The GTMnow Podcast

GTM: BREAKING: Inside Nooks’ Launch: Why AI-Native Sales Tools Are Challenging Legacy Platforms, with Co-Founder & CEO Dan Lee

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0:00 | 32:03

Dan Lee (Co-Founder & CEO of Nooks) joins GTMnow to give a behind the scenes on how Nooks is launching a new Agent Workspace and AI Sequencing layer designed to operate across the full action set of a rep’s day — calls, emails, research, prospecting, and strategy.


The conversation explores why top of funnel is changing the fastest, why traditional sequencing tools optimize the “move” but not the strategy, and how AI systems that learn from rep behavior can compound advantage over time. As adoption deepens, automation can move from ~40% of outbound execution toward 70% and beyond, while switching away resets that intelligence.


We also discuss the broader category shift: customers pushing AI-native tools to take on incumbents, the rise of agent workspaces as the new interface for GTM teams, and why calls remain the most data-rich channel in outbound compared to silent email non-responses.


Guest links:

Guest - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan9lee/

Guest company - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nooksapp/

Guest company website: https://www.nooks.ai/


Host links:

Sophie Buonassisi - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/

Sophie Buonassisi - X (Twitter): https://x.com/sophiebuona

Newsletter: https://thegtmnewsletter.substack.com


Sponsors:

HockeyStack - the AI platform that unifies GTM data to help teams convert, expand, and scale. Learn more at https://www.hockeystack.com/


Granola - the AI notepad that turns meetings into action by capturing context, decisions, and next steps automatically. Head to https://www.granola.ai/gtmfund and get three months free with the code GTMFUND.


Transcript available under the episode here: https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/Subscribe to GTMnow for the latest episodes! https://gtmnow.com/


Highlights:

00:00 – Announcing the Agent Workspace and AI sequencing product

01:25 – Why sales is fundamentally human (even in the AI era)

02:39 – The Agent Workspace as the human–AI interface

02:56 – Why legacy sequencing tools were built for a manual world

04:14 – The sales chess analogy: understand the board before making the move

05:02 – Reps spend too much time "making the move"

06:00 – Nooks as a simulati

The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content. 

SPEAKER_00

You come bearing big news.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, we're super excited for the new agent workspace and AI sequences products.

SPEAKER_00

There's a broader shift happening. AI native companies starting to challenge legacy incumbents. One of the big standouts of Nux is how just disciplined you've been with your go-to-market. What was the actual moment where you knew it was the right time to take on incumbents?

SPEAKER_01

Our customers kept asking for it.

SPEAKER_00

The best sign.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Dan Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Nux. Talk to me about your strategy of having a moat.

SPEAKER_02

From initially deploying, we will write like 40% of the emails without the reps having to edit them. And then over time, we've seen it go up to 70%. And soon it'll be 90%. And if you were to go switch back to something else, it'll be back down to 40%. We think a lot about making sales sexy again.

SPEAKER_00

There you go. I can see it on a tote bag or something.

SPEAKER_02

This is a unique moment in time where top of funnel actually is the part of the job that is changing the most with AI. AI can't really close for you, at least not yet. Even if AI could fully remove a rep from the sales process, if your competitor is using reps and building relationships and you're not, guess who's gonna win?

SPEAKER_00

Dan, welcome to GTM Now.

SPEAKER_02

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. And you come bearing big news. You're announcing agent workspace and AI sequencing. Tell us a little bit about the new product.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, we're super excited for the new agent workspace and AI sequences products. I guess first off, uh, can share a bit of context uh on why we built these products. We believe sales is fundamentally human. Uh if you look at all the jobs that AI is transforming, there are only a handful where it's changing how millions of people do their work. You know, in the US, there are six million drivers, five million in sales, three million customer support, a million and a half software engineers, and a million lawyers. Uh and if you look across these, sales is one of the most human. As a passenger, the ideal experience is to be dropped off at your destination automatically, safer and faster. And customer support, you know, if I can get resolve my ticket faster and more accurately, same thing. As a buyer, if you're spending a lot of money and solving an important problem, then you want to build trust in a relationship. Um so sales is one of the most human, but it's also the one of the ones that's changing the most with AI, where AI can now read and write and reason like a rep. Reps will always be selling, because if your competitor is using human reps and you're not, guess who's gonna win? But they need an interface then to work with AI where they can delegate work and they can, you know, as a result, up level uh and be higher leverage. Um so the agent workspace for us is that interface. It can operate across all the full action set for reps, uh across emails, calls, research, list building, prospecting, and has all the basic functionality uh of, say, legacy sequencing tools, um, but built for this new world where AI can do a lot of the work. And instead of most tasks being manual, they can be AI assisted.

