Smarter, Leaner, Faster: The Rise Of AI-Driven Startups With Claudia Richoux

AI-driven startups are reshaping what it means to build, scale, and lead in tech. Co-founder of Supplyco, Claudia Richoux, shares how she’s transforming industrial sales and marketing through AI, running an ultra-lean operation, and redefining startup leadership in a changing economy. From surviving the chaos of early ventures to learning how empathy fuels strong teams, Claudia’s story captures the grit, intellect, and creativity behind modern entrepreneurship — and why embracing AI isn’t just about efficiency, but about building smarter, more human companies.

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Smarter, Leaner, Faster: The Rise Of AI-Driven Startups With Claudia Richoux

Claudia Richoux’s Journey: From Military Brat To Tech CEO

We’re sitting down with Claudia Richoux. Welcome to LeverUp. We’ve had a little bit of a hiatus as we’ve been head down on a couple of near-term opportunities. We’re super glad to have you on LeverUp. We’re glad you’re here.

I am so happy to be here. I’m so excited for this conversation. It’s going to be so fun.

Do me a favor. Let’s tell everybody your story. Give me the pithy version about your background, and we’ll go all over the place.

I grew up military brat. I was always super nerdy. I got more into STEM in early high school. I developed an obsession with particle accelerators. I was a weird kid, and by the end of high school, I was programming. I was doing cybersecurity competitions. I built parts of a particle accelerator at the University of Maryland with a professor there. I then went to UChicago. I started out with Math and Physics, and then I realized a Physics PhD does not make that much money, does not have that many career opportunities, and very likely, I’ll end up an experimentalist instead of a theorist.

I switched to Math CS. I did a lot of internships through college. I was very interested in cryptography and cybersecurity. I got super into cryptography, like the mathy stuff. I worked some jobs in that, and then I spent some time in crypto doing blockchain security research, which was fun. I got to work on a project where it was like DARPA-affiliated research. I got to do very cool cryptographic research. Working in that space, I eventually spun out an encrypted cloud storage company from my job. I did that for a couple of years and learned a lot of things about business. Now I’m here, working at Supplyco, where I’m the CEO. We are building marketing and sales software for the industrial segment.

Supplyco: AI-Powered Solutions For Industrial Sales & Future Automation

You’re speaking my language, so let’s dive right in. Tell me about Supplyco. What problem are you guys solving, and what attracted you to that space? Wherever you want to take it.

I was in the ashes of the previous business venture, and I was looking at what I wanted to do next. I was looking at startups that I liked, and I noticed myself feeling jealous all the time of all the manufacturing startups of SpaceX. I was like, “They’re launching rockets into space. They’re building physical things.” Flexport was exciting. I’ve learned more about it, but at the time, I was like, “That’s so cool. Cargo is so cool.” My brother is in the merchant marines. He was doing real things like defending shipping routes, which are so important.

I was seeing all these things in the news, where I’m like, “I don’t understand the underlying mechanics of why this thing is happening in this way.” A lot of things came together where I want to do something in logistics, supply chain, or manufacturing because I want to do something real. I want to do something impactful, and I want to understand this massive part of the world that is so important to history. I started talking to people. I started touring ports, truck terminals, warehouses, and factories. I toured a lot of stuff in the auto supply chain. I traveled to do this. It was very intensive for a while. I read everything I could. I talked to everyone I could.

Eventually, we iterated through a couple of ideas, and then I realized that my background is in software. I need to start where I have a lot of leverage, where I can create a lot of impact very quickly, so that’s probably something with AI right now, so I came to sales and marketing eventually because that’s a very informational-heavy space. I’ve worked in a machine shop with my Physics stuff, but I’m not a machinist. I’m not an expert, so I need to work somewhere where I have a home turf advantage. That is sales and marketing because I have experience with that.

We decided to double down there, and our product idea came from talking to people who have these problems and hearing from them, like, “Prospecting takes a lot of time, our sales process is very intensive, these are very big leads.” We actually analyze a large variety of data sources about their leads to help them target the right customers, help make sure that their salespeople are spending time with the right people, and help make sure that their salespeople are getting in front of the person the second they are in the market, because closing, that’s how quickly matters, and making sure they deeply understand their customers that they can sell better to them.

This is a product that we developed in partnership with people who are sales leaders at OEM, which is the people who are building the giant million-dollar or hundreds of thousands of dollar equipment that’s on the factory floor. We’re hoping to expand after this, but we’re happy with the software product and the value that it’s providing right now.

Are you looking at this as one module inside of a potential manufacturer, like a system of modules?

In terms of a software suite?

Yeah.

I think that we will probably expand into other software offerings in the future. There’s definitely a lot of value in processing RFQs, standards, and government contracting. There’s a lot of data that goes back and forth in the sales process. It’s very technical. You need a lot of technical expertise to go through it. We’re like, “Maybe we could automate the horrible, boring TDS, 60% to 70% of that. The same way that we’re doing with lead research, where a salesperson would go spend half their week prospecting and clicking through websites and databases.

