Customer Experience at Scale: Building the Future of CX with AI

What happens when a frustrated operator decides to solve her own problem—and ends up building one of the most empathetic AI companies in the market?

Lisa Popovici, Co-founder of Siena AI, joins First Builders to share how running multiple e-commerce brands led her to create a conversational AI platform that actually understands customer sentiment, not just scripted keywords.

Before launching Siena, Lisa felt firsthand the pain of delivering great customer experience while protecting margins and sanity. Today, Siena has raised $10M+ from investors including Sierra Ventures, Partech, Aglaé Ventures (LVMH), and The Council Capital. Their AI agents handle high-emotion customer conversations at scale without losing the human touch.

In this episode, Lisa shares:
– How she went from DTC founder to AI entrepreneur before the 2023 AI boom
– The hardest pitch she ever made—and the moment she knew she had to build Siena
– Why “empathy at scale” isn’t a buzzword but a moat
– Lessons on co-founder dynamics, hiring for early teams, and standing out in a competitive AI market
– Why traditional customer support isn’t dead—but is being radically redefined

It’s a masterclass in turning pain into product and building tech with a soul.

Follow Lisa Popovici
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisapopovici
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/lisapopovici
Company: https://www.siena.cx

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Show Notes

• Lisa’s journey from e-commerce founder to AI entrepreneur
• Building Siena AI before the mainstream AI wave
• Designing AI agents that read emotional context, not just text
• Co-founder dynamics and staying aligned over years of building
• Why empathy and defensibility are core to CX innovation
• Lessons for founders hiring their first 10 employees

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Transcript

0:04

Hey everyone, it's been so great getting these first 11 episodes of First Builders launched and published. Before we dive into today's episode with Lisa Popovich, co-founder of Sienna, we wanted to share a quick announcement that we're moving to a bi-weekly cadence. We're still going to be releasing on Mondays and across all of your streaming platforms. With that, I'll let you dive into the episode. Enjoy. Welcome to First Builders, the podcast for those who shape companies from the ground up. I'm Amber Illig, founder and general partner of the Council Capital, where we invest in early teams solving critical problems in essential industries. And I'm Rachel Choi, partner at the Council. This podcast is about a group of people who are more likely than average to land executive roles or found unicorn companies. We explore moves that propelled them to where they are today and what early stage founders can learn to accelerate their own growth. We call them first builders. Whether founders or early team members, first builders have created functions, teams, and processes from scratch, tackling the toughest phases of growth. And they don't just work at great companies, they join in the formative years and help define them. And today's guest is a masterclass in that kind of gritty strategic building. We're thrilled to welcome Lisa Popovich, co-founder of Sienna AI, a conversational AI platform. Lisa is a serial entrepreneur through and through. Before launching Sienna, Lisa scaled multiple e-commerce brands and felt firsthand the pain of trying to deliver great customer experience while protecting margins and sanity. And that frustration was the spark. So today, Sienna has raised over $10 million and is backed by top investors like Sierra Ventures, Partec, LJ Ventures, which is the venture arm of LVMH, and the council, our own firm. They've felt an empathetic AI agent that goes beyond scripted replies. It actually understands how a customer is feeling, not just what they're saying. And this is especially near and dear to my heart as someone who spent most of my career in consulting, client services, and customer success. Lisa's story really resonates because she built Sienna not just as a technologist from the outside, but as someone who lived the problem day in and day out. Lisa, welcome to First Builders. It's great to be here. Awesome to have you. So before we get into what's happening at Sienna today, I'd love to dive deeper into your entrepreneurial journey. When did you have the first inclination that you could be a founder and build something on your own? Yeah, um, well, I think there's been a few moments, but if I go Mike a little bit like way back, I think it was when I was in elementary school, I actually signed up for Avon's kid reseller program. So I'm not sure if you know like Avon, the beauty company that literally you had to order through catalog. So I remember walking um, you know, on the hallway and just showing the catalog with beauty products to my to my friends, to to the professors, to our teachers. And I think that gave me like initiated some sort of spark of entrepreneurship. So that was a really fun time. And I remember even going to their workshops with my best friend and just learning how to better sell our products. So I think that was one of the moments. That's awesome. I didn't know that about you. I feel like that sort of like shamelessness and willing to do sales is so key to being a founder. Yeah. I I re recently remember this one. That's awesome. No, that's so amazing. And you know, we we've heard that you've talked about, you know, growing up in Romania and starting your career in medicine. How did those early experiences, along with like the Avon, you know, selling, shape the kind of founder that you are today? Yeah. Um, so I think med school really hardwired my discipline and maybe also empathy. Also, I would say resilience. So the exam periods, I think we had two big ones per year. They were very long, like I think even sometimes two or three months at a time, if the actual exams were spread out. So we felt like you were constantly in like an exam period, and it was it was it was challenging. And I I remember starting to have that