I’m the co-founder and head of operations at Clay, the best way to turn any growth idea into reality. 

Here's a little bit more about me:

I started my career in politics and government, working in a variety of roles for Hillary Clinton, including on her 2016 campaign. When that ended unceremoniously, I decided that—for now—building in technology felt like the higher-impact path. These days, I’m channeling that same energy into helping people grow their businesses using Clay.

I enjoy (occasionally) beating my co-founder Kareem at racket sports, scouring NYC for the best Indian food (Musaafer is elite), and reading essays and narrative non-fiction—David Foster Wallace and Erik Larson are staples.

Varun Anand

Today Clay is announcing our second employee tender in just 9 months at a $5B valuation. 

Employee tender offers are rare at private tech companies, and repeat tenders at this frequency are rarer still. Under the traditional model, employees take on years of risk with no path to liquidity until an IPO or acquisition. 

We’re not building Clay that way. We believe that companies hitting their milestones should offer equity as part of people’s journey, not just at the end. And we want all our employees to benefit meaningfully from the value they create.

There are two reasons companies don't do tenders: 1) you don't have the demand for your stock; 2) you think your team will get demotivated if they sell their shares. 

Re: the first -- I can't help you much there (but maybe DM me and I can do a LinkedIn video consulting on your biz problems). On the second -- in our experience, the opposite happens! When people feel trusted, supported, and happy, they stay longer and build with more conviction. Our teams are more loyal, energized, and motivated to make a big outcome happen because they know we care about doing right by them. 

The tender will allow employees to sell up to $55M of Clay shares at a $5B valuation, and is led by DST Global, with participation from Conviction, avra, Operator Collective 🔆 and Frontline Ventures, alongside a stellar roster of angels and customers, including Stripe's Claire Hughes Johnson, Figma CMO Sheila Joglekar Vashee, Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra, and product leader Lenny Rachitsky.

Thank you to our team, community, and customers for making this milestone possible. We're hyped for the journey ahead!

→ Check out The New York Times feature by Michael de la Merced and our blog post in comments.

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We have 6 life coaches available to everyone at Clay. 

They are sort of like therapists (I'm not really supposed to say that!) because they do a lot of emotional labor. Every employee can book time with them and no topic is off-limits. It's one of the best things we've done. 

Before this, here's what would happen: 

Someone's struggling with impostor syndrome. Or they're thinking about a career change. Or they don't know how to deal with people issues on their team. They'd either bottle it up, dump it on their manager (who isn't trained for this), or let it fester until it became a performance problem. 

Now? They book time with a coach and get real support. Letting managers actually focus on managing without (as much) emotional labor.

The coaches keep everything confidential but they do share themes with leadership. Not "Varun is struggling with X"—but "we're seeing a lot of first-time managers who need more support and confidence". And that signal is valuable.

Let's go through the details of how this works so you can consider if it makes sense for your company. We have each coach on a $5k/mo retainer, and they have open slots for the team to book and can go over if there's too much demand. That's like 2 employees' salaries to help the other 300 be better. 

Most companies reserve coaches for executives. But here's a way you can give everyone on your team a coach in a way that helps us all win together.

Someone just applied to Clay and wrote the below in their application. This means more to me than you could know!

We are building Clay to not only help businesses grow, but also to help our teammates grow. Kareem Amin and I are in this for the long haul, and it's important to us that the people we work with represent our values, feel like their own personal growth is keeping pace with the company -- and most importantly, are cool humans who we like to have lots of fun with.

P.S. I'm glad the subway ads are doing something! Check out this surround sound ROI Karan Parekh ;)

I want to give every startup founder permission to hire candidates based off vibes. But I'm going to give you the vocabulary to feel better about it.

Leaders resist "vibes hiring" because it sounds lazy. Like you’re not doing due diligence. People don’t love feelings-based decisions and revert to only what the evidence says. But recruiting is a human game and humans have feelings. That’s why you must incorporate how someone makes you feel in the decision.

