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Some weeks back, I mentioned that I was interested in the idea of swapping a red paperclip for a house for my mum. For those who haven’t heard, a Canadian guy named Kyle made this famous ~20 years ago, and a few people have pulled off similar stunts since. Well, I am happy to announce, the project is underway, and I am currently the proud owner of a replica UFC Championship belt, worth a cool $150.

If you’d like to follow along (or even better, trade me for the belt), you can follow my progress here, where I’ll be posting every trade, my entry value, exit value, and multiple I achieved (% growth, not exact, but who cares). When I polled you a few weeks back, only 33% believed I could pull this off. I thank you all for your trust, and I plan to make you proud! Anyway, here is today’s piece. I hope you enjoy it!

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Patrick Thompson, Co-Founder & CEO at Clarify

Patrick Thompson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Clarify, an AI-native CRM platform designed for early-stage startups. He's a repeat founder who previously co-founded Iteratively, a customer data platform that was acquired by Amplitude in 2019. After the acquisition, he served as Director of Product at Amplitude and later as GM for Amplitude CDP before leaving to start Clarify with his co-founder and CTO, Ondrej Hrebicek. Thompson has deep expertise in product design and user experience, having previously served as head of design for Jira Software at Atlassian. He holds a Master's Degree in Global Leadership from the University of San Diego and is based in Seattle, Washington.

He's now focused on building Clarify into an IPO-worthy company rather than pursuing another acquisition. He leads a team of 24 people, 80% of whom he's worked with at previous companies, including Atlassian, Iteratively, and Amplitude. Thompson is married with two children and balances his demanding role as CEO with family time and hobbies like fishing, poker, and yoga.

What did you learn from your acquisition?

To give some quick context, I spent a lot of time on customer discovery when we started Iteratively—mostly around problem and solution validation. The one area we didn’t spend enough time on was business model validation. After two years, Amplitude made us an acquisition offer, and we decided to take it partly because the CDP market felt like it was contracting a bit.

The acquisition itself was a good outcome. Our customers were taken care of, the team landed in a good place, and strategically it made sense—about 70% of our customers were already Amplitude customers, and we were solving one of their biggest pain points around data quality.

Acquisitions are never easy, but I learned a ton going through that process. And this time around, my goal is to build something enduring—ideally, to take Clarify public rather than sell.

Tell us about the problem you're solving, why this?

Pretty much every founder we've ever talked to hates their CRM. It's not a tool that does work for them. Effectively, it requires them to do work for the CRM without yielding much benefit. This is a problem that I personally had back in the Iteratively days. And building a CDP, this was kind of a band-aid layer on top of the go-to-market tech stack. This time, we didn't want to solve the symptom. We wanted to solve the root cause of things like data quality challenges and the need for manual data entry.

So, we decided to build an autonomous CRM that utilizes AI to automate some of the most tedious tasks teams face today. Our ICP is early-stage startups, so we primarily work with founders. We help them by combining a few of the GTM tools they'd have to get either way: CRM, call recorder, data enrichment tool, etc. and bundling it in a pretty fair pricing package.

CRM seems like one of the most solved problems. What gave you the confidence to tackle it?

There are really three things. We did a lot of customer discovery for the startup before jumping from Amplitude to go do this. And trust me, there are very few people who love Salesforce or HubSpot. Most people actually had a pretty visceral reaction to it. As a rep or even as a founder, you're not like, ‘Hey, I love this tool, it's fucking great.’ You're more like, ‘Hey, I have to use this thing, and I don't like it. There are too many clicks. It takes too long.’

Effectively, Salesforce is like Jira. And this is someone speaking who was the head of design for Jira Software for a few years. There isn't a lot of love for it. And so for us, we were like, ‘Okay, cool. This is a problem that we have felt ourselves; it's a problem that's pretty much universal, and it's a giant market opportunity.’

To that point, yeah, I mean, we have really good competition, right? Which is what I like as well. At my previous company, we were addressing a much more acute pain point within a smaller market. There wasn't that much competition. Most of the deals we were doing weren't competitive.

This time around, there is competition, whether it's HubSpot, Attio or other companies. I'd say HubSpot is primarily who we compete with today. And that is a natural motivator for us.

What was the most difficult part of going from zero to one?

