Inside 3,700 Founder Interviews: How AI is Changing the Way Companies are Built

In this kickoff episode of AI for Go-To-Market, host Emir Atli sits down with Nathan Latka—founder, podcast host, and interviewer of over 3,700 startup founders—to explore how AI is transforming GTM. They reflect on Emir’s early days as a founder and HockeyStack’s growth, then dive into AI-driven pricing models, the evolving digital marketing landscape, and the power of authentic founder storytelling. Nathan shares insights from his vast podcast experience, highlighting how data and trust shape the future of AI-powered GTM. Whether you’re a founder, marketer or salesperson, this episode offers a candid look behind the data shaping tomorrow’s go-to-market playbook.

00:00 Introduction

00:09 Reflecting on Early Beginnings at HockeyStack

00:52 HockeyStack’s Product Evolution and Growth

01:37 AI and Go-To-Market Strategies

01:55 Podcast Insights and Founderpath

03:58 In-Person Events and Marketing Tactics

06:49 Founder-led LinkedIn and Cold Calling Strategies

12:11 Billboards and Media Investments

17:08 AI Innovations with Odin

19:34 Selling to Sales Teams

20:12 Building Trust with Data

21:17 Challenges of Data Sharing

22:36 AI in Marketing and Sales

25:10 Value-Based Pricing Models

33:52 Driving Growth with In-Person Events

36:13 Maintaining High Energy as a Founder

42:04 HockeyStack’s Future Plans and Podcast Distribution Strategy

[00:00:00] Emir Atli: Hello everyone. This is the first episode of AI for Go to Market by HockeyStack. I have Nathan Latka here. How are you? 

[00:00:06] Nathan Latka: I'm doing good, Emir. Thanks for having me, man. 

[00:00:08] Emir Atli: Awesome. I wanna start with, I don't know if you remember, but you were the act, you were actually the person that interviewed me for the first time when I was 18.

[00:00:19] Emir Atli: I don't know if you still remember that but yeah

[00:00:20] Nathan Latka: How old are you now? 

[00:00:21] Emir Atli: I'm 23. 

[00:00:22] Nathan Latka: That's wild. 

[00:00:23] Emir Atli: Yeah. That was our first product. We were in product analytics space. We were failing. If you had $800 in MRR, and that was like the headline, ack reached $800 in MRR. 

[00:00:33] Nathan Latka: And I probably said that in a proud way though, right?

[00:00:35] Nathan Latka: That's a good thing. You gotta start somewhere.

[00:00:37] Emir Atli: It's a good thing. But when I look back, it's so funny how things went. I was in Turkey in my parents' living room. The video quality is much different than this. And yeah it's a full circle moment for me. 

[00:00:48] Nathan Latka: Had you already met your co-founders?

[00:00:50] Nathan Latka: Yeah. In 2018? Yeah. Okay, got it. And is the product completely different now today than it was in 2018? 

[00:00:55] Emir Atli: That was like a really small, tiny [00:01:00] product analytics software. 

[00:01:01] Nathan Latka: Product analytics and like a Pendo light? 

[00:01:03] Emir Atli: Yeah, like a easier to use Mixpanel. 

[00:01:06] Nathan Latka: Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. Yeah. And now you've got Odin launching, you've got chat interfaces.

[00:01:11] Nathan Latka: Yeah. You're much, how many people are full time now? You're much bigger now. More than 800 for sure. 

[00:01:15] Emir Atli: Yeah. We have more than 60 people. We just did our Series A in February 20 while around with Bessemer, but everything off 

[00:01:21] Nathan Latka: 60 people. That's do you miss the days when you were back in your parents' room in Turkey and had no HR issues?

[00:01:26] Nathan Latka: No. Hiring, just you and your co-founders? 

[00:01:29] Emir Atli: Every day. 

[00:01:31] Nathan Latka: That's part of building though, so cool. Cool. Congratulations. It's, I'm really excited for you guys. 

[00:01:36] Emir Atli: Thank you very much. As the podcast theme is AI for Go To Market. Everyone is wondering about ai. It's like the, it's not new, but it's growing and growing every single day.

[00:01:44] Emir Atli: And you're one of the best people to talk about AI and overall go to market and overall companies, B2B, SaaS and everything, because you've seen thousands and thousands of sas. How many have you seen so far? 

[00:01:55] Nathan Latka: On the pod, so I built and sold my first software company and then launched my podcast in 2017.

[00:01:59] Nathan Latka: And [00:02:00] I've averaged about one episode per day for the better part of, 9, 8, 9 years. So I've interviewed over 3,700 founders personally, over a 20 minute interview. 

[00:02:08] Emir Atli: This is irrelevant, but how were you convincing founders to share all of their metrics on a podcast? 

[00:02:13] Nathan Latka: The I guess it didn't always start out with, Hey, come on the show and share all your metrics.

[00:02:17] Nathan Latka: What I learned though, is I just watched the data. The episodes that did the best were always the ones where founders shared the most. They were the most transparent. So I knew if I could get a founder to feel comfortable enough to share some of that stuff, that their episode would get more views and they would then get more customers.

[00:02:31] Nathan Latka: So the main reason most people come on is because the show's over 20 million downloads. Now each episode will get between five and 6,000 downloads on iTunes. And then it varies widely when we repost it on YouTube. Some of them flop and get a hundred views. Some of them crushing, get half a million views.

[00:02:45] Nathan Latka: So it just depends. But I think that's the trade off. The founders know I'm gonna grill 'em, but they still come on. 'cause maybe they want the exposure. 

[00:02:51] Emir Atli: Yeah. Yeah. It was like. Rapid fire questions. What's your revenue? Okay, cool. What's, how many customers do you have? Okay, cool. Where were you at next? Last year.

[00:02:57] Emir Atli: Okay, cool. Done. 

[00:02:58] Nathan Latka: Did you hate me in [00:03:00] 2018 after the interview? 

[00:03:00] Emir Atli: It was like a it was one of my first interviews, so it was like, I didn't know what was going on, but it was like seven, eight minutes At the end you were like, okay, cool. I will send you the recording. I will send the clips done.

[00:03:11] Nathan Latka: And you're like, what just happened? 

[00:03:12] Emir Atli: Yeah. What just happened? That's amazing. It was a good experience. And I've learned a lot from the podcast. I still do the. Database especially, that was 

[00:03:20] Nathan Latka: Oh, you listened to the show, is what you're saying? 

[00:03:21] Emir Atli: I listened to hundreds of episodes. I have checked out the database more than a thousand times.

[00:03:26] Emir Atli: Revenue metrics, everything. It's good. It was a good, really good SEO play too. Yeah. Whenever I was looking for a company in their revenue or anything like that, it was always at the top. 

[00:03:33] Nathan Latka: Yeah. That comes into, We're gonna talk about this in a little bit, but I think, we are right now sitting a very unique time that hasn't really happened in the last 20 years, and that is the homepage of the internet is changing.

[00:03:41] Nathan Latka: Yeah. If people aren't gonna search on Google. They're gonna be in the LLMs conversing with the chatbots and the lms. It's a massive land grab for real estate, so you just nailed it. There's a programmatic SEO play we run@gettka.com, which fuels us showing up in the lms, which is probably how, maybe you find us now today.

