we are putting the experiment out there and seeing the result. So, I think that’s something I definitely carried forward.
And the other side is, that most people are not going to understand what you’re doing at the beginning at all. Most of the world is going to be against whatever it is that you’re trying to put out there, but if you see your vision, believe in your vision, recognize that vision, then eventually that boulder will be less moving uphill and more moving quickly downhill.
Raju: I love that.
Will: That’s great.
Raju: Any interesting stories you can share without putting yourself on some list?
Ron: In terms of the army? Well, I mean, my greatest, proudest moment was during the Mavi Marmara incident, which was a Turkish flotilla that came to Israel. We basically were ambushed by a bunch of terrorists pretending to be protesters that wanted to basically take our soldiers hostage on the boat. And in that sense, we entered a wartime scenario. And I basically was the one, like, handling the entire English side of the operation online, so I was on the ground, in the tents, with all of these highest ranking generals in the entire army. And I was probably 20, 30 years their junior.
But the way I carried myself, and just doing everything I needed to do, whether that was like translating their speeches live, you know, taking the combat footage straight from intelligence, censoring it, and putting it straight online, like, it let me see what a huge difference, like, one person could make. And it also showed me how much reality can differ from what goes online because a lot of the things that we could have put out there, we weren’t allowed to because of security concerns, but those things would have made our case that much better. So, for my own eye, for the future, I always see the news, and I know that you know that news is only 50% of the story at best.
Raju: Super interesting. So, super selfishly, I mean, we’ve been doing RRE POV for many months now and we have, like, five regular listeners.
Will: [laugh].
Raju: [laugh]. No, I’m kidding. Any tips for us, any tips for us that you would recommend to expand our listening pool?
Ron: I definitely think a level of shamelessness is always in order—
Raju: Okay.
Will: And I think that, again, that sense of recurring schedule that you can build up, and that loyalty that you can build up is super powerful. And I think although podcasts is an oral or auditory medium, I do think that there is a visual element that I’m seeing taking off. And a lot of podcasts I’m finding out through TikTok and Instagram Reels, so that would be my last recommendation because I see highlights there, and that’s how I end up actually getting hooked into podcasts. So.
Raju: Oh, my God, I got to learn to dance. I’m going to do it—
Will: Okay—
Raju: Yeah.
Will: That’s it. We got to amp it up on visual socials, Raju. You do need to dance.
Raju: Will, we’re going to do a TikTok dance. I mean, that’s got to happen. That’s got to happen. That’s got to happen.
Will: Clearly, yeah.
Raju: All right, let’s move to Nielsen. Oddly, you know, it sounds like your experience in the Israel Defense Forces probably was relevant to Nielsen. What were the top few things you learned there?
Ron: Yeah, so I was a product manager at Nielsen before I understood that was, like, a sexy title that people wanted to put out there.
Raju: [laugh].
Will: [laugh].
Ron: So, that was a really interesting experience for me because I worked on the client portal, so that was where all of these huge, you know, Fortune 500 media companies, CPG companies, were accessing their data. And the art of persuasion, as we all know, is paramount when it comes to that role; you have no authority, but you have all the responsibility. So, that was very relevant in the sense that in the army, it was exactly the same game where, you know, I was in charge of all these things, but had zero resources. And then eventually, what we ended up doing was—as you say, there’s a lot of different experiences that I have that one day, we’ll see how they all connect—I did their first consumer app, which got a best new app in the Apple Store. And what I learned there is the intricacies of negotiating many different competing interests because for Nielsen, there’s always a push and pull in terms of, we are selling our—they are selling their data to companies, and those companies are making a lot of claims based on that data.
So, if Nielsen goes out publicly, directly to the consumer and says, “Actually, this is the number one shampoo,” or, “Actually this was the number one TV show,” there’s a certain element of danger to that because they are beholden to those clients who are paying for that data. So, managing that relationship was really interesting to me, and being able to use data to discover and uncover insights without stepping on people’s toes is something that I think is super relevant even to what we’re doing with Avina.
Raju: Oh, yeah. A hundred percent. So, you transitioned from an individual contributor to managing a team there. Are you, like, a natural-born leader, or was that a learned skill?
