197. He Created a Job Title 1,000+ People Now Have ft. Yash Tekriwal (Clay)

He is the head of go-to market engineering ecosystem at Clay.

Yash Tekriwal
We realized that the way we solved the problem was in fact so significant that paradigm of the work we were doing had changed. I actually get to be more of a founder in my role at Clay today than I was when I was a founder trying to build a successful company.

Samantha Murray
It’s wild because you guys essentially like invented an entirely new category of role that didn’t exist before.

Yash Tekriwal
Tell us why you killed education. Education has sort of become a dirty word for lack of you know just to be very even more provocative. I don’t think a lot of people in tech are aspirational to education.

Education isn’t really a sexy thing to do in tech. Best learning happens not when you control the process but rather control the environment.

Samantha Murray
It’s important. It’s so important.

Yash Tekriwal
If I have to choose between three different people who are maybe five percent different in the features and functionality that they offer, how am I going to make my decision? I’m going to choose the people I want to work with the most.

Josh Schachter
You’re listening to Unchurned brought to you by the Gainsight Podcast Network. Subscribe to our sub stack at unchurned.gainsight.com where we go deep on every episode like how one post sales team at CloudBeds built over 150 AI agents. That story and more at unchurned.gainsight.com.

Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of Unchurned. I’m your co-host Josh Schachter, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Go-To-Market Development and I’m co-host today with Sam Murray, Samantha Murray. She is our VP of Education at Gainsight.

Sam, thank you for joining me on this one. I’m really excited about this.

Samantha Murray
I am so excited to have this conversation.

Josh Schachter
Yeah, because we have Yash Tekriwal. He is the head of Go-To-Market Engineering Ecosystem. Did I get that right or is it ecosystem?

No, it’s Engineering Ecosystem.

Yash Tekriwal
Yeah, we clearly didn’t put too much thought into the pronounceability of the name but we’re running with it.

Josh Schachter
At Clay. Anybody heard of Clay? Yes, everybody these days.

The moonshot company, if you will. So, Yash, there’s so many exciting things that we want to talk to you about. You’ve been at the company for about three and a half years now, which I can only imagine in Clay diction is, as they say, dog years.

Yash Tekriwal
Basically a decade. Maybe 21 years, we’ll see.

Josh Schachter
Yeah, exactly. Walk us through as scenically as possible what the company was like when you stepped foot in the door.

Yash Tekriwal
As scenically as possible is a really interesting descriptor. It’s been a while since I’ve thought about this.

Josh Schachter
You know why, Yash? Because as everybody knows, I’m writing this book right now and my writing coach is like, it has to be scenic. It has to be the scene, the moment.

What was the paint on the walls?

Yash Tekriwal
It’s a good story. People like something they can visualize here in their head. So, I think that’s a good way to start it.

Let’s paint a picture. I was off of seven years of the startup grind. I had started a company that was bootstrapped and successful but then I was too young to have a low ego about it.

Left that to preserve friendships. Jumped around three to four other failed companies. Dealt with really, really crazy founders, honestly.

Josh Schachter
Wait, let’s not talk about Clay today. Let’s just dial in on all of what you just said there. Can we do that?

Yash Tekriwal
Yeah, we can also do that. We can take the direction whichever way you want.

Josh Schachter
That’ll be part two next week.

Yash Tekriwal
Exactly. But this pretext is important, I think, because when I first came to Clay, the reason I came to Clay is because Varun, who’s one of our co-founders, and I became good friends via one of my failed startups, actually, where we ran education programming with influencers and creators, which was a great, like, I wouldn’t be here otherwise if not for that failed startup. And Varun joined Clay about a year before.

He had been incessantly knocking on my door for a lot of reasons to potentially come help and work at the company because I was also a low-code, no-code automation nerd. And Clay, at that time, could best be described as a low-code, no-code table tool. And so we had used Clay at my previous failed startup to start building some of our GTM systems in place of my custom Airtable Phantom Buster, whatever else we had done.

And then I had seen some of the power and potential.

Josh Schachter
Oh, because probably at the time, Airtable was probably the thing back then, right? Like, right? Four years ago or so.

Yeah.

Yash Tekriwal
I had a custom Airtable that had some custom JavaScript that built in before it even existed as a feature in Clay, right? Email waterfalls and drop contact, Hunter, automated Google searches, and then some regular expressions to extract valuable text before AI. And at that time, it was revolutionary, but also really hard to maintain.

So Varun and Kareem and Clay were building something that I thought was really interesting. When I decided to take a break from the tiny, tiny startup world, I was really set on potentially going to join Zapier, actually. And what really won me over about Clay, just to paint the scene, I remember walking into, at that time, the Williamsburg, Brooklyn office slash apartment.

