Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Oleg Rogynskyy, Founder CEO of People.ai (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I did a story some time ago on a company called DiscoverOrg. They were mapping out the org charts inside of organizations to sell to sales organizations. They have since been acquired by ZoomInfo. As you are talking, I am thinking that that kind of data layered onto what you are doing would be very valuable. Is that on your radar?

Oleg Rogynskyy: We acquired a company called ClosePlan in October 2020. They enable companies to build org charts with a prospect inside their Salesforce. This is a much newer version of DiscoverOrg. We have seen DiscoverOrg disappear off the radar since they went public because before going public they were scraping LinkedIn to power their data set.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Oleg Rogynskyy, Founder CEO of People.ai (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How many were you able to get to start building out your model?

Oleg Rogynskyy: Graduating from Y Combinator helped us become very successful. We managed to get from Zero to 100 POC customers in the first 90 days. This was when we were in the Y Combinator. We got 100 companies on the platform on the demo day. 

Sramana Mitra: When you went into Y Combinator, were you just at a concept stage?

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Oleg Rogynskyy, Founder CEO of People.ai (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You are doing this out of what geography? It’s no longer Montreal, right?

Oleg Rogynskyy: I’m in Menlo Park right now. 

Sramana Mitra: You are in Menlo Park. Wow, I am in Menlo Park too. What part of Menlo Park are you in?

Oleg Rogynskyy: I used to live near downtown, but now I’m in Middle Field and March. 

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Oleg Rogynskyy, Founder CEO of People.ai (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Filing has always been a big problem with CRM. Salespeople don’t like to log their communication, so you are automating that. 

Oleg Rogynskyy: Yes, we are doing that with superhuman decisions. It turns out that the most predictive feature of activity data that leads to success of the activity or deal closing or some other outcome is actually dependent on whether you had the right people engaged with you on that activity. Do you have the buyers engaged? Were the right people on your end engaged?

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Oleg Rogynskyy, Founder CEO of People.ai (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What problem did you decide to go after with all this technology understanding?

Oleg Rogynskyy: We observed that most of the sales leaders at the time didn’t really know what their teams were doing. They didn’t know how to coach their sales team to better perform and have higher productivity without any data or guidance from us. It was all based on a hunch and trust. It was not based on data and knowledge.

The initial product that we did in Y Combinator in 2016 was for collecting all the activity data which included telemetry of your sales team, email, calendar, and Zoom to turn that data into a coaching recommendation of what a sales manager should be coaching their team to do.

531st 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Francisco De Sousa Webber, Cortical.io

Francisco De Sousa Webber, Founder CEO at Cortical.io based in Vienna, Austria, joins us for a terrific conversation on cutting edge NLP.

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526th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Oleg Rogynskyy, People.ai

Oleg Rogynskyy is Founder CEO of People.ai. This is a fantastic discussion on how to cold start an AI company, build it to scale, etc. Also, excellent guidance on white spaces around which to build new AI companies.

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Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Oleg Rogynskyy, Founder CEO of People.ai (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

This is a fantastic discussion on how to cold start an AI company, build it to scale, etc. Also, excellent guidance on white spaces around which to build new AI companies.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself. Tell us a bit about your background and all also introduce us to People.ai.