Arjun R Pillai (00:28.93)
Welcome everybody to yet another episode of Rethink Revenue Podcast. Today I am super excited to welcome Pelek Israeli to the podcast. He is currently the CRO of Vyantis. He has been focused on SaaS, performance marketing and a bunch of creative technology media. You have worked in startups and in big companies. You have been a CRO multiple times. And to top all of it, Vyantis just announced your 41 million series C.
And in the report I read that you have been tripling your ARR two years in a row. Most companies are actually struggling to keep up with the growth and here you are doing tripling and then going to your series A. Amazing. Congratulations. That's what we are here to learn from. We are excited to learn more about how you are doing it, what are the challenges that you have, how are you using AI. With all of that, let me welcome you to the show palette.
Peleg Israeli (01:32.654)
Hello Arjun, thank you for having me over and thanks for the warm congratulations. I do want to say just one nuance, it's our Sirius B. So yes, it's been an exciting week. We've announced our Sirius B, $41 million. Intel Capital has joined us as one of our investors and we're excited. That brings us to a total of $60 million of funding. We worked very hard to get to this milestone, but we have much more work to do to continue on this path we're on.
Arjun R Pillai (01:42.189)
War.
Arjun R Pillai (02:02.882)
The work just started and that makes sense. The company is also not that old, right? It's what? 2022 founded company, something like that.
Peleg Israeli (02:10.158)
It's four years old, so we found it in 2020. Yeah, about 75-ish people. Yeah, still going through our birth motions.
Arjun R Pillai (02:19.704)
Yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing. So as the CRO of the company that is tripling in revenue and you have way more work to be done now that you have more money in the bank, what is keeping you up at night as a CRO?
Peleg Israeli (02:33.26)
Yeah, and you know what? You kind of hit the nail on the head because I think with great success also comes great expectations, right? So yes, we have an amazing week and all great, but we have so much more we want to do. We have big plans. We have big visions. We have lots of kind of ideas. But ultimately, what keeps me up at night is execution. We have smart people with brilliant ideas and big visions and everything makes sense. And I think...
We just need to make sure we execute flawlessly and make sure we turn ideas into action and do that in a way that we can grow healthily and keep our customers happy, continue to bring value and scale the business in the most healthy way possible.
Arjun R Pillai (03:15.384)
How big is your team, your sales, let's say the quota carrying reps or the post sales people, just for people to get a context of what we are talking here.
Peleg Israeli (03:25.048)
Yeah, the go-to-market side of the company is ballpark 10 people. So it's a relatively small go-to-market team. We do have kind of a unique setup. We rely heavily or part of our growth motion is coming through partnerships. That's a big focus area that is scalable. We have pre-sales functions that are very important part of our go-to-market team. So not quite a carrying in the kind of more
Arjun R Pillai (03:53.496)
finished
Peleg Israeli (03:54.338)
direct sense of the way but a very, very strong contributor to the sales motion and a small and mighty team that accomplishes quite a lot.
Arjun R Pillai (04:03.639)
I know that when this product as such has a lot of AI, you you do a lot of predictive things for your customers. But as a CRO, how is AI shaping your day to day or your teams? How are you thinking about AI within your career?
Peleg Israeli (04:20.384)
It's interesting, right? So from a pure CRO perspective, because I can talk about ours, on how kind of AI is embedded in our solutions and how our customers are using it for marketing. But zooming out for that for a moment from a pure CRO who's running my team, I think we use AI in several different ways. One in the kind of first that comes to mind is in video conferencing like we're having now, right? So it's different tools that record calls, that transcribe them, that have...
give you a clear executive summary, sentiment analysis, type of tools that just help you oversee everything we're doing at scale. And that has proved to be extremely effective, especially when we're living in a global world and many of the teams or team members are remote. Ultimately, putting us all in the same conversation through using AI technology is a real game changer. So that's the first one.
Arjun R Pillai (04:56.94)
Mm-hmm.
Peleg Israeli (05:16.044)
I'm thinking about outreach, right? And just kind of one-on-one personalization. So, Gen.ai has proved to be phenomenal in that sense and helping us customize what it is we're trying to say, specific use cases or conversations or what kind of situations, again, has made reps live a bit more, I don't want say easier because it creates different challenges that we can talk about as well, but it does add a lot of efficiency into the workflows and helps them focus their time.
on different items.
Arjun R Pillai (05:48.279)
Is a good part of your motion go-to-market motion outbound as well today or is it supported by marketing? How do you split your I guess the top of the funnel?
