This Founder Raised $4.2 million to Fix Customer Support with AI

they they can 10x their teams out with AI and they can put a lot of stricter controls on that so now I actively lean on the pain I look for the failure I mean it's funny it's on the news that Salesforce is cutting 1,000 jobs and at the same time they're hiring for sales people to sell AI we learned how to work together it wasn't always easy and we didn't start by being a great co-founding team Alex marantos he's the founder of intri a YC back company they're building a AI power quality assurance agent is that a right explanation for your company I would say probably we're building um using AI to automate quality assurance for customer [Music] support me and Alex had a really good workout in sauna before this and I I okay a quick disclaimer I want to do more workouts in podcast with other YC Founders and I loved it Alex is um Alex was really into calisthenics and now he's building companies from two different countries London and San Francisco that's right and we also have um a big presence in Athens Greece by the way that was a great Fitness check to see which guest you're going to bring to the podcast it's kind of like the preliminary round so how do you juggle like between London SF uh tell me everything yeah it's uh it's something really new to me because um we were previously based in London uh we started growing the team obviously we got into YC so we needed to be in the Bay Area for the batch we really enjoyed it we see the benefits of it and so we started gradually branching out and we started growing the team mainly in Greece because of the connections that we have there all founders are Greeks um and there is strong engineering talent but but also we did have a hub in London which we want to maintain with clients uh with partners and also there's a lot of talent there and then eventually I decided to transition myself as a CEO to the Bay Area because of the ecosystem there's a lot of people building a lot of cool stuff so I think this is the right place for me to be so I'm planning to split my time probably half of my time in SF then some of my time around Europe seeing the team see Senor customers but SF is my base and gradually we're going to transition the company as well I think the difference I see there's two types of companies there's customer support especially there's companies like apple where you can request a call back and then there there's companies like uh there's other companies where basically they create this black hole where impossible to get a human on board and they're using AI to make to basically like filter less and less people in to reach the human an anecdotal data Maybe or or take but I think us is a great customer experience I'm not going to name providers but well actually I'm going to name like AMX I use AMX they always have phenomenal support and why is that because of training because of quality assurance they have really great systems in place to make sure that every conversation is unique and that you feel welcomed to your point when I speak to my large Banks I'm not going to name them now because this kind of like negative feedback but I always feel like people don't want to talk to me they just want to get rid of me and that's not how I want to feel for something that I pay a lot of money for or that I I'm expecting a great experience I want to feel like they want to hear me out and they want to help me out that's why I'm using that service let's talk about the product and the business model behind it like how is it going to work for the company to plug in your company how are they going to like how how automated this is like can they just upload all their customer data and it basically breaks it down into a structured uh easy to understand like report yeah um that that's right in a sense um so quality assurance is an old problem um and it's a function that has existed for a while basically it's been managed on spreadsheets all of these years you can think of a very classic human Le manual workflow that somebody collects tickets collects data points creates like those like spreadsheet ninjas and they go and they create pivot tables and everything and then they try to share it within the teams so it's very burdensome and very difficult to digest and and be shared across the organization now with our software first of all we are not consumer facing we we are a layer that sits on top of the help desks or all of the the call center software that that companies use so we're not exposed to the End customer at least at the moment and then what happens is that those operational excellence or customer support leadership teams they plug that software on top of the help desk it's an easy integration an API integration usually just like 10 minutes one click and then we inest all of the tickets and then we offer a UI on that UI organizations can input or configure their criteria or as they call them scorecards usually every organization has a checklist that every agent that speaks to a customer needs to go by and that relates to compliance it relates to tone of voice it relates to language that is being used uh to process um adherence so it can be soft skills communication or can be operationally driven uh criteria so we allow them to configure that and then the next step is understanding and sampling what kind of conversations they want to review and this is another key strength of of what we do we allow them to create a lot of custom rules