[00:03:57] Emir Atli: Yeah. Let's dive into that. Yeah. We were just talking about the in [00:04:00] person go to market motion and how everything like the digital channels are not working as well as in person. And you're running Founder Path, is it Right to say Founder Path has a software portion. And then also a capital portion, right?

[00:04:10] Emir Atli: It's a software. 

[00:04:11] Nathan Latka: Yeah. It's heavy on, so when I built my first software company, I wasted months not wasted, but I had to go spend months traveling to raise our series A. We did 2 million on a 8.5 pre 10.5 post. We were at a million dollars of a RR bootstrapped at that point. And when I exited, I made way less than I thought I would.

[00:04:28] Nathan Latka: And so I said, there's gotta be an alternative to VC for founders. And that's when I launched the debt fund. But what, where founders don't have time is I can't let's say I. Do a million dollars into HockeyStack. You don't have time to send me your QuickBooks p and l and your bank statements and your Stripe customers at the end of every month.

[00:04:45] Nathan Latka: So we built an API to get money out to founders faster. 

[00:04:49] Emir Atli: Yeah. So first of all, that's awesome. So you have a software portion and it's, you also described it as a. Bank almost, right? Like a financial services company and financial, 

[00:04:59] Nathan Latka: we don't check [00:05:00] deposits, but yes. Yeah.

[00:05:00] Nathan Latka: You could definitely call us a FinTech.

[00:05:02] Emir Atli: Yeah. What is working go to market for founder path right now? 

[00:05:06] Nathan Latka: Yeah I. The Founder Paths core business model is we're operating of our third fund. It's $150 million fund. So life to date, we've deployed $200 million into about 500 software companies. Their average ARR is about $8 million. So I guess if they were raising, that'd be what, late series A, early series B, maybe? Yes. Seven, 8 million of a RR. It's a very personal decision for the founders, right? So even though our website says. Connect your stripe, get an offer in 30 seconds. Why are you the next day?

[00:05:31] Nathan Latka: A lot of times these founders wanna shake my hand, meet me in person. They realize I'm not the crazy person on my podcast that has just asked out numbers all day long. Yeah. We go meet at the battery here in San Francisco. Less crazy go. Yeah. Less crazy. Less crazy. So what's working at Founder Path right now is we started hosting these mini events.

[00:05:46] Nathan Latka: And so if you go to lua lu.ma/meet SaaS meet and shake hands, meet SaaS, I'm just going literally city to city and just hosting small dinners. And if the dinners grow in terms of RSVPs, like past 10, 15 people, then I rent [00:06:00] a bigger space and we turn it into a mini conference. And if it gets bigger to like a hundred, we just make it a conference.

[00:06:05] Nathan Latka: So that's what's working for us right now. 

[00:06:07] Emir Atli: So all in person. 

[00:06:08] Nathan Latka: A lot of in person. Yeah. The other stuff a lot of the leads from Founder Path come from GI Latka. So GI Latka today, like as of yesterday, we're recording this on May 25th. I think Sunday, May 25th, holiday weekend we're hustling.

[00:06:20] Nathan Latka: Yeah. But we get anywhere between three and 4,000 organic clicks from Google and the LMS per day to get laca. When folks sign up to get Laca, I qualify if they're a founder or not, and I'll ping them instantly and say, Hey, are you looking for capital? We'd love to do a deal and then bring over to Founder Path.

[00:06:35] Nathan Latka: So there's no, there is no marketing or sales team at Founder Path besides myself and a gentleman named Kevin that just onboard users and founders.

[00:06:43] Emir Atli: Before, like this era. Of ai every digital channel is saturated. Maybe two, three years ago. Were you seeing more success in like traditional digital channels I don't know, ads SEO, any other digital channel?

[00:06:55] Nathan Latka: Yeah, we're doing, I don't know about you guys. We're having a lot of success with ads right now, but not the traditional sense. [00:07:00] Most of you guys, you're probably running ads. You're spending 20, 30, $50,000 a month on Google. You're probably pay an agency five grand a month just to manage it.

[00:07:07] Nathan Latka: And then maybe they take 2% of whatever the GMV is you're putting through their agency. What we have found is that the highest performing measured by click through rate and cost per click and cost per lead C-P-L-C-T-R-C-P-C. Those are all, what's performing best is I will go on LinkedIn every morning and I'll go find anyone talking about a founder, talking about how they've fast, they've grown revenue, or a tiny team with giant revenue or something SaaS related, and anything with more than a hundred likes and maybe 20, 30 comments.

[00:07:34] Nathan Latka: I'll comment and say, Hey, I'd love to feature you on our next webinar. You game to come on. Then my audience boosts that comment thread 'cause they see me engaging. And what happens is it usually will take off, we'll then promote that other person's content as a thought leader ad but the trade off is I'll say, Amir, your post is going viral.

[00:07:52] Nathan Latka: We'll put $2,000 of Facebook or of founder path ads spend behind it. But the trade off is right after the button in LinkedIn. You've gotta put [00:08:00] Join me on the next webinar with our Luma link to the webinar. So that's the call to action. It doesn't even feel like an ad. That's what's working best for us.

[00:08:07] Emir Atli: Actually that was one of my questions. I see those comments all the time. Yeah. Is that like an automation or is it all manual? You wake up? It's all me. You like search for, you probably have keywords, revenue, funder, bootstrap, whatever else. Yes. In the search. Okay. 

[00:08:20] Nathan Latka: Yeah, I think I'm, I don't know about you man.

[00:08:22] Nathan Latka: I'm nervous to have it anything connected to my LinkedIn that's automated. Yeah, like one for the fact that they could say something that looks like something for me that looks stupid if it says it or type something wrong or whatever. But two, it's just so risky. I don't know why I would risk my LinkedIn account, but I know a lot of people love automating on LinkedIn.

[00:08:37] Nathan Latka: Yeah, you don't do any automation, right? 

[00:08:39] Emir Atli: No. I'm really nervous too. Yeah. It used to. Smart. Not anymore. 

[00:08:43] Nathan Latka: Yeah. Are you spending money on LinkedIn ads at all for Hot? We do, yeah. Oh, you do? Yeah. Can you share, is LinkedIn like your biggest ad channel versus Google or Meta? 

[00:08:50] Emir Atli: Yeah. We have gone through a lot, so we have gone through 10 KA month, 200 KA month, 220 KA month.

[00:08:56] Emir Atli: Right now it's 40, 50 KA month. Okay. The interesting thing about LinkedIn or any other page [00:09:00] channel is. Like earlier, early on in the journey, we made the mistake of, okay, LinkedIn is generating X amount of pipeline, let's say 2 million, $3 million in qualified pipeline a month. If you double it, then we'll get 6 million as like traditional mistake.

[00:09:12] Emir Atli: So we increased that quarterly, monthly, but nothing changed. And what we found out is. If you are investing in one channel, then you need to invest in all other channels. So that one channel can basically giant more cut pipelines. So basically what we have done is we cut it in half and then we even decrease that even more.

[00:09:29] Emir Atli: You weigh it even more. Our spent, we cut it in. Oh, decreased it even more. Yeah. Yeah. We cut it in half. We then decrease a little bit more. And then we started an up on team. So we now have six SDRs and the head of sales open. And their entire flow is all automated. So they basically start at 9:00 AM all the way to 5:00 PM They do co calls only.