Peleg Israeli (05:58.454)
Yeah, so we're an interesting product in that sense because what we've brought to the world is very, very innovative, which means that on one hand, it's awesome that we've really disrupted kind of the space we play in and are bringing this fresh new approach. But what comes with that is a heavy kind of something that we need to invest heavily in is an education. We need to actually tell the world.
what this innovation is all about, why this product is important, how we can fundamentally change the way marketing teams go about their performance marketing. So just to answer your question, yes, outbound is a lot of that, but it's also getting up on stages and introducing this new way of thinking to the world. It's some of our content marketing. It's through the partnerships I said, and just thinking through how to educate on a bit of a larger scale about what it is that we're doing.
Arjun R Pillai (06:56.394)
And you have been in the MaTeX space and Atex space and these spaces have gone through big shifts. They used to be VC's favorite space back in the day and then it kind of changed and then Google, Meta, Amazon started taking bulk of the dollars coming out of that tech space. So what is the biggest shift that is happening right now in your space?
Peleg Israeli (07:19.652)
wow. So yes, the majority of my career I've been in these spaces. So I've seen the evolution and also from, I guess, from many different sides, from the client or advertiser side, from the agency side, from the SaaS company side, and even from the platform side. I spent a couple of years at Meta. So really, if I had to answer your question in a simple way, I'd say AI has fundamentally changed the way these advertising platforms work and has moved the whole kind of media buying motion.
to be very much related to a black box where you throw in creatives and a budget and a target. And AI in the black box makes a ton of decisions that you have very little, if any, visibility into. And hopefully magic comes out the other side of that. But it's moved from very precise media buying and targeting. And I'm going to target this demographic in Texas at this hour of the day, three times around this zip code, to let the black box choose.
where this is going and what's going to be most effective. And it works. Don't get me wrong. That approach works. But I think there's lots, lots more to do to actually impact the black box. So that's the number one frustration I hear kind of for marketing teams where ultimately a lot of the levers that they are used to operating have been taken away from them. And now it's up to AI to solve all their problems. And really a good marketer ask themselves, what can I do to control the outcome of
working with this black box.
Arjun R Pillai (08:50.621)
So I think I am seeing the same things, but at the same time, while I think it's a huge leverage for the marketers, Hawaii is AI still not utilized that much. If you go to an average demand gen team, whether B2C or B2B, they are using some form of an AI, but it's more for like a content generation, you know, or an ad copy generation or something like that. But the
more than that they haven't started using like an agent or something why do you think AI is still underutilized
Peleg Israeli (09:23.212)
Yeah, that's a great question. I can answer that from kind of the space that Vojantis plays in. So I'll talk about predictive AI, right? Because I think Gen.AI, for example, is being utilized. We can argue about how much and if it's doing in a good way. But chat GPT, for as an example, I think many folks are using, also running into challenges associated with that, but it is being utilized. Predictive AI, different field.
I don't see that almost being utilized at all. And I think it's because A, it's very, very complex, right? So it's not yet at the point where there's an easy consumer facing kind of interface that you could very easily kind of expect to create a big leaps and bounds forward through with predictive AI. And I think the second part of that is that not many people fully understand and appreciate how predictive AI can fundamentally change
everything they do on the business and once you sit down and think about it for a while it all makes sense but it's not the natural go-to to kind of think through how to grow your business.
Arjun R Pillai (10:31.54)
Yeah, most of the times, you when at least in this world, when we see AI, people kind of directly go to Gen AI and assume that all AI is Gen AI. But that's a clear differentiation between the Gen AI or the language AI, which is generation of language and content. And then there is a predictive AI, which is where you guys are playing, which is all about predicting the next actions, predicting the next best outcome, and then optimizing the system based on that. So
When the system and for good or bad, advertising has been the space that has used machine learning for a really long time. Even back in 2010, 2015, know, ad bidding, bid optimization, there was a lot of ML going in even then. So now it is actually going to the next level with companies like yours. Where do human marketers add the most value now?
Peleg Israeli (11:22.996)
what a loaded question, right? Are the machines taking over? I'll tell you what, and this is actually interesting, I actually go back to Gen.AI, because I think it's maybe easier to make the point there, but maybe to answer your question directly, I think it's all about how humans and machines work together, right? So I know there's this fear, there's debate about AI is getting better and better, and it's coming for our jobs, and it's taking away kind of different responsibilities that we have.
But I think you'll see this across many different teams, at least in the Gen.AI space, when people try to use Gen.AI, know, sometimes it works great. Many times, it's not 100 % what we want that it's in the ballpark. And other times, it's far away from the ballpark. And then it starts to become this question of where is the human element that is, first of all, asking Gen.AI tools to do whatever it is they want them to do, but also monitoring, monitoring the output, looking at what's happening, being kind of that.
