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Small bites of insight to unlock your pipeline strategy
Where GTM Leaders share their secret ingredients for modern pipeline generation—a flavor for every diet.
Andrew McGuire:
Today we're joined by a founder who went from Meta to YC to building what just might be the future of B2B relationships. Ratchet Katar is the co-founder, CEO and founding AE of Centralize. What makes this conversation particularly exciting is Ratchet's unique journey from his days at USC and Meta through Y Combinator to building a company that's fundamentally rethinking how B2B relationships work in the AI age. Please welcome to the show Ratchet Go to Market Snacks, small bite of insights to unlock your pipeline strategy. How are you? And welcome to the show.
Rachit Kataria:
Doing amazingly, especially after that intro. That was very kind of you to lay everything out the whole journey so far. Yeah. Feeling great, man. Feeling great. Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Andrew.
Andrew McGuire:
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you being here and I've been thinking a lot about what I'm seeing in the space and how things have drastically changed. I was talking to Mark Casso go and on a different episode just about the great ignore and how everybody's ignoring emails and phone calls. I just was talking with Dave Walsh at Limelight about how creators and brands are the new attention of what's happening. And so what you're building is really unique in this all in one space. This all in one deal, work for high a CV teams. And I'd love to just understand why you started it, what brought you to this place, and then how you're thinking about pipe gen and pipe strategy using something like that.
Rachit Kataria:
Yeah, yeah. Happy to share. And also, yeah, mark and Dave, shout outs to both of you. We caught up not too long ago. Each of you both. Great to see you all again eventually if you're watching this. Yeah. How do we get here? So it's a bit of a windy story. I met my co-founder, will first week at college at USC, been best friends for almost a decade and always wanting to build something together. And a big piece of the journey for us was realizing that we've been product engineers our entire lives. So I was a founding engine on Facebook shops, which scaled from zero to two 50 million monthly active users in a year. Crazy Journey. That's wild. It is pretty insane ride. Kind of seeing that from the alpha in May, 2020 to scaling out. And I went to a YC company called A to B, shout out to the entire team there.
It's fuel cards for trucking. So literally imagine a card to buy gas and as the product tech lead there, I was literally going out on the field with AEs literally to figure out what I need to build that our customers would make sure they get the most excited about. And so I was going to Truck Stops and HQs and literally giving out the cards and the tech and trying to see what we had to do here. And I saw firsthand how important it was to understand if you actually knew the relationships, the who were involved, what they each individually care about, the who's missing, what matters to each of them, how is that changing underneath you When you had to grasp on that, things were very smooth, life worked out very well. Everyone was happy on both sides when you didn't have a grasp on that.
And we had many cases where I wouldn't say many, but at least one or two, that I was directly responsible for triaging, where a six figure churn came out of nowhere, out of nowhere. And we're like, why? And under the hood it was you lost, your champion, priorities had changed, then you came through that we didn't have context on, they weren't updated because all that story was all over the place. Different people, different tools, different data sets, and ultimately you're no longer on the same page. And that leads to well, you never want to have happen, which is what you thought was an amazing deal that at the finish line disappears. And so I'd been very close to that upfront. My co-founder will saw it even at a greater scale. He's incredible. He was the engineer that created the prototyping team at Slack. So for all of y'all watching, you might be using his team's products. He worked with the CPO and CTO there to create Slack huddles, clips, say for later. And working directly with their go-to-market team at Slack scale such a horizontal product. That was a very equally difficult thing to understand. Everyone had a different story. Who's involved, what needs to be said to whom to get them excited, who's missing? And it is just so siloed. It's so difficult to get that story straight. So Will and I took it upon ourselves to make it happen.
Andrew McGuire:
Very cool. So talk to me about how we should be thinking about this new world of relationships. We talked a little bit about it before we hit record, but just there's something that you like to call the six Ws, and I'd love to expand on that a little bit.