It’s a co-work, co-live space. There’s a living room. There’s a one bedroom on the left as you enter with a couple of doors.

That was our all hands meeting room. And then there’s a kitchen all the way down and sort of like a little dungeon jail cell room in the middle. And there’s maybe seven people, six people working out of there, mostly engineers, plus Varun.

And that was it. I’m less interested in who was working out of there.

Josh Schachter
Who was living out of there?

Yash Tekriwal
On a couple of late nights, a couple of us that I won’t name, I think probably me the most in particular, actually. Yeah. My unfortunate claim to fame sometimes is that I’ve slept at least one night in every single office we’ve had.

But that’s not something to look up to, I would say.

Samantha Murray
But it’s startup life.

Yash Tekriwal
It’s startup life, work-life boundaries, mental health, all of these things I think are important. So I would not look at that as a tale of inspiration. But yeah, that’s kind of the scene.

And I think that Karim and Varun were very different founders than a lot of the founders I had worked with. And I remember telling myself at the time that the main thing I wanted was a little bit of stability, the opportunity to grow and have a lot of fun building with a team that I thought was really, really world class. And all of those were true in spades at Clay.

Samantha Murray
You get a bit of that entrepreneur vibe. Even though you weren’t necessarily a founder, you’re still feeling like you have some of that founder energy?

Yash Tekriwal
I think so much so, actually. I would say I’ve had a lot of offers to go do other crazy things over the last three and a half years that I’ve had at Clay. And I think of many things, the biggest thing that keeps me here is in many ways, I actually get to be more of a founder in my role at Clay today than I was when I was a founder trying to build a successful company.

Love that.

Samantha Murray
It’s rare. So you got to hold on to those when they come along.

Josh Schachter
We’re going to get into that because you had a post, which we think is a classic post. And founders are disruptive. They think outside the box.

They can be provocative, right? And they’re agents of amazing change. And so this post that you had encapsulates all of that.

So we’re going get into that in a moment around your domain at Clay. But first, I want to go back to the moment of making you the first ever go-to-market engineer, because that is quite a distinguished thing to be able to say that you are.

Yash Tekriwal
Yeah, it’s kind of a lucky thing and kind of a random thing, if I’m being so, so honest. If you want the real details of what happened to Boots on the Ground, we had enough PLG revenue around August of 2023 to start thinking about a top-down sales motion. And so Varun and I had a conversation.

I was still figuring out what even my role company fit would be. I like jumping around and doing things. That’s not a long-term, sustainable thing.

And so I had experience building out sales teams in the past and was excited to kind of figure out for us what our top-down motion could be. And so at that time, as many, many sales leaders probably know, especially if you’ve been a sales leader at an early company, the trouble of building your early sales motion is you have to juggle three things at the same time. You have to juggle the actual taking of calls, the scoping, the experimentation to figure out the language, the disco, the qualification.

What are you selling? How are you packaging it? How are you pricing it?

It sort of gets included in that. Then you have to actually do the calls themselves with a sales mentality and framework, which is a significant chunk of your time. And then you also have to be building sales systems.

You can’t just be doing all of it via hand-to-hand combat. Many people may start that way because you don’t have a ton of people banging on your door to buy your product. But we were uniquely positioned, I think, as a company with a lot of PLG presence, where when we launched an enterprise tier, we got a flood of interest.

I think I remember at some point looking at my calendar and measuring it. I was hopping on 30 to 35 calls a week in addition to trying to do the data cleaning and the systems and the playbook definition. And that is truly just not enough time in the day to do it.

So the way the go-to-market engineer title sort of became a thing is I talked to Varun. He said, theoretically, this is exactly what our product is supposed to solve. So why don’t you see how far you can push the systems, the screening, the scoring with Clay before we actually go out and try and hire more of the team?

And so I did that. And the honest, honest story is that still wasn’t perfect. We had just so much inbound interest that probably in hindsight what I should have done is intentionally say no to more calls to really milk the power of Clay.

But we were still getting so much data, so much processing, and so much value out of the automated systems I was building with Clay and our CRM at that time that Varun sort of looked at and he said, you’re not really doing a traditional salesperson’s job. And also, you’re not really doing a traditional ops person’s job. It’s like somewhere in between.

Also, why don’t we call that something new? Because it feels like this is what people should be doing with our software long-term. There’s a famous Slack message in a blog post somewhere.

Varun just goes, I think we’re going to call it GTM engineer. And then the rest is sort of history.

Samantha Murray
It’s wild. It’s wild because the introduction of a new… You guys essentially invented an entirely new category of role that didn’t exist before.

And I’m sure that’s what led a little bit to some of the need for the education stuff that we’re going to talk about, right? Right. It’s very cool.