Ron: I do think I’m a natural-born leader. To be honest, I think it’s probably one of the things I’m actually good at. No [laugh].
Raju: Oh, my G—[laugh] that’s fantastic.
Ron: I think what comes naturally to me is seeing other people’s potential and tapping into that even when they don’t see it for themselves yet. And I think that’s something I discovered really early on, and then everything else I just need to be kind of good enough at until I can hire someone to do it. The second thing is that somebody once told me at my previous company, which was Bowtie, was I always had, like, a pick-up-the-broom mentality [unintelligible 00:10:22] my CRO, Ethan, used to tell me, which is the sense of, I don’t mind doing any of the dirty work, doing the things that fall between the cracks. Oftentimes, I talk to people who they want to work at a startup, but they want to manage, or they want to do operations. And it honestly makes me laugh because, you know, that’s a completely not relevant perspective until you’re so much farther into the company. Like, you have to be willing to go out there, do the work, embarrass yourself, pick up the phone to succeed. So yeah, that quality is something else that I have.
Raju: That’s awesome. Well, let’s talk a little bit about Bowtie. Two large organizations, and then you became the founder of Bowtie. So, a few questions, and you can unpack them as you want. Like, first of all, like, what is Bowtie, for our listeners? I know what it is, but like, Will may not.
Ron: Bowtie was the world’s first AI receptionist for appointment-based businesses. So, if you called a spa, salon, or a doctor, and eventually a fitness business as well and no one answered, then the AI would text you back and be able to service you. And this was before ChatGPT, before the huge breakthrough in LLMs that we have today, so everything, we had to build completely custom from scratch.
Will: Wow, that’s incredible.
Raju: That’s awesome. And so, what was the motivation to start that business? I mean, you’re here, you got two big companies under your belt, and you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to go start Bowtie,” right, like… with a couple of guys, right? Like, why [laugh]?
Ron: So, interesting enough. It all started with—it started as a student project because Cornell Tech, their whole mission is to create startups in New York to grow this ecosystem so it’s more diversified—beyond finance and fashion, I guess—and the original kernel of Bowtie was that chatbots were going to take over the world. So, there was, like, a vision moment where I spoke to the guys and we said, “Okay, well, chatbots is the future.” This is 2016, six months before it kind of exploded onto the rest of the scene which, I think, where you kind of want to be in terms of technology, like, slightly ahead, but not, you know, ten years ahead, where you completely are missing the window. And so, we knew that was going to be a huge shift.
And we knew that there was app fatigue, in terms of users downloading an app to interact with every single business that they wanted to essentially do commerce with. And so, from there, it was actually some experimentation to decide which industry we should be going into. So originally, we were going to do restaurants, and talking about, nobody wants an app for every single restaurant that they order from. And then we quickly realized once we actually launched that, that our user or our customer wasn’t actually the consumer, it was the business owner. And the business owner is the one actually paying for the product. The business owner is the one who should be getting the most value from the product.
And then at that point, we realized that restaurants wasn’t where we needed to go. We needed to go somewhere else. And then through our research and through all the learnings that we had up until now—or then—we actually pivoted to just beauty originally. So, three guys who had, like, never probably stepped into a salon in their entire lives—
Raju: Your hair would say otherwise.
Ron: [laugh].
Will: [laugh].
Ron: That changes over time. I know much more about every single type of balayage and double-process than you can imagine. But no, what we realized was, in terms of AI and what we could generalize in scale, actually, the menu set and the conversation that somebody has between a customer and a receptionist is very limited in terms of the types of actions that you could take and the ways you could order. So, imagine somebody ordering a salad. That’s, like, a 40-step process.
It’s so much more complicated than you can imagine in conversation, versus somebody booking a haircut, booking, eventually, a doctor’s appointment, a [cry 00:14:08] appointment, all these things. So, that’s why we actually, very deliberately, just went into one very, very, very niche vertical, which was beauty, eventually expanding to all these other ones, until Mindbody acquired us, and started to see serious success, once we attached the phone to it. So, it really was, like, a process of experimentation that started with a broader idea of what the future should be like.
Raju: Yeah, I kind of love it. That’s kind of what startups—my biggest statement is more startups will dive from indigestion and starvation, and sounds like you guys started broad and kind of narrowed into something that actually had usability and a use case that kind of worked.