routine. Like I was a morning person, I feel like my brain just works better in the morning. So I was waking up around five, I was doing like the first block of studying. I was doing my coffee, I was studying, and then I did like a break to go to the gym, come back, eat, study, sleep, repeat. So I feel like that routine really helped me a lot. And I must admit, I was quite nerdy. So maybe I hope it helped my brain in some way, like just developing my memory and just uh, you know, understanding better how to put, you know, just like I would say bridge things together and that thought process of thinking through harder problems. So I think, yeah, um, I I would say resilience, discipline, routine, empathy, and also resourcefulness. Especially I'm I was born in Romania, so that's where I studied med school. One of the things that I disliked um in uh during during university was the fact that it was too much theory and less practice. So you I was supposed to have that resourcefulness to go and find maybe other workshops or interesting courses uh that would uh have that practice element or just research on my own, like YouTube and just finding other folks that could teach me what I was missing in classes. Yeah, and this is wild. So you started off in medicine and then you ended up building an AI startup, but in between you also founded several companies, as I remember. So, how did you even get from medicine to D2C companies and then eventually to Siena? Yeah. So during med school, I think I was in my second year. So I studied six years. I graduated, but I didn't follow with my residency. I met uh my co-founder Andre. Uh, I think I was in the in the second year of studying, and he actually introduced me to the world of e-commerce and Shopify. I was always like very geeky about like computers and internet and all this kind of stuff, but I didn't necessarily know about Shopify or you know, didn't really get into e-commerce. So Andre introduced me to that, and I just became fascinated. And I remember he was the first one that was building um as we as we met, he was building his Shopify brand. And I just got so interested and passionate and curious about it, and I offered, like, hey, can I just can I be your assistant for free? I you know, I just want to learn, it's so fascinating. And um, that's how I I got to work with him, and then I started building my own just because of course studying at school was not enough. So that's how I got uh into it, just by cu through curiosity, and then I feel like like we never necessarily like oh we want to build an AI company, so we didn't necessarily know that, but I felt I feel like it was a straight line for us. Everything progressed naturally because we so when we were running our brands in parallel, we were doing customer service, we were, you know, in the tickets, in the trenches, we were talking to uh to the two customers, and then we hired folks to to to take care of the tickets, and then we built teams, and then we used a bunch of software and CRM. So we pretty much have been through all of that journey that our customers today are going through. So I think that gave us such a deep understanding of of the customer today, and that's why I feel like CNR really stands out in the market. So yeah, it was a natural progression through curiosity. And of course, I feel like every business that we worked on led us to where we are today because from every single one, I think like we took some of the learnings and a lot, a lot of feedback and research. Yeah, definitely. And I can hear what you were saying earlier about how you really like to connect ideas, even when you were in medicine and how you're continuing to connect ideas um all along your building journey into to Sienna today. Um so you started building Sienna actually before like that big AI boom in 2023. Um, what signal were you following, you know, before the rest of us caught on? Yeah. So I think with Sienna, there were a lot of like aha moments. There's even like every week we have, you know, like something blows our mind. But like before, you know, we started before ChatGPT came out. So our previous company was a conversational SMS marketing app for Shopify brands, and we were only doing SMS as a channel. And uh funny, the funny thing is that it was fully human power. So it was like very little automation. We had actual real humans, you know, uh on the other side of the of the text chatting with the customers and helping them throughout their shopping journey and helping them to recover their abandoned cards and so on. So our customers at the time, they really loved how um, you know, this human approach and the results, and they were asking us, can you replicate that across other channels? Because we're traveling in tickets. 70% of our tickets are literally saying the same thing, and we are just so overwhelmed, and we are not really happy with the chatbots or the automation solutions that were out there at the time. For a period of time, we were like, no, we need to stay focused. Uh, staying focused is is key, and we're just gonna do SMS. But then, like, we started hearing that more and more, and then we knew that the future was going to be AI. It it was quite uh impossible for us to scale with only being human-powered uh and human-led. So we started like looking into the customer service market, so beyond going beyond just SMS, and we really found out uh that there were so many gaps and inefficiencies, even like when you looked at the um the call centers of the world or customer service, like business uh operations uh of the world, they were really struggling with retaining those people with their productivity, with their happiness. So we even found out like studies that were saying like I I don't recall exactly the percentage, but it was very high percentage of people being depressed because of their jobs, like literally picking up the phone and talking to frustrated customers every single day is quite depressing and like it really affects you know your your day-to-day. So it was just one of one of the things that attracted us. And obviously, the tools at the time were not cutting it, so you know, with rule-based automation