Josh Schachter
It’s interesting. I spoke to Amit Bhandav, CEO of Gong recently, and I was talking to him about his category creation, if you will, around revenue intelligence and whatnot. And he said to me, he’s like, don’t go out there and try to create a category.

And I’ve spoken to other people at this as well. Don’t try to create the category. It’ll happen naturally if you’re doing the things the right way and you’ve got enough natural pull.

So it sounds like you guys weren’t trying to create necessarily this role to, what do they say, frame it, name it, claim it, something of that nature, right? You weren’t trying to own that.

Yash Tekriwal
No, I don’t think we really were. Varun may have been. But I think that it’s really just…

I would agree with that framework, right? Don’t go out and try to do something abstract and then reverse engineer your way into it because you don’t know what doing the actual work and solving the real problems in front of you will yield. And the way the title sort of came around is just we wanted to build really powerful software to help people stop doing mundane data work and start doing more human relational creative work.

Then we started using that ourselves. We started dogfooding it. We realized that the way we solved the problem was, in fact, so significant that the paradigm of the work we were doing had changed.

But if we had tried to predict that, and if you go think about the seven years that Clay existed before it really became a breakout company, that was a difficulty of it. A lack of focus trying to just do and solve all the problems at the same time. And if you had tried to reverse engineer your way into a career at that point, maybe you would have come up with like no-code automator.

Everyone was a no-code automator. I was a no-code automator at some point. What does that mean?

Is it really solving a concrete specific problem that is relatable to a lot of people? Part of the reason I think the no-code, low-code movement failed is because it was just too many things to too many different people. And now we have vibe coding, which is basically the ultimate version of no-coding.

Josh Schachter
Yeah. How many go-to-market engineers are there out there now?

Yash Tekriwal
You know, that’s a great question. I see a thread in Slack about this maybe every other week. And the honest answer is, I think in the low over a thousand, I know the job postings have gone up to like 400, 500 trackable on LinkedIn and they’re growing exponentially.

It also just depends on how you categorize it. I think not everyone has adopted the GTM engineer terminology, but I also see GTM data architect now. I also see head of GTM innovation, GTM AI engineer.

The main thing, I actually don’t really care what people call it. I think probably we should care more as a company, but I just care more that we all recognize the work has shifted. The job is different and therefore the skills are different.

Josh Schachter
Yeah. Well, I just did a Claude prompt as you were talking to get there.

Yash Tekriwal
Nice.

Josh Schachter
What’s Claude saying? So LinkedIn listed over 3,000 open go-to-market roles, open roles in January 26. A double the number from mid-year of 2025.

Here’s a useful framing stat. 54% of the fastest growing B2B SaaS companies in the world now have at least one go-to-market engineer. And at the end of it all, they say probably 25 to 50,000 worldwide.

That seems high and that’s a pretty big range, but nonetheless, that’s pretty darn cool. So congratulations on being numero uno. I want to shift gears now and I’m going to start to fade back into the darkness of this conversation, the background, because we have Sam on today as our co-host.

She is one of the world’s most, I would say the nation’s most foremost, but she’s not American. So it’d be the Canadian nation.

Samantha Murray
The Canadian version.

Josh Schachter
Yeah. Continental. It was funner the way I said it, but yes.

She’s one of the most continental, the continent’s foremost experts on education in B2B SaaS and all that stuff. And you do a lot of this as well. You posted two months ago on LinkedIn and you said, we killed the education team at clay.

We killed the education team at clay. We’re now calling it go-to-market engineering ecosystem. I put more thought into this than I care to admit.

So let’s talk through why. Okay, Sam, what do you want to ask Yash? Where do you want to go with this now?

Samantha Murray
Oh my gosh. So many things, but I also just want to start by saying, when I saw that post, by the way, I was like, this is exactly why. So when I joined Gainsight, I actually had this huge debate internally with myself, obviously, around my title, my role, because I was like, education, I don’t know if that’s the right thing, because it was the right thing when I was leading customer ed at Shopify.

Then when I was doing the go-to-market stuff at Docebo, it made a lot of sense.

Josh Schachter
But so much- Yash, do you know, because of you, we almost called her VP of go-to-market ecosystem education?

Samantha Murray
Just a meta. We would have needed to make up our own version of that.

Yash Tekriwal
Amazing.

Samantha Murray
Yeah. But I have this big mental debate because I couldn’t agree more with the framing that the model has changed, the way that I approach learning has changed, the entirety of this ecosystem has changed. And so I had this big internal debate.

I thought I would just share that with you. I ended up kind of just going along with the title because my role is very specifically like product strategy and go-to-market strategy for the education umbrella at Gainsight. But yeah, very interested in diving into this.

Yash Tekriwal
Yeah. I’m so down. I think I have so many thoughts on this and I’m sure I know other education professionals in tech have all felt it, I think, for a while, but I think it’s more prominent than ever because of AI.