There are a lot of things like that in this space where you’re having to go through a lot of technical information. The sales engineer should be a solutions-engineering. They should be talking to the customers. They should be handling the things that are not easily automatable. There are a lot of similar opportunities to what we’re doing right now. Also, procurement, we’re interested in.

It’s super easy to say that. My playbook in industrials, if I wanted to grow sales, was to go steal somebody’s book of business. I would hire a sales rep who had a book of business. I try to get them to walk their customers across the street. It’s very expensive from a customer acquisition cost perspective, but it’s interesting. I have tried three times to hire a marketer for a B2B marketing firm. They all had a good pitch, and there was always a lot of cash swept away from the company that didn’t amount to anything. I’m very interested to see how you could apply this. Nobody is running over to the industrial space. Five years ago, nobody was running to the industrial space. I am hearing or seeing little fingerprints in Silicon Valley of people creeping back into industrials. What is driving that?

The Industrial Renaissance: Why Silicon Valley Is Turning To Manufacturing

It’s so cool, a lot of the SpaceX stuff and the Tesla factories. They are shiny. A lot of software engineers are having a bit of a crisis right now, especially with AI automating a lot of their jobs. For a lot of people, it’s sunk in, like, “What do I do? I changed the corners of the button to be a little bit more rounded.” The market is very flooded with B2B, SaaS.

It is rewarding, and you are making people’s lives better, but a lot of technical intelligence software engineers, who got CS degrees, they’re like, “Where do I fit into the value chain?” They’re seeing that part is very small. Their impact on people’s lives is a bit small. A lot of people see the value. It is cool, like, “They have robots. That’s awesome,” but it’s also everything in your life, and we’re realizing that more after COVID, and after the Ever Given plugged the Suez Canal, people are like, “This stuff matters. The rails that my life runs on are no longer invisible to me.” They’re very interested to learn more.

There’s the American dynamism thing that a lot of these VC firms were talking about, too. There’s a lot of patriotism. You see Trump wanting to revitalize America’s manufacturing base, or he’s talking about it. He’s implementing policies that gesture at that. In the news, it’s in the collective unconscious, like people want to make real things. People are getting driven to that. I’ve seen a lot of startups get funded that are basically rebuilding manufacturing from scratch.

Hadrian is cool. They’re building a lights-out factory. You should know more about them than I do. Don’t ask me any hard questions, but that’s awesome. You see Tesla, you see SpaceX. These are all exciting and flashy. We’re obviously doing software. We’re not so exciting and flashy. We’re pretty cool, but not in the cool video footage way. A lot of software engineers are like, “I want that in my life. It brings me a lot of satisfaction to get involved there.”

There’s nothing that gives me more energy and keeps me from checking my phone and playing with my phone than going into a factory, but it’s still boots on and going into a factory of a type I’ve never been to before. I had a paper mill locked up in Canada at the end of ‘23, close to being locked up. I hadn’t been in a paper mill in like five or six years before that. This one was especially interesting. My sale was like, “I’ve never seen Paul act like this. I was crawling under there with the flashlight and looking around. I think it may have been 200 factories in the last 15 to 20 years. It’s interesting.

Second point, I was sitting down with a back-end software developer over a drink in New York. I asked her, “Why did you go into this?” She’s like, “I thought it was going to be so stable.” It was a money ratio to stable income. That was a good lifestyle, and it was at the vortex or episode of everything that was good, and that is suddenly gone. Say more about that because I’ve gotten this question a couple of times with the comment.

The Shifting Landscape For Software Engineers In The Age Of AI

I came to software engineering and computer science because I liked it. I liked playing with the computer. I liked solving puzzles. I would program for fun. I started programming when I was eleven. It has always been a fun thing for me. When I came to college, there were a lot of people who were doing CS as a pre-professional major almost and the passion wasn’t always there. It made me sad to see them, honestly. I did it because I loved it, but the classes were not fun for them. They would get an absolutely brutal assignment, and it was not fun.

I understand that there was so much advertising for so many years about learning to code, that you’ll be stable forever. That did seem real. I did not expect the LLMs to be able to code this world this quickly. I trained them in a class in 2019 shortly after the transformer paper came out in 2018. I don’t know. It was spitting gibberish at me. It was obviously translating, but the code is so highly structured. There’s so much logic involved. I think a few people expected this, but certainly not so quickly. It has definitely been a big psychological adjustment for engineers.

