Doug Camplejohn
(00:01)
Hello, this is Doug Camplejohn and welcome to the latest episode of Revenue Renegades. This week, I’m very excited to have the co-founder and CEO of Clari, also known as the Prime Minister of Revenue on his LinkedIn title. I’ll let him describe that. Andy Byrne.
Andy
(00:16)
Hold on, Doug, marketing made me do that one, by the way. We’re having some fun with it.
Doug Camplejohn
(00:19)
It’s a good title, I have to admit. I was at Sundance this year and there’s a great documentary coming out about the former Prime Minister of New Zealand. I just don’t want people to be confused when the documentary comes out and says Prime Minister, that they’re thinking of you. Welcome to the show. I don’t know if we can fit this in an hour. There’s so much we could talk about. Why don’t we start with the founding story of Clari - where did the idea come from and how did this get started?
Andy
(00:57)
Yeah, sure. One word that started the company starts with a P. Want to guess, Doug? What’s the word?
Doug Camplejohn
(01:06)
Are we talking about a person or an idea?
Andy
(01:10)
No, it’s actually a verb. Hang.
Doug Camplejohn
(01:15)
Pain, perseverance. There are so many words.
Andy
(01:18)
No, this was an emotional founding. I’ve been in and around large sales teams my whole career and saw the pain of them using CRM systems to run their sales process. It was just horrible. Reps were in the CRM and their default behavior was to export to Excel, then to BI. We saw this everywhere. We thought, this seems pretty messed up. We started early research-two of us in a garage in Los Altos. We went to Sequoia Capital. My technical co-founder, Venkat Rangan, had done deep research into CRM technical architectures and realized there were a lot of problems. It’s a 30-year-old architecture.
One thing leaders wanted was to answer the most important question in business: will they meet or miss? At the rep level, deal level, company level, current quarter, next quarter, etc. We realized CRM architecture was not doing historical snapshotting at scale. If you can’t track history, you can’t predict the future. We took that idea to Sequoia. Doug Leone and Jim Getz gave us the green light. It was the fourth company we’d done with them. We started building. Where Salesforce saw a lot of failure, we started to see success. Reps were closing deals faster, managers were driving more revenue, execs were boosting forecast predictability and accuracy. We saw a movement around what we called predictive sales management.
Andy
(03:20)
Then we saw a really fun unplanned moment. Our license started expanding outside sales teams-marketing, pre-sales, finance, post-sales. I remember telling the engineers, this is so much bigger than sales. This is about revenue: create, convert, close, renew, expand. We reframed the company, changed the website, and called it revenue operations. The category started to evolve and take off. We marketed it everywhere. I remember telling competitors, stop calling it sales, call it revenue. They thought it was a good idea. A few years later the fastest-growing job in the United States was revenue operations, director of ops, rev ops. I thought it was a PR stunt by our team. I checked LinkedIn-there were half a million jobs. Now the category has gone from RevOps to revenue orchestration. Fast forward to today: we’re over a thousand customers, have optimized over 3,000 revenue cadences, and have $4 trillion in revenue going through the platform every 90 days.
Doug Camplejohn
(04:54)
That’s insane. Tell me about the early days of growth. How did you get early momentum, and when did you know you were onto something?
Andy
(05:09)
When we started getting invited to sales kickoffs. The first thing we built was a beautiful mobile app. The day we were going to release the app, we got on the TechCrunch stage-the same day Benioff held up Salesforce One Mobile. I thought we were in trouble. The board said we were fine. Buyers fell in love with our app. We knew we were onto something when we were asked to do keynotes at big sales kickoffs. At the time, standing on stage in front of 150 people was a big deal.
We’d make them download the app right there and demonstrate it. That’s when we thought something interesting was happening. Then we started getting pull from large enterprises wanting to deploy Clari wall-to-wall. That was year three and four. It took about 18 months to build the product and make it scale for large enterprises. Those were the early wins.
Doug Camplejohn
(07:05)
That must be gratifying to be pulled in by your customers, presenting your product to their sales team. That’s definitely a leading indicator. Let’s talk about the category. You mentioned revenue orchestration. Building a category is no small feat. What were the moments when you decided to create a category or work with others to create one, rather than trying to fit into something that already exists?
Andy
(07:38)
You can’t have a category alone. We looked at all the dimensions of the MQs and Forrester Waves. As entrepreneurs, you study that a lot. I actually went to our competitors and told them they weren’t framing it right. We’d have adult conversations-even though we were trying to beat each other in the market-about what customers were saying. That was point one. Point two: you need a little luck. The title Chief Revenue Officer didn’t exist when I started Clari. It was VP of Sales. We started to see the rise of the CRO, SalesOps becoming RevOps, because organizations saw inefficient silos between marketing, sales, renewals, and expansion. They wanted to flatten that under the CRO. That dynamic happened with or without us. The combination of intentional effort and organic market shifts, plus analysts doing their own work, led to the market waves and precursor reports before the Forrester Wave and Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Andy
(09:43)
Early on, analysts didn’t believe me. Now they’re writing all kinds of reports about the market.