SPEAKER_00

And I have to ask, how does this compare with any kind of legacy tool like Sales Loft or Outreach?

SPEAKER_02

A lot of sales teams today have built outbound motions on legacy sequencing tools uh that were built for a world where most tasks were manual, where you manually add prospects to sequence or you manually write emails. Unfortunately, I think uh a lot of these companies, the way to grow at the time, you know, because AI wasn't able to do work, uh, was to go take budget from other sales tools to go down the funnel and as a result have lost focus on generating pipeline, uh, which was kind of their original goal. I think the opportunity for us is that AI can now do a lot of this work because you know, I talk about this concept of what's above the surface and what's below the surface. Pipeline generation, a lot of the work historically has been below the surface, right? You don't want to pay your best enterprise sellers to go find phone numbers and write emails all day when they could instead be closing big deals. So Nooks is designed to really accelerate these top-of-funnel activities intelligently. It's learning from your best reps. Um, it's kind of taking their best practices and scaling that across the team. Actually, some some interesting key differences that we think about. Whereas coding has more of like a right answer, right? Where it compiles and it passes tests, sales doesn't really have a right answer. Um, it's more like a complex human game of chess where first you need to understand the board, uh, understand what's, you know, what is the buyer's problems, who is involved in the decision, uh, what's their tool stack, what's our relationship, how do they influence each other? Uh, and you never have this perfect view of the board. You're piecing it together with conversations, with information from your CRM, research on the web. And then once you understand the board, then you have to evaluate strategies. Do I go top down, do I go bottoms up? Um, do I go directly for the meeting or build some champions first? Do I lead with messaging around the competitors, or do I lead with messaging more around social proof? This is what sets the best reps apart from the average, where they are putting themselves in the prospect's shoes and uh empathizing, understanding how they're going to react. And once you pick that strategy, finally then you make the move. You write the email, you make the call. Uh and these legacy tools are focused completely on making the move, right? On just writing the email, on making the call. The opportunity now with AI is AI can help a lot with this whole process with understanding the board, helping evaluate and suggest strategies and actually making the moves for you, uh, such that reps, instead of you know focusing on this these labor-intensive kind of just um you know, writing emails, they can be a lot higher leverage, thinking more, you know, more deeply about what are their problems uh and you know, can we come up with creative strategies to solve them?

SPEAKER_00

I love the chess analogy. That's incredible. And one thing that you said that really stuck was we don't have the same kind of clarity on the go-to-market side that the engineering side does. And that's where there's just been a lot of ambiguity to date. You talked about how you can potentially help make some of those decisions or decide whether it's top-down or bottom-up. Is that in the platform itself?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. So the idea, um, you know, I guess playing off this chess analogy, Nooks is built to play alongside you, right? To help you understand the board, right, and accelerate the research. Or uh when you're evaluating decisions, right? You can think like kind of like a like a simulation engine will suggest, hey, here are like, you know, three possible uh moves. Which one do you want to take? Right. And by playing alongside you, you're actually able to learn faster than but just by watching, you know, observing them passively. Um it's called active learning, where you know, Netflix, for example, it learns faster by recommending you movies and seeing which one you pick rather than just seeing which which movies you pick by yourself because you're able to kind of narrow ambiguity. Yeah, the way we've built Nooks, we think a lot about really ergonomic human to AI and back to human handoffs, um, such that the AI is able to learn over time how you think. Because right now, the challenge, you know, code has all the context, right? You know, you could look at a file of code and see exactly what it's gonna do. And you could train a model on that, and it, you know, models are good at that. The challenge is an email. You can train a model on tons of emails, but it's not gonna be good at writing emails for you. And the reason is because the reason for the email is not in the email itself. It's actually behind the email, the context, right? What's the situation behind sending the email? You know, what were the people involved? Uh, what were their problems? What did they care about? What were my interactions with them? You know, how did they influence each other? Right. And that's what goes behind the email. And right now that's in the rep's head. You know, they're they're thinking through this stuff. The only way you can learn that is actually by owning the surface where they work to get the feedback from them.

