Default launches AI-native GTM data layer to replace the 'Frankenstack' plaguing B2B sales teams

early stage companies in the space I think so I think you're going to see a lot of interesting progress in the next year and then we'll have lots of different ways to structure um how to participate as these companies grow

fantastic well thank you so much for coming Excited to meet more of your companies.

Yeah, good luck out there. We'll talk to you soon.

Goodbye.

Okay,

up next we have Nico from Default with an amazing series A. I've known Nico for a long time, but it's his first time on the show, so we'll bring him in to the TV. How you doing, Nico? Good to see you.

Long time no see.

Get that overnight success button ready.

Overnight success.

Another one.

Yeah.

Introduce yourself. I've introduced the company. Give us the news. Tell us what happened. These guys get on their system.

Hello, gentlemen. Hello, listeners. I'm Nico,

one of the co-founders here at default.com. Most recently, default.ai. We got a nice URL redirect on.

Here we go.

Um, wait, you're going from to.ai domain.

We we kept the com main main domain. Had to pick up default.AI Yeah, I have a regression just to protect protect.com respect.

How dare us

the com?

No. Very good. Uh tell us about the product.

Yeah, so we spent the last few years building out a bunch of top off ofunnel orchestration tools primarily for inbound scheduling, inbound routing, enrichment for uh very fast growing uh B2B companies. And over the ca the last like 12 18 months we just kept hearing from everyone that everyone was trying to deploy agents uh was running still running into the same issues people have been running into for the last decade

and we took a really big bet and uh basically built a new product over a good chunk of last year and last Wednesday about 5 days ago we launched to the world and it's been it's been great so far. I've this is my 12th meeting of the day. So I'm glad to be I'm glad to jump off the demo demo router.

Explain the the flow. When does the agent come into the pu in into the into the process? I imagine inbound lead B2B SAS company. They have a landing page. There's at some point they collect a form or an email and then the magic happens. Like what is the magic? What is happening?

Yeah, John. So we, you know, the the way we used to work before, um, you know, before we launched a new product, we'd basically come in, we'd hook into the forms on your website. We'd add a little piece of code that told us, you know, how many visitors were coming to your site, who was showing up, etc.

And then we'd kind of build out all this middleware and plumbing between your forms, your website, all these top funnel signals and your CRM and your sales team. Um, now what we do is we give you an out-of-the-box data layer. And what data layer is, it's a real time data warehouse you plug into your CRM, whether that be Salesforce, HubSpot, or similar. Y

uh we pipe in all of all that really rich context that agents can use to really answer these tough to usually really tough to answer questions about your business. And you know, everyone says that, you know, all growth problems are data problems. Um and uh you know at least in at least in go to market and um effectively what we what we do out of the box now is give you this data layer that plugs into your tools and uh this kind of semantic modeling layer that translates all this context from your systems uh as well as different activity like meetings and form submissions and website visitors into a language that you know agents can actually understand and can use to answer uh you know these really tough questions. Isn't this going to grow into a CRM at some point? It feels like the opportunity to do a compound startup, do many more features like you have not only is your is your company AI enabled on the product side, but your engineering team's enabled on the products on the AI side. So I would imagine you'd be able to ship more features. Like why have you stayed where you are? Do you think that will remain the case or do you have ambitions to build out uh something that looks like a legacy uh workflow? Is there demand for that or do you see the whole uh the whole process just sort of evolving in a way that you'll never need to build what traditionally looks like a CRM? I think a lot of the same fundamental problems our customers are running into today even as they're navigating this really challenging um really ch really challenging kind of transition uh even at at really really large scale. Um these are the same problems they were running into 10 years ago. Um so there's no shortage of surface area to solve for today for us. Uh that being said, we're already seeing a ton of our customers uh really really built some really cool stuff internally and uh completely flipped the way um you know things have been done for the last last couple decades. So um that being said, you know, every every road in in this category and and you know more broadly leads to an incumbent like a Salesforce or uh or similar. So um yeah, we've we've we've built with with uh that mantra since since day one.