super limited in terms of what we you were able to do. So it was very hard to scale the human element with the tools that were available at the time. So we just started diving and obsessing about it. And we we looked into the the models that were available at the time, but of course, Chat GPT was not uh out there. So we actually decided, okay, we're gonna do this, we're gonna tackle all channels, go go, gonna go beyond SMS, we're going to really work backwards from how the like the human agent experience looks today, working backwards and try to replicate that with AI. So we actually started building our models in-house. But then once ChatGPT came out, uh, you know, I think this is one of the most important traits of a of a company or of a startup to be not be afraid to change course overnight and just like constantly innovate, or you know, if you need to literally scratch everything, you should be able to do so. But of course, like I feel like the foundation that we've built really helped us. And then once Chad GPT came out and the new models, we were at launch with our beta customers in around three months. So we were the first um agent that launched this type of solution for e-commerce brands. It I remember it was December 2022. Wow. That's super exciting. And I mean, what you were saying just about like the human agent experience. I mean, on the other side, right? Like you never want to feel like you're talking to a chat bot. I feel like I'm always typing representative or I always see on the phone, representative, get me to the representative, right? I want to talk to the human. And so the fact that you really understood that at your core, I think probably is what makes Sienna as you're designing it very successful. Yeah. And we've seen time and time again at the council too, exactly what you were saying. Like the founders that are willing to, no matter how much upsunk cost they've put into something, the founders that are willing to kind of see the new landscape and say, hey, like this isn't gonna work or this is gonna work like 10 times better. We have to change course. It just seems like that really, really accelerates things when you're willing to do that. Obviously, you can't do it all the time when you don't really have a good signal, but you had a really good signal at the time. And I consider myself lucky that I met you like right around that moment. Because I think the first time we we grabbed like a juice at Joe and the Juice in San Francisco, and you were working on the, I think the SMS version of it. And then it was like we're building our own model a few months later, and then it was like, actually, we're going all in, and this is kind of the new reality. And I still, with all of that, I feel like you guys were ahead of the curve. So that was really cool. Cool to see. And one more thing to add regarding the channels. I think one of the biggest differentiators was the fact that we were multi-channel from day one. So the automation tools at that time, and still they are around today, you know, the chat bots of the world, they are all focused on live chat. So literally, that's the chat that they're providing, which we all know we've had experience with. Because we already had so much experience from running the conversational SMS uh marketing platform, and we we were gathering all this feedback and um, I would say, requests that brands want this omni-channel experience and provide the same level of support, but of course, custom for every single channel. We really believe that this is the way to go. So, you know, CNN can help uh brands automate across all channels, but you can have a different type of strategy across each. Totally. And given you you talked about how, you know, your career, it didn't make sense, you know, from day one that you'd be where you are right now in an AI company, but it was also so natural and so linear the way that it progressed. I'm curious now, now that you are where you are, like, how do you lean back on those experiences and how do you think that changes your experience as a founder? Having actually been in some of the shoes of your customers and been the operator of uh an e-commerce brand. Yeah. I think first it helps with our um like velocity because sometimes when you meet with a customer, whether it's like virtual or in person, like they don't necessarily need to say it twice. Sometimes they don't even finish their sentence because we get it. Like it's just so easy to understand exactly what is the job to be be done behind their request or behind their ideas, because we've been there. So I think that really helps a lot, uh, this deep understanding of the space. And a lot of the team members at CNR are coming from uh e-commerce, CX or AI backgrounds. So this, you know, just helps with that velocity and innovation. And I think, you know, like when we when we look um at the future in the next five to ten years, there's already so much noise in AI, not only in the customer service space, but across, you know, the entire AI industry. I do believe that the solutions that are going to win are the ones that are laser focused and very specialized in what they're doing. Awesome. Well, you've talked a little bit about how Sienna, you know, and other platforms are, you know, Sienna is about empathy at scale. And AI is not really known for their emotional intelligence, right? Like there's a lot of discussion and discourse around this currently. And how do you make sure that your product isn't just a smarter chat bot? Yeah. Um, so I think it all starts with uh how CNR was built. So CNR was built from the ground up on top of large language models. So this is basically our entire infrastructure is purely generative AI, and our approach is multi-agent and multi-model. So, what this means is that you know, you can do so many things inside of CNR. So you have multiple channels, you can automate multiple use cases, you can integrate with multiple vendors to achieve, I would say, your desired outcomes that replicate, you know, human workflows. So for every single job, there's a different agent doing a different job and using the most, the best fitted model for that. Because