Rachit Kataria:
Yeah, yeah. Six Ws is a big way of how we think about the world and it's the who, what, where, why, and how of any deal. Who is involved so far across everyone they've ever talked to, what do they each individually care about, not just, oh yeah, there's an overall call recording or there's a high level of who's there, but literally what matters if you're going to multithread across each persona that Andrea has to hear versus ratchet versus Willow versus anyone else. When has anyone ever interacted with them across the entire team? Deals are not one alone. There's multiple people engaged here. Where are the gaps? If you just visualize it? Is the entire VP row empty? Are we even at the season? Are we at the power line? If you're forecasting this deal for tomorrow and none of those people are there is not happening.
So where are the gaps? Why should they even care? Tying to strategic priorities at the company level, but then the individual words that you say to them, why should they get excited about what you're offering them? And then finally, it's the how do you take to your question, Andrew, on Pipe, the network that you have as a team, your execs, investors, advisors, any friend of the company to then figure out who's one degree away that you can help leverage to fill in the gaps and find the right people faster. So those are how we think about the six doubles.
Andrew McGuire:
Okay. When you're talking about this, I just think about my AE days when I'm at Salesforce and I'm inside of the CRM and adding all these contacts into the system, and then I have a spreadsheet where I'm trying to track everything and then I'm going into a one-on-one to update things and double clicking into the next steps to keep it all up to date. And I wasn't selling into the Fortune 50 or Fortune 500, so it was literally like one or two stakeholders, but this was also before covid when things were a little simpler. And to me now we would deploy Outreach or SalesLoft to help us keep track of that plus CRM. And it just has gotten so convoluted with all the different systems that has been really challenging to figure out what to do. And I am curious, tell me a little bit about how you're simplifying and organizing that in a clean way for us to be able to actually think about the world with all these new tools in the noise that we've created. How do we make things easier for people now?
Rachit Kataria:
Yeah. Yeah. That was our entire motivation. That's why I'm standing here in the first place. We have just seen how difficult it is across, like you said, Salesforce, your CRM data, your calls, your calendar events, your emails, your slacks, your LinkedIn information, probably a bunch of other things I'm forgetting. There's just so many places where,
Andrew McGuire:
Yeah, don't forget Gong or your note taker or the other thing that
Rachit Kataria:
All the above, it's an endless C and we're very conscious of that. Obviously we're building the sales space and we very intentionally are not just another tool. The name is centralized for a reason. The goal is that you have one single tab now, one place of action that even our customers today say, I never opened up Salesforce anymore. I don't open up half of my, if not any of their tools now. Because what we like to do is say you have all this data across the board. What if you had one single view that actually solved all those six doubles that gave you the R in your CRM as we like to call it, that we fill Salesforce as well to let around that where do you come and wake up to and think strategy, the relationships that spin, who you've talked to from all the places that have existing contacts in your CRM that's on the receiving end of an email call calendar, what they care about from the words they've individually said in every single one of those surfaces. Again, who's missing? You can visualize that white space of the personas you're trying to get to and then all that context on your network from LinkedIn that you can bring in and then visualize not just names and faces that, but in context of who you've gone into so far, who's missing that can again fill out the whole story to get this deal closed. That's how we think about centralized and it should never feel like if we do our job, you have to open up a single tool ever again because all an one tab,
Andrew McGuire:
Just to be frank, I mean that's what everybody's been trying to do for years, right? We are the single pane of glass. Gong says that because you have your forecasting a call, so you can snip it, put it into buckets. Outreach in the early days was trying to figure this out. I know SalesLoft is trying to, how do we do a BM? And it's challenging to orchestrate a play across all of this with all the different players and it doesn't feel like that's been solved, so I just don't believe that this is possible, right? Everybody's been trying for years. So why does this work now and it didn't before?