How have you thought about segmenting the market, finding niches, finding little veins? Like I if you find that you're doing really well with startups or doing really well with uh real estate agents or like anything that takes inbound uh and has a go to market motion or in B2B software, there are other niches within B2B software, right? um more dev tool focused, more finance focused, B2B software. Um do you find that there are sort of mini network effects in these niches? Have you been successful finding a few or do you want to deliberately uh cast a wide net so you can sort of cross-pollinate all the the the learnings from one category to the others like immediately? So I would say you know really early on we were focused on working with the fastest growing um you know really the fastest growing startups and there was a bit of a you know I don't know if network effect is how to put it but um there you know a lot of our pipeline came from referrals really early on you know people would would go and they'd sign up and book a demo for their favorite uh favorite new recently launched and fresh off the assembly line uh kind of product and they'd see the little powered by default um logo down at the bottom and that drove a ton of traffic for us and got us to where we are today.

But um you know it's really interesting. I think a lot of our customers you know we serve a lot of customers in in software uh a few in like medical devices uh some services businesses uh fintech as well. and more or less everyone uh you know everyone runs into some some version of the same problem which is they've got all these different systems that don't really talk to one another um and really kind of create this sort of like data soup or this like franken stack is what we call it uh that just makes it really really hard to grow. creates this like growth tax. You know, every incremental dollar of revenue past a certain uh you know, past a certain threshold depending on the vertical or market, you know, requires sort of army of uh operations people to sort of maintain the Franken stack and keep it at bay. So, yeah.

So, uh I how how prevalent is the Franken stack? Because I feel like there's a view of the world that's like data bricks exist, snowflakes exist, like everyone has this beautiful data lake and of course and and not only that, Zapier exists and and there's vibe coding and you can clearly create these ETL pipelines between everything. Certainly every company has done that. Sounds like they haven't. uh is there is there like a revenue scale or an employee scale where that does become unblocked and does become best practice and then is that is that moving down into smaller and smaller organizations?

Yeah. So I'll I'll give two answers here. First and foremost, I've never met someone who didn't hate their CRM.

Okay.

Uh I'll I'll say that first and foremost. Second, you know, I think um it's very rare that we run into a scaling, you know, revenue org that has, you know, very deep technical proficiency and, you know, is is spending a lot of their time in a data warehouse, uh or writing SQL. Uh typically, they're pulling reports and trying to answer, you know, a lot of these lot normally tough to answer questions. Um, that being said, one of the things that I've been, you know, my the team and I have been really excited about here over the course of the last year is seeing so many uh really really fast growing companies like owner.com is a perfect example. Kyle Norton, the CRO there, has built just an absolutely incredible go to market operations team. Uh, they've built so much internal uh, you know, basically just building their own distribution product. uh their own foundation they can use to scale and as a result they're able to gain a massive competitive advantage uh and they started doing that very very early on. You see the same thing with other hyperrowth companies like ramp and rippling and and many others but um you know the the best companies treat distribution as as product and uh you know as an extension of of product and um you know I think that is that is getting earlier and earlier uh in terms of when when companies start prioritizing that. Tell us about the round

last before that,

please.

7-day work week.

Five day work week.

Logo tattoo work week.

Do you have the default as like kind of a back piece?

Yeah. I've got I've got a nice stamp down here. Yeah.

Nice.

The whole back.

Yeah. I mean, you got a

But but I mean, jokes aside, what is the work culture like at default these days?

Yeah, it's uh it's intense. you know, we've been doing a really hard thing for a good chunk of the last year. Um,

basically project for GTM

for B2B SAS. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

No, but it is a competition. You want to win and there's other players and like, you know, if you if you're on the beach 5 days a week, like you're just going to get smoked. This is real.

Yep.

We're we're definitely not on the beach five days a week. Yeah. I'm too pale too pale for that. But, um, no. Yeah. We, you know, we're we're solving a lot of uh a lot of really hard problems. I think we have a lot of really smart people who are really really excited at, you know, kind of solving solving the growth rate problem and trying to help help our customers grow better and faster. Um, a lot of that stuff, you know, a lot of the the problems that we run into are a lot of the same kind of boring things that our customers run into on a daily basis. We have the benefit of having really good resources and a lot of great minds, you know, thinking about how to solve these problems day in and day out. And um, you know, we're we're very excited about the future.

Amazing. Tell us about the round.

How much?

So, uh, so we did a $10 million last year again.

There we go.

There's another one.

Yeah. One more. Hurry up. Stop playing