Rocks2GA founder Ishan Mukherjee on building an agentic CRM and the pressure driving AI SaaS fraud

welcome to the Temple of te technology great to have you here uh how you doing today I'm good I'm good thanks for having me on John Jordy nice to meet you um Sam connected us so excited excited to join your ramp sponsored yes this is a ramp sponsored segment Sam seriously like I went to ramp and I was like okay there's a whole bunch of noise in this whole industry but there's probably something that's working like just tell me what you guys use and they were like well we use rocks and it's great and so uh they introduced us and I'm glad to have you here and want to learn more about the product genuinely because uh it's not something that we're using yet but in the future we imagine that you know millions of people are getting phone calls and emails from us every single day encouraging them to listen to the show encouraging them to to uh you know download rate US five stars and apple podcast we want a really intense million AI Salesforce and we're hoping you can help us with that we want to swarm we want a swarm the amazing but anyway uh what do you actually do yeah absolutely so we're show pretty early most of it is all word of mouth as yet so there's a big launch coming in a couple of months and we actually have a sales and marketing team so um we buil the first Enterprise ready agentic CRM so it's a new generation of software where the CRM works for you so rocks system like in Ram gets installed it unifies all your customer data in one place keeps it in in Rams environment and then feeds a swarm of agents and our agents are designed to supercharge the max preman the S of the world like how do you supercharge the highest compensated Frontline kind of winners or or killers in go to market love it and the way we do that is we double or triple their productivity by having these agents basically do a lot of the back office work like and that's kind of our vision is the winning companies of tomorrow like ramp are going to have supercharged Builders with cursor and cognition and supercharged sellers with hopefully rocks so that's that's what we do I love it I have a ton of questions I mean it sounds like one thing that we were kicking around was this this idea that maybe it's too early to have an agent at the front line actually writing copy hitting send and maybe we're more in the Centaur era where a human with an AI is more powerful than either a human or an AI alone is that how you're thinking about it right now even if in the long term you're going full the AI will actually send emails yeah and kind of going off of that specifically I think everyone can see why back back office work is getting sort of automated perect for L and you know cursor can have an amazing NPS even if it has like a huge error rate yet front office work when you're interacting with customers like everybody's experienced this at some point you know either uh the individual themselves or an employee of the individual like sort of messes something up with a customer and it's sort of like this frustrating experience because it's like actually lost Revenue versus like a lost five minutes like correcting a bug so balancing that sort of of front like the bigger challenge is probably like the front office work where the error rates just have to be much lower yeah absolutely as Lulu kind of gave me the best advice like we're building bat suits not Butlers and the core idea comes from I've held a bag all my life and I ran a good market for a public company before we're not at a point where you can completely go FSD for your largest customers the core idea is how do you supercharge a Sam or a Max or Eric with AI but they're the ones who are orchestrating or QB the system where they review and send because the cost of really messing up is in in my kind of the small term feels like a bad email but you would degrade trust through the brand through the person and that's what we focus on is how do you build an gentic system that you could use today it's not vaporware things you can use today but how do we supercharge the kind of Front Line kind of back carriers I think over time like there's going to be dramatic seat compression or or if gencies to be had where people who support those back carriers which is kind of 80% of the employee base they will have to kind of evolve to thrive or or kind of risk basically not being relevant uh can you talk about the innovator's Dilemma sustaining innovation in agentic systems versus disruptive innovation Logan Bartlett on his show said that you know if you go back to mobile the the the Salesforce of mobile was just Salesforce and his thesis was that maybe the Salesforce of AI is just Salesforce but um and they're obviously doing stuff in AI but at the same time we're seeing apple drop the ball on product development Google's dropping the ball on product development it feels like there's more fertile ground than ever so how have you reasoned through that and why are you taking this bet even though there's some people that are saying hey it's only a matter of time till the big guys get it together 100% like Ben's the goat like he's the goat of all goats and let's hear for Benny off folks Legend yeah like I I grew up not in the Bay Area like you read up on them and they're the big inspiration so if you look at service now and and Salesforce they have a massive Advantage because they have distribution but also data like kind of firm belief is that the alpha is in working with the intelligence providers and being earning the right to be the custodian for Enterprise data and bringing in public data so our position is what we're arbitraging is what some somebody who holds kind of a bag at a public company knows is traditional systems have both lost usage the users they don't want to use them they use new tools but they've also lost data data is now in the warehouse so if you 40% of the data in in in a software kind of data warehouse like a snowflake is actually go to market data interesting so when we think about kind of building these new systems incumbents A3 billion dollar kind of income it has a massive Advantage but what we're focused on is how can we a earn the eyeballs of the Sams and and Max freans of the world but do it in a way where we're doing a rug Pole where build a system of record which index is a data that's not already in the system of record right so Ross gets installed indexes everything in the warehouse brings in you can connect all the other sources and I think the winning com kind of companies would be folks who bundle data and users in these platforms and hopefully earn the right to be the next kind of default platforms talk about the pressure that you feel and then maybe other um other companies specifically in San Francisco around you see these companies coming out you see these Revenue charts right it used to be investors it used to be and seriously in 2021 I remember saying investors would say you know sort of best-in-class companies are getting to 1 million AR in 9 months Y and now it's