[00:09:46] Emir Atli: Oh, wow. And then 5:00 PM 6:00 PM they usually do follow ups in other admin tasks. Okay. And each one of them. Generate as much as LinkedIn. But what it happens is those people that hear about us on cold calls, they also see the LinkedIn ads. [00:10:00] So that means they see LinkedIn ads when they go Google, they see us again.

[00:10:03] Emir Atli: Yeah. So basically LinkedIn right now is working better at a 40% of the cost. But now we are investing in another channel that basically makes LinkedIn more efficient. Yeah. Now basically if we add in person events, which is what I wanna do, we have a giant scheme in two weeks. If you're in San Francisco, I would love for it to come.

[00:10:18] Nathan Latka: That's you do in-person events? 

[00:10:19] Emir Atli: Just, yeah. 

[00:10:20] Nathan Latka: Can I ask what that costs? 

[00:10:21] Emir Atli: This suite was 4,700. Okay, got it. 

[00:10:25] Nathan Latka: And how many people can you invite? 20. 

[00:10:26] Emir Atli: 20? Yeah. 

[00:10:27] Nathan Latka: Okay. That's. Okay, that's not bad. So it's divided by 10, 4 70. So yeah, you're paying like 250 per person. 

[00:10:32] Emir Atli: Yeah. And then I think this one doesn't have food.

[00:10:35] Emir Atli: So a hundred dollars per person, if you invite 20 people, it's like 2000. So it's, yeah. Six, 700. It's not bad. I think if you go to a really good restaurant in San Francisco, you would pay more. 

[00:10:44] Nathan Latka: A hundred percent. Yeah. You're a good person to ask this. 'cause look, I'm a data guy too.

[00:10:47] Nathan Latka: I'm always like, look at the data, look at the numbers. But what you just said, it's really hard to track, which is basically the soft power you're building on LinkedIn. Is helping decrease the friction and increasing conversion rate on your cold calls. Yeah, it's really hard [00:11:00] to track that attribution.

[00:11:01] Nathan Latka: Do you guys, HockeyStack I think maybe helps with some of this, but do you just go, okay, the numbers are good enough, but I'm also just using my intuition as CRO of HockeyStack that we're just gonna do this, it's the right thing to do. Like decreasing cost and adding another channel or in general?

[00:11:13] Nathan Latka: One thing is helping the other, even if you can't directly make the attribution work or link up. 

[00:11:18] Emir Atli: Yeah. One, as a software company we use AEC day to day. So we can essentially see the lift of convergence if someone has cocoa and LinkedIn touchpoint versus just LinkedIn.

[00:11:27] Emir Atli: We can also see if we have a cold call or like a website visit, if we retarget them on LinkedIn. Do we have more conversions? Is there an incremental lift? We use all of those reports on, on HockeyStack, which makes it much easier, but also day to day. As a CRO, I'm extremely close to our sales reps, both on SDRs and AEs.

[00:11:45] Nathan Latka: So like how many do you have today? It's just sales. 

[00:11:47] Emir Atli: We have 12. 12. 

[00:11:48] Nathan Latka: They all carry a quota. 

[00:11:49] Emir Atli: Yeah. Everyone is in terms, so everyone is in the office. So it makes it like they 

[00:11:52] Nathan Latka: work in here industrious. 

[00:11:53] Emir Atli: Exactly. So theirs sit there in those small rooms, Uhhuh, and then AEs also have their demo rooms. So basically [00:12:00] during the day, I would probably ask four or five, maybe six times a day.

[00:12:03] Emir Atli: How is everything, how are the conversations today? Do you see anything different? They also slack me all the time, like this is what I heard. So it was like the feedback loop is really short. So for example, I would say we have done billboards in San Francisco for four months. This Q1.

[00:12:15] Emir Atli: So during those months I was like, has anyone mentioned billboards? Anyone mentioned billboards? 

[00:12:19] Nathan Latka: Have they The view? Yeah. Really? Yeah. People say, I saw that on the billboard. That's why I took your cold call. 

[00:12:23] Emir Atli: Yeah. One of the. Biggest software companies actually said yes to a coco. And then we asked them like, why?

[00:12:30] Emir Atli: And then they said, actually, I've seen your billboard five months ago, and then I've been researching you online. Wow. And we were seeing them on our website all the time, so that's why we were calling them all the time. Yeah, so the feedback loop there is really short. And then also we have the data, so both of them.

[00:12:43] Nathan Latka: Yeah. 

[00:12:43] Emir Atli: That's wild. You guys. We see 

[00:12:44] Nathan Latka: billboards all the time and we go, I just always wonder, I'm like, oh, is that just a vanity thing? Is it working? You guys just heard it here from Amir. It's working. What do four billboards in San Francisco cost? 

[00:12:53] Emir Atli: So we have done 1 0 1 highway. That's the most expensive one.

[00:12:57] Emir Atli: Okay. That was like, can I guess 40? [00:13:00] Yeah. 

[00:13:00] Nathan Latka: Oh yeah. I say I was gonna guess something like 12 grand a month. And you have to do it for at least six months. No, the, you can do the minimum is one month. It was like 35, 40 K for one month. Yeah. Holy. That's way more expensive than I thought it would be.

[00:13:12] Emir Atli: But it is so we have done this with a seed startup actually. Okay. A software company. So they basically show on average this billboard gets x many impressions. 

[00:13:22] Nathan Latka: Oh, it's like a data company for billboards. Yeah. Yeah. What's the company? It's okay if you don't have it's, we'll put it in the show notes.

[00:13:27] Emir Atli: One screen, one screen, one screen AI shout out to them too. So they basically say visible board gets 5 million impressions. So then you can see per impression how much you pay. And it's. Not so much LinkedIn, a little bit more expensive, but yeah, so that one, and then we have done three more.

[00:13:41] Emir Atli: Actually, one of them was here. We were able to see it from our windows. Santo was like 120 K month. 

[00:13:46] Nathan Latka: Interesting. Okay. And you feel like it was worth it. You'll do it again, or you'll do it maybe once per year for a month. 

[00:13:51] Emir Atli: What is, what works really well for companies is you go to a city and you take over every single spot.

[00:13:56] Nathan Latka: So just go all in or all out. 

[00:13:58] Emir Atli: Yeah. So San Francisco is a [00:14:00] little bit harder to do that, but like places like Austin, for example is perfect. Yeah. Or like we have I. Like health tech companies that do this in like Northwest. For example, we have, we had one customer that basically told me we have done this in some city in Midwest.

[00:14:15] Emir Atli: I don't remember the city but they basically spent 30 K 

[00:14:17] Nathan Latka: and they track it all on HockeyStack. 

[00:14:19] Emir Atli: Yeah. And then they were basically in every single street of that. City. Wow. Because it's much less expensive than San Francisco. Like companies like RAMP for example, they do this all the time. You can see RAMP everywhere in San Francisco.

[00:14:30] Emir Atli: That works a little bit more. We wanted test it. We wanted to test it with a couple spots. It worked well. Yeah, but I think next step. I probably wouldn't do it in San Francisco because a million, 

[00:14:39] Nathan Latka: it's noisy. Yeah. You're also investing in media, right? Media as well. Yes. People I think, overlook media, especially like in the age of ai media is just like code like you, it's marginal value.