and they say let's say I want to evaluate all conversations that had a negative review or I want to evaluate conversations that have been open for more than x time or conversations that more than five or like six people touched so there's a lot of configurability on that and then they also get to choose if the AI is going to evaluate all of these conversations we offer Hybrid models which is a hot take that I can take you on later in terms of how you know human AI collaboration is going to uh look like in my opinion over the next few years and then eventually they can extract all of the insights from that data like what conversation going wrong what is the reason uh which teams are performing best which teams are not which teams need coaching um how is that coaching going because we offer all of that kind of like bundling capability on the platform from from data ingestion to evaluation to reporting to coaching your teams and then creates that fly whe of improvement and and data that's how I feel about this whole AI Revolution that's happening right now is companies are going to get leaner but they're also going to get collectively more intelligent it's a couple of things as well a lot of our customers used to hire and they still do bpos business processing operators I think this is the term um um and then this is a lot about I thought bpos are like the the call centers in Philippines and India that's right that's right yeah there's also in in the US and there's a ton of them in Central Europe um and this is this can go up to the millions of dollars every year for an organization but now what we're seeing is a lot of organizations want to bring that inhouse as you said they they can 10x their team's output with AI and they can put a lot stricter controls on that because let's say that you run a call center and you offer that service to an organization and then you also give the quality assurance I'm sure that everybody's meaning well but but it's kind of like the evaluator checking themselves in a sense and a lot of organizations want to have that that kind of like objective or that third party View and things and they they rather keep that in house so I have a lot of employees in Philippines and one thing I noticed like because of these AI tools these employees in Philippines are really good now like they can write the best English or 100% like you know and and I but I always like no the company's always going to get get rid of some less and less people because overhead is like the biggest expense you know like paying for people's employees paying for benefits paying for insurance so I think the overall like how do you personally feel about like companies getting rid of more and more customer service people I think it's twofold definitely companies are getting leaner I mean it's funny it's on the news that Salesforce is cutting 1,000 jobs and at the same time they're hiring for sales people to sell AI so I think we'll see a shift in in skills required in jobs but I also think that a lot of the customers experience are becoming more digital um you have a lot more interactions online and yes you can automate a portion of that with chatbots and AI uh but then still you have a lot of volume going into your customer support teams for complex cases for unexpected scenarios so I think there will be some automation on some basic stuff maybe L1 as we call them interactions like hey where can I find this statement where can I find like simple questions but then when things go wrong that yet the AI is not very capable to understanding unexpected workflows to to Big extent and give a deterministic output then we'll still have teams and AI tools are going to help argument in in my opinion human capability so for example in our case um a human QA previously could do up to maybe 100 evaluations every week now we're going to get them to 150 because they can use our tool the AI creates an evaluation and then the the human QA just opens it makes the job much easier now you know before it was like oh my God manually reading every customer service I can just imagine as a person you would you would get bored like okay let's talk about AI models real quick and then we'll segue that into AI agents but how do you personally feel about using the open AI API and I know it can get like really costly really fast and how do you feel about the open- source uh wave that's coming along with new models by llama and then like China releasing deep seek so personally how do you feel about that internally like I'm pretty sure you guys must be discussing this every day on an ongoing basis and it's so exciting I'm like excited I'm pumped like every day I wake up I'm like w what happened today you know come out today right yeah um I think uh we're pretty confident in the foundational models API and open AI API um I I view foundational models as what cloud was 10 15 years ago no everything is built now on top of AWS and gcp or whatever so I think you're going to have open AI you're going to have anop you're going to have a few of them it's a fully managed service right it's similar to running your own servers or your own data centers or going to a cloud provider um we are running on foundational models right now we have a mix of the major ones um but we are always always thinking and and maybe we'll be testing some open source models the challenge becomes then um you know you have to maintain that models you have to self-manage them and also I don't I I don't want to be I'll