we all know there's so many models out there, and like every single month we see a new one coming out, but every single model has its own superpowers or set of skills. So we are very good. I'm super proud of our product team because literally, as like if today a model drops, we will start testing it today, and we will see in which area of Cienna, which uh functionality does this model apply best, so we achieve better results than we had before. So I think it all starts from here, and then of course, the reason why it's not robotic, and if you go right now and interact with Cienna on one of our customers' websites or you know social media accounts, uh you will have no idea that you're talking to AI. You actually think it's a real representative from their brand. And this is because it is as I said, we really work backwards from how humans operate and also think. So Cienna has that contextual understanding, it can apply reasoning, and then only after applying that reasoning and really understanding, going deep into what the customer wants or confirms they want, it will go ahead and take that decision, whether it's just a response or recommendation, or it's multiple actions that need to be taken and other uh other platforms. So I would say is this context and reasoning engine, and then uh one one of the things that um I would say is the most unique at Sienna is our persona studio. So here's where you can really bring these agents to life and make them part of your uh brand's DNA. So you can really create someone like Sam for email that is uh more professional, likes to have a certain verbiage, or signs up with a specific signature, or always brings up something. But then uh maybe I don't know, Sarah for uh for social media that is more quirky, you know, that you are following on social media is mostly made up of Gen Z. So you wanna like mirror that language and cool slang, yeah, so you can really design it that way. Uh, and of course, you can add your business context, so it really feels like it's a teammate. And I feel like that's how the majority of our customers describe Sienna, literally as another teammate. That's awesome. And I'm sure just like a traditional call center, Sienna deals with customers when they're pissed off, confused, or panicked. I'm curious, what's the craziest edge case that Sienna has had to solve? There's so many. I think what surprises me the most is when, yeah, there's this is funny. So we have uh an internal Slack community with all of our customers, and they are constantly sharing fun things about what Cienna is doing or surprising things. So I remember someone, uh, I think it was yeah, the CX manager at Earth Breeze, and she shared that Cienna responded to to a question about I think like a product or something that that they have, but Cienna was not trained to respond. So they didn't create an automation or they didn't necessarily add that knowledge into Cienna. But the most impressive things about uh impressive thing about her is that we call her her a she, by the way. Nice. So everyone calls her or she. So the most impressive thing is that even if she's not trained on something, she will still find a way to really give like a really impressive answer. Even if it's something that, okay, let me, you know, at the end of the response, it would say, Okay, I'll connect you with my colleague, like a handoff, you know, doing that handoff. But it still like has so much empathy and excitement in the responses. So I think that's very impressive. Of course, like this is there's other more, I would say, complex things that really blow our minds. So the fact that it's capable of taking multiple actions at the same time, you know, in multiple uh third-party apps that we integrate with and respond to multiple things at the same time and really uh know when uh it's time to do a handoff because it really mirrors the behavior of the customer and maybe identifies some level of frustration. Or now with um with our launch that uh they were doing this week with CNA memory, CNA remembers absolutely everything about your customers and really stores that information so it references it, uh references it in future conversations. So it really creates these customer profiles and everything about the customer, and it really knows them better than anyone else. So, like finally being able to have that shopping experience with your favorite brand that knows everything about you, so you don't need to repeat yourself twice. Like they will know if I prefer my chocolate protein that is, you know, the cleanest way, whatever, this is what I prefer. And I usually travel these months, Sienna will remember, so we will always send me the order at the right time. So it's these types of things and details that really make the difference. Yeah, that's that's awesome. I mean, it seems like every time, like, you know, you're kind of chatting about like what Sienna can do, you're always referring back to the context, the reasoning, really like all the elements that, you know, allow for that real human interaction essentially, but through Sienna, which is really cool. So switching gears a little bit, you know, you've lived in a lot of different places outside of Silicon Valley. Is there a particular, you know, or popular startup mantra from Silicon Valley or an idea from there that you completely reject, especially as someone who's lived in Europe and New York and LA? I think I'm not a big fan of the traditional uh Silicon Valley growth playbooks anymore. Because in this new era with how you know AI companies, they feel like there's no like the old playbooks that not does do not really apply anymore. So, for example, let's say if, you know, like usually you have this traditional way of doing um an org design structure, right? So, you know, most of Silicon Valley companies or like most tech companies in the world, they have kind of like the same org design structure. You know, you would even title your people the same way, or the way you hire and the way you think about hiring, it's just you know, it's in that traditional way. So now with you know, the new companies, like especially with AI, you can have such a small, like