[00:14:48] Nathan Latka: You create it once you record a minute. You write one line of code and it can deliver value forever depending on what your distribution looks like as you launch it. Yeah. What guides you? You guys, this is a cool office you guys can't see here on the screen, but this obviously looks very cool [00:15:00] behind us.

[00:15:00] Nathan Latka: But literally on the other side, there's a massive wall that's probably 30 foot long and it's probably 10 feet tall with just the whiteboard schematic stuff. And then there's probably four or five tables in this room. And then you guys, it sounds have other rooms for your sales reps.

[00:15:11] Nathan Latka: Yeah. But why invest in media? 

[00:15:14] Emir Atli: Yeah, so media, from day one, we have always invested in fonder brand, our LinkedIn content. I've been doing LinkedIn for the last two and a half years, so I've been posting every single day. I still do. 

[00:15:23] Nathan Latka: Manually or use any tools for that? 

[00:15:25] Emir Atli: No, I don't use tools manually.

[00:15:27] Emir Atli: Yeah. So one, what I found out is. LinkedIn or like any type of social media. LinkedIn works well for us because we target enterprise midmarket, enterprise B2B software companies and their GTM leadership, that's where they hang out in the, basically the impact of LinkedIn or like any type of funder brand or employee brand.

[00:15:47] Emir Atli: We have also, we have, we also have employees that post regularly on LinkedIn that is not even comparable to any go to market channel. 

[00:15:53] Nathan Latka: Like it's the best. 

[00:15:54] Emir Atli: Yeah, it is the best like people. Associate themselves with HockeyStack through a person. And [00:16:00] also you can basically imagine. I, whenever someone asks me a question like this I'm always saying if you wake up tomorrow, imagine you can say something and then in one day, 50,000, 60,000, sometimes a hundred thousand people see it.

[00:16:13] Emir Atli: My best post last month was a million impressions. I wake up one day, I write something, and a million people see it the next day. There is something that you cannot compare that to anything else. 

[00:16:21] Nathan Latka: Why do you think that post worked? 

[00:16:23] Emir Atli: That was a traditional comment to get. Posts. 

[00:16:26] Nathan Latka: Okay.

[00:16:26] Nathan Latka: What was the tease?

[00:16:27] Nathan Latka: What were you teasing? 

[00:16:28] Emir Atli: It was like we've, six months ago we had $0 in qualified pipeline from outbound. Today we have X, Y, Z million, what they've done and then coming to get the playbook and then 10,000 people commented. 

[00:16:39] Nathan Latka: People hate on those posts, but you know what? If they keep working, I love, people are gonna keep doing 'em.

[00:16:43] Emir Atli: Yeah. 

[00:16:43] Nathan Latka: Why change it? If it works. 

[00:16:44] Emir Atli: Yeah. It is very similar. I was thinking about this yesterday. It was very similar to how, I don't know if they still do it, but on Facebook or I don't know about TikTok, but they were doing like. Influencers. Were doing giveaway posts. Do you remember those?

[00:16:55] Emir Atli: Yeah. Yeah. I'm giving away. I don't know. AirPods a car. Yeah. And then you need to comment and [00:17:00] tag to people.

[00:17:00] Nathan Latka: They didn't even try and hide it. It's here's 200 bucks if you leave a comment. Yeah, exactly. It's like straight up prime. Exactly. It's wild. How are you guys? How are you guys? So should we shift in like AI a little bit and how you guys are thinking about ai?

[00:17:12] Nathan Latka: You have Odin, which just came, when did it come out? Six months ago. Six months ago. What are you seeing? Are people using it? You wanna describe what it does for folks? 

[00:17:18] Emir Atli: Yeah. So Odin is our AI analyst. Basically, instead of looking at a dashboard, Odin, you can simply ask a question. It can be a really complex question too, and maximum five to five and a half minutes, it answers any type of question that you ask.

[00:17:32] Emir Atli: If it's like super complex, takes about five minutes. If it's like a little bit less complex, takes 30 seconds to a minute, but, Odin basically goes into every single. Buyer journey. So for example, if you ask how are enterprise buyer journeys different than SMB, do you see any channel that is present in enterprise versus SMB, you can also ask three or four questions in one prompt.

[00:17:51] Emir Atli: It goes into every single company's buyer journey. It compares that with metrics, with seasonality, with any type of metric that it can see, not just an aggregate dashboard. People ask me like [00:18:00] if I take a screenshot of a dashboard put into chat GPT, isn't that the same? But actually you see numbers there.

[00:18:05] Emir Atli: Odin can actually go into every single one of them and then analyze the buyer journeys and then give you an answer. We see that go-to-market teams have been paralyzed for a very long time with dashboards and overload of data. Right now, they're able to get answers the right questions really fast.

[00:18:19] Emir Atli: And Odin is one of our biggest features in terms of product usage right now. 

[00:18:22] Nathan Latka: How do you measure product usage on Odin? 

[00:18:24] Emir Atli: Lock stack. We have a product dashboard. So basically it's companies, how much how many minutes they spend on a feature. 

[00:18:30] Nathan Latka: So it's minutes. Yeah, minutes. A number of minutes in o and asking questions.

[00:18:34] Nathan Latka: Interesting. Yeah. Where I get stuck on all this stuff is you guys, ideally, I. Who, whoever has the most data for every go-to-market motion, in my opinion, should be the one. Not just saying what you should do but actually doing it. So if I ask Odin, Hey, I have a hundred thousand dollars of extra to spend this month, where, which channel of mine should I spend it?

[00:18:52] Nathan Latka: Assuming you have all my data already through API connections, you can tell me you should spend it here, but shouldn't you also just be my ad agency? Shouldn't you just [00:19:00] manage and automatically reroute the a hundred grand? 

[00:19:03] Emir Atli: Yes, that's, I think that's the feature. I don't know if agencies will exist in. I dunno, three to four years.

[00:19:10] Emir Atli: But yeah, you can ask those questions right now. It doesn't automatically allocate your budget, but it gives you like a really good roadmap with all of your data. 

[00:19:17] Nathan Latka: Would HockeyStack consider you guys have fresh money? Would you ever consider a rollup strategy buying a bunch of ad agencies specifically for this reason?

[00:19:25] Emir Atli: We actually going after, we have two main product teams three product, main product teams. One is infrastructure, second is ai, and then third one is sales intelligence. So we're going after sales teams right now. I see. I see. So basically what we wanna do is in marketing analyst and then a sales agent working together all the time.

[00:19:44] Emir Atli: On the backend. And then marketing and sales teams see the hard outputs and they basically see this is what we need to do, and that they execute on that versus. Analyzing data, analyzing the buyer journeys, trying to see what to reach out to, writing, messaging, everything they will just execute.

[00:19:59] Nathan Latka: Yeah, [00:20:00] one of the things, I dunno if you guys are thinking about it, but I know Amir and I are, is in this kind of world that we're moving into who, who wins ultimately. If everyone has perfect data and great dashboards and it's all outcome based and you just type something and things done who ultimately wins?