SPEAKER_00

One area I'd love to hear more about is around the signaling. Yeah. Because that's something that we've seen with a lot of solutions that have have tried to really lean into signaling is the differentiation between what signal is and noise. And so, how are you designing the product so that it's really picking up the true buying signals as opposed to any kind of online activity?

SPEAKER_02

Totally. A lot of signals tools today are built completely independently from this the action, like both evaluating uh what strategy should we take and then actually taking action on it. And as a result, it's a lot less useful. Because ideally, like the whole point is understanding the board, right? And like the signal, like uh is now a good time, you know, who who at the you know company cares about my product and is gonna be a good fit. So by building uh the signal, by building kind of this uh research and understanding of you know each account uh and tying it directly to uh how reps think about the strategy uh and actually writing the email and making the call and then taking that feedback loop where um every call uh and every piece of information you learn on a call should feed back in. We have built our signals to reason like reps, right? So it's not just a simple um, you know, did they change jobs, right? But like actually understanding when a rep is looking at it, uh it's what position did they take now? Um, you know, who do we think is on their team from our conversations uh with the team all you know, with the team that they're joining already? Like what is this role supposed to do? Right. You're you actually need to marry both third-party data that everyone has access to with your own first party data. Because if you're just looking at what stuff that's available on the web, they're getting outreach from everyone, you know, saying, Oh, I saw you change jobs. But if you actually understand the context behind it, right? Oh, like, you know, they change you changed jobs, but I talked with your team all you know, with the team that you just joined already, and they said you, you know, you're they brought you in to fill, you know, to go solve this problem for them, right? Yeah. Like actually uh by bringing in this unique insight, you're able to get a lot more signal and actually deliver more value.

SPEAKER_00

Well, that's incredibly powerful because what we've seen companies have success with is when you have your own proprietary data mix and you are essentially creating a proprietary data mix for each company that you're prospecting, marrying that third-party and first party data.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I think one of the really powerful things in starting with the calling channel uh is that is actually the most data rich. Because even a no on a call, you get information. No, I don't have budget. No, this other person makes a decision. No, we're thinking about that in Q2. Whereas a no on an email is no response.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

You can actually use calls not just to go book a meeting, but to gather information, right? And to build champions. Most Nooks customers use Nooks to go start talking to individual contributors to understand their problems and then take that up the org chart to go talk to the manager and say, hey, Joe just started, you know, started onboarding and he's facing these issues. How are you thinking about it? Right. Yeah. And then you can use that to write a really tailored email to the VP at the end. But yeah, actually using the call as our wedge has been really helpful because it's able to help not just with uh, you know, the taking the making the move and taking action, but also uh at you know at the top with gathering more information and it's you know this really great feedback loop.

SPEAKER_00

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SPEAKER_01

Our customers kept asking for it.

SPEAKER_00

The best sign.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. 70% of our customers uh have said that they want to use our sequences product. And the reason is because they generate most of their pipeline with NUCS. You know, they're using these legacy tools that, you know, they feel have kind of let them down. It logically makes sense. I think uh if I'm one of these legacy sequencing tools in a pre-AI world, the opportunity uh at the top of funnel is just limited, right? The way you have, you know, you grew historically as a sales tool is by taking other sales tools budget.

SPEAKER_00

Right.

SPEAKER_02

Right. The top of the funnel, the SDR, it's like easy to kind of lose sight of uh that initial, you know, persona and go after Gong and go after Clary and kind of you know go um try try to do these other jobs. Yeah. And it's kind of logical because they're trying to get closer to the CRO, because that's where the budget is, and that's how you go displace other sales tools. I think the opportunity we have though is this is a unique moment in time where top of funnel actually is the part of the job uh that is changing the most uh with AI. Right? Because AI can't really close for you, not at least not yet. Part of the way I think about it is this iceberg analogy. What's above the surface is you know talking, you know, building relationships, you know, being consultative, solving problems, being creative, right? This is the human stuff. Uh and then what's below the surface uh is like just making the moves, writing the email, and like doing research and building a list and you know, finding the phone number. Um and AI should be doing a lot of the stuff beneath the surface. And in closing, a lot of the work is above the surface, actually, right? Because you know, in closing, it's uh it is more human and more problem solving and relationship building. Whereas at the top of funnel, the reason the SDR role has existed historically is because you don't want your best enterprise sellers spending all to their, you know, all their time finding phone numbers and writing emails.