I'll give some predictions but I think the the pace that open Ai and these companies are moving is so fast um that even if we managed an open source model I I believe what I've seen so far at a stage at a company of our stage openi will get to the improvements before we do and then we can ride on that wave and I think you know the founder of perplexity has said it better than anyone that every company is a rapper company every company in the late 90s and zeros was an internet rapper company then everybody becomes a cloud rapper company I think now every company becomes kind of like a a foundational model rapper company I think it's the underlying infrastructure that is going to fuel the next generation of applications and these applications are going to be agentic in my opinion you said agentic yeah now let's talk about agents yeah let's do it uh I'm building an AI agent right now that's going to post non-stop news on Twitter sounds like spam I'm joking Twitter is like okay Twitter is the Twitter for me is like I have a love and hate relationship and I've noticed like Twitter is like where you get the news the fastest like and yeah you need to be hot of the press yeah it needs to be Snappy short quick and there's a lot of people who've built AI agents for Twitter now I mean there's going to be more and more platforms coming out with AI agents uh there's AI agents in every vertical but what do you personally think like what's the exciting part about AI agents like around them as well because we don't want to like spam like social Med media with a lot of AI agents you know then we we got to keep the balance of human content versus the AI I think it's very difficult to predict what exactly is going to happen um and I think anybody who's like just giving wild predictions for the next five or six years I think probably they kind of like shooting the dark in my opinion unless they have Insider knowledge um but still um I think for the next two to three years we're going to see a lot of kind of low skill repetitive job jobs being completely replaced U maybe like accounting um some basic stuff right things that that can be really good at um and this is going to power a lot of productivity in in a higher middle management layer because what you see now is that computing power and um in a sense um kind of like just repetitive work is being automated but what is not yet automated is judgment and decision making so now a lot of um I think the agentic workflows are going to produce a lot more information um a lot more speed in execution and that will accelerate decision making in in Upper um layers of organizations and I think in the next 3 to 5 years maybe even more we're going to see some Automation in judgment as well I don't know if you've seen the the request for startups from YC but now they're asking for b2a which is business to agents kind of like I think the the fundamental shift will become when llms or AI whatever sort of AI starts becoming the end user or the consumer of it because up until now humans have been the buyers oh and then you still need the human judgment yeah um because there's emotional implications there's a lot of stuff but as the minute that this starts getting automated it it has already started in a sense in algorithmic trading that you know you have algorithms trading in that sense and obviously you need human oversight there's human logic in it but it happen so fast that that a manual human Trader um in my opinion is very difficult to you know out compete an Al milliseconds exactly wow oh my God I'm like so I was talking to the founder of argil AI lais he also did YC badge he was telling me uh a really good example of Agents uh where basically someone built a writer's room and he had 10 different agents and they all were basically arguing with each other like you know imagine like a writer's room for a movie U you you all have to argue like oh why does this scene exist it shouldn't exist there should be a conflict there should be a resolution so someone built this 10 agents and they were arguing with each other to come up with like the script for the TV show and that was a really good example like I think reasoning and logic are getting better and better and uh that's that's where it gets really exciting I person there is this joke I always tell people there's I have I only talk to two people people day one is CH GPT I and the other one is deep SE I don't want to take us into um I don't want to derail us but this is an interesting point this is in my opinion how human knowledge Collective knowledge evolved it was by refining ideas by batting off with each other and that's what we do even today and that's what organizations do they get teams together they're the best idea emerges if there's meritocracy I believe that llms and and AI generally can just accelerate that so much faster and when I don't know when AGI is going to happen I don't have the keys to that but when it happens I think it will get to a point that we reach truth so much faster and then for every moment of truth you can make a decision and then when that decision making becomes so quickly then it just accelerates everything so I'm very excited about that okay awesome I do want to talk about Ai and AI agents for like hours but I also want the audience to also hear more about you as a person cuz I really the show is called emerging Founders and I think the most important thing is like I want people to learn more about the founder itself so can we go back