Ron: Right, and very tangible ROI, which I think for SMBs some—eventually we’ll talk about Avina which is just enterprise—but with SMBs, they’re inundated constantly with people walking into their store and pitching them. You really want to have a very straightforward case of ROI to be successful. And then if you do, you can make that sale in one call. Like, I would call a business in the middle of the Midwest in America, and I was able to close a contract for, like, $1,500 a year—because it was, you know, $150 a month at the time—in less than an hour. Like, get the credit card, move on to the next business.
Raju: So, how was that transition from Megacorp to startups? Any difficult lessons, any… you know, advice you would give founders that are moving from a big company to a small company, or just trying to, like—you know, all their work experience is big companies, and now they’re, like, starting something fresh?
Ron: Yeah, so I think that kind of touches on one of the questions you asked previous which is, the skills I take into the company, which is, again, you got to be willing to roll up your sleeves. I was probably the worst salesman ever going into the first startup.
Will: I don’t believe that [laugh].
Ron: I know. I know, I know. I have a very outgoing personality. If you want me to put together an event for you, you know, I was the president of the alumni for Cornell Tech, like, I could destroy any business, like, for the benefit of everybody else, but when it came to selling for myself and me profiting, like, I had a block. And I think it’s really easy to dismiss that for people and not kind of believe it.
And what I did was in my accelerator, I was actually really honest about it in one of our mentoring sessions, and I showed them the email I’d been sending to this business owner to chase them for their credit card. And this man said, “Okay, this guy actually needs help.” Like—[laugh]—like, if I—
Raju: [laugh].
Will: [laugh].
Ron: —if I had—it was like, a six paragraph email asking them for a credit card. Like, no one’s reading this. If I had not been vulnerable and honest about where my faults were and my gap were, I never would have addressed it. And so, he immediately put me with this person who later became my CRO, Ethan Pope, who at the time was this 19-year-old boy genius, took a look at our product, said, “This is incredible. Like, this is product-market fit. You’re ready to go.”
We had two paying customers at the time. And then what he said, actually to me was, this is ready for sales. And I was like, okay, like, but why would they buy it? And he was like, “Because you just believe in it. Like, once you believe in it, like, they will come.”
And it was such a small thing, but it kind of gave me that confidence moving forward, even though this person, you know, six, seven years my junior, he had been doing SaaS sales for, like, five years up until that point. And from then on, it was just practicing the muscle, you know? Exercising, and exercising it until I could pick up any call, and not be afraid that the person was going to call me ma’am, or hang up on me, or curse me out, or report me to Mindbody because it was just part of [crosstalk 00:17:35].
Will: That’s awesome. And it says a lot about the fact that the journey is a developmental one of becoming an entrepreneur, that not everyone starts with these superpowers, but that you can actually acquire these skills over time.
Raju: Yeah.
Ron: A hundred percent.
Raju: Oh, amazing. So, Bowtie was ultimately acquired, and you decided to do it all over again… with the same co-founders, so you obviously hate them. That’s number one.
Ron: Or they just hate me.
Raju: [laugh]. Can we just do a shout-out for them, so everybody knows their names?
Ron: Yeah. So, Vivek Sudarsan is our CPO, [unintelligible 00:18:10], and Mike Wong is our CTO. And they are both copilots.
Raju: Fantastic. And I will attest that they are—all three of these guys are amazing human beings. I’ve had the pleasure of working with them for a few months now, and really, really honorable, straightforward, honest, hardworking, incredibly, you know, vibrant people. So, all three of you guys.
Ron: I seriously believe they’re two of the most talented people I have ever met my entire life.
Raju: Yeah. Ron told me, like, I’ve got two 10x engineers on my team. And I was like, “Nobody has two 10x engineers.” And now I know that it’s possible. So okay, let’s get into Avina because this is the, you know, core of what we’re going to talk about. What does the name mean? How did you come up with Avina, and what does it mean?
Ron: Yeah so Avina means ‘as clear as water’ in Farsi, so it’s giving the sellers clarity in terms of what actions to take next.
Raju: Okay. And what problem are we looking to solve—because obviously, that’s the natural transition—what is the problem statement, and how does Avina work?