I’ve worked with people who have not wanted to use the code automation. It’s sad because for a long time, everyone said there was never any question about it. You’re engineering skills are of high value. You’re of very high value. All of tech was set up to prize the engineer. Your manager would treat you like royalty. The recruiters would treat you like royalty. There are these coding boot camps everywhere. I was encouraged to drop everything and learn to code. That’s not the case anymore. The skills that are valuable, as they talk about on Twitter a lot, are product engineering. You need to have some business and customer sense because it’s so quick, except for the deep technical stuff, where the AI is getting shockingly better very quickly.

There are a lot of things that two years ago, it couldn’t do, but now it can. Even more highly senior engineering jobs are getting automated. The thing that it can’t automate is business sense and taste. It will go off the rails when it’s reasoning about that. Maybe that’s solvable, I don’t know. Engineers with product skills will continue to have a good spot in the market. Nobody has been encouraged to develop that. It’s a rare skill set, and I think that the absolute number of engineering jobs is going to go way down. A lot of people are going to have trouble finding work. That is going to be tragic. There are going to be a lot of sad stories coming out of that. I am sad about it because it impacts a lot of my friends. I don’t know what to say other than economic movements cause chaos, and it’s sad.

Yeah, but technology has never caused a net job loss. I get so sick of that. Agrarian jobs were 60% in the mid-1800s. They’re at 5% now. To get to 5% or 10% or whatever it is, it took 75 years. I’m not saying it’s not going to go slower than that, but we created more jobs in that time. The more penultimate example is the assembly line where everybody is like, “There’s not going to be any more car assemblers.” You actually need more texts to fix the line, and you’ve got more parts coming in automation. Where do software engineers go? To use the farming metaphor, were they plowing the field by hand, and then the combine comes in, and the auto plow? The workers had to go to the factory. Let’s be honest. The farmers went to the factories. Where do software engineers go?

AI And Job Evolution: Where Do Software Engineers Go Next?

For software engineering, I think that there will be a lot of software. I’m speculating wildly, but I think that QA is going to be a significantly increased role, especially with AI. There are some things that the AI will miss that a human is not going to miss. Anywhere where human taste and emotional intelligence come in, AI is not going to be doing that. Anywhere where a deep understanding of a problem and common sense come in, there is going to be some level of AI, which is predicting the next token. It will map closer and closer onto those deeper concepts. It’s still going to continue to miss the things at the bottom level of intuition.

Probably, more senior people will go ultra-technical. People who had a bit more of a product role will go more into product engineering, where they are more leadership-facing, more customer-facing. I think a lot more low-skilled roles will drift towards heavier QA instead of front-end development. All of this assumes that there’s going to be a need for a lot more software built, and that there’s going to be the economics of that entire stack of business, is going to make sense, which I am not sure about. The changes that we’ve seen in the past two to three years have been so shocking in the way that things work internally. They’ve been very unpredictable. I don’t know how to predict what’s going to happen.

Nobody is going to get it right. If I go over to where AI, LLM is going to affect, I think about an attorney. I call this the attorney problem. You learn to be an attorney after you graduate from law school by reviewing documents for periods and commas, looking at clauses, and going over them. I flashed forward. I can say, “Produce me a letter of intent,” in a document in AI. I can do it by myself very quickly. It’s very helpful, and it probably cuts 90% off my effort and time.

Given that, though, how do I train a new person? I call this the attorney problem. How do you make a partner attorney that doesn’t go up that landscape and that stairstep to get to that partner level knowledge? I don’t know how to solve this problem. Ostensibly, that gets solved with AI. It’s a super interesting topic around labor productivity and management, because senior people could lay off all their associates if they were law firm and they would be okay. Eventually, the business dies.

The “Attorney Problem”: Training The Next Generation In An AI Era

I totally agree. We’ve seen this in other industries where there has been some automation, then you have a skills crisis because, for some reason, you don’t need juniors for anything. I’m blanking on examples, but I’ve seen this in other Industries before. I think we’re going to hit the skills crisis. We’re going to have training programs probably because, like me, going through getting your 10,000 reps in of I had to go write an operating system, I had to go write a scheduler, I had to go write a file system, I had to go write a compiler. All of these things were horrible.

I banked my brain against them for a very long time, but I am very good at understanding how the guts of the computer work now. That is absolutely instrumental in debugging because the AI will get you 90% of the way there. The last 10%, like everyone jokes about, “I love vibe coding,” which is using the AI to code something together, but I hate vibe debugging, which is when the AI does something stupid and I don’t know how to fix it.

I have very fast intuition for how to fix it because I know how the computer gut works. Someone without intensive training does not have that. The last 10% is 90% of the work that’s going to continue to exist unless you really get your reps in, which is a problem because the standard computer science assignments that would make people cry before or now, 30 seconds AI, and they don’t even have to get their reps in.

I want to go to you as a startup CEO, but first, I have to ask this question. Somehow, from a software development entrepreneurship, does this make it easier for someone who has a SaaS startup to not have to ever take venture money?