Josh Schachter
Sorry. I just want to start with the most provocative, Yash. Tell us why education, you killed education.

Yash Tekriwal
Yeah. So for me, and I’d love to hear both of your thoughts on this as well, there’s two big reasons. Reason number one is that education has sort of become a dirty word just to be even more provocative.

I don’t think a lot of people in tech are aspirational to education. For example, without naming any people, I’ve had conversations at Clay back when we were called the education team from people who saw the work we were doing and how we did it, who were like, oh, maybe I would want to do that at some point. But then those people also had questions of like, what does my career growth look like in education?

Education isn’t really a sexy thing to do in tech. It feels like people think of it as more of an afterthought. I don’t know that that sets me up for career success long-term.

And then I was having hand-to-hand combat with all these people saying, that’s the wrong way to think about it. The right way to think about your career in general is not by your title or your status or what you’re doing. It’s by the work you accomplish, the impact that you have and the skills that you build.

But also I’m not trying to fight the career mindset conversation long-term. I know how people think about careers. We are also a marketing team.

If you’re approaching it from a marketing lens and angle, you then get into problem number two, which is embedded in problem number one. Hey, a lot of the things that we’re doing are not just content production and videos and recording, which is what most people associate with education today. Would I rather fight the battle of reforming everyone’s deeply tranched expectations around education, or can we actually just disrupt the pattern, call it something different so that people then…

I actually love when everyone says, what does that mean? Because now we’re actually forming a new relationship to a term for what is happening. And a lot of it is not just content.

It’s community, it’s experience, it’s in-person, it’s relational. Because the best learning we’ve always known happens that way anyways. We’re just now more able to do it at scale because of all the tools we have available to us.

So that’s the one-two punch of why we decided to change it.

Samantha Murray
It’s so good. It’s so good because this is a philosophy that I’ve held so deeply for so long, since the early days of creating Customer Ed at Shopify, launching our very first iteration of Shopify Academy. We were part of the marketing team and our original goal with Shopify Academy was to support with conversion from trial to paid plan.

It was attached to our PLG motion and the entirety of what we were doing was very much a marketing sort of activity across all of the different things that you mentioned. The experiences, the in-person, the meetups, the connection into community, all of that stuff. What I think is also interesting, because you didn’t specifically call this language out, but it’s like the shift from output to driving an actual outcome, I think matters.

And I think something you called out in one of your posts recently spoke to seeing education as a product. This is such a deep-rooted philosophy of mine that it is just like any other product. A good product manager, a good user experience designer is focused on creating experiences that drive a desired action or some sort of outcome with our users.

That at the end of the day is the goal of good learning, right? That’s what we’re trying to do is to deliver an outcome. Tell me more about that, around your philosophy around that and how you’re embedding that philosophy in the rest of your team.

Yash Tekriwal
Yeah, I think I could rant too long about this, but I think I’ll try and keep it short. I think it really just depends on how you think about what your ecosystem or education team is doing. I think one, the shift from ecosystem to education opens up the aperture of what’s possible for the team to do.

Now we’ve shifted from videos and content that are, of course, very marketing oriented and top of funnel and informative, but also by the way, sort of deeper in funnel as well. They get used as resources for the support team and customer success. Sales will sometimes send explainer videos of the things that we’ve recorded to go move a deal along the pipeline.

So really you’re actually accountable to the entire go-to-market org in many ways. And then we’re actually, I’m planning another post about this soon. I think that in a world where you have in-person experiences, digital experiences, communities that you’re also building, really the ecosystem becomes a part of everything the go-to-market motion is doing.

So now, for example, we run in-person workshops specifically targeted just at opportunities we have in pipeline that are in early stages of discovery or qualification. Why? Because we hear tons of people saying, oh, clay is powerful, but it’s too complicated, or I don’t understand how to use it, or maybe it’s not worth the time investment.

And so our thesis is, why don’t we prove you wrong? Why don’t we actually just have you come join us for four hours, five hours live in the middle of the day? It’s going to be fun.

We’re going to have you build something really exciting in that time. And you’re not just going to learn clay, you’re also going to learn AI, new ways of thinking, computational thinking, and it’s going to be incredibly valuable for you and your team. Those workshops go incredibly well.

And when we do those workshops, we pass back a lot of information to the sales team to actually go be better salespeople in those deals and better partners to prospective customers. And then you can extend this metaphor to running these experiences, having these groups across the community and all the other things that we provide. So something else that I’m actually in the process of doing with the team is putting us through our sales training and putting the whole team through our customer experience training as well.

So we can take all of those ideas and be better partners to those orgs internally by speaking the same language for the programs we use to serve those segments. Yes.

Samantha Murray
Yes. I want to say something maybe a little bit spicy, a little bit provocative. I’m also on that train as like an intrapreneur, like try to push the boundaries.

