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I was strolling around the Salt Lake City Walmart parking lot with Varun Anand, the lanky, 6-foot-4-inch soon-to-be cofounder of software company Clay, and sweating profusely. Anand had us doing laps, wildly gesticulating as he explained his conundrum. He was looking for his next gig, and he couldn’t stop thinking about a little startup in New York. 

It was 2021, the height of Covid-era career moves, and Anand was on the hunt. Because of his background having led go-to-market at large startups, he had more established offers on the table. But he had fallen in love with a soon-to-be-released product. I had started writing at Every six months before and was living in Salt Lake City, and through a friend of a friend, he had reached out to me to talk shop on what startups I found interesting. 

Everyone who plays the high-risk game of early-stage startups can relate to this feeling. Analysts (including this one) will tell you that the odds of startup failure are over 95 percent. The gray hairs will accumulate, the cushy life you could have working at Google will haunt you, and discomfort will be your constant state. 

Nevertheless, some part of you yearns for the adventure. You have an irrational instinct that this idea could work—somehow, some way. Anand had it that day. I had it the day I sent my first newsletter to 25 subscribers, consisting exclusively of my roommates and extended family. You, too, have probably heard the siren song of building something new. 

That emotion is important. It is that heady mix of passion, American individualism, and capitalist spirit that has propelled Silicon Valley forward for the past 50 years. 

In the case of Anand, it led to him joining Clay. Since then, the software startup that helps companies launch their products in the market raised a $62 million Series B at a $500 million valuation from Meritech Capital, with participation from Sequoia. It has grown like a weed since its launch on Product Hunt in February 2022, and now has 100,000 users at more than 2,500 companies. Last year, while most software founders I know were fighting tooth and nail for growth the Clay team had so much they could barely keep up. 

None of that success was obvious in 2021, when the company hadn’t publicly launched yet. Anand’s only guiding light was his intuition that the several-year-old company had potential. At the time, Anand asked me what he should do. A few months after we had met in person we debated the variables of Clay’s potential success over text messaging, trying to pin it down to technical factors—the focus of its product-led growth, how it would capitalize on the buzz. I realized that there was something much grander to rely on than these details—his intuition. I sent Anand a text: “I mean if you are still excited about a B2B SaaS thing after this long then do it.”

Five years into its operation, in early 2022, Anand joined Clay, leading all things go-to-market. By doing so, he joined cofounder Kareem Amin, who had been investing in Clay’s mission since it incorporated in 2017. (The other cofounder, whom Anand referenced in our meeting, left to pursue ideas in crypto.) Two intuitions came together to guide what is now a category-defining platform to help sales and marketing teams amass data on prospective customers and customize their outreach.

The founding feeling

• Intuition over analysis: How Clay's founders trusted their gut
• The power of focus: Narrowing down to a single, compelling use case
• Emotional drive: Why passion matters more than product in early stages
• Divine labor: Finding meaning in the minutiae of building a company