In this episode, we engage with Mahe Bayireddi, co-founder and CEO of Phenom. Mahe shares his journey of leveraging generative AI to drive business success, drawing from lessons learned with his first company, iMomentous, and applying them to the innovative recruiting solutions that Phenom offers today. He emphasizes the importance of continuously re-evaluating workflows, prioritizing functionality, and ensuring data quality and integration. This episode is packed with practical insights and advice for any B2B SaaS founders looking to harness AI to boost productivity and create competitive advantages!

1. Learning from Past Mistakes: Mahe's journey to success with Phenom began with the failure of iMomentous. This experience underscored the importance of failure as a valuable learning tool. Analyzing data from multiple perspectives allows for a deeper understanding of core infrastructure. Mahe applied the lessons learned from iMomentous to Phenom, leading to more effective recruiting practices. He emphasizes, "To understand talent effectively, you must comprehend the perspectives of candidate employees, HR, and managers."
   
2. AI and Value Addition: Continuously assess how your product adds value to users, ensuring a consistent experience for all. In the context of generative AI, knowledge workers could see 30-40% productivity gains, unlike frontline workers.

3. Constantly re-evaluate: For Mahe, he constantly thinks about the existing workflow within each company that he serves, and which pieces can be automated, which pieces can be more intelligent, and which key pieces can be more generative so that humans don’t have to do it all manually. Mahe explains that this is the constant thought process he has which as founders, is a critical step as you continue to build your startup platform.
   
   
4. Don’t overcomplicate it: Mahe and his team asked themselves “Where can we use AI in our infrastructure? Not just use AI to use AI which then makes things confusing. This is where he comes up with his idea of building a job search way better than anyone else in the B2B market. It’s about functionality versus looking fancy. As you are building your product,  simply ask yourself key questions to understand what you need to build. 
   
   
5. Key Questions for Founders: For new founders building a B2B SaaS company: To achieve significant productivity and efficiency gains with generative AI, it’s important to have a thorough understanding of the user case. Mahe has a few questions for entrepreneurs- Where do you know the data exceptionally well? Where do you have the data sets about that user context in a much more authentic format, and then how do you influence and interest in their current flow of events? Think about your answers to each question. 
   
   
6. Mahe on starting from scratch: If Mahe were to start again, he would focus on identifying and creating a unique data set that offers leverage and insight unavailable to most of the industry. He would ask himself this question  “What is the new data set I will create, which doesn’t exist that will give me leverage that most of the industry does not have?”
   
   
7. Why many AI companies fail from Mahe’s POV:  He believes that it’s not because they didn’t do the prediction part right, they didn’t cover the data quality and coverage correctly. Both the data quality and the data coverage come only when you have the integration infrastructure very effective. He asks us to look at successful companies and notice that it is about the existing data integration and how large the data coverage is. 

8. Scaling Challenges: Scaling presents new challenges at each stage. Initially, the focus is on gaining attention, then managing investor expectations, and finally on strategic scaling. Mahe, at Phenom's current SaaS B2B stage, emphasizes focusing on elite customers and strategic enterprises. He highlights the need for tailored products, sales strategies, marketing, and support infrastructure, which vary from the early stages where the product must simply work as needed.

9. Looking ahead: This is the exciting part according to Mahe. How do you look at the next stage, and what you don’t know and how do we unpack that? This is where your “high” is, as it is more than a challenge because the unknown is new and once you fulfill that challenge, it feels great. The downside is that if for some reason, you can’t fulfill the challenge, the outcomes may be a lot worse. But this is the risk you take as an entrepreneur. 

10. Thinking about scaling in three notions: In business, it's about navigating elimination, continuity, and knowledge acquisition. In the beginning, it is about gaining as much attention as possible because nobody knows who you are and you need people to notice you.  As revenue climbs to $10M-$20M, prioritize your strengths and streamline operations to aim for $50M. Beyond $100M-$200M, meticulous infrastructure management becomes crucial. Prepare strategies for both adversity and prosperity in market conditions to sustain growth effectively.
    
    

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