So, what does this mean in practice with candidates? It means that you pay attention to the intangible. Do you get energy from the conversations? Do they inspire you with confidence and peace of mind? Do you feel excitement not anxiety when you see their caller ID on your phone? Do you feel conversational chemistry? Do you naturally gravitate towards and want to spend more time with them? Good news - at a startup, you’re basically living with them.

With these hires, everything just feels right. Decisions are made easily, conflict and arguments resolve in seconds not hours, and the building blocks of trust stack on top of each other. You have people like this on your team right now. You know who they are.

Interviewing is an information gathering exercise, and how a candidate makes you feel (The Vibes) is as important as their take home assessment, behavioral interview and specific competencies. 

Even if someone is perfect on paper, you can’t get things done at the quality and speed a startup requires if you keep having those little moments of friction that fracture the trust and communication needed to excel.

You are about to spend your life building with them. You need to enjoy the vibes!

Our new Head of Sales Development has one job: don't embarrass us. Here's an inside look at how we're building Clay's first ever SDR (ClayDR!) team:

You might be thinking, "Wait, what's up with that? I thought Clay was making it so there would never be SDRs ever again?" Wrong. So, I sat down with Rob Cook to walk through how we're re-thinking the SDR role in the age of AI.

We get into:

- What Clay-powered SDRs actually do all day
- The two types of salespeople we're hiring and why the goal is to turn them into one
- Our key success metrics for the ClayDR team (it's not just pipeline)
- When to go bespoke vs. scale: How we decide between 10 custom touches for always-on accounts and many-to-one plays for awareness
- Why "don't embarrass us" is actually the most important charter and what that means for how our SDRs engage with prospects

Plus, much, much more. In the end, Rob shares why it bothers him so much when folks say they feel badly for SDRs and "how hard the job is." And why our #1 goal is to bring the joy back to business development.

Watch below 👇

P.S. Do you want to redefine what being an SDR looks like at the company redefining growth? Come work with us. Link to apply in comments.

Three years ago, Patrick Spychalski was an intern on our team selling Clay tables for $200. Last week he sold his Clay agency in a multi-million dollar deal (I'm guessing, he won't tell me the numbers). If you want to start your own Claygency, here's the inside scoop on how he went from Clay intern to exited founder:

First off, this moment is particularly meaningful for me. I've had a front-row seat to The Kiln getting started, setting the standard for what's possible, and emerging as a leader within the Clay ecosystem. But more than that, it's been so cool to see how much Patrick and his co-founder Mathias Powell have grown over the years, and I'm so so proud of them and their team and all they've built to this point. 

Now to the fun stuff... The Clay ecosystem is bopping, and the people want to know the dirty deets!! And how they can make bank too. So I sat down with Patrick and got into them:

- The pricing journey that took The Kiln from $200/table to $20K/month retainers and their real retention numbers
- How bringing on Mathias was the inflection point that made the business scalable
- Why specialization matters now in a way it didn't 2 years ago (and examples from Clay agencies crushing it in Europe)
- Why Patrick says they "could have been significantly bigger", but staying smaller made them more valuable
- The hardball questions Patrick asked 2X that proved they would be better together

At the end, Patrick shares what made 2X actually want to acquire The Kiln and his advice for anyone starting a Clay agency in 2026.

Watch below!

P.S. What do you want to know about building and selling a Clay agency? Patrick said he would do a little AMA in the comments. Ask away 👇

It took me 7 months and dozens of interviews to hire an executive assistant. Fortunately, I think we got it right with Tess Hokin. Here's my advice to any leader looking to hire an EA:

First, let me empathize with you - this is a hard role to hire for! It's probably the first time you're interviewing EAs, and it's challenging to evaluate them in a traditional behavioral interview process.

There are two things that matter most:

1) Remember that this is a deeply personal hire. It's important to find someone who gets you and you really like as a person (because let me tell you, you'll be spending a lot of time with them) .