Doug Camplejohn
(09:58)
That’s often how it goes. You pay for a lot of one-on-one time with certain analysts.
Andy
(10:05)
I remember marketing telling me, “Andy, don’t be difficult with this analyst, stay calm.” I tried my best to educate. Now we’re totally aligned. They call it revenue orchestration. It’s about the three pillars in revenue: create, convert, close.
Andy
(10:44)
We use the word orchestration because it’s about orchestrating tasks and actions for the individual and the entire team-not just the seller, but everyone up to the CRO. Clari is used in boardrooms to predict where we’ll land. There are 5,000 users at Adobe, running different cadences: new logo, renewal, expansion, channel, consumption-by segment, product line, geo. It gets complicated. You have to orchestrate all of that: action orchestration and team orchestration to create, convert, close, and predict outcomes.
Doug Camplejohn
(11:58)
When you talk about competitors, I think of Manny at Outreach, Kyle at SalesLoft, Amit at Gong. Are those the companies you’re referring to?
Andy
(12:07)
All three. I convinced them to say revenue.
Doug Camplejohn
(12:12)
Was that before or after you all expanded your product lines?
Andy
(12:24)
It was before. One edit to your commentary: Kyle and Manny were not competitive with us. Sales engagement wasn’t competitive with running internal workflows. Clari’s ethos is running internal revenue workflows: one-on-ones, pipeline inspections, deal reviews, forecast calls, all the way from rep to exec. Kyle and Manny focused on reaching out externally to customers-sales engagement. Amit at Gong and the team at Chorus focused on recording conversations at scale. That’s the orientation of the three. We even discussed partnering to make the market bigger, but business is business and now we all compete. The category is created and growing. The most important thing is that customers are winning.
Andy
(14:22)
They’re picking full platforms to eliminate the rep’s need to use multiple tools, reduce administrative burden, and cut RevTech stack spend. The next stage is who is set up to usher in the era of generative revenue-moving from human-driven to agent-assisted, from heavy and slow to delightful and fast.
Doug Camplejohn
(15:19)
Let’s talk about that. When did AI become part of your products, how has it affected your roadmap, and where do you see it going?
Andy
(15:30)
Great question. Companies claiming to be AI companies crack me up. In year two, we started predicting the future. We built a scalable time series architecture across structured data and could append unstructured data. When we first released predictive scores in year two (2014), we were actually predicting outcomes. People were skeptical at first, like how people feel about getting into a Waymo. Over the decade, we’ve seen users go from skeptical to reliant. AI started in year two, but it wasn’t generative-no one was thinking about generative AI then.
Andy
(16:59)
We got lucky because our data store allows LLMs to leverage what we built from the start, which gives us a good shot at doing powerful things as we move from assist to automate to agentic.
Doug Camplejohn
(17:16)
If you recall my last company, Fliptop, we called it machine learning, not AI. Heads of sales often trusted their gut more than software. If the software’s prediction was off, they’d say, “See, my gut’s better.” Over time, though, people rely on it more in forecasting.
Andy
(17:52)
Exactly.
Andy
(18:09)
I just got off three calls with large investors who use Clari as the main application in board meetings. They ask about pipeline created, current quarter, next quarter, mix by product, segment, geo, and gaps. The CRO doesn’t have to go to slide 175-it’s all real data. Our strength is providing a strategic apparatus to run revenue.
Doug Camplejohn
(18:56)
You mentioned $4 trillion-plus in revenue managed by your customers. With so many customers and sales motions, how do you ensure this is a piece of software rather than a consulting project each time?
Andy
(19:29)
Great question. We’ve learned a ton about cadences-over 3,500 now. A cadence could be current quarter, next quarter, new logo, renewals, expansion, channel, consumption, etc. Different verticals have different go-to-market motions. We’ve learned as we go. Bringing that expertise into the application layer is important. Now, it’s a guided experience. Software has gone from fragmented to unified to guided, and now to assisted and agentic. That’s where the innovation is.
Doug Camplejohn
(21:35)
Let’s talk about the future of Clari. It was all LLMs, now it’s agents. What are your thoughts on the current buzzword, and how does that fit into your roadmap?
Andy
(21:55)
The world will see a lot of agent failure. The CRO and CIO are now working closely. The CRO wants discipline, accountability, reliability, and behavior change across thousands of people. The CIO wants to leverage generative AI and metadata to improve business processes, especially in revenue. We’re spending more time with CIOs now. Early days, CIOs didn’t know we existed.
Andy
(23:54)
Generative AI budgets are being pointed at revenue processes. The key is solving for both executives: process and user delight for the CRO, security and flexibility for the CIO. That’s what’s happening inside customer accounts.
Doug Camplejohn
(24:44)
How is Clari bringing silos together across teams?
Andy
(25:03)
You see it in NPS and CSAT scores. Many users aren’t salespeople. Anyone who helps a deal close is a revenue-critical employee. Revenue is bigger than just sales teams. Many product managers, finance, and supply chain teams use the platform for demand planning. We’ve improved self-service, allowing users to create their own views and workflows. Under the hood, we’re moving toward autonomous revenue systems-learning from what all humans are doing to inform agents. Revenue is nonlinear, with structured and unstructured data. Getting that right at scale is very hard.