Ron: Essentially what it is, it’s an AI sales companion that gives sellers X-ray vision into their accounts and that empowers them to close more deals faster. And the problem that we’re solving for is multifold, but the essential problem is that there’s so much data now floating around that the amount of time and energy that they need to investigate and extract insights from that data is nearly impossible for the amount of work that they need to do every day to go close deals and decide what actions to take next.
Raju: And so, what types of data are you aggregating in order to come up with some of these insights?
Ron: Yeah, absolutely. So, there’s a lot of shallow, kind of, AI tools out there, or AI tools that are bolted onto, you know, specific applications, so like, onto your CRM, or onto your sales outbound email tool, or onto your call transcript tool, but nobody’s actually taking on this AI companion as its own product and as its own category. And what we’re doing is we are unifying and cleaning all of your marketing and sales data and any external data that you need to be tracked on your prospects websites and press releases, and we have a very unique way of actually tracking all of the leads or prospects behavior in terms of the marketing data. So, we’re actually reading down to the sentence. We’re consuming down to the sentence, everything that the leader prospect is reading on your website, every message that they’re clicking on in an ad, anything they’re screenshotting, anything they’re copy-pasting, and from there, we have a scoring algorithm that actually uses AI to track what topics and pain points are resonating with that audience, and then giving that information straight to the seller to be able to go after those accounts and look like they know more than even the account knows about themselves in that moment.
Will: Wow.
Raju: It sounds pretty powerful, but other people kind of make those statements. You know, like, it’s… cloudy, right? You see Einstein and a bunch of other tools out there that are making claims that they’re leveraging AI to give efficiency to sales. What’s fundamentally different here, and how does that sort of play out? So, maybe an example would be easiest for people to digest. Like, what other solutions do and what you guys do that makes it different?
Ron: Yeah. So, we are, again, the only ones who are agnostic about the data. So, even if you take a specific solution like Einstein and Salesforce, they’re always going to put their data first, and they’re always going to be missing part of the picture. So, we are totally objective about where we’re pulling in those insights and where we’re pulling that information, and our entire goal is to make that as plug-and-play for you to then be able to get the insights you need wherever you work. So, our AI actually has the greatest amount of context in terms of wherever it is that you’re taking an action.
So, if you’re in your email, if you’re in LinkedIn, if you’re about to text them, if you’re in an outbound email campaign tool, if you’re actually about to generate an ad, it’s really with you, wherever you work, through our Chrome extension and our Slack bot, and we haven’t seen anybody else do that. We haven’t seen anybody try to bridge the gap between marketing and sales. We’ve seen people really focus on one side of the house or the other. And we really believe that the gold is in bringing those two departments together, and that the only way to actually do that is through this automated solution, and not through human-to-human communication, where things are constantly slipping between the cracks.
Raju: Yeah, I love that. And if I’m a prospect and I’m coming in there, one of the challenges, you know, I think customers think about is, like, this is going to take forever to set up. Is it hard? Does it take a long time to sort of get things started, or is it relatively easy? Is it API-based? I mean, walk through, sort of like, a setup process?
Ron: So, I think that speaks to part of the ‘why now’ of the product as well what you just touched on, which is the API-ification of all these data sources. And so, right now, our onboarding is literally two 30-minute meetings, and then you start getting value. So, that is, to me, already incredibly fast. I’m sure we can even get it down from there.
But you hook in all your pipes. So again, whether that’s your CRM, your ad platforms, your email app on, you put one line of code of script on the website, and then the next meeting is literally us showing you how to download the Chrome extension and install Slack. So, even that piece of it is something you can do self-service. And to be able to get to that level of insights in what is basically zero time and little to no customization on our part, for the engine to actually just start moving, that is a very powerful thing.
Raju: Totally.
Will: So, Ron, what makes the magic happen there? I mean, that sounds pretty incredible. Are you referencing the newly onboarded customer’s data set against models that you have? Are you—and how should people think about, kind of, their data privacy in this context?