to your journey like you grew up in Greece I did what did you do for your college and what was your journey right after college that's right and so I I lived in Greece up until I was 26 um I studied political science in my hometown called thesaloniki it's gree's second largest city it's up in the north it's a student City 1 million people it's a lot of fun is it a coastal city H it is a coastal city some beautiful beaches and there it's it's a wonderful place uh great food and but what happen is that I come from an entrepreneurial background my both of my parents they always run their own business SMB they were in Publications uh they were in TV Productions um event production I was in that since I was a kid like from very early years and um I was always fascinated by that as you can imagine I would look up to my parents um and I started getting involved as early as I could and I started organizing my own music and arts festival back in Greece it was mainly based on street art hip hop uh there was a lot of extreme sports a lot of music generally I was 23 when I launched it and I did it for 5 years and that that was the majority of my student years while studing fulltime I was organizing the festival explain more about this Festival this sounds exciting what it's everything M so what is it like you go to the it's like Coachella or something or what is the I wish it were like Coachella um but that was my that was my dream so I I'm I play music I studed music as a kid and I what instrument do you play guitar okay awesome yeah and I was I was always fascinated about festivals and music it was a deep passion of mine still is to a big extent and there was no Festival in my in my country that brought a lot of artists young artists from many backgrounds together and I just really wanted that and I couldn't find it and and I said I'm going to create it and I didn't know a lot of people had some great friends great artists that I knew from my hometown and still know and we all pulled together we said let's just do it let's open it up let's make it free for people to come and join I don't care how I'm going to find the money I'm going to fund it um and we did it for the first year we didn't have an entrance ticket anything we just collected sponsorships and we ended up and what was like the venue and stuff uh the venue was like um an old military Camp it was abandoned we got um um we got permission from the municipality at the time I hired a you know um the company that would put up a stage um that was decent and big enough I I did have some connections and and my my parents obviously because they were in the industry they helped me with that as well um and then we threw that kind of like a big party and we we ended up having four 5,000 people coming and people loved in everybody was saying like that was in 2013 and everybody was saying like there was no such thing it was 23 at the time there's no such thing anywhere around we need to keep on doing it so next time we doubled it next year and then obviously we needed to raise the budget because we wanted to start bringing more more um great artists and we needed to also pay artists and we put a kind of like a ticket to it initially um and then we made it a 3-day Festival and then I got it funded from I got a scholarship from the Bosch Foundation that took me to Berlin where I was able to Shadow a lot of the club and Festival owners over there and learned from them and then I keep funding and funding the festival and ended up growing to 400 artists from all over the world including graffiti artists uh dance and how did you monetize uh ticket there was a ticket we had sponsorships and and then there was ad Mission ticket inter um yeah and then um yeah it was a 3-day Festival a lot of fun like there's still a lot of material online I'll send you some I don't advertise that anymore because it's a different part of my life and I'm very proud of and it's been good fun so Greece is known for the financial crashes and a lot of inflation oh man you you poking that you you like I'm like I love okay first I have to tell you I love Greek food like that makes two of us there is a place called Nick the Greek I always order I love Greek food so maybe we'll grab right after this but let go but uh tell me more about like what happened during the financial crash oh man you you you Tak me down me what year was this H that was I don't think I don't know if your I don't think that your audience is going to be too familiar with Greek political history or economics uh but there was a big crash uh in 2008 that was a global crash obviously then that trickled down and and Greece basically got kind of like bankrupt and we had Capital controls so that that happened right at the days of me organizing the festival so the government got bankrupt um the the kind of like the economy of Greece that we had a lot of outstanding depth we had the IMF coming in um we had austerity measures applied um a lot of payments were outstanding uh basically the the the country def they didn't default by technical terms but it was defaulted in a sense so we needed to to borrow money to pay our outstanding debts to the European Union effectively we can record an entire different podcast about it for sure but anyway that was happening in the middle of me organizing my Festival so I don't know I had like half a million of outstanding payments out there uh receivables and also outgoing and everything was frozen and I was like 23 years old and I can't