Yeah. We run so lean. The way that I manage the business is so much leaner than a standard-sized business. We’re seeing legacy SaaS businesses that were founded 10 or 15 years ago, and they have such high headcounts. All of their operational processes would completely fall apart if they did a layoff and tried to restructure in an AI native way. That would be such a cost. I will probably be worth it, but they would lose so many customers because so many things would fall through the cracks. Whereas we’re natively building with all of these workflows automation before hiring. We’re very lean, very AI-first. We should talk about that later because there’s this tiny teams movement of people who are getting millions of dollars in revenue with sub-ten people.

It’s interesting you say that. One of the assets I have locked up right now is a manufacturer, and they don’t even use QuickBooks. They are millions in revenue. Eight digits of millions. My message is I’d rather have no tech than bad tech. I get to put in what I want to put in. I’m going to be done. It’s almost like that. If you were set up for the high headcount intensive model, disentangling that, and going to a leaner teams model, you can scrum with yourself and one other person.

You definitely can. We do.

Startup Leadership: Finding Energy In The Sales-Product Intersection

It’s so fascinating. Let’s pivot over to start-up leadership because I don’t have you all day. Talk to me about the tasks you have to worry about. It’s either fundraising, operations, sales, or product development. Which one of those four, or if I’m missing a secret fifth one, which one of those gives you the most energy?

It’s the intersection, from sales to product design, that gives me the most energy. I’m super into psychology. I’m super into user psychology. I’m super into empathizing with user behavior. That gives me a ton of energy. The selling is a bit stressful for me still. Obviously, I’m introverted, but the tail end of that, where we get the customer requirements, we understand them deeply, and then we figure out the best way with software to map software onto those workflows in a highly empathetic manner that will be very ergonomic to the user, like usability, Nielsen Norman Group, early Apple, all of that stuff.

I’m a huge fan girl. I had a huge reading period about UX design and user psychology at the start of last year, and now it gets me so much energy. I enjoy it so much. It’s such an amazing creative outlet for me. It’s fun because, with the AI, you get to go from words the customers said to thoughts in your head, to something you can actually click through in hours. It’s such a dopamine hit.

Mastering Sales: Strategies For Introverted Founders

My favorite prompt is give me a metaphor to explain X, Y, or Z. That’s like nitrous oxide for my brain. I get one metaphor cooking, and it starts 10,000 other ideas are coming there. Energy is there, but you’ve got to sell. What do you do to let’s say pump yourself up and get motivated to go sell and go talk to customers even though it’s not a preferred task?

It’s definitely not pumping myself up. I think my co-founder, who was sitting behind me, does like, “Go, go, go.” I give myself structure so that I don’t start feeling lost or scared during the sales calls. I’m big on preparation. There’s this book I was about to grab my copy of, which is usually sitting right here. It’s actually sitting over there because we were talking and reading through it. It’s Founding Sales by Peter Kazanjy. They give it to every participant at Y Combinator. It is the bible for how to do B2B Saas for people who aren’t coming from a sales background, but need to do sales. It gives you a map of everything you should be doing.

I also want to shout out PMF Camp by Rob Snyder. It’s $5,000 per organization or person that joins. It is so worth it. He has a lot of free materials as well. That was a bootcamp that we did to learn to sell, which audited our sales process and gave us a lot of structure, and told us what to do for every single call, then also Founding Sales. Whenever I have a question, whenever something feels weird in the sales process, it’s covered in that book. I give myself a lot of structure. I give myself a lot of education, so I know exactly what to do at every step. I’ve read a bunch of sales books. None of the names of them are coming to mind right now, but all the classics.

I actually write about my laptop. I’m looking at it right now. I have a call structure doc that tells me if I’m blanking, if I’m freaking out, here’s what I say next. I approached sales calls in a much more relaxed, friendly manner. I’m not trying to hard sell. I’m not getting myself hyped up before. I start by building rapport, making a friendship, getting to know the human in front of me, and then I move through understanding their problems. I move through saying, “That sounds like a problem we can solve. It sounds like this other guy, whom we solved it for.” It’s a very natural, flowing conversation because I’ve done my homework and because I’m properly taking the time to understand the other person and connect with them properly, instead of trying to sell something that doesn’t make sense.

The fact that I’m solving a real problem that they actually have makes the conversation so much more comfortable, and it means that I don’t have to get myself hyped up, and then the structure for closing and moving people through the pipeline. Once again, I don’t have to get myself hyped up. I just go in and I execute my plan. That has made it a lot less bad. Also, getting your reps in. I felt confident over time. My first sales calls. I wasn’t selling. I literally was not selling. I was like, “Let’s have a conversation for half an hour.” “Why didn’t that close?” I go watch it and I’m like, “That wasn’t a sales call. That was a friendly chat.” The feedback was uncomfortable, but then we fixed it.

Let’s pivot to the other side. Steal man this for me. Fundraising is not selling.