a way smaller team achieving way more. And the the type of like profiles that you're looking for are completely different. And now I feel like I have a I have a good friend, Erica, who wrote this uh really cool uh article about the new uh unicorns, which are the elephants. I'm not sure if you're not going to be able to do that. And you can create your community that way. So I just like feel like to summarize, it's about like, yeah, I don't, I'm not a fan of traditional playbooks, like growth playbooks anymore, or like the traditional way of hiring, or who you're gonna hire first. But I am a big fan of, you know, very like trying to leverage AI as much as possible and hiring different types of profiles with different types of set of skills. Yeah. What do you think is kind of the ultimate skill or set of skills in this new environment? Given you're like hiring somebody that might need to cover multiple functions. Yeah. Um, so I would say there's there's a few skills or attitudes. So obviously, like being very hungry, curious, having good taste, because now you don't really need to know as much of like, for example, if I'm not talking about engineers necessarily, I'm talking about, let's say, go to market, because I'm on the go-to-market side, so I'm always thinking about this. But you don't necessarily need to be extremely technical because of how you know easy these AI stools make it, but you do need to have good taste in order to really come up with the a beautiful outcome, right? So when you think about even lending pages or when you think about campaigns, you do need to have that level of taste. Uh good writing, because with AI, I feel like it's an art of how you communicate with it. Like the the the better you communicate, the better your prompts, the better the output and the results. So if you're just gonna give it superficial prompts, you're not gonna get too much, and you're just gonna end up frustrated, frustrated, and then probably so will your your work. Uh it will be a little bit, you know, subpar. So I would say uh these are the the main ones, like hunger, trade writing, taste, uh, and curiosity. And uh yeah, I think these are the most important ones. Awesome. Yeah. I think I just read um something that you wrote actually, like on the communication style and the prompting on, you know, your your LinkedIn newsletter. And it was really helpful. And some of the things that I actually brought into mind also, my Chat GPT experience of creating like the customized, you know, GPT prompts and ensuring that ChatGPT knows a little bit more of like the types of answers that you know I want to get out of it. And I've noticed a difference actually in the outputs as well. Um, so it's awesome. So thank you also for that. Yeah. Yeah. One other thing that I really like, I listened. I'm I'm a big fan of Lenny's uh podcast. I think we all are. And I think he he recently had someone from um from Linear saying that they they never compromise quality for speed or speed for quality. And I feel like maybe until you know AI, these AI tools got the way like the uh where they are today, maybe sometimes you needed to compromise, right? Depending on the project, but now there's no excuse. So you can actually have both. So that's where I would say the taste element really comes into play. Yeah. That's funny because that was gonna be my next question is like, how do you balance speed of deployment with integrity of the product? And it sounds like because you can move so fast, it it all becomes around quality. That's cool. Yeah, and I think there's there's another element where we stay very close to our customers. So we have our customers on Slack, and it's it's like we actually at some point, I remember I would say almost in the first year of CNA, we were like, oh, like should we maybe move? Like it's getting a little bit crazy, but then we decided no, let's keep going this way because this is the easiest way for us to stay extremely close to our customers. And uh, as soon as something is obviously we have our customer advisory board, which we collaborate very closely with, but then everyone can get access or early access to the things that we are experimenting with or that are about to go in beta, or really get deployed for everyone. That like super fast communication and direct access to your customer is customers is everything. So you can it helps with balancing uh that out. Yeah, and I'm sure that they feel the transparency too, and they're probably I'm only about more likely to refer you to another potential customer if they feel like, well, you know, I can see all the other people in here with similar experiences and and problems that as I have. And I also see how Sienna's tackling that. Um, it just feels way more transparent than like a brand that is just telling you one thing and you don't really know what they're doing on the other side. Yeah, yeah. It is very brave of you though. Yeah. As I'm hearing that, I was like, oh wow, it's something that, you know, we've done with some customers, but not really with all before. Very we have great systems now that help us triage and also we're using CNR uh for our own support. So switching gears a little bit, um, so as a founder, what has been your most painful learning moment and what would you do differently if you had a chance? I think it's always hiring, like hiring, like there's you know, there's moments where you feel like, oh, like I've learned so much, I will never make these mistakes again, but you still make them. So I feel like hiring is a constant learning process. Like, there's I don't think it's ever gonna end. Because like, even if someone like, you know, we do um we have a pretty cool hiring process where we really send assigns assignments. Sometimes we work with with the person for a few days or a week to really see how the collaboration would look like and really make sure it's the best fit for both of us. But you never know, you know, like culture-wise or you know, style-wise and working-wise, how that's gonna look like until you actually, you know, get to work together for a few weeks. I think it's always hiring. It's uh you always learn painful lessons