[00:20:12] Nathan Latka: And my best guess to this, and then I would love your feedback on this, is the hardest part to making all this work is actually on building the trust with. The company that's using you, the founder in my case or for you? The CRO. The CMO, getting them to connect all their data sources so that when they chat with your chat bot, the chat bot actually has source data to go reference to then give the response.

[00:20:31] Nathan Latka: You're effectively building your own rag database or your own vector database for each customer that they can then call and talk to. How do you see it? 

[00:20:38] Emir Atli: How do I see? Who? Who will win? 

[00:20:41] Nathan Latka: Yeah. What's the moat? Basically, would you agree that it's whoever has the most data is gonna win? Or do you disagree?

[00:20:47] Emir Atli: I think it is one, whoever has the most data. I think the other thing is how to basically not make sense of the data, but if you have trillions, hundreds [00:21:00] of trillions of data, how can you enable this across companies, not just one company. So not like selling the data, but how can you basically, very similar to your database.

[00:21:10] Emir Atli: But in a similar way, how can I basically open this up as a database? Anonymized. Yeah. So that everyone can see it. That is what I'm thinking about every day. 

[00:21:17] Nathan Latka: I'm, I so have to follow up on that. I currently have an ad agency I use for my ads. And I always tell 'em, 'cause I spend a lot of time writing the copy personally.

[00:21:24] Nathan Latka: And I always tell them, guys, listen, I know you wanna reference me as a testimonial. I know you wanna put me on your website, but if this copy works, I don't want everyone else to do it because then it loses effectiveness. And sure enough, if I, because they now this. I'm not gonna name it, but this agency has grown very fast.

[00:21:39] Nathan Latka: Sure enough, when I come up with some winning ad where the CTR on LinkedIn is above like 2.5% sure enough I see four other people who are in this space posting the same kind of thing on LinkedIn. I'm like, gosh darn it, now I lost it. So like I'm curious if what you just described actually does come true.

[00:21:53] Nathan Latka: 'cause I think there like brands are gonna wanna hold their IP and their IP is gonna come down to creativity. So if there's software tools like you that try and [00:22:00] democratize the creativity, I'm curious if there's gonna be a pullback. 

[00:22:03] Emir Atli: Not democratizing the creativity, but basically like understanding what is happening on a macro level right now.

[00:22:11] Emir Atli: So like for example, if our pipeline is down this month. Is it us or is it everyone? Ah, if our CCP on LinkedIn is really high, is it us or is it LinkedIn kind of thing. I see. And then also at is certain level, I don't know how right now, but it is like what I'm thinking about every single day. Beyond that, how can I basically.

[00:22:28] Emir Atli: Make this data useful to a lot of companies, not even just our customers, but everyone in the world in some way, some shape or form. But I see what you say too. There's what I think happening with AI too. So right now nobody shares what they do with ai. Like the use case right now is like writing copywriting.

[00:22:43] Emir Atli: Yeah. Ad copy, writing email. But I do these workshops every day, like one or two every single day with other go-to-market leaders AI workshops, and I see really. Good use cases, but also 90% of the people think it's overrated. Or they think it's hyped and overrated. And [00:23:00] they don't see the value.

[00:23:00] Emir Atli: But I, I think the biggest thing is what you said, nobody's sharing their AI use cases because it's really easy to replicate. Yeah. Then everyone's gonna do it and it's not gonna work. 

[00:23:09] Nathan Latka: Yeah. That's why I'm always skeptical of these LinkedIn posts where someone's here's my org chart. It's all agents, comment below and I'll give you all my agents.

[00:23:15] Nathan Latka: I'm like, if it was working really well, you would not want anybody else to have it because like the. Like where I spend a lot of my time thinking in terms of go to market in the world of AI is the best, the winners are gonna be the ones that think like a historian. In other words, they do something that works well.

[00:23:31] Nathan Latka: There's an event and then like a good historian writing a textbook, they document the inputs to the system. The system and the outputs. And if you can clearly document the system, it becomes very easy to build an agent on gum loop. Or these kinds of tools. Yeah. But to your point, most of the use cases I've seen right now is I built an agent to come up with LinkedIn hooks, but like I do think there's gonna be a much deeper agentic flow in the go to market motion. And you're probably seeing some of this stuff right now. 

[00:23:57] Emir Atli: Yes. I think what's gonna happen is very similar [00:24:00] to Palantir. Like for example, you cannot go buy a Palantir.

[00:24:03] Nathan Latka: Yeah. 

[00:24:04] Emir Atli: There's a limited set of companies they can actually buy, Palantir actually can use it. Governments and Ferrari and like really large companies. I think one, the easier workflows is gonna be really a commodity like anyone can build or use a LinkedIn hook rider, but I think there's gonna be companies that will build really deep enterprise workflows and we'll sell it for millions of dollars a year and then go and build deploy.

[00:24:29] Emir Atli: Engineers like Palantir does to really big software companies. It automate lots of workflows within a company. But they basically won't be able to productize it. For example, if you sell the workday, you cannot say this is Workday's workflows. Okay. I'm gonna deploy it for Salesforce.

[00:24:45] Emir Atli: Yeah. You won't be able to that, but I think they're gonna be companies that do that. 

[00:24:48] Nathan Latka: Really interesting insight. Yeah. This is, we now have 500 portfolio companies, so we're thinking, man, if we can build some sort of agentic workflow and then give it for free to all of our portfolio companies to help them increase revenue per employee.

[00:24:58] Nathan Latka: That would be a major [00:25:00] win. That's a very good reason for founder path to invest in discovering the best agentic workflows for things like marketing. 

[00:25:05] Emir Atli: I'm curious what what do you see from your, like investments from your portfolio. How are best founders, best companies use AI right now?

[00:25:10] Nathan Latka: I would say the biggest change I've seen over the past six months, and again we're recording this here in May of 2025, is the fastest growing founders have pivoted their pricing pages really fast. They've all moved from seat page price, seat based pricing to usage based. Or output based. So some examples of that would be like open arc.ai, right?

[00:25:27] Nathan Latka: Used to be a seat model. Now each plan is like how many images or videos you create, 4,000 images, 10,000 videos, and then you have to upgrade. When you look at some of these other companies like clay.com which, everybody knows if you go actually plot their pricing grid on a map, what you will see is the price per a thousand credits drops from $72 price per a thousand credits on their earlier plans, their beginner plans, 10, 20, 30 bucks a month.

[00:25:50] Nathan Latka: Maybe more, but as you upgrade the base plan, the price per a thousand credits drops from $72 to 36, and then all the way down to 17 if you upgrade to their enterprise plan. [00:26:00] So I think like the fastest growing founders that we are seeing in our audience have figured out the right psychology. Of how their buyers buy their products, both the base plan and the usage base component, whether that's per credit, per video created or per image output.

[00:26:13] Emir Atli: So for this this is also something that I'm thinking about a lot and I talk to a lot of people. So I was talking to an SVP sales at the enterprise org on Friday. He basically has 500 AEs that he is managing. And the org is like 6, 7,000 employees. Oh, wow. What he told me was, this is all something I'm thinking about constantly is if you go to a usage based model, so for example, if you take HockeyStack is selling minimum annual deals.

[00:26:36] Emir Atli: We have two year deals, like how far are revenue is two year deals 

[00:26:39] Nathan Latka: and what's a general, are we talking like SMB, like what's the general ARPU or our A CB 

[00:26:42] Emir Atli: 50,60 K per year. 