SPEAKER_00

That makes sense. And like you said, AI can now do a lot of the things below the surface and write emails and enrich and outreach. So what does that role above the iceberg surface look like a couple years down the line, even as AI just continues to expand what that bottom looks like?

SPEAKER_02

Aaron Powell Yeah. I think it really varies. I guess first is um, you know, what's what's happening now is we're taking human intelligence and learning that in models. Like I mentioned, you know, uh our agent workspace, playing the game alongside you to learn how you make the moves, automate more and more of that over time. And this creates a bunch of opportunities, right? When you can do more with less, um what do you do as a company? Some companies do the same with less, right? They cut uh and they focus on efficiency. Some people do more with the same, right? I can keep the same team and do even more. And some companies will actually even do more with more, right? Like when you can make the function more efficient and say, hey, per, you know, per sales rep, I get this much, you know, efficient uh this much more efficiency gain, I might want more sales reps, right? And I think, you know, there's this question of growth versus efficiency, this question of like, you know, a transactional versus strategic sale. Do you know expand a rep's book size uh or do you actually keep the same book size and say go for each uh account, go even deeper and you know add more value up front? Um I think another um uh important dynamic is that sales is competitive, right? And even if AI could fully remove a rep from the sales process, if your competitor is using reps and building relationships and you're not, guess who's gonna win? Right.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

A lot of people will say, oh, if I can help automate writing emails or help automate making calls, um, you know, isn't that kind of zero sum? I just get more emails and get more calls and um, you know, there's not more value created. But whoever wins is the one who delivers more value up front. And it drives everyone to be more consultative and to focus on these higher leverage problems of under you know, actually deeply understanding customer problems and solving them.

SPEAKER_00

Well, that's I mean a very promising future. And what you said is exactly why we believe from our lines at GTM fund, go to market just gets ever so much more complicated and in a beautiful, complex way. But there's now more than ever options to automate parts of go to market. So you'd think at a surface level, it might get actually easier, but you just touched on the variety of different things that it actually unlocks and it becomes a more uh complex problem where if you think about it like a maze, there's just a lot more pathways you can take.

SPEAKER_02

100%. I think like when uh information went from libraries to the internet, it's not like just one thing happened. Right. Right. It's an explosion of uh opportunities when you can make something that much more efficient.

SPEAKER_00

Really well said. Can we walk through an example? Like let's say I, at my company, I'm prospecting NUX. Yeah. And I'm using NUX's platform to prospect Nooks. What happens? What are the steps that it looks like and how does that compare to a traditional process if we were to just make it really concrete in case anyone's curious?

SPEAKER_02

I love demos. I wish I could pull up a demo here. Um we own kind of the end-to-end prospecting workflow. Okay. So first off, as a rep, you know, you have your book of business and you're gonna want to understand, you know, I can't sell it to all hundred companies at once, right? Yeah. So I want to figure out which ones do I focus on. So first you do research. And often you'll do that research both across first and third party sources. So across your CRM, across like call transcripts, you know, if we've had interactions with them, look at previous emails that we've sent. Maybe you did it, maybe another rep did it because it changed territories, as well as like like web research. So, you know, who's changing jobs, did they hit their you know, annual, uh hit did they hit their quarterly revenue goals based on their 10K report?

SPEAKER_00

Any podcast transcripts.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, podcasts, product launches, all sorts of things. Um and ideally you're marrying these, right? You're trying to understand, okay, they told me this in a conversation, they announced this two months later. Like, what is what does that mean? Right. Or this person joined this job that they mentioned they were hiring for. So you want like not just the surface level signal, but you need to synthesize across them to understand, you know, why now, why is it a good fit. Um, and then once you actually decide, hey, this is an account that I want to go after, then you need to figure out the people uh and actually go deeper in like understanding like the engagement history.