I think in the context of Clarify, you're building a platform, right? So there are just so many core primitives that you have to build. There's so much breadth and depth that you have to accomplish. I think most startups tend to figure out how to carve out a niche in the market and then expand outward. In CRM, to be viable, if not yet lovable, you need to meet many of the basic expectations.

For us, the first year was about introducing something that was, I'd say, usable in the market, and then starting to layer on a lot more delights and differentiators. But yeah, there's just a lot to build in this category, which takes time.

What does your day-to-day look like as CEO? Who are your direct reports?

Most of my time is spent working with customers and the internal team. A lot of it is about trying to be the voice of the customer. I'm a very external-facing person within the company. I spend a lot of time conducting customer discovery and interviewing people. I try to do the best job I can to relay that feedback back to the engineering team on what they're building.

A bunch of it's spent on hiring, too. So a lot of the team—we're 24 people now. A lot of it's been recruiting the best team I've ever worked with. So actively hiring, building the bench for when we want to scale the organization, managing fundraising, and managing investor relations. I think that's all pretty typical. I'd say the vast majority of my time is spent with customers, making sure that they're successful and that we're building the right product for them.

As far as team goes, I have one other co-founder on the team at the moment, which I worked with prior, which is Ondrej Hrebicek, who's our CTO. He's amazing. I wouldn't consider him a direct report; he's more of a peer, managing all aspects of the engineering side.

Right now I have five direct reports: one salesperson, a customer success manager, our head of design, a head of marketing—and a support engineer who just joined this past week. In addition, our head of operations reports to me as well. Looking ahead, I expect marketing and sales will continue to report into me, while product and design will likely be grouped more closely together. That’s probably the structure I see evolving over time.

How did you identify your ICP, and your wedge into the market?

We ended up building out an early design partner program early on. We had 17 people identified for our Early Access Program prior to launching and starting the company. A lot of that was just doing customer discovery with them to understand what pain points they had with their existing CRM. A lot of these were Series A, Series B companies at the time.

The reason that we focused downmarket is that we felt like we had the best chance of getting into product market fit for those companies early, rather than building an upmarket solution on the CRM side. If you were to go build a mid-market enterprise CRM, it would take you, I don't know, on the quick side, six to eight years, on the longer side, 10 to a dozen years to get a product that they could use. So effectively, you're forced to move downmarket with SMB startups.

And to be honest, that's who we love anyway. That's who we want to actually build product for. And yes, over time, we'll be moving upmarket as our product matures and our go-to-market strategy matures. But effectively, we want to be working with other founders early on and really building a product that they love.

So as part of our early access program, we spent a lot of time doing research, both on the problem and solution validation side, putting designs together, showing those designs to customers, and getting feedback from them. And as quickly as we could, we got something in market that they can actually play with and then get us feedback and iterate with them on.

That took about six months in total before we had people using the product. And then, from there, it's more of a traditional zero-to-one, one-to-ten kind of iteration. But yeah, getting from zero to one is always really tricky in the sense of what are you building that's really valuable for them, specifically within an established market like CRM, where there's a bunch of incumbents that you're competing with.

We had originally 17 folks in our early access program. Most of them were never actually onboarded, but they gave us a ton of feedback on what we would need to build. And over the entire process of building the product, we've onboarded dozens of other companies into our design partner program. By the time that we launched, we had over 50 active companies using Clarify and effectively getting their feedback with Slack channels with them. It was more co-designing in the sense that they were very much involved in the process of what we're building.

And then it was nice because when we had any questions, we could just reach out to these people and jump on a call or just send them a Slack message directly. So that was super helpful as far as the speed of iteration and speed of customer feedback, versus traditionally it would take you a lot longer to get that feedback. We were looking for your quintessential early adopters.

How quickly can you get someone to love the product?

Once you actually have a meeting, we record the calls. We automatically create tasks for you. We update tasks automatically. We update deals and fields on records automatically for you. So effectively, you can just set it up, and it just runs in the background as you go about your day-to-day.

How do you think about goal-setting at Clarify?

I'd still say we're a Series A company operating like a seed-stage company. We've moved really, really quickly. Our focus is ultimately on the customer, and the customer outcome is whether they can achieve what they want to do. And so, for us, success isn't just whether the feature shipped; it's whether the feature actually achieved the result that the customer is looking for. We still have kind of a phased rollout process where we work through an alpha, beta, GA program.

