The 3 skills early B2B founders can't fake — Sriharsha Guduguntla

When you're an early stage startup, there's only three things that matter: selling the product, coding, and talking to your customers. Period. If you can master those three things, you will evolve into the leader that you want to be.

Welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Reimagine Podcast. We are stoked to have with us today Shri Hara Guda, who is the co-founder and CEO of Hyperbound, a YC Alum from Summer of 2023. Previously, he was on the Salesforce Einstein team working on their AI chat builder. He's also a former founding engineer at Bloom, which was a financial education startup. With his background in conversational AI and edtech, he's super excited to be building the next generation of sales coaching and training, which we all know is a space that desperately needs some help.

Shri, thanks for joining us, man.

Awesome, I appreciate it. Welcome.

Yeah, thank you so much. I'm very happy to be here and really excited to get this thing going.

Yeah, Adam passed the first test. He was able to say your last name and first name. I asked before we started recording. I went through it five times with him.

Awesome. I feel like I usually mess that up, so I'll just say Shri, because I will definitely mess up the last name.

So one of the things we like to talk to founders about as we go through this conversation is the origin story. Like, why did you guys build what you're building? What was the connection? You've done a lot of interesting work through conversational AI in the AI space, so why go after this and why are you so passionate about it?

Yeah, 100%, Dale. I mean, it's been a long journey to get here. Finding a gap in sales tech is one of the most difficult things to do because it's notoriously super overcrowded, very saturated. There's a hundred different clones of the same product. So it was not easy finding the problem that we did, but I can tell you what happened.

We went through Y Combinator last summer. For people that aren't familiar with Y Combinator, it's a startup accelerator. We raised our first seed round after Y Combinator. Through that, we were actually working on a different idea before this—it was like an email automation, a Lavender, Reggie competitor, essentially. That product had really good product-market fit. We had a lot of customers. The problem was that the email channel is kind of on a downtrend right now. So we decided maybe this wasn't where we wanted to be for the next ten years.

We talked to our customers back then—hundreds and hundreds of sales leaders—and found that training was just one of the most difficult things to do. We naturally asked the question, because we're both engineers and we're not salespeople by trade: why don't you just build an AI that you can practice with? That's what we did when we started our company initially. We built this chatbot internally that we'd practice objection handling with, because that's just how we do things.

We talked about that with sales leaders naturally, and they were like, "Could you build that for anyone?" We were like, "Probably." That's how Hyperbound was born. We built the first bot back then, showed it to a bunch of leaders, and it's evolved over time. The product is just way ahead of where it was on day one. We're really glad that we found something that's solving a real need.

You know, it's interesting. When you look at the space, first off, I'm glad that you didn't go into the email space. I think it's crowded and confusing, and I think that even with AI, I would say it's gotten worse, not better. The emails I get from AI are so obviously AI. Like, "Hey Adam, I hope you're doing well." So I'm glad you pivoted away from that.

When you look at where the need is and where AI could help the most, it's definitely in training and developing. How do we bring it all full circle? But a lot hasn't been tied in, right? Like, sales training is this underappreciated, undervalued thing in organizations. It's like, "Oh, we'll just hire some enablement person and they'll put together a slide deck on training." Talk to me about your philosophy on training and how it comes full circle with Hyperbound, because I think it starts with that philosophy, right? Like, what should training be?

Yeah, 100%. The way we think about it is you have tools like Gong and Attention and all these call recording tools that claim to coach your reps and clone your best performer, right? In some ways it makes sense. You're basically taking these calls, analyzing them, figuring out what went wrong, what could improve, and then trying to impart that advice back to your reps, trying to close the loop. But the problem with that is it's reactive coaching. You're doing this all after the deal is completed. It's more like a postmortem rather than a proactive approach.

What we're trying to do at Hyperbound is basically change the entire way training is done. Instead of trying to go fix everything after the deal has closed, after you've lost it, we're actually taking a more proactive approach and preparing for it ahead of time using a tool like Hyperbound, where you can jump into a simulated environment and practice for that scenario before it even happens, being able to anticipate that. So now what you can do is use tools like Gong to anticipate what scenarios might come up and proactively prepare your reps for those situations in the future.