SPEAKER_00

And does it show you all that engagement history?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, it shows it. It cites like you know, you can uh go in and see previous deals and call transcripts. We have this chat assistant that's you can think a little bit like uh ChatGPT, but built expl like specifically for this. You know, you can ask it, hey, like, you know, uh what our our interactions have been, or you could ask about a specific prospect, hey, you know, for for this prospect, um, what were the things that they cared about? And you know, even, hey, if I were to go after the, you know, try to get their attention, you know, in previous calls, what personal things did they mention where I should send them a gift? Uh like, you know, it's actually very flexible. Um and for each of these things, it's really important to build trust. So we cite our sources. From here, you uh we'll suggest which prospects to go after. Um, you know, we'll give a reason kind of for each. And directly from you know, within this chat interface, you can add them to sequences, you can call them, email them, uh, and we learn from this over time. Because when we make a suggestion and you action it, that was probably useful. And if we make a suggestion and you don't, less useful. So over time, actually, we're able to kind of, you know, this is the um playing the game with you, right, and suggesting moves, learning which ones you take. Same with emails, right? We'll suggest several versions of emails for you. And instead of manually writing emails, or even instead of, you know, us, we write one email and then you know, you try to go uh prompt it a lot to go change it, right? We'll uh give you several versions to kind of uh explore the solution space for you. And instead, you can use that judgment, right, and just pick which one you want, and then you can give some suggestions on top. Um and these are all kind of designed in order uh in order to learn from the rep, um, right, to understand how they think and you know, which prospect do you go after in this scenario, which email do you write in this scenario? And over time we're actually able to automate that.

SPEAKER_00

Super cool. And one of the classic features of let's say incumbents or any legacy sequencing platforms is that you pre-build a sequence and then you drop your contact in and they go through all the steps. Yeah. Do you still pre-build your sequence? And then how does that shift?

SPEAKER_02

Aaron Powell We support all the core functionality of like legacy tools. So like, you know, you can you can build the same exact sequences and steps, but we have an understanding of the org chart. We know, hey, this person reports to that person, right? And we can suggest, hey, actually go after this person first, right? Yeah basically a historical sequence, maybe you call someone and she says she's going on Mat leave, and then you go put them in some state, okay, like you know, we'll follow up on them later. But actually, probably you want to, you probably want to send her a gift, right? And understand who else is involved in the decision and call some of the people that you know are now uh uh reporting to her. You can think it has like the core functions of like, you know, sequence steps and messaging and templates and you know, all all the core things that that you'd expect, but kind of reimagine, you know, for for the world where AI is is uh actually able to understand uh the sales process.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And intelligence just layered on top.

SPEAKER_02

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00

That's fantastic. A quick pause, I've got an incredible deal, exclusive to GTM Now listeners. It's for granola, the AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings. We're granola users at GTM Fund, and trust me when I say it has changed the way that we work. Granola takes meeting notes for you without any intrusive bots joining your calls. During or after the call, you can chat with your notes, ask granola to pull out action items, help you negotiate, write a follow-up email, or even coach you using recipes, which are pre-made prompts. It's actually the same technology we use to create the notes for this very podcast. Once you try it on a first meeting, it's hard to go without it. Head to granola.ai forward slash GTM fund to get three months free with the code GTMfund all capitals, and that will be in the show notes. Back to the episode. And Dan, today Nooks is the agent workspace and AI sequencing product, but it didn't always start that way. You know, like most startups, you went through pivots and iterations. What was the origin of Nooks? What was the original idea and why did you set down that path to actually build it?

SPEAKER_02

My background before Nooks uh was. In AI. I studied AI at Stanford. I worked at Scale AI on their machine learning team before starting Nooks. Nooks actually started with related idea, but like executed very differently. It was like mid-2020, early in the pandemic, when I started hacking on Nooks.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

I was interested in virtual collaboration, right? Everyone has switched to Zoom. All my friends had, you know, uh were at Stanford and now going to classes online. And I was interested in one, can you get this virtual collaboration, virtual office, virtual workspace to work? And two, if you get that working, you have a lot of data on how people work. And can you start making it smart? Can you automate some of that work? Um, can you help learn best practices and share them across the team? I didn't know anything about sales at the time. This was a very broad, abstract concept.

SPEAKER_00

Right.