Fundraising is selling. What do you mean?

I want you to steal man for it. Why would fundraising not be selling?

You’re selling a different product, but you’re selling. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to steal man that. It’s factually incorrect. I was selling your company.

Fundraising: Selling A Vision Vs. Selling A Product

The way I’ve coached people to this was that I’m just telling my story. I’m excited about my vision, and I’m just telling my story so I don’t have to sell.

When you’re excited about your vision, you still have to understand the person you’re fundraising from. They want to feel a certain way, but they also want to feel that you are solving a problem for them. There’s a reason they’re investing, and it’s because their fund has some KPIs that they need to hit. You might or might not fit into that. You need to get that across, and part of that is being compelling about I am a competent founder. I have done the research in this market. I am excited about this market as someone who takes myself seriously and knows a lot about this market, knows a lot about business, and has the skills to execute.

You have to get them pulled into that excitement. It’s the same as selling. I need to convince the prospect, “This can solve your problem. This is going to solve your problem. It’s going to solve your problem competently. I believe in that. I am trustworthy, and let’s go use the product together.” I don’t know. There’s definitely a lot more loosey-gooseyness because it’s a high-risk investment. It’s venture investment.

You are selling something that does not fully exist yet, but that’s the same as our earlier sales calls for design partnerships before we have the product built. We were like, “Do you want to go on this fun journey with us to help us build the product with us?” You’re selling the future instead of selling the current. I guess the level of loosey-gooseyness and emotions that are involved is like, “Are you selling something more tangible or less tangible?

That’s where I get it. Are you talking about features or something that exists, or are you talking about the world that could be in a future state?

It’s also what you’re selling when you sell software. It’s like, “This is what your life will be when you use the software.” I can’t show you that, but we can imagine it together on the call.

Funny aside, that’s the best SAP implementation. The CEO taught all his employees the German words and did absolutely no customization. I mean, the minimum amount of customization and made everybody learn German, and it went pretty well.

That sounds fun.

I think everybody was so worried about not being able to understand. They were immediately compliant and not pushing back.

It’s like the Trump art of the deal. Let’s not think about that.

Just so everybody knows. We’re recording this on Friday, April 11th. I’ve had the most engaging week of my career. My phone is ringing off the hook. People are asking me tariff questions. This is my Super Bowl from a manufacturing perspective.

I go to dinner parties, and everyone is talking about tariffs. I’m like, “I sell to manufacturers and I have some questions about tariffs. Would you like to hear the report from the trade show?”

I have to sanitize this. I got a coffee with an infrastructure investor. Apparently, she had given him multiple hundreds of thousands to an advisory firm to give to the tariff. The content they provided was very non-committal to any outcome. I would say it torched a couple of hundred thousand dollars on their advisory fees.

Unfortunately, recently, there has been more clarity but also less clarity as the negotiations happened post-tariffs. I was at a conference for management in the machine tool and machine shop industry, like executives and leaders, about a month ago. That was when there was noise about reciprocal tariffs, but absolutely no clarity about how they would be implemented. It completely matters for this industry, both in terms of machine tools, and in terms of supplies that you’re buying, and whether the machine shops you’re selling to will go on under.

They brought four different economists, policy people, and lobbyists on stage. All of them, the slides were like, “We don’t know, and we’re stressed.” The audience was not taking it much better than I expected, but still seemed quite nervous. The reciprocal tariffs hit while we were at the last conference, which was like, “This is crazy.”

It is steady state to steady state. Tariff action is likely not a creative to the overall consumer businesses, even the country. The transient and watching people where the situation is now, we’re literally setting up a supply chain in Mexico to extricate something from China. It’s like a game of chicken where the tariffs are going to end up. Now it’s like I’m not even 99% certain. I would be highly surprised if the long-term tariff stays in place between Mexico and Canada.

Cultivating A High-Autonomy, Feedback-Driven Team Culture

I knew the NAFTA agreement much better than I knew the one that was in 2020. I would be highly surprised. I wasn’t surprised before. I’ve been wrong before. I’ve been able to call it. It’s super interesting. We could talk about tariffs for two hours. One other thing. As we pivot to start-up culture, when you’re growing your team beyond somebody who can do to job, what do you look for in the qualities of people that you hire? How do you think about developing them?

Obviously, we’re going for much smaller teams. Every individual has to have much higher autonomy, because there’s so much more you can get done with the AI. You need to be able to come up with ideas for how to fill your day. You need to be taking bigger bites, which means that you need to have more decision-making ability. Definitely, the intelligence needs to be there.

We’re moving so quickly that it’s so much easier to bump into each other and step on each other’s toes. The emotional intelligence, the conflict resolution ability, and the ability for me and them to both give one-sentence, quick feedback. We don’t need to sit down. It doesn’t need to be a high-anxiety thing. There doesn’t need to be three weeks of hard feelings after I give a piece of hard feedback.