[00:26:43] Nathan Latka: Okay, so this is like mid-market pushing enterprise.

[00:26:45] Emir Atli: So then we have three year deals. If you go and sell like a two year deal with a usage based model one.

[00:26:52] Emir Atli: What is, what are they gonna, basically, if you're a finance person at the prospects company, and if you say you can pay a hundred KA [00:27:00] year, or you can pay 20 K year or can pay five 50 K year because you don't know how much you're gonna consume, what do you think about that? Like how are one, is the billing cycles or like contracts are gonna change with usage based modeling?

[00:27:11] Emir Atli: Is it gonna be like clay where you pay monthly? That you can stop anytime? Or is it gonna be. I don't know, finance and procurement just changed their minds about this.

[00:27:18] Nathan Latka: It's a really good insight. I don't have a direct answer, but what I can tell you though is if we look at SaaS over the last 10 years, there are many customer, there are many companies with inflated a RR.

[00:27:29] Nathan Latka: And what I mean by that is they know they've got four or five customers paying a thousand bucks a month. And when they go look in their logs, they know those customers haven't logged on in six months. So they're just praying people forget that they're still paying, even though they're not getting any usage.

[00:27:42] Nathan Latka: That's not a great way to build a healthy company. So I generally think consumers are going, or let's say people inside of software, inside of businesses that are buying software are going to expect to only pay for what they use. And there's gonna be tools that make it easier to cancel if they're paying these flat fees for things that they're not using.

[00:27:58] Nathan Latka: Now, does that mean that there's no more annual [00:28:00] deals? I don't think so. Does that mean that CFOs won't be able to budget appropriately? I don't think that's probably true either. I think it's probably some combination of what you're already thinking about, which is you're selling a multi-year deal with the base number of credits used, and then if you go above that, there's maybe, an extra fee or something.

[00:28:16] Nathan Latka: But what are you guys testing right now? Are you credits or seat based? 

[00:28:20] Emir Atli: We have a base platform fee based on on our reporting product. It's based on website visitors. On our sales product. It's based on seats. Okay. We haven't been testing it, to be honest with you. Yeah. I don't know when we should get started.

[00:28:33] Emir Atli: It's probably soon. Two. How can we get started? I don't wanna risk revenue as any fonder 

[00:28:39] Nathan Latka: Are CROs asking you, you have a tight feedback loop with everybody sitting out here. Has anyone said, Hey, these guys don't wanna pay seat based, they just wanna pay for usage. Definitely. 

[00:28:47] Emir Atli: People don't wanna pay for seats.

[00:28:48] Nathan Latka: Really interesting. 

[00:28:50] Emir Atli: Yeah. That is on the sales side, definitely people don't wanna pay for seats. And also on the marketing side, for example, we do for the last two years since we get got started, we have been doing it all based on website [00:29:00] visitors over and over again. Especially in enterprise. They always say I have this, let's say a million visitors a month I. Yeah, but 50% of them are from countries that I go, I don't care about. And then some of them are customers, some of them check out our careers page. Yeah. I don't want to pay for the traffic to them. So it's it's not like seed based, but people, as you said, don't only want to use for the valuable portion, whether it's like seats, but it's.

[00:29:24] Emir Atli: The product usage, but versus it's growing over time. 

[00:29:27] Nathan Latka: Not to put you on the spot, but if you were forced right now to predict. If you had to come up with a usage based model, you had to get rid of your seat based model and you had to define some usage metric for your sales tool, I think you said it was.

[00:29:37] Nathan Latka: Yeah. Or your marketing, what would you move, not saying you are gonna do it, but if you were, what would you move towards? 

[00:29:42] Emir Atli: I think, so the reason that, we were talking about this, the reason that we say dashboards are dead and then we are moving towards like a, interface that's not dashboards is because agents and AI in general make it really easy to assign a value to act in action.

[00:29:58] Emir Atli: So I think every single action will have an [00:30:00] average like value. So for example, if you do X, Y, Z with this agent, the value of it is on average is $50. Like in terms of pipeline revenue, then you basically price it based on that. That is what I would do if I had to start. Doing this in like today.

[00:30:15] Emir Atli: That's how I would do it. And then you basically need a lot of data to prove that, and you need a really solid business case. I think basically moving forward, in my opinion, the mid-market layer is not gonna exist. You either do PLG. Lower volume, you can cancel any time like clay and then you get to a volume or you do really a large enterprise.

[00:30:38] Nathan Latka: Yeah. I don't have the answer to this, but it's interesting to hear how you'd think about it. All comes back like we all grew up playing games like whether it was Age of Empire's, conquerors edition, where I would have to chop down the logs to get my little log number to go up and then I could use the logs to buy a dock or build a house.

[00:30:51] Nathan Latka: It's effectively is the future of CROs and B two P SaaS. You're actually a game designer and you're thinking about what is the equivalent of chopping the log or buying credits, and then what do you [00:31:00] use those logs or credits for building a doc or using the HockeyStack product three times more, et cetera.

[00:31:05] Nathan Latka: Okay. It's a fun psychological question. 

[00:31:08] Emir Atli: I think that's a really good way to see it. 

[00:31:10] Nathan Latka: Yeah. What would the logs be for you? New closed customers, new, that's, this is the hard part, right? How do you assign a value to each action? 

[00:31:19] Emir Atli: I think so you have employees, then you have AI agents, that's like the people and agents that do the work.

[00:31:26] Emir Atli: So each one of them basically has a value. I think every single company they're like. Really a few companies that do this really well and I got to, I get to interact with a lot of go to market leaders every single day. Can you name a couple of them so people can go study, like for example, companies?

[00:31:42] Emir Atli: I don't think I can name these, but there are companies that basically has, if I hire an A, if I an SDR, if I hire a customer success manager, this is the value of it in three months. So you need to do the same thing for your product or your AI agent. Yep. If you hired us and there's no ramp time, but probably there's like context gathering, building [00:32:00] model assignment.

[00:32:00] Emir Atli: Let's say it's six weeks and after six weeks is the. Revenue or action or like customer success, ticket resolution, which then go into a employee cost savings kind of model. Then you price based on I think the, yeah. The industry that does this very well, I don't know how familiar with you are with the customer success industry, like Intercom, Decagon, Sierra, they do this really well.

[00:32:22] Emir Atli: So they basically say, I was listening to podcasts from Intercom, CEO, so he was basically saying if a human. Sold ticket, it's $10. If comes AI sold ticket, it's 50 cents. So they basically get the delta and then they sell it based on that. 

[00:32:37] Nathan Latka: Smart. Yeah, it's really clear. That's the hard part is you have to assign the pricing and then also be able to sell it and explain it in a very clear way.

[00:32:44] Emir Atli: Yeah. That is also why. AI agents and customer success is a com like becoming a commodity right now because it's easier. To assign this value. It's easy. I don't know if it's easier to build, but it's easier to basically get to a pricing model like this and it's easier to solve because there's really clear ROI.

[00:32:57] Emir Atli: Yeah. It's, I think [00:33:00] AI and go to market, like even other industries is still like getting started right now. Yeah. Which is exciting. 

[00:33:05] Nathan Latka: Yeah, I agree. I agree. 