SPEAKER_02

Um and was first focused on getting that virtual collaboration working. So I was on the ice hockey team, uh, the club ice hockey team at Stanford, and some of my friends were TAs in the computer science department. And when I showed them the early versions of Nooks, they were like, oh, this seems useful for office hours. Um so actually, our our first users uh were Stanford classes. Um, the whole computer science department used Nooks for office hours uh during the pandemic um instead of Zoom because we had easier ways to um you know work on a problem set together and then switch groups and you know, basically like this more interactive Zoom. Stanford wanted to pay us like$2 a student a quarter or something like that. And we were super excited. Yeah. Um but then we realized that, oh, this probably isn't gonna work long term because everyone wants to go back in person. We kind of broadened uh to general remote work. Um so then we started having uh startup teams like sales, product, marketing, engineering teams using Nooks. We found that sales teams were actually the most engaged uh using the product. They were all using it to make calls together. Did you watch The Wolf of Wall Street?

SPEAKER_00

Yes.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, you know that scene where Leonardo DiCaprio is making calls and everyone huddles around and listens.

SPEAKER_00

Yes.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

That was quite literally Nooks.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah. Like in a virtual sense, and probably you know, that's a little exaggerated. They they don't party out uh as hard after.

SPEAKER_00

They might. You never know. That's not the clock.

SPEAKER_02

Um yeah, really understanding what works and replicating that across the team. We were intrigued, right? Because coming from engineering backgrounds, like we didn't know much about sales. Honestly, if you had asked me, you know, five years ago, I would have said sales, isn't that like a dirty job? Like, shouldn't you build a product that sells itself? Um But then we spent a bunch of time with them and realized one, okay, it's not a dirty job. They're actually adding a lot of value and it's this really interesting problem solving. This is kind of where we, you know, when we started thinking of this this chess analogy, right? Um two, they're this great fit not only for collaboration, um, because they all want to work together and you know they they need to learn from each other rather than you know listening to your gong calls once a week from your manager. There's so much room for automation. They're writing emails, they're making calls, they're doing research. Um and we started focusing on on the sales use case actually in 2022, before ChatGPT came out. But given our background in AI, we knew that AI was going to be doing a lot of this. We didn't know how soon. Yeah, it's been kind of a fun journey from there, evolving from virtual classroom to virtual office to virtual sales floor to now the agent workspace for sales.

SPEAKER_00

And how long was it between the first three iterations?

SPEAKER_02

So between So 2020 was the virtual classroom. Uh 2021 was when we started thinking about virtual office. And then 2022, beginning of 2022, was when when we s when when you started thinking about the virtual sales floor.

SPEAKER_00

Fast forward to 2026, and we're now the agent workspace and AI sequencing tool. So it's been quite the progression and journey of the city.

SPEAKER_02

Sequencing, AI dialer, coaching. Um so like sequences is the newest product that we're launching.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Um, but thousands of companies use Nooks for calling, coaching. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

A common thing that we hear is just around all of the different moments throughout the journey. You know, Chris Denyan was the first sales hire at Snowflake. He stayed for 11 years and went through the IPO. And he sat down on the podcast here and shared how an outage actually almost put them out of business. So these kind of near-death experiences. Did you experience a near-death experience along the journey?

SPEAKER_02

In the early days, we were kind of in the wilderness.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Where th those were probably the closest to death. And it wasn't acute, right? Because we were kind of just, you know, uh figuring things out. No, it started as a project, not as a company. So I didn't actually, you know, when I started hacking on it, I was more actually interested in building um than in starting a company. And then eventually some investors approached us, and this was for the virtual classroom idea. Right. Um, there is a graveyard of virtual classrooms. Um, there's a graveyard of virtual offices. Those were probably like the nearest death experiences. It, you know, we probably didn't even feel it at the time. Yeah. Yeah. And and I'm sure plenty more.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. You've got the hindsight perspective of being able to see those graveyards now. Yeah. Having pivoted away from it.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

And as the product progressed, inevitably so did the company. Were there any through lines, any values or systems that stayed with you throughout those pivots?