When you say philosophy, I wouldn't say there's anything too complicated here. Every sales leader knows that practice and preparation are key to having a successful sales call. It's just that up till now there was no way to really implement that or actually go out and build these simulations. We've kind of built this tool that makes it very easy to build those scenarios and build those simulations for your reps to practice.

Yeah, it's super important to get to practice. We actually just launched a conversation with Larry Long Jr., and he was talking about how if you're not practicing, if you're not executing, if you're not doing it when everyone else is looking on the side—not on game day, but actually when you should be practicing off hours—then you're not going to be successful. So I love that you're doing it. I think it's right for disrupting this industry, and I think it's needed heavily.

One of the things that many of our founders that we talk with deal with are setbacks. You talked about one of your setbacks, which was: "Hey, we went down one path on the email marketing or email front, but found that wasn't going to work out well." What's another setback that you guys ran into that actually became a setup for success in the future of Hyperbound?

Yeah, so you know, I think it was just being very real about the situation of email. When we first started, as most engineers or technical founders tend to be, it was like: "Okay, if we build a better product, we can succeed." Right? Our goal was just to build a better product than Lavender, build a better product than Reggie. Who have also totally pivoted, by the way.

Yeah, they're all pivoting.

They're all pivoting for sure. We knew that we could build a better product because it's not that we don't have the technical skills to do so. But it was more like: can we actually build a product that just writes better emails? And we did. We did that. But I think the problem was even with really good emails and really good content, people were not getting the response rates that they wanted. That's a big problem that we just could not solve or overcome.

We just realized we just had to come to the hard truth that this is not our fault. This is just email as a whole right now. Customers we found were just starting to move to other channels, and primarily, you know how it is—2024 has literally been the age of cold calling. People are just jumping on the phones now more than ever. So it's just a really great time for us to jump into this space and see what we can do to disrupt it.

I agree with you 100% that people are jumping on the phones more than ever. As someone who does take cold calls—Dale doesn't—I can tell you they're not getting a whole lot better. I have a stepson that just started a BDR role for the very first time ever, and I could tell you the training he got was: "Here's your lead list. Go listen to a couple Gong calls and go make a phone call." There wasn't a whole lot of training, which is frustrating. So what you're saying resonates with me deeply on a personal level.

# Transcript

**Speaker 1:** Level, how do you differentiate what you're doing from Gong, of the world? Other than, you know, it's real time and proactive versus reactive. But to me, as a sales leader, it's more than that, right? Because most sales leaders are going to say, well, I have my team go listen to Gong, and then we manually roleplay. Like, how would you handle that scenario? How is HyperBound different? How are you changing the game?

**Speaker 2:** Yeah, so the whole point of HyperBound is, here's the thing, right? It's like if you take the athlete example, right? So right now, the athlete, let's take basketball because I'm a big basketball fan. Right now, you play a basketball game and you actually go home, watch the tape, you review it with the coach, right? And then you go out and try to not make those same mistakes the next game, right? But if someone just told the player, like, hey, just shoot better. Make sure your free throw, make sure you make your free throw, right? Are they actually going to go do that in the real game, right? What they're going to do is they're going to go to the gym, shoot free throws until they get it right, right? You even see pros, like the best players in the world like Steph Curry, LeBron James, they have been shooting free throws for 25 years and they still shoot them every day.

**Speaker 1:** Right.

**Speaker 2:** So I think the point that we're trying to get across here is you're doing the post-analysis, that's great, right? And you're telling your reps, like, here's what you need to improve on. Here's what you need to do. Now, how do you actually get them to do that? How do you actually hold them accountable to what they're doing after that, right? Because there's no way to know unless they hop on the next call, mess that one up also, and then you have to go tell them again and remind them again, right? But HyperBound, you can actually just build a simulation inside of HyperBound and tell them, hey, go do a simulation of this 100 times, and I'm going to go verify that you did it correctly because we're going to have all the AI scorecarding. In fact, coaches don't have to do much work to actually analyze these calls. We're doing most of the heavy lifting. And that way, you can see, okay, is this rep qualified? Have they figured out how to handle this objection? Are they certified, essentially, right? So it's just a way of giving people a way to practice, like I've been saying the whole time, essentially. And that's like the big differentiator between Gong and us. I wouldn't even say we're really competitors. You know, we're very different sides of the table.