describe the stress um obviously I was supported by my co-founders the team and everything but I it's funny enough I ended up in the hospital uh when this happened I was like there was so many things happening and I had this kind of like stress shock uh that kind of like half of my my body got paralyzed uh one morning that I woke up and I'm going to send this episode to my roommate at the time because he thought initially I'm going to send this episode to my roommate because at the time when this was happening like I realized I was having breakfast and then half of my body is power izing my roommate thought that I was joking that I was making fun of something he started laughing and then damn that's what stress can do to a body I know right um and that taught me a lot about Stress Management on my side as well how to set boundaries how to prioritize my time how to make to make decisions and how not to get overwhelmed by what's happening every day because in my opinion life only gets more stressful especially the more ambitious you are the more you're pushing so it is a skill that I I always try to improve on that's a good segue into Wellness I think me personally I'm obsessed with like Health and Wellness it's like everything like sauna steam working out you motivate me on IG getting getting the steps in like we got the whoop band like you know uh how do you manage your stress levels right now and how do you balance okay on one hand there's like this really fast-paced life where you don't have time for anything and then on the other hand you have to intentionally slow the time down otherwise you don't feel present so how do you think about that like and what are some things you do in your life to kind of de-stress keep that balance going yeah it's it's a huge thing for me probably the most important thing in my life uh over the past four five years uh this is going to sound funny but at some point I was so stressed especially when I had first moved to London you know trying to find my footing there and going through job interviews and studying at the same time and all of that I started smoking and then you know I would just roll with with you know the mates and we would go grab a pint and I I'd end up like having three four pints nothing too excessive but it was on The Daily right and I did prioritized my gym and everything and then I realized I was running low on energy and then at some point I drew a line obviously I quit smoking I didn't do it for too long and and then it's become I built this regime that I will go to the gym every day no matter what and I realized that the more I did that I had a very regimented schedule where I would wake up at 5:00 a.m. I know this is a classic kind of like um Playbook of a maybe a 30-year-old um coo founder but um um I would um go to the gym immediately I will do my cult shower I will do my SAA I would read my book uh I would just make sure that I take care of my body and my mind before I give myself to the world and to the day um now it's a bit more volatile because of the time zones and I'm traveling between uh you know many different places and I need to be present for my customers and my team but I still I always make sure that I take 2 hours in my day to work out at least and I try to e as clean as I can because I see that when I do that my performance is really lower um and I can see that this is not benefiting my company my team and those around me and one very important thing though next to that is community and and your partner and who you who's next to you uh if they're not supporting you through that then you're bound to fail in my opinion so it's really important to surround yourself with like-minded people this may sound like a cliche but your environment kind of like can be um a huge factor of whether you fail or not achieving the lifestyle that you want man that's the whole reason I started this podcast to be around other Founders and to be around other smart people and I also feel like a lot of Founders have this like lonely lifestyle we're like you know like the Alcohol Anonymous we're we're all like uh just going through stuff and we a lot of us don't have an outlet to release all this like energy and I feel that that's why this is this this is great yeah I love it I love it it's it's the it's one of the main reason that I want to move to a being with minded people having that sense of community and it does feel like that since I moved there I home you know I've lived for eight years in London and I love it and avoid the gry London yeah well I mean LA and SF is not treating me greatly these days because it's raining due to that tropical uh rainstorm but uh yeah in general the weather is great and the everything is great that's that's beautiful man and then I really want to talk a little bit more about the co- finding the great co-founder because I personally noticed like that's the hardest thing to find the right co-founder and I also noticed like YC intentionally backs a lot of like really good co-founders and even like two or three teams they rarely invest in like one person one person founded companies can you talk a little bit more more about how you met your co-founders and like the dynamic you guys have between yourselves yeah so it sounds to good to be true but my co-founders are my best friends uh we all met in London coincidentally we're all Greeks even though I like to say that I don't only hang out around Greeks but it just so happened that we're like-minded and we we met