SPEAKER_02

Uh we have six core values. I think are really fundamental to uh, you know, how we hire, to how we build culture, um, you know, how we prioritize. The first two we wouldn't have a company without. Um, those are earn customer love and extreme ownership. The next two describe how we do it, do more with less and ask why. And then the last two are kind of how we do it working together. Um, and this is energize and support the team and be a good person. You know, I think each of the values is really important in its own sense, right? Um we exist to serve our customers. We wouldn't be able to execute without, you know, uh really strong and clear ownership. I think some of our more unique ones, one of my favorites is Ask Why. We hire deeply curious people who are truth seeking and really seek to deeply understand the why behind anything they're doing. Um, I tell everyone, uh, if you're working on something but you don't understand why, stop immediately. Before you get started again, first understand why. Because otherwise you're probably doing it wrong. Uh, even if you're not doing it wrong, you might realize that there's actually a better way. We are building a new type of company, right? Where historically software has enabled work and now it can do work for people. And as a result, we need everyone to think from first principles and to really, you know, question the why. And then another, I think, critical one is do more with less. We can do anything, but not everything. And ruthless prioritization is our key advantage. And like I mean ruthless. Like you know, I tell everyone, if it's not important, don't do it. Right? Only do the most important things. Be lazy. Because as a startup, competing with much, much larger players, um that that prioritization is actually our key advantage.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and you have to be ruthless around prioritization as a startup, or you do become, you know, one of the tombstones in a graveyard usually. There's a lot of frameworks that say, you know, pick your top three things, for example, for the day. And it seems like there's a billion things going on. There's so many different things to do. But if you actually just pick three, and I've been doing this for probably about nine months now, and it's helped tremendously because there's always important fires and things to do. But those three things, if they get done, the rest starts to kind of evolve and move. And it just allows you to prioritize more greatly.

SPEAKER_02

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00

And I can extrapolate from what you shared there that you're hiring curious people. They're asking questions, why?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

What other kind of either traits or type of person and hire are you making?

SPEAKER_02

For a long time, actually, for our go-to-market hires, for example, we have had like a kind of AI literacy kind of uh uh interview question. Basically learning this new AI tool and uh seeing how they approach that, right? Can they think through it and problem solve? Like the most basic is can they actually use this new, you know, like uh keep up with the tools uh because it obviously changes their productivity. Um, but also just like how do they think, right? Can um can they reason through problems? Are they logical? Everyone on the team um needs to kind of have this level of problem solving. Another thing that I think about a lot is our engineering hiring. Um I think our engineering team, you know, every team is important. Uh our engineering team is one of the most important because today the product defines how successful you'll be, how much value you can add to customers, right? Your long-term differentiation. Working at scale before, actually, um, Alex was great at turning an unsexy problem of data labeling sexy for the best engineers, and as a result, did really well uh as a company. And I think sales is a problem that the best engineers are not naturally attracted to. But by kind of understanding the problem myself, by by feeling that myself too, right? Where five years ago I said would have said, Hey, sales, like that seems like a dirty job. Um, you know, kind of having gone on this journey and understanding why it's such an interesting problem uh and the huge opportunity in this space um uh and the value that you can create from, you know, just millions of people, uh, has helped us attract the best engineering team. And as a result, then has helped us build the best, you know, the best product. And the reason why we win is probably because, you know, because of the products, which ties back then to the engineering team.

SPEAKER_00

And I mean, you can have the best product in the world, but if you are not selling it and getting in the hands of customers, then they don't get that value. So I can see how you're flipping it on its head for engineers and really bringing them in through that recruiting process. It feels like we should have a slogan like making sales sexy again or something like that.

SPEAKER_02

But that's funny. Yeah. Making sales sexy again. Uh we might steal that from you. There you go.

SPEAKER_00

I can see it on a tote bag or something. And Dan, are there any roles that you're hiring for right now at Nooks that you'd want to shout out?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. We are hiring across the board, uh, across engineering, product, design, sales, marketing, customer success. If you're interested, come check out our website, uh Nooks.ai, uh, and come to the careers page. You know, also feel free to connect with me. We're we're always looking for top talent across the board.

SPEAKER_00

Incredible. Well, both the careers page and your LinkedIn profile, that's best place, will be in the show notes for anyone listening.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Excited to chat.

SPEAKER_00

Awesome. Dan, this has been wonderful. Thank you for joining GTM now. Thank you for sharing all the insight.

SPEAKER_02

Thanks so much for having me.