Mutiny’s Jaleh Rezaei: Walking Away From Millions In Software To Grow Even Faster With Sales AI

**Alex Konrad** (0:00)
Salespeople only spend 21% of their time actually selling to customers. But a startup called Mutiny is trying to change all that. What's it using? AI agents. Our guest today on the show is the co-founder and CEO of Mutiny, Jaleh Rezaei. Jaleh technically co-founded this startup way back in 2018
But she kind of co-founded it in November 2025, when she burned the ships and refounded the company to be much smaller and move much faster.

**Jaleh Rezaei** (0:25)
In my eyes, it's a six-month-old company, seven-month-old company now. We are 15 people.
We completely built the product from the ground up. It's a brand new foundation. And also AI, it's just a very different type of product to build than the SaaS business that we were building.

**Alex Konrad** (0:45)
This episode is brought to you by Rippling AI, the only AI built to give you full visibility into your startup and the ability to take action across every department. Today on the podcast, we're gonna talk about why salespeople do get backed up in busy work, how AI has upended SaaS as we know it, and how Jaleh has overcome what she calls Claude's spookies. Plus, we talk about why she believes founders shouldn't worry about optics.
I'm Alex Konrad, founder and editor of Upstarts Media. And this is The Upstarts Podcast, our weekly show where we talk to startup founders who are punching above their weight to take on the status quo. Jaleh, thanks so much for coming on the show.

**Jaleh Rezaei** (1:22)
Thanks for having me.

**Alex Konrad** (1:24)
So what is Mutiny?

**Jaleh Rezaei** (1:25)
We help go to market teams, do all of the manual work that it takes to take a customer from cold, doesn't know who you are, all the way to close and expanding.

**Alex Konrad** (1:37)
So one way I was thinking about this, you can tell me if I'm right, is in a way kind of helping those salespeople focus on the actual sales, and a lot less of maybe the prep or sort of the other stuff that they have to do when they're not selling.

**Jaleh Rezaei** (1:51)
Yeah, exactly. So Salesforce releases its annual report using all of their data and talks through the amount of time that sellers are spending, and it's about 21% of their time is spent with customers in selling activities.
And then 80% of their time is spent on all of the other things that you need to do in between meetings. Following up with customers, getting things ready, personalizing everything to their pain points, doing your forecasting, internal reporting, CRM updates, all of that stuff. So our goal is to make it so that they're spending all of their time working with customers and very little time on the non-selling activities.

**Alex Konrad** (2:32)
What is the right balance that you're trying to outsource versus have these salespeople still actually know and get ready for, to be prepared to do well?

**Jaleh Rezaei** (2:41)
Absolutely. So it's very important that they understand the customer's pain points and they are reflecting their deal instinct in all of the things that goes to the customer. So I'm a really big fan of keeping the rep in the loop, but eliminating the unnecessary work. So for example, when a rep is trying to do follow-ups with customers, they might have had three calls that day and one of the customers asked them for some custom pricing thing, and there was just a long discussion that they had about what the ideal pricing proposal would look like for them.
Maybe another customer was an early stage one and they wanted examples of other companies like them and how they're using the product. All of these things, if you add them up, at the end of the day, the sales rep has to sit at their desk and create all of this stuff, go search in the content repository and find the right case studies and figure out if these are the right ones to share with the customer. They have to go manually create all of that proposal and all of these things. They have to go look up their pricing and tailor it, etc. The nice thing with Mutiny is that our agent centrally accesses all of this stuff, and then every time it executes, it just has that information. It's able to create things for them that follows their brand, and it just makes it really easy. The rep gets a one-shot generation of something that's actually ready to send to the customer. But we make it super easy for them to edit it and give feedback and make changes to it so that it is exactly what they believe is going to have the highest engagement rate when it hits the customer.