Ron: Yeah. So, when we first started the company, we were starting on the marketing side, which again, speaks to some of the unique value that we’re bringing here. So, we understand the importance of protecting and maintaining that data set as its own isolated warehouse, and that it’s not actually cross-contaminated with any of the other potential customers that come in, especially if they are competitive. And so, that is a huge strength of ours in terms of getting the model up and running. And then on the data side, we build multiple layers of intelligent pre-processing, leveraging LLMs of increasing intelligence to produce the highest quality insights that normally would be impossible for the reps to find.
And on the chat side, we have a system that basically dynamically generates execution plans to serve the users’ requests. So essentially, that’s, like, a ChatGPT on top of all your data. And that took, you know, many months to build, but essentially is a proprietary LLM and RAG orchestration framework that achieves this. And over time, we’re going to be fine-tuning that model to deliver even more pointed insight to the seller.
Raju: Awesome. Yeah. And is there, like, a more appropriate customer for this, versus a customer that maybe we’ll get to eventually, or is everybody going to get value? So, people listening to this and say, “Hey, man, I love this Ron guy. He’s got great hair—even though I can’t see it, I can visualize it, you know, through the podcast, people are visualizing right now—but, like, I want to work with these guys.” But would you say, “Hey, listen, you know, early stage, early days of our company, you know, these are the right types of companies for us to be working for with, you know, at the onset?”
Ron: Yeah, so I think definitely around Series B or beyond is good. And so, challenger mentality of a startup, they should have some marketing on the website. If they just have a landing page, and there’s not many insights we can pull out of it. And then if they have a sales-led motion, then they’re not so much about relationship sales. So, if they’re really going out there, trying to get new companies in growth mode, trying to disrupt their industry, that’s really where our sweet spot is right now.
Raju: Okay. So, is there a price point that they’re selling their product at, or is it, like, you know, a million dollars, all the way down to two dollars? I mean, two dollars tends to be a marketing-driven sale, as opposed to, like, a product-driven sale, like, you know, what kinds of complexities do you want in this to help uncover for them?
Ron: Yeah, so the deal cycle is longer than a dead in a month, I think at a minimum, would be where we would want to start. And then, ARR, yeah, can be anywhere from $100,000 to multi-million dollar deals.
Raju: Okay. $100,000 to multi-million, you know, a few months of, you know, sort of, sales associated with it, but not like something super custom, super hands-on, like, you were selling a Boeing jet. You know that probably doesn’t make sense. It’s just something that’s a little bit more turn the crank kind of orientation associated with it. And how many ICPs can they have? Unlimited, or do you see, you know, like, hey, we’ve got five, six, seven, different customer profiles that go on different journeys, or do you want sort of one customer journey?
Ron: No, so we can definitely support a few different ICPs. That functionality we’re building out now, so you’re going to be able to tell the AI the types of customers you’re going after, but if you have you know, three to eight groups of types of companies that you’re going after, like, that would be totally fine.
Raju: Okay. But you have to kind of spell it out for the AI—
Ron: Yes.
Raju: —just so it categorizes, as opposed to the AI categorizing it on its own?
Ron: Yes, especially because we’re pairing the IPD anonymization of people coming to the site with our analysis, so the unique insights that we provide. So, essentially turning this insight into prescriptive action, having the ICP settings is essential to filtering out a lot of the noise.
Raju: So, for listeners, how do they get in touch with you if they’re interested here?
Ron: Yeah, so our website is now live: avina.io. We are now in beta, and we are launching into public in the next few weeks.
Raju: That’s awesome. Okay. Any other things that you want to mention about Avina before I jump into some other questions that are a little bit more picking your brain on AI and, you know, picking your brain on what you think is going to work and going to happen downstream?
Ron: Yeah, I do want to say one other thing, so—
Raju: Absolutely. Jump in.
Ron: So, in terms of what drove this idea forward—and going back to vision and comparing, kind of, Bowtie to Avina—the light bulb moment for us here was that everything we had learned in terms of having an AI assistant to help businesses and SMBs was applicable in much the same way with enterprise. And our whole vision here is if we bring this power of this AI assistant-slash-agent, as more functionality is built out and more alerting and scraping is actually put in the hands of the front lines, then we are giving those sellers superpowers that they didn’t have before, and that’s something that we’re super excited to see, and I think something that’s going to be a huge differentiator for us. So, it’s really not just about synthesizing insights off your data; it’s also about extracting and creating brand-new insights from the external data. That’s the first piece.