that you feel like you've learned them once, but they just come up again or maybe come up in a different format. And I think um, you know, like I used to think that hiring specialized people is better than hiring generalists, but now obviously I kind of like changed this mindset because in this AI era, you kind of need generalists that are super smart and can make it work and they have good taste. And of course, they, you know, maybe are more inclined and have that affinity towards their department or their area, right? Their uh area where they shine, like marketing or sales or uh engineering or product. But yeah, I feel like hiring is always a you know, it's like hiring better. And um, I think that's always a painful. Yeah, that resonates with me a lot. As a people manager turned business owner, it's the constant. And I'm sure as the company's growing too, like the different levels of types of people that you need are different. So it's like once you uh once you figured out the pattern, that's not necessarily the pattern that's gonna get you through the next phase, too. Okay, so one thing I wanted to ask about. So uh we love to ask about co-founder dynamics. You and Andre have been working together for the longest time. How do you keep the working relationship healthy and productive, particularly as you're managing a growing company too? Yeah. Um I think I am I'm very lucky to have Andre as my co-founder. I used to think like, oh, when I talk to my founder friends that uh might be building companies on their own, I'm like, wow, how can you do it? I feel like life is so much better with the co-founder because when someone is having uh, you know, maybe not the best day or they're more down, the other one might have the best day, so you kind of like can balance your you know out. And uh it's always it's always the case. So having someone there, it's always important. I think Andre and I are like Yin and Yang, to be honest, because we are very different. Um Andre is more, I would say, rational, he's the technical one, he always applies second, third order thinking and likes to apply first principles thinking. And I'm learning all of these things from him a lot, but on the opposite side, I am the one that is more impulsive, and when I just feel something in my gut, I will just want to go ahead and do it on the spot without necessarily like always looking at the data or like you know, because just I feel it, and maybe I'm more of that experimental type, so yeah, and spontaneous. So I feel like there's a great balance, and I think also when it comes to, you know, as like Siena is growing almost every month and working with people, like we always learn from one another, like that dynamic, and it really helps us better shape the culture. I feel like even if both of us are from Romania and come from the same culture, we do bring different, I would say, perspectives into the company because both of us were raised in different ways, so you do bring different sides. I think how we keep it healthy. We started last year also doing co-founder coaching. So we have one session. We do individual individual sessions, but we also started doing uh co-founder sessions, and it really helps a lot having that space where someone mediate meditates, I think that's the word. Yeah, um, the conversation, and we can bring up some situations and see okay, how we would have handled them differently, or maybe some decisions that we need to make. And yeah, our our our coach really helps us and he's the best. So that has really helped a lot. And sometimes we like from one session that lasts about like an hour and a half, two hours, like we get one big takeaway that we apply, like you know, throughout the throughout the next weeks and months, and that changes everything. So, for example, I used to so when I get ideas, I sometimes I try to find the best format to share with Andre because we might not always like get you know a lot of time to just brainstorm and hang out because we all have our teams and uh you know full calendar. So I sometimes try like emailing in a beautiful format or creating the process in notion and then like or recording something. But then what Charlie proposed is that hey, why don't you bring it up as a proposal and then your ideas and your vision would be like Andre would approach it differently because you know that was like sometimes frustrating because like I share so many things and nothing gets like you know, we we don't get to talk about it or we don't make enough space. So even that one little thing, like the way you position it as a proposal, it just changes everything. So it's gonna be considered differently. And I also apply that with my team, and it's just like small things that actually make a huge difference. That is huge. Like I think even on our own team, I'd like to implement that because there's like no shortage when you're running a business of good ideas that come up. But if somebody puts the effort in is like, this is my proposal, and I'm ready to kick it off as soon as I get the okay. You're like, oh, okay, wow, all right, there's already a plan here, and I I'm gonna like seriously consider this. So that's cool. Yeah. Awesome. Well, there's one question that I've been dying to kind of ask you, just given how I've spent like my whole career in client services and customer success. I feel like everyone in the industry right now is just talking about how you know AI is gonna first replace, you know, CS and customer support. Obviously, you're you've seen this with like Siena, right? How do you how do you think about that? Like, would you say that traditional customer support is dead? Um so you're asking if traditional customer support is dead, if AI would replace humans? Okay. Um, I think traditional customer support is not yet dead, but is slowly dying. But I'm not talking about having a department that is fully managed by humans. I'm not talking about that. I think, you know, especially in uh e-commerce and retail, the adoption curve is still slow. It's not moving as fast as maybe, you know, in um, I don't know, in um product and engineering or in other types of organizations and industries. So I