through our Network um and there were both at the time early employees of revolute um in in the very early team uh Dei my CTO he used to be in the team that buil the core backing platform at revolute and then George R what does revolute do again can you explain revolute is probably the largest digital Bank in the world right now um kind of like one of the very first very successful Neo Banks um headquarter out of London and now they serve I think 50 million customers globally and I'm doing a great pitch for them hopefully Nikolai is going to be watching this and and he's going to give me some credit for that and so this is the best thing like starting a company with your best friends like if you have that kind of Dynam but how do you keep each other like accountable like not get too comfortable you know I think it's um a few things we we learned how to work co-founding team even though we're great friends we went through stages and we still go through stages there are two things zero ego um and and how do you get to zero ego in my opinion is by appreciating and understanding in that that the other person comes from a good place that we are fully aligned on what we're trying to achieve and everything that I say to you or they say to me comes from a place of of mutual agreement to the goal and I think that helps us resolve conflict very fast very effectively it keeps us bonded um and it helps us make decisions very quickly that's how we we run the team and what's like the next phase of intrig like uh can you talk a little bit about the fundraising journey and then what's the next big thing you guys are like heavily focused on yeah so well by the way were rejected by YC two times um there was a third rejection but it was from a different project that we can talk about later but um we started in 2023 we raised Our preed Round by two investors uh episode one was the lead uh E2 VC was the follower and a few select angels from our Network U that was 1.1 million at the time um and that happened in London great investors I'm I'm not kind of like you know sucking up now but I think that it's really difficult equally as difficult as it is to find co-founders it is to find great investors so these people have bed us from the first minute they never questioned us they were always there to help us and keep us accountable um and then we all decided that it's going to benefit us to apply to YC mainly for the ecosystem and the network exposure so we did that we got rejected two times we refined our goto Market we refined our ICP we closed our first big client uh we're working with it was deal.com at the time uh who has been kind of like a designed partner to us as well and extremely helpful and that got us into YC Tom blumfield is our partner um he had a lot of exposure obviously he's the founder of mono another great great UK neobank very successful um so he's seen those issues in customer support and and the costs for such a company on QA uh so he knew the problem very well uh and he liked um our vision and what we taking the company so he got us in then we went through the batch we buil the product we buil pipeline we closed a couple more contracts and then with Enterprises and then we went out to raise our seid round uh which we closed I think it was late October we announced it very recently and we had particip again from the same investors who co-ed around as previously and then we also had um joining General Catalyst Sequoia Scout activant capital and a few more Angels mainly YC Founders because we these people we think have great experience and want to be closer to that ecosystem as well and what we're mostly excited about is first of all building the best AI QA in the market uh we already get that from from our customers they tell us you guys are the best we've never seen something like that however we've been building that for S months only we have so much more to build um especially when we go to customizability of the platform we want to allow companies to just plug and play and bring their own quality assurance Frameworks we don't want to show horn them into whatever our software can do so that takes a lot of um building kind of like the surrounding infrastructure and layer and then the next thing is is taking that to more agentic workflows um and then eventually becoming the brain of operations within customer support teams with all the insights that we can give we create alerts daily digest for executives so we want to be the intelligence for how a customer support organization operates love it man I think I think that's intense by the way we're intense people yeah it's uh competition is not for loser like this is this is great I feel like I like how heavily like you're focused on one and one single thing and you want to be like the master of it yes what is a book you've given most as a gift and why and what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life and they basically completely you change as a person after reading that book and you I love that um I I I don't want to sound um preten that I do love reading and it's something that really helped me break my previous scarcity mindset to an aboundance mindset so the most gifted book must be the almanac of Naval ravikant love that I love Naval U because it helped me become centered and get to what I want very quickly I think many of us um starting with myself we we struggle to admit to ourselves what we want and that creates a lot of stress in our lives so that helped me get to