[00:33:06] Emir Atli: From your portfolio do you think B2B SaaS is. Not that important or not that great right now. 

[00:33:15] Nathan Latka: I think, look, there's a lot of people saying B2B SaaS is dead.

[00:33:17] Nathan Latka: And I think it does well as a LinkedIn headline, but what I would say is never before in our lifetimes, at least. How old are you now? 20. 23. 23? Yeah. I'm 35. Like certainly not in my lifetime. Has, have I seen this much change in such a short amount of time in the tech space? So is B2B SAS dead? No.

[00:33:34] Nathan Latka: Is it changing the fastest we've ever seen it change? Absolutely. Yes. And those people that are not. Moving and quickly updating fast, I think are gonna get totally left behind. As always in startup plan, speed, talent, consuming a lot of information to then distill it and understand what's important for your business and not, those are the most important things today, I think.

[00:33:52] Emir Atli: And then you mentioned in-person events being like the biggest go-to market motion for founder path right now. What are other challenges that you wanna test? Or you wanna add [00:34:00] on? 

[00:34:00] Nathan Latka: Yeah so in-person events work really well. I already covered sort of the LinkedIn ads that we're doing. Those are really the big ones that we're doing.

[00:34:06] Nathan Latka: We've tested a lot of things but it's really hard to run all those things effectively. We found something that works really well. We're gonna go all in on that. It's also just I don't know about you, but like, when I'm forced into doing things that I don't personally enjoy, I do a worse job and I just really love.

[00:34:21] Nathan Latka: In-person events, so naturally the numbers are gonna be better, right? So I'm leaning into that, like I'm learning, I'm leaning into like my Venn diagram of strengths. That's like just where I'm gonna lean in LinkedIn and in-person events, 

[00:34:31] Emir Atli: but the in-person events, when I think about it, is not gonna scale.

[00:34:37] Emir Atli: Like you cannot be in Austin right now in San Francisco and New York and Miami all at the same time. Do you, you're also. But you're also bootstrapped right now . You don't need to report to 

[00:34:46] Nathan Latka: We're a fund, right? Yeah. So it's a little tricky, but 

[00:34:48] Emir Atli: yeah, you don't have anyone to report to.

[00:34:49] Emir Atli: You don't. No one can say, why aren't you growing? That's correct. Yes. 10% month over month. That, so it's your own business.

[00:34:54] Nathan Latka: I hold myself up a pretty high standard, so I'll put myself up inside. The same way you would? 

[00:34:58] Emir Atli: Yeah. Is that like a [00:35:00] concern for you or is it growing fast enough that you don't even care about?

[00:35:02] Emir Atli: Is it gonna scale 10 x 20 x 30 x with person events? 

[00:35:06] Nathan Latka: Yeah, that question is different depending on your business model. Remember, founder Pro is a fund, right? So the way we make money is I go raise money from banks at really low rates. I then find great founders to then lend that money to who want to save their equity.

[00:35:18] Nathan Latka: And I make a spread in between. So I have to be very careful not to lend money to companies that I don't think are gonna pay back. 'cause if one or two companies blow up. The whole fund is gone. Those are called charge offs in our world. And you've seen some lenders in our space go under because of this.

[00:35:34] Nathan Latka: I wanna be doing this, Emir, for 10, 20, 30 years. I love it. So I'm pretty, pretty conservative. We get about 50 million of capital requests per month. At Founder Path, we're only approving about 10 million. So you can do the math on that. Yeah. Better 20% acceptance rate. Yeah.

[00:35:46] Nathan Latka: Now to your point about scaling, if I can scale my time and be in, let's say the max I can do energy wise and everything is. Two cities per week, that means I can hit 10 cities per month. The way you would scale because we're a fund, is you [00:36:00] would just increase your average check size.

[00:36:01] Nathan Latka: So instead of doing 200 K checks, we're now up to average size of million dollar checks. If we increase the size, the same number of dinners, same kind of founders, but we increase check size of 2 million, I just doubled the business. Yeah. 

[00:36:11] Emir Atli: Yeah. 

[00:36:13] Nathan Latka: Makes sense. 

[00:36:13] Emir Atli: I actually want to, before we wrap up, I want to ask a few personal questions.

[00:36:17] Nathan Latka: Yeah. Hit me with the personal stuff. Yeah. 

[00:36:19] Emir Atli: So I was watching, do you know owner owner.com? Yes. Incredible story. Incredible story. Really good. A incredible fonder a 

[00:36:26] Nathan Latka: hundred million series D. Recently. 

[00:36:28] Emir Atli: CI think C. Okay. He actually dropped out from high school. We dropped out from college. He is, the founder is still young.

[00:36:35] Emir Atli: I think he's 24 or 25. Really incredible story. Really high growth. I am a big fan of their CRO, Kyle Norton. We talk about, we talked two weeks ago or so. He is phenomenal. I was watching a podcast that Adam was on the CEO of owner and he was saying, basically he was talking about his like day-to-day routines, health and stuff like that.

[00:36:53] Emir Atli: And he was saying like, if. If business, he was like saying something like, if startups are a marathon, [00:37:00] fonders are kinda like the athletes. So you need to. Basically, you act like an athlete. With your sleep, with your routine, with your food and everything. You have been in the game for how many years?

[00:37:09] Emir Atli: 10. 10 plus years? Yeah. 

[00:37:11] Nathan Latka: I wrote my first line of code in Virginia Tech, Southwest Virginia when I was 18, and I'm 35 today, 17, 5, 6, 7, 17 years ago. 

[00:37:19] Emir Atli: So for your last 17 years, you have been in the game. Being a founder in my opinion, is one of the hardest jobs there are probably your hard jobs too, but it's extremely hard.

[00:37:27] Emir Atli: How do you maintain. Your energy. You have a really high energy. How do you maintain your energy? How do you travel all the time? I've seen you in two different airports. I dunno if you remember, I've seen you in Austin. I think I've seen you in another airport, 

[00:37:37] Nathan Latka: and I caught you randomly at a coffee shop here, I think a couple years ago.

[00:37:40] Nathan Latka: Yeah. 

[00:37:41] Emir Atli: So how do you maintain that? 

[00:37:43] Nathan Latka: Yeah I would say the best answer I can give to this is you have to actually listen to, like your energy. See, most founders can't listen to their energy because they have other stakeholders. Like a board they have to respond to, or co-founders who expect something of them.

[00:37:56] Nathan Latka: I learned at my first software company where I had a board and two [00:38:00] co-founders like I learned what I liked and didn't like, and so I'm in a unique position right now as a solo founder with, a board who's basically advisors that I really enjoy. And so what that enables me to do is listen to my energy.

[00:38:10] Nathan Latka: If there's, if I'm doing something that like takes my energy, I can just stop doing it and go all in on things that do. Whereas most founders can't do that. Like you can't stop managing sales reps if that is not a high energy. I'm not saying it is, but you probably love it. But if you didn't like it, you couldn't stop it as a CRO at a fast growing series B company, you have to do that.

[00:38:26] Nathan Latka: Yeah. I don't find myself. In many positions during the day going I've gotta just push through this. I have to do it. And that's why I can keep my energy pretty darn high.

[00:38:35] Emir Atli: Do you have any like routines that you do every day? I think you run a lot. 