I’ve always had this thought that people who land in customer education roles from a prior, like you’ve had experience as a go-to-market engineer, you land in some sort of training role, and then you’re adopting all of this philosophy as fundamental knowledge that you have about doing the role. And that really changes the way that you approach education and training the rest of your customers. Myself, I come from a marketing background.

And so when I entered the role of customer education, I was bringing so much of that mentality of like, I’m trying to get someone across the funnel. That’s my job at the end of the day is to move them from point A to point B. How do I do that in the quickest way possible?

And how do I design an experience across multiple touch points that’s going to force that to happen? Do you find that there’s a difference speaking, coming back to the career trajectory, I guess. Do you think that that’s valuable?

Have you found that valuable in terms of your background?

Yash Tekriwal
Yeah. It’s sort of all come together in a very interesting way, I think. It’s one of those moments where you can only connect the dots looking back, not forwards.

Totally. So in terms of career background, to be very simple about it, because I had a very hectic career. I was a high school teacher, actually, in the beginning stages of my career.

The fun part about that is I have zero formal teaching experience. So I started building like an education nonprofit with a few friends when I was in college. And it was just mostly based on the ways that I wish I had been able to learn as a student.

I never loved command and control lecture style classes. I always loved getting my hands dirty, building projects, working with friends and asking tough questions. And so that went really well.

We pitched this private school in the area, was like, hey, can you come help us teach a really powerful interdisciplinary CS art class? And I think from that experience, I actually often think that being an educator in a very progressive school was like a lightning in a bottle type moment for me that makes no sense given my academic background or career up until that point. I took my LSATs that same year to go be a lawyer.

Crazy different parallel path. But because of the unique environment I got into with how they approached learning and community and building, I then thought, wow, why don’t we actually just have this in so many more places? Why do we do so many lectures, so many recorded videos?

Why can’t we apply this more broadly? And I think actually that mentality then helped me in my first sales job and career, where a lot of discovery is really similar to a teacher’s approach. How do I ask the right questions that are going to uncover the information that this person may have or may not yet have that will ask them to critically think and become a partner to me in the journey of what we’re building together?

I actually think teachers, really great progressive ones, would make some of the best salespeople you have, especially in the discovery qualification side of the equation. And then you add that together with systems and computational thinking and automation, and it’s sort of this unique, perfect blend I could have never imagined trying to plan for the future to do what I do today, which is the ecosystem, the learning, the community for a very technical AI native product. You guys are not fighting enough.

We should fight more. Yeah, it’s true. But I don’t know, what could we fight about?

Should we ask, like, there needs to be more of a tension.

Josh Schachter
It’s got to be a tension statement here. Like, otherwise, how am I going to get a title for the episode? Like, come on, isn’t there something you can do?

Samantha Murray
There’s two very progressive customer ed folks in a room together. It’s hard not to be aligned.

Yash Tekriwal
Powers combined.

Samantha Murray
Yeah, exactly.

Yash Tekriwal
Yeah, because it’s also, it is still rare, I think, which is what’s so shocking to me. I’m curious how you feel about this as well, Sam, Samantha, still don’t know which one we’re going with. Let’s go with Sam.

All good. I’m shocked at how, so here’s another very spicy thing, right? We have been looking for an LMS to power all of our digital learning experiences.

But part of the problem is that we are so progressive in how we run our programs. And so in this equation of build versus buy, I am often the person who says, let’s buy wherever we can. I don’t want the team to spend all of their time vibe coding.

I want them to spend it on the experiences, but this is a unique example of most people are still doing things the old way.

Samantha Murray
It’s tough. I agree. It’s tough because we’ve given the container for so long.

The LMS world has just like, here’s the box. And now I need you to mold to this box and adhere to the way that we have designed this box so that you can have the audit controls that you need, the regulatory complaints built in designed entirely around an L&D world where those things mattered. And that’s just not the way that we operate in digital customer success and customer ed.

And so, yeah, just like couldn’t agree more with the statement.

Yash Tekriwal
Amazing. I’m trying to be nice here. I don’t know.

It’s not working. Yeah.

Josh Schachter
No, no, but okay. Here, let’s go. What are you going to build?

What’s the unique use case that’s top of your list here that’s breaking the envelope?

Yash Tekriwal
So it’s not even a use case so much as it is just like it’s a product designed fundamentally for the wrong thing, I think. The easiest way I can put it is LMSs are designed for a content first experience, right? LMSs are designed around how do I put the right asynchronous content, the text, the modules together in a way so that learners can consume, consume, consume, and then assess, assess, assess.

That’s one philosophy on how to teach people things. My hot take maybe is incredibly isolating. I don’t think anyone I know has ever been like, you know what I’m excited to do today?