that faster um the second book that has really influenced me um and these go go together right my top three books as well is Atlas Shrugged by an Rand I think her whole philosophy around objectivism is phenomenal um it really changed my mind on on how I I see value in things and how I give value to people to me a relationship not in a dirty world but a relationship is about value exchange so approaching a new relationship by offering something always opens up more opportunities for for deeper Connection in my opinion similar to how you approached me uh you just reached out and said hey I've seen these two three things I want to do this with you so that was was you giving value now that we've met and we've hang out and I see how you work I can definitely see that the third one was um the case against Reality by Donald Hoffman he's a neuroscientist in California um he completely changed my perspective about perception and and it made me realize that whatever we see now it's not necessarily real it's how we perceive and we explain things and that allowed me to and it still allows me to try and see things from somebody else's perspective and that always helped me Resolve conflict faster or even not even get into conflict and at the end of the day that helps me I believe become smarter because if I see something in a different way and then I disagree with that initially but I can adopt that then I've learned something new and I can move on to the next one wow I love it uh by the way the naval book is I've given it to like 10 you must be right 10 people I have to well that's my goal actually one day to get him on the podcast his podcast with the Joe Rogan was like the best podcast ever like I've I've re listened to it like 10 times it was so good Have you listened to that one yes have listen to all his podcast I love him okay next question what purchase of $100 or less has positively impacted your life in the last 6 months um it could be anything it could be like a gadget could be like a course it could be an app could be anything it's difficult man i' I I I try to keep very lean and Frugal with my purchases um again at the risk of coming across as pretentious I would say probably the cs50 course of Harvard it's an online course about Computing and like coding but why I did that is because I'm not an engineer even though I've worked in Semite technical jobs I've worked in tech companies I really feel the whole time that I need to understand the underlying infrastructure and how things work generally in life not only with computers I need to know how processes work how people work how Industries work and that allowed me to to understand how engineering Works in in a better sense and that also helped me improve my communication with my co-founders um and and understanding technical issues and I think it's a necessary thing for for any Tech founder building a tech company building software you need to have a big understanding or at least a fun Foundation understanding of how things work and this really changed my um my ability to process information take decisions on it while building a company I love that you it it makes you a better Communicator like uh knowing the first principle from first principes thinking like knowing all these things how has a failure apparent failure set you off for latest success it felt like failure in the moment but then in the coming years you were like oh that had to I had to go through that yeah another vulnerable moment so I considered my Festival U failing at the time because in the last year even though we had grown a lot I wanted to take it a different direction so I didn't really listen to my audience and I didn't want and this this taught me to always listen to what the market wants number one but it also took me a lot of hardship it also helped me keep my ego in check and I think um that created so much more resilience in me so now I actively lean on the pain I look for the failure whatever makes me feel uncomfortable I know that this is what I need to do obviously within reason right I don't want to wipe myself out with the risks that I'm taking uh but that hardship and and and that resilience building exercise has helped me become more resilient in the end great answer so I want to know like ideally what kind of companies are intri looking for so they can kind of reach out to you after they hear this podcast thank you uh consumer Enterprises post series a all the way to larger Enterprise I think at the stage where right now probably pre IPO is our sweet spot um think about fintech neobanks retailers um holiday Airlines type of businesses any businesses that have a lot of customers who need urgent support and great support yeah and they don't want to leave those customers be anguishing in in Endless Loops that's kind of the companies that we're looking to to help and and help us grow with them as well amazing and how can people find you what social platforms are you on right now yeah you can find us on um on intrig on X and can you tell the website uh it's www.ent.com um and then we are on X we're on LinkedIn my personal handles are Alex marantos for both X and Linkedin uh and I'm I'm usually responding very quickly uh I love to speaking with people who are in the industry of customer support or other Founders So yeah thank you for watching another episode of emerging founders with manav I had a great conversation with Alex and I'll see you guys in the next one thank you so much for having me it was good fun