**Speaker 1:** Yeah, and I think there is a place where you guys can kind of coexist because what they're doing and where you guys are going, I think are two different things. It's like a niche play. So, as a founder, one of the things I'm curious about a lot is the evolution of your leadership style. You were an engineer to begin with, you started doing engineering, now you're moving into a founder role, which arguably should always be the best sales resource in the company. So, how are you evolving as a leader for your organization as you guys grow? People buy from people. That's why companies who invest in meaningful connections win. The best part? Gifting doesn't have to be expensive to drive results. Just thoughtful. Soso's intelligent gifting platform is designed to boost personalized engagement throughout the entire sales process. Trust me, I led sales for a Soso competitor, and I could tell you no one does gifting better than Soso. If you're looking for a proven way to win and retain more customers, visit soso.com.

That's a great question, and it's one of the things that I am actively working on as well. You know, the nice part is when you're an early-stage startup, there's only three things that matter, and that's selling the product, coding, and talking to your customers. Period. Right? If you can master those three things, you will evolve into the leader that you want to be, right? Because you're going to become the expert in your space. You're going to become the person that's closest to your customers that knows them in and out and what they want, right? So I don't really think of it as like this whole self-improvement journey where I got to read all these books or learn how to become a leader. I see it as, okay, let me focus on the three things that will get me to become successful, get me to become the expert that I want to be. And you know, over time, those skills are going to develop and those are going to come as we build the company.

Of course, there's a lot of other things that come with this, right? Eventually, we're going to have a big team. We're going to have employees that we're going to have to manage. So there's going to be some leadership skills that I'll need to kind of learn on the fly as we do that. So I'm looking forward to it. I've always been one to take a challenge, so I'm really excited for that.

**Speaker 1:** Awesome. Yeah, I think it's good, like breaking things into smaller chunks. Like three. I think people can digest that. So I think that's a good strategy, and I think founders listening to this conversation like, start breaking things into smaller pieces and don't try to take everything all together. I like that advice.

**Speaker 2:** Exactly.

**Speaker 1:** I want to double click on the leadership because you talked about things that a lot of people I think overlook. That as you grow, you're going to have a team and you're going to have to hire people. And you know, there's other skills that you have to learn. We talk with a lot of founders, both on this podcast and off this podcast, and coach a lot of founders through that growth. How are you looking at resources or coaching or guidance on like, to learn those skills? Because it's not as simple as saying, oh, I'm going to pick this book and it's going to teach me how to be a better leader. It's going to teach me how to manage people. Like, do you have a group of other founders that you interact with? Talk to me a little bit about that leadership evolution and how you're going about it.

**Speaker 2:** That's a great question. Yeah, so, you know, lucky enough for us, having gone through Y Combinator was a huge, huge push in the right direction, right? Like, when we joined YC, I've never done a sales call in my life. So, like, YC definitely prepared me for a lot of the scenarios that were going to come up, prepared me for how to speak with investors, how to actually take a sales call, how to run a sales cycle, right? Like just some of the basics. And you know, a lot of it comes down to just applying it and seeing it kind of unfold in real life, right? And I won't lie, like, even a tool like HyperBound helped me a lot with preparing. Like, our own tool helped me become a better salesperson, right? And on top of that, I would also say, you know, I can't speak to employee management and all that stuff right now. We have one employee at the moment, so it's hard to say.

**Speaker 1:** That's still one to manage though.

**Speaker 2:** Exactly. This guy all the time. It's tough. It's tough.

**Speaker 1:** Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say what that's going to look like down the line, but you know, I'm always one to kind of just adapt, learn on the fly. Like, I'm not trying to force anything or trying to go out and watch a bunch of self-improvement videos to improve. Like, I believe that doing it, going through it, making the mistakes—that's the only way to learn.

**Speaker 1:** Awesome. At Revenue Reimagined, we believe in giving back to the community. You've been gracious enough to provide a gift to the audience. Why don't you tell them what it's all about?

**Speaker 2:** Yeah, 100%. So basically, you know, we build a lot of bots on HyperBound. We have thousands and thousands of bots that we built over the past couple of months. So you know, I would be very happy to build a custom bot for everyone that watches this podcast. And we'll have that built for you.