do see still these types of companies running just with humans, but I do feel like the you know, the old way of doing customer service with the old, you know, software or infrastructures and all of those inefficiencies is slowly gonna die. What I also believe when it comes to, you know, AI replacing humans and so on, I I know this has been uh said a lot, but I really believe in this that AI is not going to replace humans. It's it AI is not gonna replace you, it's going to replace people that are not gonna adopt AI and they're just going to be like uh skeptical and really like uh blocking the uh the adoption of it. Uh so you are definitely going to be replaced with someone that leverages these tools and actually, you know, um drives these waves. So it's it's the same in customer service. I do believe that I mean what we've seen in the businesses that we work with is there's there's um there's been mostly restructuring of the team. So let's say, so for example, we had one of our one of our earliest customers, uh Cottery. They were able, because CNR took so much of the load, uh they were able to finally implement a white glove uh program, a loyalty program that they had in their backlog for, I believe like a year or even like maybe more than a year because they didn't have time to do so. Those folks that were you know spending time on the repetitive stuff, things that are not necessarily like gonna move the needle beyond just you know answering uh customers, they can actually go and do more exciting stuff that will actually generate more revenue, bring more loyalty, more attention, increase you know, LTV, AOV, and so on. So, this is one example. I love that example by the way. Yeah, we're big fans of it. Yeah, we've we've seen a lot of this, and just you know, AI is making making jobs way more exciting, giving so much more opportunity to to these folks. There's still a lot of, you know, I would say fear and skepticism, which is normal with every single innovation we've seen this happening historically. But yeah, it's um it's definitely getting more and more exciting as I think, yeah, if if you take it slow, and this is one of the reasons why I even started the newsletter, even though I know there's a million AI newsletters out there, but everyone, you know, picks and chooses. So it just brings, like I, you know, my goal was to bring AI in a more curated fashion to our community. Yeah. And you know, when you were talking about like the coterie example, I think like the people that I see wanting to really adopt it on the customer service side, they're thinking about the more strategic things that they can end up doing, like you were saying, like, you know, the the things that actually move the needle from a revenue perspective or can open up um new opportunities there. I'm curious too, if you know, as you've been building Cienna, like have you thought about, you know, just where kind of like the like what those like customer service like functions are going to start doing instead, right? Like, you know, kind of beyond the coder example. Are there other things that they're um that you're seeing? Yeah, I'm I think so. Another example, one of our other customers, Terra Cafe, which they are a very cool uh coffee machine based here in New York. So what they've done is they were actually able to put all of those resources that initially were on customer service on their community. So now they're uh posting a lot of things across New York, they are doing partnerships with Rivian and doing running, you know, uh events and all that stuff. So they just bring more awareness into the company. So a lot of the folks that were previously doing customer service or social media are just transitioning more towards that in-person element, which is cool. Yeah. Is there a common thread across like the companies that you see, you know, just being more quick to adopt AI or adopt Sienna? Yeah, yeah. Uh they're winning, right? They're winning, of course, but I think the the common thread is the people behind the companies. So, like the most successful companies at Sienna are successful because of the people behind. So they are really like, I mean, obviously, not only like visionaries, and they are not afraid of implementing new technology and getting their hands dirty and maybe, you know, in the beginning doing that groundwork so then after they could be really scaling 10x faster. But it's also about the operational efficiency behind these companies, so they are very well structured, very well designed. The type of like again comes down to the skill set of the people. Um and tech savviness really yeah, says says a lot, and that's yeah, it's all about the people. I mean, um I feel like and it's not necessarily the number of people, like don't get me wrong. It can be literally literally be one or two people that make the difference, but it's about yeah, um, having the right mindset. Yeah, and strong. All right, we're going to transition to a quick fire round. So, what's the best founder lesson you learned the hard way? Fire fast. Good one. Most underrated skill for a founder or early employee. Taste and great writing. AI tool that you love that no one talks about. I feel like everyone talks about them at this point. I love lovable Nv0 right now. Yeah. One early decision at Sienna that changed everything. Bring in customers on Slack. Nice. And then what's your favorite founder ritual or productivity hack? Does it need to be like founder? Okay, I'll I have personal, but also like work. So my productivity hack is my calendar, my Google calendar is everything. I have every single thing in there, including my personal life. So that is like the most, and also like you I leverage tasks relentlessly. Like I love, and just like checking, checking, checking, making sure I don't forget anything. And then on the personal side, I think meditating twice per day really helps. Awesome. Cool. All right, last one is uh a little more loaded. So if you had a magic wand, what is one thing that basically you get like three wishes? What is one thing that you'd fix for yourself, Sienna, and the future of customer experience? For myself, um, I would love to be