It’s like, “Got it. Move on. I have the confidence to change this and keep moving. I’m not going to freak out.” What’s really important is maintaining that healthy feedback culture, so that we can just keep moving fast without any problems. A good network is important because we’re looking for these autonomous fast movers.

It’s like I know somebody who can solve this problem because we are now relying on external service providers. When we’re hiring, that’s important. I do care about the good network. I care about someone who has the confidence to call me out when I’m wrong and knows how to deliver that. I’m not going to sit on it and become resentful, and then blow up at you. I’m just going to give the feedback. I will fix it. It’s not a huge thing.

I like being able to learn from people because I want them to be enjoyable to work with. The way that we’ve been hiring is honestly finding someone with these qualities, then vetting that they have these qualities, and coming to trust them. That has been the easiest to do from my network, and then with a nice, long trial period, which not everyone is open to. That’s not the move for everyone, but it is something that I want to have. It’s that long paid child where we get to know each other and make sure that you’re a perfect fit because we’re going to be working so closely together so much.

The way that we’ve been approaching this, you’re going to laugh, we’ve started throwing bimonthly pizza parties where we try to get people to bring their startup friends. We’ll get to know people through those, get to have a couple of interactions, get to see who your friends are, what you like in conversation, and then if we’re interested, we’ll talk to people.

That means those have been fun, a very cheap way to build a startup community in New York City. It definitely had that undertone. Shout out if you’re in New York City and you’re looking for a founding engineer or a revenue ops role. Get in touch with me on LinkedIn. I will invite you to Pizza Tuesday, and you can come hang out. That is not a promise to hire or interview you, but start hanging out, and we’ll see what happens.

I have my developer friend that I should introduce you to. She’s a bit question mark. She’s very personable. I don’t know how she survives every day back in software engineering. She’s so extroverted and so people-facing.

That’s what we’re looking for. That’s what I mean by that. When I said product engineer, I wasn’t joking. That’s how this role looks now.

I think she should be highly credible, too, because she has been the back end and all this stuff. I know nothing about that. Let’s take it back up. You said conflict? Can you give me an example of some disagreement you had and walk me through the process and the team? What did you disagree about? How did you give feedback, or did they give you feedback? How did that end out? Talk about what a healthy culture looks like.

Navigating Disagreements: Building A Healthy Startup Culture

I can give a good one and a bad one, I guess. I’m going to sanitize this a little bit. In the last iteration of the company, everything is management’s responsibility. At the end, it’s all my fault. Everything is my fault forever, but we were not getting our sales numbers at any stage of the pipeline. The pipeline was not set up well, but we were also selling something that was not destined to have product-market fit and needed a lot of work, and the way that was communicated across teams.

I’ll give a good example and a bad example. Sanitized, of course. A bad example is that the sales team was having a bad time. Sales and BD were having a very bad time selling a product that was not oriented well towards hitting the product market, fit. Product and Engineering stayed quite siloed. It was my job to communicate this across, but the sales and I were not strong enough with the Product and Engineering. We let them, and we did not get the critically bad data across quickly enough.

Eventually, when I do start pushing hard enough and saying it is time to make significant roadmap changes, including potentially throwing all the code away, which is where we did end up, that was really spicy. People were like, “Why can’t we just ship it? Why shouldn’t we continue spending all this money on this engineering team and on this very high-budget, very technical product development?” Definitely, I could have done more to facilitate that communication, had it been easier.

Also, in the future, I would like to hire people who, even if I messed it up as badly as I did last year in terms of not clearly getting that critical piece of information across with the appropriate amount of this is a five-alarm fire, as soon as I can. I would like to have people who go, “Now what?” Instead of “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” and like, “Let’s face this crisis very quickly.” In terms of now, I’m working with my co-founder. I came in at noon after running a bunch of errands. That was very cringy. He comes in very early, and I am a bit of a later start person.

I feel like we emotionally process that pretty quickly. I was in at 9:00. I’m working at 9:45, and I intend to do that going forward. There wasn’t the brewing resentment. I think it lasted days, if not hours, and then no tears about it from me. I’m like, “I owe that. I need to come in early. We need to be working the same hours.” Even if our output is the same in whatever hours we work, it’s important for us to be there to make each other feel supported while we’re grinding on this stuff.

I think that’s better. I had given him hard feedback too, and I haven’t felt afraid to do so. There has never been so much underlying like, “He’s going to blow up when I say this.” That’s not there, and I want to keep that culture. I want to never be afraid to say, “You’re scaring the juniors,” or “I think the road map is on sideways,” just saying something like, “You should redo that.” That should be easy to confide in and fearless, and there shouldn’t be any big feelings about it. Keeping that alive is the most important thing ever because, otherwise, the startup starts going off the rails.