We spend a lot of time post-shipping trying to analyze whether the feature was successful? We also tend to adopt a more experimentation-driven or hypothesis-based approach to shipping. So, what are we trying to achieve? What are the different experiments we're going to run? I guess this is our solution. How much validation do we do on the solution side? What's our confidence? I'd say we're definitely applying a startup mindset, but trying to move really, really quickly. As for planning, we try to do vision setting on an annual basis. We try to break that down into quarters.

We have effectively a pod model. We have several engineering pods, each led by an engineer responsible for their own area of ownership. And then they own the roadmap, they own the metrics for their pods. And that kind of ladders up into overall business metrics.

The way that we do goal setting is pretty unique. We try to be super ambitious on the goals, where I think a lot of people tend to under-commit and over-deliver. We try to overcommit and actually hit them, which is very different.

We're pretty ambitious with our goals. And the reason is life is too short to fuck around, right? We want to make a dent in the world. And so we're pretty ambitious, which we want to set that culture.

They care a lot about the quality and the craftsmanship of what they build, but ultimately, they also want to make a dent in the world. And so we interview for that.

Recruiting-wise, a lot of folks that we've worked with before, we've hired the best team I've ever worked with. And a lot of this is people from Atlassian, our last startup, and Amplitude. So hiring the best people tends to get people to want to rise to the challenge effectively. The better the team is, the more people get excited about that and try to kind of up-level and up-skill themselves as well.

Tell me about where your pod structure came from?

I think Shopify was one of the first ones to talk a lot about pods. This was back in the early 2010s as well. And they kind of reorged into a pod model. I actually really like Linear—they talk a lot about the heirloom tomato. There's an article that they published around heirloom tomatoes, where not all pods are the same size. You might have a tomato that's a little bit bigger and one that's a little bit smaller. And so that's kind of the model that we have.

Our core relationships team is probably the biggest pod that we have. They also own the entire platform and a lot of the primitives. And we have an intelligence team and then an engagement team. And so those are more, I'd say, directly focused on some of the investment areas that we want to make.

We want to ensure that they're fairly well-encapsulated, resourced correctly, and focused on more of these longer-term initiatives that we want to have in the company. I'd say it's worked well for us in the sense that we're 15-plus engineers now, and we wanted to have a high degree of ownership and autonomy within our engineering team.

So getting them into areas where they can just go deeper, develop that subject matter expertise, and just general code ownership as well. Whereas they're not moving on from one to another, where effectively we're a feature factory. We want them to effectively feel like owners in the areas where they work. Our engineers own product as well.

We have other engineers who are more focused on backend scalability, infra, generally the vast majority of our team is product engineering.

What's your recruitment strategy? How do you find and hire great people?

It's funny, we actually publish our hiring interview process on our website, but effectively, we try to make it pretty lightweight. What we found is that most hiring is kind of 50-50, unfortunately. You're going to get 50% of it right, 50% of it wrong. You can add a ton of impediments or work on the recruiting process, but generally it's probably not going to increase the confidence of your hiring the right person or not, plus or minus 10%.

The first 10 hires that you make will make or break your company. Just like the first 10 customers you get will make or break your company as well. So the more you can hire from your network, the more you can hire the best people you've ever worked with, the better. I'd also say recruiting is not—you're not going to just have a conversation and hire somebody in a month. So I always think of my job as building the bench. One person who joined us on the team, I've been recruiting for five years. I was recruiting him at the previous company that we managed prior to the acquisition at Amplitude.

It took me five years of talking to this person to eventually get them to join. And it was a different—it was three companies later, essentially. So I would definitely say it takes a lot of time for great talent to decide to do it. There are other examples where there are two people we gave an offer to who decided to join another company. And then, in hindsight, we ended up hiring five, six months later. So, it might be a no now, but if you build a really good relationship with them, have a really good interview process, and are authentic, the likelihood of them deciding they want to actually work with you in the future is fairly high.

If somebody joins another company, my guess is that within the first couple of months, they'll know if it works or not. Just ping them, ‘Hey man, I was just thinking about you, hope all is well.’ And the likelihood is if it's not well, they'll be like, ‘Hey, we should chat.’

What does your interview process look like today?

We basically do a video screen. It's 30 minutes. We do a technical interview. It's typically 90 minutes. We do a values interview and then a final interview.

And the technical interview, depending on the candidate, could be 90 minutes or two to three hours, but really, it's trying to get a sense of how they work, how they think culturally, and whether they are aligned. But the best way to actually understand if somebody's going to work is just to work with them for a week or two.