[00:38:39] Nathan Latka: I do run. It's really I think and by the way, like Nathan too, his name's Nathan too, I think.

[00:38:43] Nathan Latka: At owner. Adam or Adam? Adam. Adam. Adam. Yeah, Adam Bill. There was also a post about like him working so hard one night, like he collapsed and his founders had to like, or his partner or someone had to take him to the hospital and re-energize him 'cause he was like super intense. So like these things go like both ways.

[00:38:58] Nathan Latka: The best correlation I have is, I try to [00:39:00] date, I know I'm a fun guy. Try to date you. Open up all the apps, but like I meet people. And I'm like, Hey, why don't you just bring your computer to Cosmic Coffee in Austin and we can work together? And they're like, what the fuck are, 

[00:39:10] Emir Atli: I'm sure that's a fun date.

[00:39:11] Emir Atli: Yeah. 

[00:39:11] Nathan Latka: This is not for me. This is like thrilling right? To them it's like, what are you talking about? It's Sunday. I don't wanna do that. But I just think you have to, you have to enjoy it. That's what keeps your energy high. And look, NA again, incredible company that they're building over there.

[00:39:23] Nathan Latka: I'm obviously rooting for them. We'll see what, we'll see what happens. 

[00:39:26] Emir Atli: How often do you work out? 

[00:39:27] Nathan Latka: I'm wor so my rules you asked, sorry, I avoided the question. I try to run four miles twice a week. I. On Strava. It usually is around the lake in downtown Austin. I also try to get to the gym at least three times a week.

[00:39:40] Nathan Latka: So five days a week I'm sweating. You're doing something physical. And then the big thing is this is what's really hard when I'm traveling, is getting enough protein. Like here, about a couple blocks away, I looked up like Ben's food or something and I show up to order it 'cause it was like pulled pork, chicken, avocado looked really good and it turns out we had Ghost kitchen.

[00:39:59] Nathan Latka: Yeah. Ben's best food. [00:40:00] Yes. Yes. But he was so good. It's good. It's clear, it's very clear to me. They're very good at getting the DoorDash orders 'cause the food looks delicious. But if you've, have you been to the physical location? No. Yeah, it's like a, it's like a Black ghost kitchen. It's very, we, it's strange.

[00:40:12] Nathan Latka: I like actually walked in and physically order and it was delicious. But that's the hard part is when you're traveling, it's getting the right amount of protein. I think a lot of founders, if you're trying to manage like hustling and all that with also working out and building your company diet is really important.

[00:40:25] Emir Atli: Do you have any supplements that you use? 

[00:40:27] Nathan Latka: I do. Do you wanna see one? This is my trick. Sure. I'll give you one guess on what it is, but gimme a second to grab it. Okay. Alright. So Amir, my secret thing is in here. You get one guess on what this is. This is it. What? This is my secret supplement. I carry it with me everywhere I go.

[00:40:47] Nathan Latka: You get one guess. Mango. 

[00:40:50] Emir Atli: No. 

[00:40:50] Nathan Latka: How about this? You get one question. You can ask me one qualifying question and then you get one guess. I actually am due for today, so I'll actually go ahead and is it like I do [00:41:00] four, four per day? I think I start with a C. Hey know C team, Uhhuh. It's great team. It's a great team.

[00:41:10] Nathan Latka: And I'm gonna sound like really loud chewing in the mic, but you, I couldn't do the powder 'cause it doesn't get through airports and it looks like cocaine. So I found gummies and these are amazing. Like I'll take them now, gimme energy for the rest of the day. Really. I can hit the gym and still be like, all in, you just have to drink a crap ton of water.

[00:41:28] Nathan Latka: But this is my secret. 

[00:41:29] Emir Atli: You don't drink coffee? You do. 

[00:41:30] Nathan Latka: I do coffee in the morning.

[00:41:31] Nathan Latka: Yeah. Yeah. You do anything like this? 

[00:41:33] Emir Atli: I used to, but not anymore, yeah. 

[00:41:36] Nathan Latka: You guys were all thinking oh my gosh, Nathan's gonna bring out a like a. Coke, pot of weed or something? In the middle of a middle. You think I would do that on Amir's first podcast on his new show launching?

[00:41:47] Emir Atli: No, 

[00:41:47] Nathan Latka: you can do the second one. There we go. 

[00:41:49] Emir Atli: Just creatine. Nice. Cool. Is there anything else you wanna talk about or anything you want to end off the show with? No, 

[00:41:55] Nathan Latka: this was great, but what I mean for other people in B2B SaaS thing about launching their own show. [00:42:00] You guys are getting this going. It's your first episode.

[00:42:02] Nathan Latka: What's your plan? How do you plan to get distribution? 

[00:42:04] Emir Atli: Yeah this is basically a part of our bigger plan. We are moving away from dashboards to a chat interface. We are moving away from just marketing, reporting to marketing and sales is like AI for go to market company. So this show our in-person events, our product.

[00:42:17] Emir Atli: Our social media, everything is gonna tie into one theme and one narrative. And then a part of it is gonna be people like you who inspire me, who I talk to, friends, partners. Some of them are gonna be customers, some of them are gonna be people that we wanna sell to. So it's like a overall shift in our company.

[00:42:35] Emir Atli: And this is not just like a show. We are also shifting the way that we. Talk about our product, the way that we sell our product, the way that we do customer success, the way that we do finance everything into this new era of ai. So it's gonna be one of those pillars, a small pillar. How we're gonna do distribution is one, we have a great studio, we spend.

[00:42:53] Emir Atli: A lot of time Jake actually behind a camera. Shout out to Jake, who spent a lot of time building this great podcast studio. So we wanna bring [00:43:00] people to our office to do shows like this. Also, we wanna tie that into in-person events. We do panels, we do really good in-person events at our office.

[00:43:07] Emir Atli: So it's gonna be one in-person interaction to clips on social media. We have total, we have a hundred, 120 k followers on LinkedIn across our team and me. It's gonna be that and it's gonna be people sharing it. 

[00:43:19] Nathan Latka: Yeah, look, I'm rooting for you guys. I missed out in 2018 when he was still in Turkey in his parents' basement.

[00:43:23] Nathan Latka: I should have said, you're not allowed to come on the show unless you write let me write a $10,000 angel check. I'd be rich today richer than I am. I'd be so rich. But it's crazy to watch you guys build and talk about moving fast. We're recording this on Memorial Day weekend, on a Sunday.

[00:43:35] Nathan Latka: I saw you guys' post about the new studio on LinkedIn. Speaking about LinkedIn, right? Two days ago, I ping you on LinkedIn. I'm like, he's not gonna respond to holiday weekend. You write back, you say, here's my number. Let's record on Sunday and like here we are. So talking about moving fast and winning, like I'm super bullish on what you guys are building.

[00:43:49] Nathan Latka: It's obviously a hot space, a lot of change in the sort of go to market motion, C-M-O-C-R-O space. Congrats on Odin. Congrats on everything and thanks for letting me the be the first guest on your show. 

[00:43:57] Emir Atli: Thank you so much for DMing me on a Saturday. And [00:44:00] also thank you so much for inspiring us all the time and doing the first interview five years ago.

[00:44:03] Emir Atli: Thanks. Good luck, man. Thank you. Yep.