able to sleep nine hours per day. That's the dream, right? I'm not even saying eight, I need nine. I feel like that would change everything, especially for women. So totally, yeah, without compromising the remaining time though. So time should expand, yeah. Um, for Sienna that I would fix, I think I think for me personally, because I'm on the growth side of things, I always want to fix the the growth, like the velocity of growth, like the speed at which we're growing. Obviously, for a founder, there's never enough, or like never never fast enough, and also like the brand awareness piece. So I would just like wave a magic wand and just like make sure CNI is everywhere because that's my my goal, right? I'm trying to scale that as as fast as possible in the in the best way possible. And for the future of customer experience, my my biggest goal and our goal is to be able to go on any of my favorite businesses or products that I use maybe on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis, and be able to interact with Sienna seamlessly and get everything I need seamlessly solved or you know, answered. Yeah, that's basically my goal. Yeah, awesome. Love it. Well, Lisa, this has been such a great conversation. Uh, where can people follow your journey or get their hands on Sienna? Yeah, uh, so our website is sienna.cx from customer experience, and you can always find us on LinkedIn. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining uh joining us here on First Builders. Your story is really a masterclass in turning, you know, pain and frustration into product and doing it with empathy, fire, and precision. Yeah, thank you so much, Lisa. It's an honor having you here and great to have you in the portfolio as well. Thank you. Appreciate it. That was awesome. Rachel, what hit home for you? Like there's so many different things in there. The main one for me was probably, of course, the customer success and customer experience like throughout, but also her, just like her willingness to scrap sunk costs and being super adaptable, especially when they started building their model. And then they're like, oh, you know, open AI is out. We need to scrap that and use, you know, the what's being built. And then the other thing also that she talked about was just how in the age of AI, it's so important to still have the people that are driving those strategic decisions, having taste, having really great communication. She referred to that so many times throughout her uh conversation. Um, it actually reminded me of even the tip that I pulled from her and customized my own Chat GPT to have better um outputs as well. So it's so important to have like the people behind the AI to operationalize and drive it faster. Yeah. And I love that she brought up the taste point because this is a conversation I've had with a lot of people one-on-one. And some totally agree with that and some don't. I'm very much in Lisa's camp there, where I feel like taste is the one thing that you really can't outsource to an AI now or even in the short to medium term. I don't know long term, but for now it seems very hard to do. And I think particularly customers and people are out there with this sort of skeptical eye, like, am I talking to an AI right now? And, you know, quality goes a long way and showing that you've put a lot of thought into something goes a long way. And so being that sort of master curator as you're pulling together all these AI tools is critical. And then I loved also the point that she made about how all these successful customers that she gets to work with seem to have successful people behind them. Because in a sort of meta way, that's what this whole podcast is about, because that's also how we're designing our portfolio at the council. Because if you kind of if you think about brand name companies that have gone through IPOs that everybody knows, usually they have a suite of products at that point in time. But at some point they just had one product. So they were a product before they were a company with a suite of products. And then before they had a product, they were a person or a couple of people kicking off that company. And I find the same thing, the ones that really take off have the most impressive people like Lisa at the front. So, or even behind the scenes. So I thought that was great. And then I also loved her comment about co-founders because I've seen, you know, just across our portfolio. And even last week when we were talking it with Donish, we used the same terminology of Yin and Yang with him and his co-founder, Jeff. And Andre and Lisa definitely have the same thing going on. And I've kind of seen two different, I guess, archetypes or mixtures of founders in our portfolio. One is the solo founder who feels totally comfortable not having the sounding board, and they kind of build a scaffolding around them with the team members that they hire to have the sort of accountability that you get with a co-founder, but it's not for everyone. And I can see how that could be unhealthy for some and many, probably. And then we also have these sort of co-founders with this, you know, very different skill set than their counterpart. And what I don't see working out very well is two co-founders that have the sort of same skill set. So I think for anybody listening who's thinking about founding a company right now, I've talked to some folks that are still at their jobs and they haven't yet left and they're thinking about who to co-found companies with. And I've noticed there's a tendency to think about who you like working with the most. And sometimes that is someone that's very similar to you. They might be in your same function, think about problems the same way. But you also want somebody that will challenge you and bring new skills to the table. So I think that's really critical in trying to find the right co-founder. Yeah, it's always about the people, whether it's AI, whether it's co founders, your team, you know, it's gonna always go back to the people. Totally. Yeah. Well, if this episode fired you up, drop us a review, share it with your favorite builder, and subscribe to First Builders wherever you listen.