**Speaker 1:** That's a lot of bots.

**Speaker 2:** A lot of bots. And yeah, we'll have a link that you can actually access and start talking to the bot and try selling to it. And we'll have a scorecard as well to see how well you do on the call.

**Speaker 1:** I love that. That's super cool. We'll drop that in the show notes. I want to talk about, you know, as you grow, especially coming out of Y Combinator, times have changed over the past, I don't know, 18 months or so. And now it's really important to balance growth versus sustainability, right? It used to be, go hire as fast as you can, as many people as you can, and go spend as much money as you possibly can because God knows we're just going to get the money back. And now that's changed to, we want you to grow quickly, but it has to be in a sustainable, slow, steady manner. How do you balance that growth versus sustainability? And what are some of the hard choices you've had to make in doing so?

A great question. You know, I am a first-time founder, so there's a lot of things that I am learning through making those mistakes and taking bold steps that are kind of scary at times, right? But I think the one month that we've had at Hyperbound, and thanks to YC as well, has just been basically be as lean as possible and do things only when you need them, right?

So what I mean by that is, let's say hiring, right? Pretty much every company that went through our batch during YC had already hired people. They had multiple engineers, people contracting for them, designers, all that kind of stuff. We didn't hire until two weeks ago. Our first employee came two weeks ago. This is eight months into the company, right? And it was very much intentional. Not that we didn't need the help, of course we needed the help, but I think AO and I have always been advocates of like, let's do as much as we can with the resources that we have. And when we reach the tipping point where we can't handle it anymore, that's when we're going to hire, right?

So even after getting traction for the company, first month and a half, January, February, even like first week of March, we were like, okay, we can do this, we can do this until we reach the point where we have way too much work and not enough bandwidth. And that's when we decided to hire. So that's the way I like to think about it, at least in terms of how to balance growth and sustainability. It's more like, let's spend money when we need it, let's get employees when we need them, let's buy resources as needed. It's never like we're going to do anything because we just feel like it or something like that. It's always going to be purpose-driven.

I love that. Let's wrap this thing up with a little bit of rapid fire. Answer a word or two. Let's fire them off.

So first one: if you weren't in tech, what profession would you be in and why?

That's a great question. So most people don't know this, but I actually have a YouTube channel and an Instagram and a TikTok where I basically make covers. I'm a singer. I like to sing on the side. I also play the cello and the piano a little bit. So yeah, I just love to make covers. I've done a couple music videos here and there. So yeah, catch me on YouTube. Very cool. To answer your question, I would love to become a musician if not for tech, but that is definitely a pipe dream.

Cool. Nice. What's the one word you would use to describe your startup journey so far?

Yeah, that's a difficult one. I'm just going to cop out here and say difficult.

That's okay. Don't overthink it.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's not easy for sure. So difficult.

Hey, that's good. What's the first app you check when you wake up?

That's a good question. Oh no, this is going to be bad. LinkedIn.

It wasn't always LinkedIn. It used to be like Facebook or Instagram.

Yeah, now it's LinkedIn for sure.

All right, last one. And I'm going to bring it back to you wanting to have a career in music. What is the one song that comes to mind that gets you in the zone for work?

Yeah, that's a tough one too. I mean, I have a lot of songs that I like, but yeah, mostly I actually sing a lot of Indian music. Like Hindi music, Telugu music, Tamil music. Yeah, so there's actually a lot of Hindi music that I love to listen to that most people watching this podcast probably don't know. But yeah, that's my go-to.

I love it. Awesome. Dale, I'm going to let you wrap it up.

Shara, thank you so much for joining us, talking about your founder journey, talking about your product, your company, your leadership, and where you guys plan on going. We're excited to follow along. Where can folks find you? Where could they learn more about you? I'm going to guess LinkedIn, but I don't want to steal your thunder.

Yeah, no, thank you so much for having me, Adam and Dale. Basically, if you guys want to reach out to me, feel free to just message me on LinkedIn. Or feel free to go follow our Hyperbound page on LinkedIn. You can also visit hyperbound.ai to try out some of our free demo bots on our website. And if you are absolutely dying for a demo, just shoot us an email at [email protected], and we'll be happy to prioritize you.

I love it. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you.