AI to AE's: Grit, Glean, and Kleiner Perkins' next Enterprise AI hit — Joubin Mirzadegan, Roadrunner

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (0:00)
During my sales career, probably the number one thing that used to break my back was that the underlying software with Salesforce CPQ and others, just to create a quote, get it approved, is horrific. If you think you've seen bad software, you haven't until you've seen a 30-second loading screen to get from one page to another when you're trying to close a deal with two days left in the quarter. This is just standard across the industry. It's how it worked at every job that I was ever at. I used to get yelled at because I would be asking people to turn something within a day or two because I needed to get a quote out the door. I was like, oh my God, I actually think you can abstract away a bunch of the complexity with these LLMs. It's unstructured and structured text that you can reason with and do stuff with. That's why coding is such a great use case. That's why Harvey is such a great use case because you have all this case law, and then you can point the LLM at it and you can reason with it. Then you build a bunch of enterprise features and functionality and workflows on top of that. This is a very similar problem in nature. And so that was like the light bulb moment of like, okay, I think we can actually build something better.
I feel good. I feel comfortable in this seat.

**Swix** (1:20)
How's my levels?

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (1:21)
What's that?

**Swix** (1:21)
How's my levels?

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (1:22)
Yeah, you're good. All right. I got to ask you, how was the Zuck interview?

**Swix** (1:31)
Yeah, it's very interesting. Are we recording? Yeah, I just wrote it. I think they kind of obviously had an agenda coming in, which was basically to raise the profile of CZI and Priscilla Chan with Zuck being a supporting character, right? And I think they accomplished their mission because my quick hot take in a single sentence is if Priscilla Chan gets half of what she wants to do done, she will have more impacts on humanity than Mark Zuckerberg, right? Facebook will just be a funding mechanism for the greatest bio research work done in human history.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (2:07)
Wow. Were you nervous?

**Swix** (2:10)
You must have been nervous. No, I wasn't nervous because of the sheer amount of prep that the CZI people put into us, which like honestly like low key to understand what it's like with the executive staff of a hundred billionaire. I've never dealt with someone like that. They are so good.
They like they prepped us so well so that like I felt like I knew exactly.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (2:34)
You mean Zuck's team isn't randomly letting people walk in off the street and just ask whatever without any pre basing knowledge?

**Swix** (2:40)
I feel like I had to interview three times to get even in that room. So yeah, it was very fascinating. We were very honored to be picked by them because we're not a biofocus podcast.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (2:49)
No.

**Swix** (2:50)
But the whole point was to reach out to engineers. And while they're there, we're on the stronger footing.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (2:54)
Yeah. That's awesome. I mean, it feels like a breakthrough, doesn't it? You've had some studs on.

**Swix** (2:58)
Yeah. We just had Fei-Fei Li today. Today? Yeah. Just released.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (3:03)
You came from that?

**Swix** (3:04)
Well, Labs. No, and we just released it.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (3:06)
Oh, you did? Oh, nice.

**Swix** (3:07)
That was a couple of weeks ago.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (3:08)
Who else have you done?

**Swix** (3:09)
There's a bunch. Greg Bachman.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (3:10)
You've done some amazing people. Is it surreal?

**Swix** (3:13)
Yeah, it's surreal for me who started out as just like an independent creator. Let's see where this goes to now. We're legitimately in that tier of podcasts that gets invited to everything. So that is very surreal.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (3:25)
Yeah. It's pretty exciting. Who would have thought, you know?

**Swix** (3:29)
I mean, I think like for you, I've been following your progress for a while. I don't think when you were still like a CRO podcast, I don't think I was caught caught on yet. But I think like anyone following top founders who really wants to get real stories, they eventually find their way to you and you get really good stuff. So congrats.

**Joubin Mirzadegan** (3:48)
I appreciate that.
I think the transition from the CRO to the founder, whatever happened like what episode 70 or 80 when I was like, because it was only CROs for a while. The thing that I found refreshing, I'm curious if you've seen this, is that founders and CEOs have an authority to speak in a different way than somebody on the executive team. Yeah. Where they can just talk. So much of what I want to do is have an earnest and honest conversation. It's harder to do that when you're thinking, what is my boss going to think? Whereas if you're the founder, you can just speak, you can just speak, you know?