And the bigger and more you invest in it, there's actually more efficient and scalable and ways to think through how do you insert humans into this loop and how do humans kind of amplify their skill at the same time, in control and make sure they're not making ridiculous mistakes. So that is definitely a part where I think humans have and will continue to have a big role to play.
Arjun R Pillai (12:31.751)
you
Peleg Israeli (12:45.432)
Maybe going back to one of your first questions and into the CRO role and kind of from a pure sales standpoint or perspective, it's the human connection, right? Because ultimately it's very easy to fall into the trap of let's do everything remotely and on VC and let's use GenAI tools to craft all our messaging and let's tell the machine what we want to say and they'll say it more articulate and better than that. And you can fall into that trap.
and kind of do everything in an AI focused way. But I think the real magic happens when people meet outside of this digital and virtual world and actually create real connections and from a sales perspective, look each other in the eye, shake hands, gain that trust, talk about something that maybe is not 100 % only business related, because that's the 15 minutes slot we have in the calendar. And I think that's awesome.
I love it when that happens. Just last week I was in London, so we launched our EMEA office, which was an exciting moment, and we had an event, and I gave a talk at the event and met some really interesting people, and following kind of my talk, some people came up and we discussed some of the topics that I addressed, and one of them was very, very interested and wanted to continue the conversation.
And suddenly it became, hold on, you're still in town, when can we meet again? And we actually met again that same day and talked about how we went, potentially do business together. But to me, it was just a reminder of, wow, I'm so happy, I was there physically. People were there and wanted to take another physical meeting and just have real one-on-one time, which we can't lose in this whole AI revolution. Long answer to a very short question.
Arjun R Pillai (14:37.874)
No, no, I think I agree. There are several pieces where AI is extremely good, even in our world, right? But when it comes to knowledge management and things like that, AI is ahead. And it can actually help humans quite a bit, the sellers quite a bit in dockets world and the customers that we work with. So totally aligned with what you're seeing. I think that I also think that the adoption of AI in the companies will be slower than what people are expecting.
because this we live in the kind of a little tech bubble going to tech Twitter and hearing everything about AI. We think the whole world is talking about AI, but most people are not really talking about AI. They are going about their work, but AI is slowly seeping into almost everything that they are doing. And, it will still take its own time for it to kind of fully bake into our lives and start adding a ton of value and the displacement while it may happen, it's not going to be like as drastic as people think it is. That's I was basically agreeing with you.
with a long-winded sentence. So in your world, how are you guiding your own teams? You like you mentioned about the conversational intelligence that you are using basically to keep up. But beyond that, are there individual pieces or problems that, hey, if you could solve it today using AI, what is that one problem that you would love AI to solve for you or your team members?
Peleg Israeli (15:38.84)
Yeah.
Peleg Israeli (16:03.502)
wow. Lots of things I'd love AI to solve, but you know what? Maybe as a CRO, I can kind of move the conversation a bit from the upper funnel where we started. So obviously sales, we talked about that, but then what happens once you close the deal? What happens once customers onboard to this complex solution that requires time and effort? And that's a place where I think AI can do wonders and is doing wonders. And it's how...
organizations start to embed or integrate some of this technology into customer onboarding flows, into kind of making the analysis piece of the ongoing work much easier. There's a lot of product related things that can happen easier, more efficiently and more effectively through the strong usage of AI. That as a CRO is very important to me because it shortens cycles onboarding cycles. It creates a better experience for the customers.
and hopefully it kind of makes everything we do much more scalable. So that's my one kind of magic request from the AI universe.
Arjun R Pillai (17:07.889)
Got it. I'm sure somebody is building it and they are listening to it and you can expect an email and LinkedIn and a bunch of sequences for this. So now to the other side, right? There are a lot of believers. People believe all kinds of things about AI. What is a common misconception or say a myth in AI that you're like, no, I don't believe in that at all. Is there something like that?
Peleg Israeli (17:35.842)
Hmm, I think in our world, in the predictive AI world, I think a common misconception is if folks want to go down that path and they want to leverage predictive AI, you naturally think, all right, I'll build a prediction and once I have that prediction and it's accurate, I'm golden. I have it all. There we go. I wanted a prediction. Now I have an accurate prediction. That's it. Game over, Or reach the finish line.