Go run through my two hours of videos and then assess themselves. Like as much as I love the compliments we get on Play University as well, I’m shocked that people will take multiple hours to go watch the videos that we have on there. And so I think the real form of learning that often happens is more invisible and it’s harder for people to grasp because we like to have control over the outcome, but the best learning happens not when you control the process, but rather control the environment.

So now imagine a world in which the LMS is not designed for content, but instead it’s designed for community experience and feedback. Now I’m thinking more not about the content digestion, but more about how do the students in the program create the content themselves through working through still a little bit of content that they digest, but then I care more about students watching other students work, giving feedback to each other, having meaningful discussions in channel where every single one of those messages is a micro learning moment. I know and I think we all know that like the ways in which you really finesse a concept are when you’re like struggling to explain it to a friend because you’ve like sort of started to make sense of it in your head, but like this other person doesn’t understand it the way that you’re saying it. So now you have to massage your understanding of the concept in a way that actually makes sense to somebody else and then every single time you try to explain it, your understanding actually gets better and better.

Even on this podcast that we’re doing right now, I have a bunch of new ideas of how I’m going to be talking about these concepts because I’m now trying to put them out into the world with YouTube. So how do we design all of those experiences at scale and then the last thing I’ll say that is maybe not spicy about this, I think the reason this hasn’t proliferated is because it’s very very hard to measure. If you create the right environment and variables, then the last piece is you just have to get the right people super motivated to go do it because it’s so different and the like example of this I can give is we ran our first ever four week online boot camp called Alpha Forge, very heavily modeled after my favorite program I ever did called Alt MBA and the students were kind of pissed in week one because it was all conceptual. We didn’t have them touching clay tables at all and they were like I joined a technical program to become a go-to-market engineer and I haven’t touched software yet in 25% of the course, but I just told them to trust the process they were chosen for a reason. If they get to the four weeks and hate it then I will happily admit defeat, but at the end of the program everyone had that aha moment of oh actually that was maybe more powerful than anything else in terms of setting my expectation, my framing and my commitment to the people in this group with me in such a way that it became exponentially more powerful as the course continued.

Samantha Murray
There’s a mental model thing that needs to form in those early days to beyond just the human relationship, right? Like you need a foundational amount of knowledge before you start experimenting with a tool so that you have the mental models necessary to like see success when you’re and connect the dots, right?

Yash Tekriwal
Exactly, could not have been said better.

Samantha Murray
What dumped out at me while you were sharing that, first of all, like I think we’re entering into an era by the way where we don’t have to choose between like here’s an LMS, here’s an LMS box and you can’t do anything with it versus like I’m going to go vibe code something. I think that we’re entering into an era finally where both of those things can be true at the same time. You can have the infrastructure, but you can kind of develop your own experiences.

At least that’s the goal, that’s the vision that I hold. But something jumped out at me as you were talking that it sounds very akin to marketing like five, ten years ago, like the shift from like, we must measure everything and hey, we need attribution to be properly measured so that we can have our little slice of the pie when the deal closes. And it’s like, guys, we’re all one team, but none of that really matters at the end of the day.

Did we convert them? Do we at least have a general understanding of the touch points that made a difference across their pre-sales journey? Yes or no?

Great. It’s kind of the same, at least that’s the way that I’m approaching digital customer success and customer ed is like, it’s all really at the end of the day, just orchestrated experiences with the intent of creating brand affinity, creating trust, teaching them something and helping them be successful. And if we can do that and if we can show that we’re doing that successfully over time, great, we’re winning.

Yash Tekriwal
Yeah, I would say, yeah, again, plus one to all of it and essentially- Stop plussing one.

Josh Schachter
Come on, guys.

Yash Tekriwal
There’s no negative one yet. That’s the problem.

Samantha Murray
I’ll find something.

Yash Tekriwal
Yeah, we’ll get there eventually. I think two things I’ll add that are just really good examples of this, actually. Number one is there’s a LinkedIn post from someone somewhere.

I’m so sorry I’ve forgotten your name, whoever you are, but it was great where he said, here’s an example of why marketing attribution is never going to be something that your team should really do. He named the 16 different touch points he had with Clay before he ever decided to become a paying customer. And which one of those 16 do you attribute it to?

He saw a billboard, he went to a someone shot him a message on LinkedIn. He attended a discovery call and then said, nah, he went to another workshop and thought, oh, actually this might make more sense. He went to a meetup.

He then saw the newsletter. And then finally, he went to his last community meetup and thought, I now understand what I want to do. Let’s actually take the plunge.

Do you attribute one 16th of every single marketing step there to the final ROI? No. And the thing that you can still never measure is what you were just talking about, Sarah.