2) As much as possible you should incorporate real world scenarios into your process. Here are two main things we did:

During my interview, I did two role-plays with Tess. One was about booking a reservation for a team dinner. Most candidates approached this like... What type of food do you like? Let me look at some options. I'll send you 3 restaurants to choose from. Tess walked into restaurants in person to feel out the vibe, befriended the staff and then sweet-talked the GM directly to book a reservation!

The other was about not getting sick during all my travel. Most suggested rest or vitamins. Tess built me a complete travel kit and process - specific teas for the hotel, preventative supplements, a whole system I wouldn't have thought of myself.

The thoughtfulness and attention to detail and taste (so important!!) set her apart.

But most importantly -- Tess and I really vibe! We're both pastry aficionados, feed off each other's energy, and say Okurrr too much. I get energy when I'm with Tess, not drained from it when discussing logistics. It's easy to lose energy when going through the minutiae of scheduling, find someone where it feels like fun.

P.S. I linked the take home assignment in the comments below, if you want to copy it.

P.P.S. I was once an EA myself so I have a lot of empathy (and maybe too high of a standard) for this role!

Wrapping up Day 2 of the Clay Revenue Kick Off and I could not be more pumped for 2026. We have 100+ Claymates in a ballroom at the ACE Hotel in Brooklyn. Today, we're focusing on "Igniting the Outbound Engine" as outbound will be a HUGE focus for us this year, and had Evan Peters, Head of RevOps at Notion, share how they are innovating with velocity in GTM with Clay. 

Want to get in on the fun? We're hiring across the board -- GTMEs, Growth Strategists, ClayDRs and more! Apply here: https://www.clay.com/jobs

PS we had everyone write down their most ambitious goal for 2026. This one spoke to me ... what's yours?!

Let's talk about impostor syndrome and my own experience with it.

In early 2024, Clay was growing quickly and I started questioning why I was leading the GTM functions. Many talented executives wanted to work with us. Shouldn't we hire them? And if we did, why should they report to me? What could I possibly teach them? What was I even contributing? More importantly: was I putting my own ego and ambitions ahead of the interests of the company?

Eventually, I went to my co-founder Kareem. I told him that I wasn't the right person, I'm happy to do whatever we needed, and let's go find the right leaders. I was completely at peace with it.

So we interviewed candidates. Spent real time with them. All incredibly impressive, with strong track records, but ultimately we realized they weren't the right fit. We still needed the unique alchemy that got us here for our next leg of the journey. And an insight from my friend Oliver J. helped me understand that I'm not supposed to teach marketing to a CMO, but rather help them get more done in the organization I know best and stay authentic to Clay's approach. Because that authenticity is actually what marketing is all about.

I shared this story with the Clay team recently because I wanted them to understand something crucial about their own journeys here. I know many of them feel impostor syndrome -- not a surprise when dozens are doing their role for the first time. You need to understand what makes you specifically valuable in this role. What uniqueness do you bring that no one else does? And at the same time, you have to stay unattached enough to keep asking: am I still the right person to do this job? Is this role still the right fit for me and the company? 

You can't answer that honestly if your ambition and ego is in the way.

Success starts with letting go. Only then can you see things clearly and do your best work.

Thanks to Christopher Pedregal and the Granola team for hosting this fun conversation a few months ago!

We just did a big analysis of Clay's 10,000 monthly support tickets. If you're running a support team, here's what you need to know:

A few weeks ago, George Dilthey (Head of Support), went to Karan Parekh  with a problem, "Hey, the org is growing really fast. We're hiring all these support people, but they still feel underwater. Help me figure out what's going on."

The obvious answer? Hire more people. But candidly, we hadn't really studied the data yet. The thing we needed to know first was, how are we getting through ticket volumes? When are they coming in? What time of the day? From what geography?

Then once we had that data, we had to go back to first principles: What is the actual point of support? Of course, I want to give our customers an excellent experience. I want it to be world-class. I want it to solve their problem quickly and expediently. But how would you define expediently? Is it zero wait-times? 10 minutes? 60 minutes? 