Rachit Kataria:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're right to be skeptical. It's a lot to get done to make work in a single view, but what's pretty magical about the last year and even the reason why Will and I started this company when we did is you couldn't actually do this until about a year ago. The tech wasn't there, the ability to integrate across the board and actually make sense of this information in silos until lms, this was not a company that could even exist in the world. And there's a reason why now that when we started a year ago, we got to where we are today because you can actually take a deep understanding of every sentence, every word that someone said across all these surfaces, and put it into a view that actually tells you a story, not just counts of, oh yeah, 10 emails, 12 calls somewhere. There's a list of contacts that are no longer relevant. They're all stale PowerPoints where you're drawing boxes and that's all you had to do because you didn't have a choice When you're trying to do account mapping. 2025 is different. The world has changed. And the fact that you can now have AI to power all of this is what you'd find in the product. Just I would take a demo to see it, but it's there. It's live. It's real.
Andrew McGuire:
Yeah, it is a little wild. I've been playing around a lot with open AI and custom GPTs and talking to somebody or their entire business is just about how to integrate AI into a business and all these different workflows, and it's just mind boggling what is possible now. And so I am still skeptical, but yes, the single pane of glass and being able that term, I'm allergic to it because everybody's said it, but you're right. Now we're here. So let's move to what I ask every guest, which is at the end of the show, which is what's the number one belief that about pipeline generation in 2025, the market just has completely wrong, and how should companies be thinking about it differently to unlock their next big opportunity? So help me with your perspective on
Rachit Kataria:
That. Yeah, yeah. We have a pretty strong opinion here, and it's that we use this every single day. We centralize every day, and majority of our pipe actually comes from this strategy, which is if you're a team that is leveraging LinkedIn sales now, however you're using it, you are only able to know who you are connected to today to understand where your breaking points for your entire network, right? The whole network is your network worth. And if you look at that right now, it's likely who you're only connected to as a team. There is seven to eight figures of pipe across everyone watching this they didn't even realize exists. That is a direct one degree away from your CEO's, execs, advisors, and investors. And if you're not connected to those people on LinkedIn, you don't even know that network exists because they won't show up as mutuals.
And that's exactly what we do at Centralize where imagine instead of the conversation being, Hey, during onsite or one-on-one, does anyone know someone that works in X, Y, Z company? Can you check this box in a spreadsheet if you do and spend a month and a half waiting for that answer? The alternative is you basically do one-time exercise, pull in all those relationships and connections across every friend of the company and execs, advisors, investors, and now the conversation is you waking up to close, let's say a DocuSign and not even realizing until just then that your CROs advisor is one degree away from the most important decision maker in that account, and now you shaved a month and a half in your deal cycle and already jumped above power. We've already done this multiple times in practice and have seen this live across our customers using the platform, and it's just something that not enough people, frankly, because of the tooling that exists, know that that exists that they can tap into, and it's something that we're really excited about. We use it every day and bringing to all the folks that use centralized. So I think that's the difference in 2025, your network is the ones that you didn't even know existed. The untapped networks is where you should be looking, and that's going to help you out much.
Andrew McGuire:
The untapped network. We'll have to coin that. The untapped network is what centralized can unlock.
Rachit Kataria:
Exactly.
Andrew McGuire:
I've been using TeamLink or I have in the past and being able to, like you said, I have this spreadsheet in my head that I did for a previous company I was working at where you're literally just sharing Google Sheet and everybody goes through to look at it, to check a box of who has a relationship. But you're telling me that, yeah, it's wild. That is now just a feature that is possible. So I think we should end there. That is pretty powerful stuff, and I really appreciate you coming on today and talking me through exactly how your building centralized and what the objective is. And you heard it here first. This is the single pane of glass. It is actually possible now in 2025. So before we wrap up, is there anything else you want to leave the audience with?
Rachit Kataria:
No, that's a perfect ending point. Feel free d I'm a text away at any point in time. Happy to share more about what we're cooking up and yeah, happy selling.
Andrew McGuire:
All right. We'll see you on the next one.