How Scala tracks every closed deal back to its source before scaling spend | Ardie Sameti

**Ardie Sameti** (0:00)
We're building the future of Intelligent Operations and Customer Experience for the Modern Contact Center.

**Brett** (0:08)
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by frontlines.io Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with venture-backed founders and marketers where they talk all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech start-ups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now with all that said, let's jump into today's episode.
Today, our guest is Ardie Sameti, co-founder and CEO of Scala. Ardie, welcome to the show.

**Ardie Sameti** (0:47)
Awesome, Brett, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be on.

**Brett** (0:50)
Of course, looking forward to this conversation. So let's imagine that you're on a flight, Seattle to San Francisco, someone next to you is very chatty, they like to talk. They ask you, what do you do? How do you answer that question, what do you do?

**Ardie Sameti** (0:59)
Well, we are Scala, we're building the future of intelligent operations and customer experience for the modern contact center. So that's just fancy talk for saying that we're technologists and operators by heart, and we're really reinventing what the experience of operations and contact center and customer experience is for the modern business on how they service their end users.

**Brett** (1:23)
What's the origin story? Why this problem?

**Ardie Sameti** (1:25)
The origin story is very much, Brett comes from firsthand experience. Some of it is PTSD, stars, pain, the whole full journey. But in my past life, the last decade I spent at a company called Accolade, which was a healthcare technology company that I started really in the early days to say was in product market fit would be generous. It had a handful of customers when we started. And I came on board with the CEO in the Chief Product and Technology Officer at the time. We all started at the same time. And had a few hundred thousand, I think, lives that it supported. But really the crux of the mission and the idea was, is really delivering personalized health care in a really meaningful way that was very different at the time. So starting a new category called really advocacy and navigation services. So instead of like imagine calling the back-year medical insurance card, you would contact Accolade. And Accolade was comprised of health assistants, care advocates, back office specialists that would do a number of things that were tied to member services. So they would like help you with claims, benefits-related questions, they would help you find a provider. And then over time, Brett, we grew into something that was really meaningful in the market, where we scaled the business from a few customers, a few hundred thousand lives to thousands of customers, and 20 million plus lives. And we did it with the highest MPS scores in the healthcare industry. We were a leader in driving clinical outcomes, and it was something that we're really proud of. But it was a heavy, let's just say, human-driven business.
And it had an element of what you would think as a contact center, but the contact center comprised of physicians, clinicians, highly certified individuals. These weren't like transactional kind of conversations. They were very longitudinal, very intense, very personal with the healthcare service delivery model.
And it was something that was very rewarding, and I was responsible. I led all the AI and platform efforts. So I sat within the product engineering team, reporting into our CEO Raj Singh, who's relevant to the story. And we did something really exceptional. But the interesting thing was towards the end of my tenure is, as we grew, whether it was organic or even inorganic, the acquisitions that we made to expand our TAM, so did our issues.
They compounded. We're acquiring companies that tech stacks, different systems and siloed data sets, and a lot of fragmentation. So it made it more and more difficult to drive personalized health care at scale in a quality way. And so it's a long-winded way of me saying that there was a gap in the marketplace around how you can really stitch together this really complicated set of workflows, data, data sets, context, and systems to really be more predictive, proactive, and offensive with how you run and manage your business off of insights, recommendations, and leading indicators versus lagging indicators. And for the longest time, Brett, I thought it was something that was like an accolade problem. Like, oh, maybe we're just doing something wrong. Like maybe this is us and these are just growing pains and we need to figure this out. It ended up becoming really apparent to me as I would do speaking engagements and talking to folks or going to conferences that this was a universal thing that all operators, no matter the size, scale, whether you were Uber to Walmart to, you know, a smaller enterprise company, that you struggled with this, that it was just like you were firefighting and playing defense and operations was just ended up being kind of like a cost center that was, you know, responsible for a lot. And it was just kind of hard to stitch together how to make it work in a really meaningful way. So we decided myself and the CEO of Accolade and the chairman of Accolade, Raj Singh, who's an incredible mentor to me, we both decided to spin off and we started Scala. And so Raj is the co-founder and executive chairman of Scala. He's a legendary entrepreneur, builder that I pinch myself every day that he's involved. As somebody that, you know, I admire deeply and I'm the co-founder and CEO. And so we wanted to fix the problem that we experienced in our past life, but doing it in a really new AI native way that really kind of is essentially not only addressing the problems and pain points of today, but building for the future of where work needs to really shift into for operators.