And then the second piece, just to re-emphasize the relationship between marketing and sales, and this being solved with that product. There’s so many, so many, so many amazing things happening on the marketing side that salespeople can just ignore. And when they get leads every single day, and they say, “Okay, this is our high-intent lead. Go do something with it,” they have no idea what to do.
Will: Mm-hm.
Ron: And they’re not going to sit there and read every webinar that that person attended, every question they asked, every article they read. Like, nobody has time for that. But the answers are right there in front of them. And so, the statistic that we found that I think was super relevant to that, that I just wanted to end with, is we’ve seen the teams achieve 38% higher win rates when marketing and sales are aligned. And instead of leaving that to process in terms of a weekly meeting and some Slack channel where you post the latest PDF, why don’t we use AI to actually solve that problem?
Raju: That’s awesome. 38% is a massive, massive update. Will?
Will: That sounds incredibly powerful, Ron. I feel like we got to get this in front of the whole portfolio. This can supercharge people’s growth plans.
Ron: I agree.
Raju: Yeah, a hundred percent. Plus that logo. People can’t see it on this podcast, but that logo, I think it’s going to go viral. I was promised a t-shirt. I’m just telling you, I was promised a t-shirt.
Ron: [crosstalk 00:30:12]. It’s the softest thing you’ll ever feel. I promise you.
Raju: Okay. Oh, my God. I have a very fluffy dog, is it softer than my fluffy dog?
Ron: We’ll do a comparison.
Raju: Okay, fine. I’m going to—like, on the next podcast, I might pet the fluffy dog and the Avina shirt simultaneously, see what happens. I’ll give people—the listeners deserve to know. The listeners deserve to know. So, I’m a big believer in applied AI, thus our investments in Avina and Catio—which uses AI to help companies optimize their software architecture—and OpenEnvoy, which uses AI to help companies optimize accounts payable.
So, we as a firm, love AI, but we love applied AI because we think those are the categories where we’re going to win quickly, we’re going to leverage companies data, and we’re going to return value to them. Just, Avina is leveraging the sales and marketing data from a company and returning value. OpenEnvoy is leveraging their accounts payable and their vendor contracts, and returning value. And Catio is leveraging their architectures and returning value. You are obviously a big believer in this as well, but what about general AI? What are your thoughts about generalized AI? Do you think that that’s, like, ready for prime time, a little bit behind the times, or do you think it’s kind of here to go?
Ron: For me, I’ve been using it in just casual conversations with my friends these days, just generalized AI, if we’re talking about ChatGPT and those types of assistance. I think every day, I discover new use cases for it. I’m extremely bullish on it, and I’m shocked when people don’t know how to use it. Literally, I’m having conversations with my friends late at night about, you know, deep topics. I bring ChatGPT into the conversation as the audio version of the tool, and we’re just having it participate. So, at this point, it’s basically my best friend, my coworker, my therapist, and the probably a few other use cases.
Raju: Oh, my God. I was going to ask you all about this, but I’m going to get there, one by one. This is fantastic. Okay. So, now we’re going to move to the Gatling gun section of the podcast. If you’ve ever listened to this, it’s like, I ask kooky questions, and I’m looking for simple answers. One word, right off the top of your head; it doesn’t need to be well-thought-out. So, best artificial intelligence movie you’ve ever seen. And I’ll give you an example of two if you can’t think of one, but if you can think of one, I’ll let you answer.
Ron: I’m going to say Bicentennial Man.
Raju: Bicentennial Man. Okay. I was going to go with Ex Machina or War Games. What about you, Will?
Will: Oh, for me, it’s War Games.
Raju: War Games.
Will: Changed my life.
Raju: Yeah, I know. I know, I know. Best comedy for artificial intelligence movie? I have one, and I’m just going to say Kelly LeBrock, Weird Science.
Will: Oh, yeah.
Ron: Oh… I have to steal that answer. That’s also a favorite.
Raju: Yeah, you could steal that. Or Upload. I’ve seen this series Upload on Amazon Prime.
Ron: Oh, if we’re doing series, that’s a completely different question [laugh].
Raju: Okay. Yeah, yeah. True, true, true, true, true.
