AI Enabled Customer Communications - with David Daneshgar, Co-Founder and CEO Whippy

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics at Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by David Daneshgar, the founder and CEO of Whippy. We'll be covering three primary topic areas with David today. First, how being a World Series of Poker Champion helps David as an entrepreneur. Second, the promise, potential, and reality of AI-empowered customer communications today.
Third, customer use cases for AI-enabled customer communications. With that as a background, David, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**David Daneshgar** (1:17)
Yeah, of course. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
I'll keep it brief, but it's a pretty interesting background.
I went to school at Berkeley, which was highly entrepreneurial, and there I started teaching statistics and probability of gaming. We had the ability to teach classes. I found it interesting and this is when poker was becoming big and Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker. I went on to be a professional poker player, and I won the World Series of Poker, one of the No Limit Hold'em tournaments in 2008 I had a really good run there, was ranked as high as number five in the world, so that was awesome. Then parlayed that to have Jerry Bus, the owner of the Lakers, write my letter of recommendation. So I went to business school at Chicago Booth and started Bloom Nation with two of my old co-founders there. Bloom Nation grew, it helped local florists. And I think there I learned more about the nuances on communication and automation. This is when e-commerce was fairly new, at least to florists. And now fast forward to today, I started Whippy with one of my engineers at Bloom Nation, and all about just like how do people communicate better, whether it's through SMS, email, or voice, and excited to talk about that today.

**Ray Rike** (2:33)
What an amazing career progression from poker to petals, a flower, and now to AI. So David, how did that world series of poker experience, I know it helped fund your first entrepreneur venture, Bloom Nation.
How does that experience translate into being a SaaS founder?

**David Daneshgar** (2:53)
Yeah. I think there's a couple of things. So one thing I think just in general with successful startups, it's like execution. So you play things in this theoretical world, but when you play poker, it's like a real world hits you and it's all about execution and how quick you can make decisions, how often you make the right versus the wrong decision. You'll always make wrong decisions. I think that's the same in business actually. No one's like 100 percent, but you have to look for patterns or you have to look for things, and you have to make quick decisions.
And you also need to really think them, but you can't go down a rabbit hole and get too stuck on this thing, or you're missing the rest of the business. And that's the same in poker. So I think that's one thing. I think another thing that helped me a lot, and people that play poker listening to this will know, is this idea of tilt.
I'm still trying to get better at it, but when you have a bad hand and you get all, I would call it emotional, you don't want the next hand to, you don't want to carry that over to the next hand. And I can see that in business, you have like a customer lead, you have an issue, then you need to go into a one-on-one with an employee and you have to somehow lock that out. And I still don't think I'm perfect, but poker made me stronger at that. And I think the other thing is just the people skills, to be honest with you.
At Whippy now, a lot of it's become sales, the partnerships, you have to be empathetic. You have to also do like discovery, you need to understand what they're thinking, right? The same thing comes in, in just like in general negotiation. So I think poker helped me for all of those.

**Ray Rike** (4:20)
Interesting, especially with your experience as a statistics professor.
So let me ask, by having that skill of poker and avoiding that tilt, right, of the emotions, do you find that you apply more probability and objectivity to your decisions as an entrepreneur?