It’s brand affinity and it’s the community feeling. And I think that actually becomes an ever increasingly hard to penetrate moat in an era of AI where your tools are likely going to become more and more similar to each other. And then at that point, if I have to choose between three different people who are maybe 5% different in the features and functionality that they offer, how am I going to make my decision?

I’m going to choose the people I want to work with the most.

Samantha Murray
Yes. Yeah. It’s vibes at the end of the day.

I mean, it’s so important. It’s so important.

Josh Schachter
And I do want to say, Yash, I was going to attend one of the workshops that you guys had in New York. I remember you told me. Yeah.

I know. And I bailed and I’m sorry. And I hate when people bail.

It’s the worst. But I’m not necessarily the IC per se. And to be honest with you, it was actually more out of my own self-interest of wanting to imitate you guys.

And imitation is the best form of flattery. And it’s literally what it was. I wanted to go to the Clay office to see the famous Varun studio there in the middle of the office and to see what you guys are doing with the workshops.

And I was even just at the Notion office yesterday. And they’re talking to their head of customer success. And they’re doing workshops with, I don’t know, maybe, but I don’t think we weren’t talking about prospects, but with their customers of getting hands on and building the agents together.

With the Notion agents. And so Gainsight is just now at the very precipice of launching our agents and our agents’ studio. So I’m like, oh, fuck.

We’re going to go all in on these workshops. I’ve got to get some budget for that traveling tour. But I love what you guys are doing.

I love the IRL stuff. So kudos to you. We’re going to wrap things up here in a moment.

But before, I do want to get to the whole actual ecosystem that you’re building here. The orchestration of it all. So I’ll ramble this out very quickly.

And then you can do a little bit of a deep dive in what these things actually mean, Yash. So under your remit, and you’ve got what, like 16, 17, something like that, people that are working in your purview. You’ve got these different, these six pods.

So you’ve got certifications, certifying people with the badges and stuff like that of where they are in their their, their knowledge journey, and skill set journey of using Clay. You’ve got talent and recruiting. Well, you can explain these more, but you’ve got talent, you’ve got content.

I love, by the way, your theme on like edutainment, right? Education, entertainment, right? For your content.

So content, community, innovation, and live training. Your six pods. Tell us a little bit about, I mean, I don’t know, that’s such a broad question, but I want to, I want everybody to know more about that orchestration.

Yash Tekriwal
Yeah, I think that, so the super honest answer is a lot of it, it was not like a planned thing where I sat down and I thought we need this and this and this and this. It really came together more so in the last six or seven months where I think as a company, our mission was just always, how do we create the best, most fun, most interesting experiences for the community that has helped us get to where we are today? We wouldn’t be here without the to be very frank.

And then how do we empower those people to become better versions of themselves so that if they win, we win and then everyone wins in the process. That’s the most positive sum game you can play. And so for a while we had these things all scattered across different parts of marketing.

And then I think it became more and more clear that, okay, actually what’s happening is we are sort of building the like best adult GTM learning playground, which is only a place for the nerdiest of the nerds. But the way that you sort of enter that space is you come in through community or innovation, right? Community is broad.

It’s like, hey, we have meetups, we have an online space, we have little masterminds, we have events that are little sort of like first steps into the door. And then we have more specific throw offs of that for the innovation ecosystem because startups and college campuses are so early in the process of figuring out what winning looks like for them, but can be category defining and how they choose to win over time because that is where the next generation of ideas and talent is coming from. So I think of those two buckets as sort of the grassroots parts of the entire ecosystem.

Then once you’re in the ecosystem, what are you doing? You’re primarily consuming that content, which ideally is not the only thing that you’re doing. And we try to make that content as entertaining as possible.

My hot take we can come back to later is I hate having scripts. You should have enough mastery of the tutorials, commands, ideas that you can just ad lib. And it feels much more natural, I think, when you ad lib, but also it’s a very specific skillset.

And then we come back over to…

Josh Schachter
It’s also a skillset, by the way, when you’re actually using your own product day in and day out.

Samantha Murray
Yeah. It’s necessary. You have to be drinking your own champagne.

You got to be doing it.

Yash Tekriwal
Exactly. And it also comes back to buy it, right? People then feel like they want to actually do it more than feeling like they have to do it.

And then we have content and experience, right? So experience has happened both digitally and in person as well. We have the workshops that we talked about.

We have online programs. We have one day webinars. And so now once you’re in the playground, you have a bunch of different rides, toys, things to play with that help you better connect to all the people still in that community.

And then the whole goal of this entire little ecosystem that we’re building, I’ll add one like another pod that we’re bringing in. Now we have our playground. Why do we not connect to all the other playgrounds that have different tools and different friends and different people we can meet?