But the reality is, and what we're seeing specifically in the world of marketing, and I think it translates to a lot of other worlds as well, predictions are just not enough. So yes, you can have a really good prediction, but that naturally goes to that next step of now that I have this prediction, what do I do with it? How do I utilize this prediction in a scalable, effective way? So in our case, we have a great prediction on what a user is going to do. How do I now train Google and Meta?
to digest that prediction. How do I turn a prediction into a signal that they can actually understand, react to, and do a better job when delivering ads to the advertiser that sent them that signal? So I guess there's a whole workflow component of turning predictions into actions that people naturally miss and might want to more time thinking about.
Arjun R Pillai (18:54.575)
Yeah, it's interesting. One of the three customers that we bring on board, they also do the DIYing of AI, but they get to the demobile state very quickly to your example, like prediction, some prediction very quickly, but to go from that state to a product where there is workflow integrations, ongoing maintenance, that's just painful. takes a company to build it, which is why companies like us exist.
Peleg Israeli (19:23.278)
100 % and I'm glad you touched about that ongoing maintenance standpoint as well because that is a whole world in itself, right? If really you've unlocked a ton of value through predictions and you figured out the workflows and everything is working well, you have to appreciate that you're now, you've turned your data infrastructure to a mission critical part of how you run your business and if you don't have very strong maintenance and operational kind of rigor around how to maintain prediction or signal continuity, then
you're not going to be able to enjoy this goodness over time.
Arjun R Pillai (19:57.615)
Awesome. So as a leader, you have to also keep updated, right? Just like we talked about maintenance of the machine maintenance of ourselves. Do you read books? Do you follow podcasts? Like what are the ways in which you kind of bring in knowledge to yourself? And then do you have recommendations for the listeners?
Peleg Israeli (20:18.37)
Yes, I do read books, I do follow podcasts. Actually, when you asked me about a recent book I was reading, I brought this one which is actually more of a leader. You know what, it doesn't show here, let's see. Now, I'm not getting beyond the blur, but it's called Multipliers. It's more of a leadership book than an AI book, but I'm definitely trying to follow the recent trends on AI and I think that's important. It's hard to do given so much is happening so quickly.
But maybe back to our point about the human element and this book that I'm currently reading, Multipliers, it's a book about basically it distinguishes between two different types of leaders. Multiplier, which is someone who absorbs the energy of the group, amplifies it, makes people at their best and helps kind of, I guess, share the love in a way that folks...
leave the room doing a better job in their role and as a team versus the miniatures, which are folks or leaders that might do the opposite and all the negative things that you can associate with that. But anyhow, I say all this because it's also a reminder that in the age of AI, it's important to also refine our emotional side, our EQ, our leadership skills, our soft skills, and make sure that we are at our best at that part of the world or that part of the equation where AI
is not as good as humans are and that's where we can bring our unique added value to the organization and teams that we work with.
Arjun R Pillai (21:48.462)
That I have to ask this who is leader who is? Inspirational to you who has maybe inspired you in the past or right now Who do you look up to from that way because given that you are and I think it's a great point that you made which is why I wanted to understand who do you see as your leader or inspiration?
Peleg Israeli (22:07.874)
Wow, it's a big question.
Peleg Israeli (22:14.614)
Are we talking, you know what? I'm going to keep this very easy because I can keep this into the voyantist world and I can give the example of our CEO, okay? Our founder and CEO. And I say this because I'm not going into big tech and I can talk about this leader and that leader and many people have many different opinions. But really our CEO, I think is a brilliant person who on one hand has a strong
Arjun R Pillai (22:25.111)
haha
Peleg Israeli (22:39.67)
vision and strong understanding kind of of the space and where it's going and how to build a company but also has that humility and has that humbleness and that kind of human emotion component I talked about that helps all of us get behind the technological vision. So I know it's not a throwing out kind of a list celebrity that the whole world will know but I say that more characteristics of what I'm looking for in wait meters.
Arjun R Pillai (23:01.517)
Understood. That makes sense. I mean, I have seen in your LinkedIn post as well that you really enjoy working with the team. And I saw that you initially was an advisor to the team and then you joined the company. So I would assume that the founders and the CEO had a lot to do with why you joined and why you are continuing to be there as the leader.
Peleg Israeli (23:24.76)
both founders and that's really a lesson to all the founders out there of how important it is for you as human beings to kind of make those connections with your leaders and I think the founder qualities and their characteristics really speak to people who are looking at the company and considering if it went to join.
Arjun R Pillai (23:44.757)
Make sense. Is there anything else on the topics that we discussed or anything else that you would want to tell to the listeners?
