Inside the AI Startup Making Customer Support 65% Cheaper

Jesse Zhang (0:00)

One of the main benefits of AI, especially agentic AI, is that it really empowers people on the team to do more. Our whole thesis is like, how can we empower your team and how can we deliver a end result where the AI is fully in there, it gets built in the product, it's tested in the product, all the conversations that it's having, you can monitor in the product. We think that is probably our big differentiation right now, this deployment model where ultimately the customer owns the results and the process.

Joubin (0:36)

Welcome to Grit, I'm Joubin, partner at Kleiner Perkins, a show where we go beyond the highlight reel and explore the personal and professional challenges of building history-making companies. Today on the show, we've got Jesse Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Decagon, the AI concierge platform re-imagining customer experience. Decagon is building AI agents that help enterprises deliver faster, more personalized support across voice, chat, email, SMS, and beyond. We talk about why customer support is the perfect wedge for agentic AI and how Decagon scaled from an idea in 2023 to a $4.5 billion company. Enjoy the episode. Do you have the feeling when like...

Okay, the feeling that I just had, like I started a company here at KP, it's growing. Yeah. Like that we incubated here. I moved in out of this KP office into a new office in January.

And I was like, all right, this is like going to fit 30, 35 people. That'll last the year.

Jesse Zhang (1:33)

Yeah.

Joubin (1:34)

And then, you know, four months in we're like spilling on top of each other. Things are going well. It's a good problem to have.

Jesse Zhang (1:40)

Yeah.

Joubin (1:40)

And then we moved into a new office Monday.

Fits like 120 people. Great. And I had this like weird cognitive dissonance, where on the one hand, I was like, this is nice. But on the other hand, I was like freaking out inside. Because I'm like, are we going to fill this? How quickly are we going to fill this? Right now, it's too big. Like, is this too nice? Like, have we earned this?

You know, do you ever have that?

Jesse Zhang (2:07)

Not really. I mean, we never got for like super nice offices. Nice meaning like too much space. Too much space.

There was a little bit of that in our last office just because it was a small group at the beginning, but we knew we were going to grow pretty fast. So.

Joubin (2:20)

Why?

Jesse Zhang (2:21)

I mean, we just had a lot of roles we were hiring for.

Joubin (2:24)

Yeah.

Jesse Zhang (2:25)

And yeah, it's engineering. It's like all the roles kind of all add up pretty quickly. And you have to get all the GNA people and so on. So this current one probably fits like 250, 300 The previous one was like 70 max. And so that was kind of a big jump. But this one's two floors. So we start with one floor first, then we add another floor. That makes sense.

The new one, we're trying to get everyone on like the same, because like I actually feel very strongly having one big open space is like very, very undervalued. And this office is our first office out of all of our offices. That's more of a donut shape because it's like in a high rise. And just like when you're on one side, you don't really see the people on the other side as much. You can't really tell when people are eating food. And yeah, so the new one is like one big like rectangle.

Joubin (3:17)

Where you can like see everything.

Jesse Zhang (3:19)

Yeah. 500 people in one rectangle.

Joubin (3:21)

Come on.

Jesse Zhang (3:23)

That's the goal.

Joubin (3:24)

Good man. Well, congrats on everything. I'm excited to do this. In the beginning, when you were, were you not unnerved to be hiring ahead of like, okay, like in the beginning of Decagon, you know, whatever, 18 months ago, you were like eight people, 10 people, right? Okay. And like you felt demand.

Jesse Zhang (3:45)

Yeah.

Joubin (3:46)

Like the market was beating you down. And you were like, all right, great. I got to go hire a bunch of people across all these roles.

Was it not unnerving in any way to like hire ahead?

Jesse Zhang (4:00)

It was a bit.

Joubin (4:01)

I mean, I think, like now in hindsight, you're like, yeah, I should have hired more. Like, obviously, like the demand was there. These customers are going to close. But you didn't know that then.