I can give you one piece of unsolicited advice. You can preserve that to get between 60 and 100 people. After 100 people, it’s very hard to do. I don’t know why. My hypothesis is that after 100 people, keeping the bar of A-players becomes increasingly difficult. People start playing politics. I’m the optimist that’s terminally pessimistic. I’m the guy that predicted predicted nine of the last three recessions.

Given that, let’s unpack you and your style a little bit. Tell me about a time in your founder journey. Admittedly, I did not start my founder journey till I was 42. The weight of thinking about other people’s rents and mortgages, and you have to sell to do everything. I’ve never had that weight, but it weighed on me before. I had thousands of people work for me. Talking about a time during your founder’s journey that goes up and down. Did you read the book The Dip by Seth Godin?

No. Should I?

I’ll send you the link. It’s like the moment before that feeling you get is not the moment before defeat. It’s the moment before victory. Tell me about a time when you felt, I’m not going to say despondent, but you were like, “Why am I doing this?” What brought you to that spot, and how did you get through it?

There have been so many. A lot of them have been personal because I do care so much about the people on my team, and then caring about their well-being has come into conflict with my fiduciary responsibilities to the best business over and over again in 800 million ways. That has been heartbreaking and difficult every single time, and that has put me crying face down on the floor, honestly, multiple times.

I started my founder journey when I was 23 years old. I was a baby. I don’t think that I was high ego in every way, but I certainly was in a lot of ways. I was high ego about the engineering and the technology is most important, which put us on a super crash course for failure. I didn’t know how to hire. I didn’t know who to hire. I didn’t know what roles to hire for. I didn’t know what divisions there should be in a startup. There were so many mistakes. A lot of people got jostled, quite severely, by my mistakes. I have to own that. On top of having to own that, I will have to fire them, or I will have to give them hard feedback because I messed up in a certain way.

All of that was extremely difficult. It makes you feel like an awful person. You’re being the enemy villain in somebody’s life. You are messing their life up when you make a mistake. They’re right to be angry at you. It doesn’t feel good. Coming to terms with that, with the fact that I have to have the fiduciary duty. I have to make as few mistakes as possible. That’s a very high-pressure role that I’ve definitely had to do a lot of personal development to be ready to take that responsibility. I don’t know. It has been a lot of growing up. I felt like I’ve had to gain an extra decade crammed into the past three years of maturity, of emotional maturity, and of being ready to own my mistakes. Part of it is taking the hits and getting through it, resolving to do better next time. It is a big part of it.

A lot of things in my career prepared me to do this, but I also think there was no amount of preparation I could have done to understand everything. Would you agree with that?

Yeah. I had no preparation. It didn’t hit that I had to make revenue at first. I was raised on a cool idea, then I was like, “I can’t just write a fun engineering toy.” I knew nothing. I thought marketing and sales were unnecessary because we would build something cool. People would realize that it was cooler, and they would come. I didn’t know. I incorporated my company, and I made it an S Corp, and then I had to turn it back into a C Corp. I raised my first round without having legal counsel. I hand-red-line, and then chatted with a lawyer who is not retained by the company. It was awesome. Good job, Claudia. I was doing a great job at the start. I was Googling all good.

The amount that I’ve had to learn in the past couple of years has been truly staggering. I don’t think that anything can prepare you. My co-founder has a lot of preparation because he went to a proper business school. He went through CDTM, which is a great German startup training accelerator thing. He worked at McKinsey. He has a lot of exposure to the inside of enterprises. Whereas I was a hacker freelancer. I had been an intern in a couple of places, but I was focused on my technical skills and not on my business school.

He is a lot more prepared, but I’ve also seen him learn and grow a lot on the job very rapidly. It’s totally being, but open to dying of exposure from raw, unfiltered capitalism. It puts you in a place that you will never get in a job. That level of autonomy is not something that a lot of people experience in their lives. You’re going to have learnings no matter what.

There are a lot of product people out there, like engineers. The disruption, and maybe we’ll need fewer engineers. Do we see more startups? What happens to that? If one of those says, “I think I’m going to get disrupted. Screw that. I’ve always wanted to do this. I’m going to jump now.” Most people don’t change because they see the light. They change because they feel the heat. They start to feel some heat. They jump in. What advice would you give them as they’re getting going?

Advice For Aspiring Founders: Talk To Customers, Not Just Vision

First off, you should do it. You should jump. This has been the most rewarding, amazing, growth-inducing experience of my life. I am a significantly better person than I was when I started this company in almost every single way. It will transform you. People are different once they do this. It’s so good. You should do it. I encourage everyone to do it. The thing that you need to do is not get swept up in all of the glamour and noise, like, “Steve Jobs had a vision. He was going to change the world.” No, don’t do that. That’s a very glamorized storybook, a genius narrative of something that probably was not reality.