basically like okay best-in-class companies are getting to 10 mil in 3 months so if you're and so what the the the sort of potentially toxic thing about this pressure is that it's making some people feel like well if I want to win as a company like we need to put up you know just the ridiculous numbers that you know and anybody that's built a company knows that like in uh like Revenue ramp is not necessarily uh like always connect you know tied to like customer satisfaction or product quality or everything like that so I'm I'm curious to know like do you think that sort of pressure to grow extremely quickly is is forcing people to make sort of like short-term decisions or riskier decisions or or in some cases even like you know misstate uh facts yeah yes I think it's ultimately the founder psyche like I've been around the block but I would I have to say two things this time around is makes me the most insecure like all of us are very insecure right my wife's listening in obviously like we're all insecure monkeys in some way so two things one is I think this this new generation is about talking about these crazy kind of kind of Revenue curves the way I internalize it is ultimately like the secret to building enduring high quality revenue is to make customers happy and the right customers happy so we focus on strategic like the seams of the world Enterprise customers like reddis and mongod DB and ramp like how do we land there how do we earn the right to expand and be essential in these businesses which will generate enduring Revenue over time as long as we're kind of helping them kind of secure and grow their own Revenue so that's how I internalize that I think the game is going to be at quality about enduring revenue and there are businesses like VZ and data dog to be built now it's just that data dog and Wiz although they were rocket ships they always focused on essential kind of uh solutions to really really large businesses and that's what we're focused on the first part of the psyches I I think is not spoken enough is the fact is and consumer expectations are in this invisible asmt to where they're expecting Singularity like consumers because they've been sold Singularity and are using perplexity and chat GPT they expect all work to be done by software so that is actually the one that keeps me up in mind like how do you deliver your genetic experience which are inherently probabilistic to meet these kind of insane kind of consumer expectations and then that's where I think the winning products are going to come from so the revenue stuff kind of really really hits but I kind of process it out but the consumers and their expectations there some stuff that kind of keeps me up 247 is it is it uh internally are you thinking with the team like how do we achieve the sort of like chat GPT moment for the Enterprise right like you could imagine like there is some place that you guys could hit in terms of product quality that would be so magical that like you would get that cognition kind of had that where they launched Devon and it was like this viral sensation even though it was an Enterprise agent for coding um but it's a great question yeah like do you think that that's do you think that that's like maybe it's the wrong way to look at it because businesses will realize hey we have something magic here we're not going to talk about it we just going to like you know it's antima you know we just yeah you're spot on so we're in the boring space of Erp and CRM the most essential but also the most lucrative software market like we've chosen the path to be the daily driver for all customer facing knowledge workers so we focus on building something that's a land expand land with the Maxes and the S of the world but grow into 200 plus kind of active users at ramp like that's kind of the core motion I think that agentic applications that win is where everybody's using it day in day out and so we optimize for like internal like post land V reality so there is no seats you land rocks and everybody uses it and I think that's that's at least my thesis is become a daily driver can you talk about the actual instantiation of the product obviously it sounds like you're plugging into the data warehouse the snowflakes of the world uh it sounds like you're maybe not plugging into the Salesforce installations is there a rocks app like how does a salesperson actually interact with rocks day-to-day absolutely pure ramp like kind of cracked engineering shop so we build product we pragmatic product Builders and we work with the platforms so we have a web app an IOS app um the guy build ramp and Robins here we have a slack app we have an email app so we want to be the front application where it is a swarm of Agents working for you it's powered by our own Warehouse uh Native CRM so it's running in your warehouse and it's a two-way sync to Salesforce or HubSpot right so that's kind of our core idea got it um in in kind of large sophisticated organizations were already winning like the mongos and these folks like we would definitely integrate our API into the internal Tools in most of the rest we want to build an application that humans actually want to use um and then hopefully get two to 3x more productive this year and put them on a path to being kind of 10 times more productive love it Jordy you got anything else that's all I got this was great well this was fantastic we'll have to have you back B news I hear there's big news coming I want him back when he announces it I want to hear it here first absolutely one short story I'm a sports nerd I grew up in India getting up in the morning seeing sports center to see like Jordan and the Wizards that's that's when I started watching it so congrat all the success hey we talked about this morning like there's going to be a one name entrepreneur for AI B2B SAS and you could be that you could be that guy so you could be LeBron you could be Kobe of B2B SAS we're rooting for you wilt Jordan well thanks for coming by Che all congrats right well we got another one name entrepreneur coming in the temple of Technology any minute now August Augustus you don't even need to know his last name you might know him by his uh Augustus former the rain maker former Roman Emperor former Roman Emperor the yeah yeah accused member of the deep State accused member of the deep State we're here to confront him put on the tinfoil hat break it down I promised him we wouldn't go too crazy with the jokes because we know the internet is watching and this will be CLI go too crazy Augustus I I really appreciate you taking uh taking a shot and taking a chance on this crazy no I mean the man has no fear he faces his um he faces his vocal appoint opponents uh daily yeah he really is good at duking it out on the timeline never lets them get to the last quote tweet uh he's having fun with it too but it must be a high stress situation because the numbers are getting crazy and we got Augustus here to break it down for us he is welcome to the Temple of Technology Augustus wow I feel like your hair grew an inch you must be