So now we have someone leading out our partnerships motion where all the other live learning programs, all the other academies that are trying to shepherd this next era of AI jobs, how do we all collaborate together to be responsible for how we steward that information to the future generation? So that’s also really exciting in terms of how we’re building the pods. And then the last piece is if you are doing a good job of making everyone in that ecosystem smarter, more competent, more successful, they should have something to show for it.

So how do we show people that they have a certification? I think of those as a lagging indicator. It’s a measure that’s very rigorous of, do you have the skill?

That’s why we keep rebuilding the program because I want it to be one-to-one. Every single person that is certified needs to blow me out of the water. And we got part of the way there in our first attempt, not fully, no offense to all the other certificated people, but now we’re getting there more in our next beta iteration.

And then we also have badges that we’re starting to release at some point in the future, not there yet, but those are more rewards for participation. You should also be rewarded just for engaging, just so that you get encouraged to engage more because that engagement is what creates that end outcome. And then once people become really talented, really skilled, and they give back to that community, we want to help place those people at companies where they will be able to do their best work and show to the world the power of that ecosystem.

Samantha Murray
People who are listening to this and not watching a video.

Josh Schachter
Oh, sorry, Sam. Everybody fades away after 30 minutes. So it’s just my mom.

Samantha Murray
But yeah, she kept like, you’re doing this like circular motion, right? Like everything that you just talked about is like this flight wheel. What you’re building is essentially a flight wheel.

And I have to share that it’s just, it’s so lovely to speak to another education person who thinks about the long-term demand, because that’s so often in a forgotten component of the education motion where obviously we want to focus on things like product adoption, and we want people to be using the product. All those things are still true. It doesn’t change the fact that at the same time, you’re like, we talked about building the brand affinity piece, which I love.

You’re building advocates and champions. You’re creating the vibes. You’re building up people who are confident that are also then going to go and champion adoption across every single future job that they undertake.

And it’s creating demand for the system that you’re building in a way that nothing else can touch. No marketing initiative can touch this. No outbound sales can touch this.

Nothing, nothing creates this kind of long-term demand gen like this ecosystem that you’ve built. So like huge kudos. I love seeing this so much because it’s so rare, but it’s such a beautiful example of like what will become.

I can’t wait to see the results that start to unfold like a year or two down the road, the compounding effects from this is going to be phenomenal. I’m sure.

Josh Schachter
Last question for you by the middle of 2027. So a year from now, what’s one thing, one big rocket you want to accomplish?

Yash Tekriwal
That’s a good question.

Yash Tekriwal
One year from now, I think the biggest thing I would love to accomplish, the thing that I’m most interested in the whole ecosystem building right now, which is maybe an unsexy answer, but true is this certifications and badging component. And I’ll tell you why. I think that assessment has always been multiple choice, short answer, very easy to grade.

And I think also any progressive education professional would tell you it is a horrible, horrible measure of an actual person’s competency. To be fair, no one has had a better solution for a long time because the only way to assess someone at a more critical level would be to have one to one human assessment where you’re now relying on the assessor and then you’re also having to rely on the person and it’s cost prohibitive. In the AI world, there are more creative ways we can get better about certifying competency.

And so a teaser that I’m happy to give you guys of the closed beta we’re doing right now is we have some very rigorous AI role plays that people are doing and having conversations that are sort of case study style of GTM. And they’re actually touching more on the core concepts and ideas that we want a go-to-market engineer to have. Because we worked backwards from the idea of, if I talk to someone who is calling themselves a go-to-market engineer and we just jam about two to three relevant business problems, I can tell you after that conversation just how good I think they are from the way that they talk about and break down their problems.

And so we’ve mixed that in with the other big component of competency, which is just the work that you’ve done. And your work should speak for itself. You shouldn’t have to speak for it.

If we can really crack that nut, then I think that has incredible downstream effects. Because then everything that you make as a goal for someone trickles down into incentives for the ecosystem. And so if you think about standard education as an example, the SAT is still one of the gold standards for testing to get into college, which is a big thing for most students.

People don’t have wonderful learnings that they get from the SAT. I’ve never heard somebody say, oh, that’s right. The way that I did complex geometry on that multiple choice question has changed how I think about the world.

They go memorize in boot camps how to actually come about those questions. It doesn’t really add to the equation of who you become. But I think if you can change the assessment standard, make it really great, then all the incentives for how people learn have to follow that.

You now have to build the skills to be able to go get the thing instead of roundabout memorizing your way into it.

Josh Schachter
Wonderful way to wrap us up. Yash Tekriwal, head of go-to-market engineering ecosystem. Yes, got that right.

Nailed it. Didn’t quite nail it, but thank you so much for being here. Wonderful to hear your story from three and a half years ago to today into next year.

Looking forward to more amazing things coming out of your New York offices. Thank you so much.

Yash Tekriwal
Plus one. Thank you guys. This was so much fun.

Appreciate it.