Peleg Israeli (23:53.582)
No, I've done a lot of rambling, but I can reverse the question to you Arjun. I'm curious, you talk to revenue leaders, you talk to CROs, you're very deep in the space. So I'm wondering if you're seeing any patterns or anything that you kind of stands out to you in the way that revenue leaders are leveraging or not leveraging AI to run their organizations.
Arjun R Pillai (24:18.636)
Yeah, the biggest pattern that I've noticed and this is very new, by the way, is that companies have started thinking a lot about their GTM AI strategy. And I'm hearing this keyword come up from multiple revenue leaders. And these are like, know, slightly bigger companies sometimes could be like 100 million revenue or like close to a billion 800 million, whatever that number is, they are actively thinking about a GTM AI strategy. Either the CEO is telling
like the VP of AI committee to go figure out the GTMAI strategy or to the rev ops to figure out the GTMAI strategy. And they are a little bit at loss in terms of like, yeah, like they know how to do point things like, you you want to improve one thing. Yes, I know how to do it, but how do you kind of tie it all together into a GTMAI strategy? That's what they come to companies and vendors. And I don't think the companies and vendors in this space are doing a good enough job in
educating them on what a GTMA strategy could look like. Everybody is trying to sell their bit of AI instead of saying that, okay, you have to start with like a KPI. You have to improve your midrides by 15 % or you have to improve your revenue per seller by 20%. Now let's start there and work backwards and try to see what makes sense here. And when you take that trusted advisor role, sometimes your company is not even the need for them. And that is fine because
That anyways, you are not going to make that sell if there is no need. But this is the pattern that I'm hearing. I'm not hearing it enough. But I think in the next six months to a year, we are going to hear a lot of talk conversations around GTMA astrology.
Peleg Israeli (25:58.118)
I think that's a spot on observation. I agree with you and to maybe take it a step further and maybe be a bit cynical on this, the vast majority of the solutions I'm seeing and kind of people are talking to me about is the end result is already predefined. Take something and do a ton more of it. And that kind of results in this world of much more volume over quality. Right?
Barting everyone around you. It's just a lot more of whatever it is you're trying to do and I think the quality piece might be Missing a bit back to what is the KPI? What is you're trying to do and how do we make that a bit more precise and effective and efficient?
Arjun R Pillai (26:35.275)
Yeah, the other pattern, which is exactly what you're talking, I guess, is everybody is trying out some AISDR and everybody is hating it. You know, like it's a pattern. I mean, there are pieces where AISDR could work, but most of the people are trying it out, spending a lot of money from their experimental budget. And they are like, you know, this is not adding to my pipeline. So that's the other pattern where people have to think beyond this. You know, let me scale more of what is not working.
My SDRs are not working so let me scale and do more of what is not working. It just doesn't make any sense.
Peleg Israeli (27:10.68)
But you know what? Back to my point earlier about the human connection. So if we're bombarding the world with endless overwhelming amounts of content, suddenly a human walking into the room and saying hello stands out, right? It's a different approach that might just get retraction.
Arjun R Pillai (27:25.471)
Yeah, yeah, which is exactly why we do the rethings at dinners, know, which hopefully you will make it the next time last time you couldn't make it. So that's exactly the point, right? There's all this virtual, but the kind of discussions that we have at our dinners is just amazing. But yeah, it is is amazing that we have had you for, you know, all this while. Thanks for all the insights. If the listeners want to learn more about you, about the company, contact you. Where should they go?
Peleg Israeli (27:31.266)
Yep.
Peleg Israeli (27:55.17)
So first of all, you're welcome to hit me up on LinkedIn or on my email. So my name is Peleg Israeli. That's spelled P-E-L-E-G dot I-S-R-A-E-L-I at voyantes, V-O-Y-A-N-T-I-S dot A-I.
Arjun R Pillai (28:14.763)
A true salesperson. Here is my email. Feel free to hit me up. I am not a hypocrite. I reach out to people. You are free to reach out to me. Love it man.
Peleg Israeli (28:18.516)
Yeah.
Peleg Israeli (28:22.542)
But please don't throw all these AI-based SDRs at me. I asked you, don't do that.
Arjun R Pillai (28:29.142)
Yeah, human messages folks, no AISDR sequences please. Thanks a lot Pelek, you have been a sport. Thanks a lot for entertaining all the different tangential questions. Thanks for sharing all the insights. And finally, thanks a lot for all the listeners for joining us. We'll see you on the next episode. Thanks a lot Pelek.
Peleg Israeli (28:35.01)
There we go.
Peleg Israeli (28:47.566)
Thanks, Arjun.
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