Doug Camplejohn
(27:57)
Did you just come up with the phrase autonomous revenue systems?
Andy
(28:01)
No, I’ve used it before. It’s fun language. You can use it, Doug.
Doug Camplejohn
(28:09)
I love the full self-driving analogy. ARS-Autonomous Revenue Systems. Let’s shift to leadership. How do you think about your role as CEO? How do you avoid distractions and focus on what’s most important?
Andy
(28:34)
Honestly, it depends on the crisis. There were two of us in a garage, now we’re 700 people, with teams in Poland and India. I’m trying to be a student of scale, learning from new leaders who can scale systems. My love is being with customers. Nothing means more than hearing from a CRO or sales rep that we changed their life. I want to stay close to the customer voice. I have three to four meetings a day with customers. Sometimes the team says I’m too involved, but it keeps me rooted. I also spend time on operational scale and culture. Culture is arguably the number one thing. I work hard to help every Clarion realize their potential. It’s a lot of work, especially over a 13-year horizon.
Andy
(31:05)
It hasn’t all been up and to the right. We’ve had tough times. I try to lead with authenticity and purpose. One leadership concept I teach is polarities. Martin Luther King was the best at this. As a leader, you have to be with employees in their current reality and also show them the vision. You can’t be a downer, but you also can’t be tone-deaf. It’s about knowing which polarity to be in, adjusting to the room, and changing the energy.
Andy
(33:16)
That lowers cortisol, increases oxytocin and serotonin, and everyone wins.
Doug Camplejohn
(33:27)
I love the vulnerability. I’ve admired watching you ramp up your LinkedIn posting. Tell me about your process for putting posts together and building your brand on LinkedIn.
Andy
(34:07)
It’s not complicated. I journal a lot. About six years ago, my brother passed away, and I started journaling to get through the grief. I recommend it to everyone-get your thoughts out before bed. It helps you sleep better. I’m teaching my sons this. I journal at night and in the morning, thinking about customers and lessons to share. There’s a balance between traditional basics and rapid innovation. Disconnecting from the craziness is hard, but important.
Doug Camplejohn
(41:04)
Early in my career at Apple, I saw teams burn out from 100-hour weeks. Balance is crucial. At my companies, I go home for dinner and unplug for a while. Sleep, exercise, and balance are vital-this is a marathon, not a sprint.
Andy
(41:51)
Leaders should know the dreams of their direct reports-not just career goals, but life dreams. If you go to that depth, you can help them with their path. If you know what they want to achieve in life, you build a bond. They’ll go the extra mile because they know you believe in them.
Doug Camplejohn
(43:09)
I love the simplicity of asking, “What is your dream?” It’s a much broader question than career goals. I feel fortunate to have always tried to make work fun. If you got hit by a bus tomorrow, make sure you have no regrets and are living the life you want.
Andy
(44:11)
Totally. Love that.
Doug Camplejohn
(44:15)
Final round. AI is touching every part of our lives. If you could automate one task forever with AI, what would it be?
Andy
(44:35)
Because I’m older, I’d love to automate doctor scheduling and health services. As you get older, these things stack up. If I could push a button and have all that automated, it would be beautiful.
Doug Camplejohn
(45:14)
There are services trying to bring together health tests and appointments, but it’s still scattered. There’s a huge opportunity there. What’s something you’re passionate about that might surprise people?
Andy
(45:46)
I have a four-quadrant “church”: mountain bike, skis, surfboard, and guitar. I check in to see if I’ve engaged in those. We should talk about music sometime, Doug. I’m also diving into mindfulness and spiritual intelligence-gratitude, journaling, affirmation, meditation, breathing. It’s a whole universe to explore. I think I’m a better person for it, and my family sees that.
Doug Camplejohn
(46:58)
We must sound like California hippies to the rest of the country, but I’m with you. In turbulent times, there’s hope in spirituality and exploration.
Andy
(47:20)
The unlock for me was tying it to how the brain works. Spiritual intelligence, psychology, and brain function help you be a better leader, father, partner, son, sibling. It’s practical and functional. My workplace and personal life have opened up as a result. I highly recommend exploring this.
Doug Camplejohn
(48:35)
What’s one thing you can’t live without in your daily routine?
Andy
(48:43)
The big thing I can’t live without is my family and my wife, Julie-my therapist and best friend. We’re empty nesting and living our best life. On a tactical level, I love a good IPA or tequila over the rocks. I could live without them, but it would be a bummer.
Doug Camplejohn
(49:24)
We’ll have to include that in our next conversation. Finally, how can listeners keep in touch with you and help you on your mission?
Andy
(49:35)
I’m a LinkedIn guy. Follow me on LinkedIn, ask questions, and I’ll do my best to respond and help.
Doug Camplejohn
(49:46)
Fantastic. Andy, this has been a fabulous conversation. Thank you all for tuning in.
Andy
(49:50)
Thanks for having me.