Ron: But then if I were to say an AI adjacent area, I would say Rick and Morty.
Raju: Okay, fine.
Will: Yeah, that’s a great answer.
Raju: That’s actually really good. That’s actually really good. When do you think we’re going to have virtually error proof AI search?
Ron: Now. Don’t we already have that [laugh]?
Raju: I don’t know if it’s error proof, but yeah okay—
Ron: Well, virtually. I mean some of the—
Raju: Okay.
Ron: Stuff out there, like, as long as they cite their sources, I haven’t seen it get it wrong?
Raju: Okay, beautiful. I like that. I like that a lot. If there’s one test that you would completely outsource to AI, what would it be?
Ron: My laundry.
Raju: Your laundry?
Ron: Yeah.
Raju: Okay, fantastic. How about you, William?
Will: Oh, I think it’s what to have for dinner tonight [laugh].
Raju: Ah. Oh, I kind of love—
Will: [crosstalk 00:34:03] the question that never seems to go away.
Raju: Oh, okay. I think I’m going to go with laundry also, but I wouldn’t have picked that, so you kind of opened me up to the possibilities. But I like that one. And what about tests you’d never want AI to take on for you.
Ron: I would say trip planning. Even though I know it’s a big AI use case for people, I like doing it myself.
Raju: Okay. Okay, that’s—because it’s so emotionally, you know, charged for you. Like, to you enjoy that aspect of it, right?
Ron: Yeah, I would not want it to be end-to-end solution that just gives me the plan. Like, [crosstalk 00:34:37].
Raju: Yeah, I’m going to say making babies for me because I have four, and I kind of really enjoyed it. But that’s fine [laugh]. So, let’s see, would you have a whole, like, no other but just an AI assistant? Would you ever have that?
Ron: Have the whole what?
Raju: No, just have AI be your assistant in life.
Ron: Yeah. Why wouldn’t it?
Raju: Okay. How about—you already said yes to this—would you have an AI friend?
Ron: So actually, that’s the only one that I wouldn’t do. So, I said it was therapist, coworker, coach… yeah, I didn’t say friend. I’m on friend.
Raju: Okay.
Ron: [laugh].
Raju: How about an AI parent?
Ron: An AI parent? No, I’m going to stay out of that one also [laugh].
Raju: [laugh]. Okay.
Will: [laugh]. I think communicating with family members is off limits for an AI.
Raju: So, no friend, no parent, but you’ll go with—
Will: Yeah.
Raju: Okay, fine.
Ron: I think it’s like all the professional relationships I have, I’m like, willing to let AI into it.
Raju: Okay, but personal, like, your friends and your family, no. All right.
Ron: And even when I’m bringing it into our my conversations with friends, it’s kind of the subject-matter expert that’s brought in, or the person who decides who was right and wrong in the conversation, so that we can move on.
Will: The authority and the decider, right?
Ron: Exactly.
Raju: There you go. There you go.
Will: But at a certain point, the AI becomes the persuader… [laugh].
Ron: Yes.
Raju: Yeah, yeah.
Will: And that, I think, is a different frontier.
Raju: Okay. What year do you think the singularity occurs?
Ron: 2055.
Raju: 2055. And what’s the year that you and I report to robots?
Ron: 2080.
Raju: 2080. All right. These are good guesses. If the singularity happens in 2055, I’m going to go 2056 [laugh] [unintelligible 00:36:16] we report to the robots. They’re going to figure it all out. Okay. Well, that was amazing. I really appreciate your time, Ron.
Ron: Of course. Hopefully Avina is one of those robots.
Raju: And website? Spell it out for our listeners.
Ron: Yeah, so it’s avina.io, A-V-I-N-A dot I-O.
Raju: Fantastic. Really enjoyed having you on. From Will and I, you know, we’re looking forward to this journey. I’m obviously sitting on your board and watching all the fine, you know, growth [laugh] and escalation that’s happening. So, really excited. Thanks for having us, being on the podcast, and to our listeners, stay tuned for the next one as well.
Will: Thanks for joining us, Ron.
Ron: Thanks for having me.
Will: Thank you for listening to RRE POV. You can keep up with the latest on the podcast at @RRE on X or rre.com, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We’ll see you next time.