In this video, Karan and I break down:

- The bimodal curve we discovered -- tickets aren't flat, there's a pattern you can plan for
- Why Thursday-Friday have half the volume of Monday-Wednesday (and what we do with that capacity)
- How to staff for sub-1 hour response times without having people idle most of the day
- Our weekend coverage strategy (that doesn't burn people out and eliminates the Monday morning queue)
- What our support team actually does during low-volume periods

If your support team feels underwater, watch below 👇

PS I don't know why the team chose a thumbnail where my eyes are closed 🙈

Engineer → Founder → Investor → Something New ✨
📍 NYC/SF

Note: If you’re a stranger, please send a personalized note so I know the context for your connection request

Christine Hong

I’m leaving my role at Techstars to pursue something I couldn’t say no to.

Working with founders at the earliest, messiest stages of company-building has been a real privilege, and one of the most formative chapters of my career.

A few people I really want to thank:

If you’re a founder considering Techstars NYC, you want to work with Andres Barreto. When it comes to helping pre-seed founders get to real PMF, he’s among the best in the industry. I’m incredibly grateful for the chance to learn from him and excited to continue supporting future cohorts as a mentor.

Huge thanks to KJ Singh for taking a chance on me, especially when I came in with zero formal investing experience. That trust changed my trajectory more than he probably knows.

And massive credit to David Cohen for building Techstars into an environment where founders are genuinely supported, challenged, and pushed to be better.

For Techstars NYC's Engineer Village, my colleague Cordelro Brown is taking over. It’s in excellent hands, and I’ll keep cheering and supporting from the sidelines.

What’s next: staying close to founders, continuing to invest and advise, and getting back into hands-on building with a much deeper focus on product.

More soon: feeling very grateful for this chapter and excited for what’s ahead ✨

Christine Lu Hong

Most founders think their only funding options are unicorn-track VC or bootstrapping.

That framing causes real damage: not because VC is bad, but because capital only works when its incentives match your business.

There’s a layer of capital in between that’s smaller, quieter, and harder to access, and it only works for certain company shapes.

Here’s the map I wish existed for founders raising their first funding:

🔷 Traditional VC
 → Their fund math depends on outlier billion-dollar outcomes, so they usually invest in companies going after $10B+ markets
 → Examples: Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, Accel, Benchmark

These are legendary funds, but because they’re managing multi-billion-dollar funds, only a handful of massive outcomes drive returns. Mid-hundreds-of-millions exits often don’t move the needle.

Here are a few distinct alternatives with very different fund math principles and founder implications:

🔷 Capital-efficient outcome VC
 → This is still venture capital (equity, boards, growth expectations), but with smaller funds and tighter portfolio construction, so a $150–300M exit can be a great outcome
 → Examples: Rittenhouse Ventures, Osage Venture Partners, Peterson Ventures, Hyde Park Venture Partners, Dundee Venture Capital

🔷 Alternative equity / shared earnings
 → Fund returns are tied to cash flow (revenue share or profit participation). Works best for companies with predictable revenue, strong margins, and a clear path to profitability in the next 12–24 months.
 → Examples: Purpose Ventures, Chisos Capital

🔷 Indie SaaS capital
 → Works best for B2B SaaS businesses on a path to $1–10M ARR with low burn and clear customer demand
 → Examples: TinySeed (This category is currently small. If you know others, I’d love to add them.)

🔷 Non-dilutive
 → Capital without giving up equity, typically repaid from revenue over time. Works best for companies with predictable revenue ($15k+ MRR) that want to extend runway without aiming for hypergrowth.
 → Examples: Lighter Capital, Founderpath, Capchase

I know this list is incomplete, and I’m probably miscategorizing at least one fund.

Founders: who did you raise from, and where would you place them?
Investors: what am I missing or mischaracterizing?

I’ll publish the full guide with real math and founder tradeoffs once finalized.

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