So if people want to actually go through a project with us, we're open to doing it. But if somebody just wants to join, we'll let them join as well. I really like what companies like PostHog, GitLab, and other companies have published as far as their interview practices.

But the one thing I realized from having a very rigorous practice pretty early on is that there are really good people who just don't have the time nor the luxury of time to be able to do that. And you potentially miss out on a lot of qualified candidates just because they're not willing to go through that.

The more experience you have, probably the better you are at gut-checking, I'd say, within the first 30, 60, 90 minutes of working with somebody and asking the right questions and seeing what questions they have for you.

My biggest litmus test in an interview is the quality of the questions that the candidate has for me. How have they done the research? Do they know who they're talking to? Do they know about the company? Do they actually understand the risks of joining an early stage company? What are their biggest concerns with the company and the business? How do they think about product?

Generally speaking, you can disqualify or qualify relatively quickly just by having an honest and open conversation with a candidate.

Why do the first customers make or break your company?

The issue is you're going to listen to your customers. So the same thing—your first 10 employees are going to make or break your business because they're going to set the culture, or you end up mis-hiring, which means that your velocity is super slow and you have to correct.

And so being very thoughtful about the first 10, being very thoughtful about the first 20 customers that you onboard and that you qualify the crap out of them—that they're actually an early adopter, that they actually have the pain that you're solving, that they actually fit your ICP—is so important.

Because otherwise, you're just going to get led astray or you're going to end up building something that's wrong for the general market that you're trying to solve.

How are you infusing AI operationally in the day-to-day?

We have kind of a bottom-up approach to AI as far as tool adoption. So anybody in the team has an unlimited budget on what they want to spend as far as AI resources go. Obviously, we use a bunch of tools, including Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. Yeah, we have—if there's a tool, we'd probably use it, including v0 now as well. And a lot of this is just through experimentation on what works best for us.

We essentially let the engineer or designer, whoever else is using these tools, choose the tools that work best for them. I think as we get bigger and bigger, we'll probably try to standardize and share best practices. Another thing we do is hold AI office hours every week. Effectively, it's a 45-minute meeting where people can come in and share how they use AI, ask questions about what best practices look like. So it means that there's a lot more shared knowledge across the team.

I think what we realized maybe two years ago is that a lot of folks weren't sharing how they were using AI, because they didn't want to give away their secrets, potentially. Versus now, I think as a company, we have a lot of people posting Loom videos about how they use AI. We just do a lot more kind of lunch and learns around this is the best practice that I've done.

Even in the context—I think I prototyped something the other day with v0, I recorded a Loom video of how I went through 157 prompts to get to what I wanted and probably what I would do differently. We're even exploring tools for using AI for auto-generating PRDs and product specs.

And then I use AI personally a ton for everything from customer communication to synthesizing customer feedback. And then even on the sales side, we use it quite a bit as well for trying to build lead lists and outreach messages and marketing website copy, everything.

So it's pretty well infused into how we operate as a team. And we try to share those learnings as much as we can, because my guess is that there are still ways that we can improve as an organization when it comes to AI adoption.

The office hours are optional. We have a bunch of optional meetings that we have—things like AI office hours, we have a Datadog session replay, so anybody can come in and watch customers use the product. We have customer interviews that are open to anybody in the company, as well as to join.

We have a meeting called ‘Breakfast with the Enemy,’ where we do competitive analysis in the space. So we have a lot of these different meetings that are optional, but the goal is to get engineering and other folks who typically may or may not be in these meetings involved as quickly as they can.

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

One, I have two kids and a wife. So I definitely do have a life outside of work. I try to prioritize as much quality time with my family as possible. I have hobbies that tend to recharge my batteries. So I like to fish, I like to do poker, I like to do yoga. If I do those things at least a couple of times a month, I'm usually pretty happy.

I need to get better at, I'd say, taking a vacation. However, I genuinely love what I do and enjoy spending my time with the team and our customers. But I think all in all, those are the things I tend to focus on—family, hobbies, health. If I do that, I'm in a better spot. If I don't do those things, then I tend not to operate at my best.

Being a founder is, generally speaking, a super lonely experience, and there aren't many people who can empathize or understand some of the problems and challenges. So it's really good just to fill that support group with other founders.

And that’s it! You can follow and connect with Patrick over on LinkedIn and Twitter, and don’t forget to check out Clarify’s website.

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