Most of these founder stories are super glamorized and valorized. It’s a hero narrative. It’s fun to read, not reality. What you need to do is you need to go talk to customers. You need to assume that you are going to build a cool toy. Even after you’ve talked to a hundred customers because you are an engineer, because you are a product person, you’re going to go build a very cool toy, that’s very cool, that’s too technically articulate, and probably doesn’t meet their business need, and you spent way too much money not meeting their business need.

Talk about your vision when you need to have the glamour with the VCs. The VCs love the vision. What you need to do is talk to the customer, like, “I’m looking at the Nielsen Norman Group usability here.” There are texts I have taped to my wall. It’s like, “Interfaces should not contain information which is irrelevant, blah, blah, blah. A minimalist three-legged stool is still a place to sit.” Solve the problem, get them to give you some money, and then think about the rest.

If you want to raise a backgammon and play that game, okay, but it takes the pressure off of you to do the right thing. There’s a good chance that you raise that mega round, set it all on fire, and then you’re very sad in four or five years because you’ve paid yourself a startup founder salary.. Be careful. Make sure you’re meeting a market demand. Make sure it’s sustainable. Playing the big narrative hero games, the people that you see right now doing that in the news, they have connections. They have PR teams. They have things going on for them that you don’t even understand yet, and you don’t have them. If you’re a little guy raising a seed round, go talk to a customer.

Did you see in the news? Somebody raised a $2 billion seed round off a $10 billion valuation?

That’s Mira Murati. She was the chief technology officer, or the CPO, of OpenAI. You and your seed round aren’t that?

Why do you need $2 billion? I guess that is my question.

This is above my pay grade.

Fair enough.

She probably does. She’s probably going to use it well, but this it’s probably for really good go-to-market or good R&D. I don’t claim to know the specifics of that deal, how it went down, or anything. I don’t know anything. It’s above my pay grade. I am talking to customers. I am chopping wood and carrying water. Thank you very much.

I love it. My gut says everybody like you toils over this question. You can only pick one. What is the most impactful book you’ve read, and why should someone on your path pick this book up? You only get one. You can’t say I got two good ones.

I’m so between two. I’m going to go spicy with it. I had, and a lot of founders have this. The thing I typed in the stock is, “Sucking chest wound of a god-shaped tool in my life.” I had rationalized myself into atheism. I grew up very Catholic. I have been practicing Jewish for several years now, but at some level, I was like, “I can’t believe I’m too rational. How could this exist?” It’s like the paradox about how God can be good when there is so much evil in the world trips me up.

I came back to, I won’t say religion, because I’ve always been practicing religion pretty much. There have been only short breaks from that in my life, but I came back to actual faith and spirituality in the past year. It had been brewing for a while. The book that I’m bringing in is not the Bible, not the Torah. I’m not going to do that to you. It is actually Carl Jung’s The Red Book. He talks through this analogy. He calls it God in an egg, which is a vision that he had about how you bring God back after you’ve understood all of these very rational arguments for why there can’t be a God.

It’s very psychological. It’s actually inside of you. I don’t know. I’m not going to try to explain it well, but that was what got me to get over my rational brain and start having a much more depth of spirituality. It got me to get over myself and come back to that. A lot of my vices, problems, insecurities, things I was messing up, and things that I was making myself very miserable with, just ironed themselves out once I no longer had an existential black hole sitting there, being the undertone of everything that I did. I feel like I’ve come to everything that I do in a much more positive way instead of a much more negative way.

You asked. I never bring this up unless someone seems excited about it, but I think that’s that, and then also all of the young stuff that I’ve read afterward has been incredibly impactful on me. It has changed my entire mindset. I feel there are no atheists in startups like a foxhole. I’m very glad that this happened to be the past year or so.

You had me at sucking chest wound of a god-shaped tool. That’s the storytelling that I was hooked me at the beginning. Where can everybody get in touch with you? Where can they get in touch with your startup?

Probably LinkedIn is best. Just DM slide me. I may or may not respond, depending on how compelling the thing you say is. I post a lot on there, so follow me. Supplyco.ai is our website. I think reaching out through there might currently be broken, though. If you’re interested in the product, just come to me or my co-founder, Jannik Wiedenhaupt, on LinkedIn. That’s a good way to reach us.

It was super nice talking to you. We could have gone Rogan-long. We’ll have to do this again at some point. I’m rooting for you. If you need anything for manufacturers and the supply chain, please talk to me. We’ll have to run a pilot when the timing is right.

I’m super excited. Thank you so much for your time. This is so much fun.

Important Links

• Supplyco
• Claudia Richoux on LinkedIn
• Jannik Wiedenhaupt on LinkedIn
• The Dip
• The Red Book

About Claudia Richoux

Claudia Richoux is a founder, engineer, and researcher based in New York City. She’s the Founder and CEO of Supplyco.ai, a venture-backed startup building sales intelligence and automation tools for industrial manufacturers.