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 🙈

James Hanzimanolis

Co-Founder @ Erudite | Content Marketing Agency | GTM Leader | Startup Advisor

Co-founder @ Erudite. We're a content marketing agency with the goal of driving more inbound leads and helping startups and small SaaS build a brand through social media.

Founder

Today is my 30th birthday. I won't do a corny "30 things I learned" list, but I will say this:

Being 30 feels weird.

A part of me is bummed out.

I wanted to accomplish so much more by this point. I wanted to own my first home, crack my first $50K month, sign an enterprise client, speak at a big event, make Forbes 30u30, and purchase a car that costs more than an executive salary.

On the other hand, I'm pretty happy.

I moved my family to the nicest city in the country, I launched Erudite, created 80M impressions for clients, generated $1B in pipeline between all the roles I've held, all while having fun and making good money.

I've also become a girl dad of 2. Maybe that'll change with our 3rd on the way. But I try my best to be superdad and my kids love me for it.

So, like I said, mixed feelings.

Now I'm going to crush my 30s.

Excelsior!

Happy birthday to me 🎉

Generate 250K-1M impressions per month | Fractional Head of Content for GTM Tech

Fun news: I've been brought on as an advisor to The Swarm 🔆

When I first found out about The Swarm, I was a skeptic.

The idea of GTN (Go-To-Network) seemed stupid to me.

How far could relationship selling take me?
Should I spend time making it a complete pipeline channel?

My friend 🏄🏼‍♂️ Scott Leese thinks it's the future.

His words to me: "In 10 years, the easiest way to sell something to someone is by getting an intro through someone in your network."

Gave it a go for 30 days and compared the sales cycle from GTN to my cold calling, cold email, and cold DM campaigns. Here were the results:

- Cold call: 65 day sales cycle
- Cold email: 62 day sales cycle
- Cold DMs: 32 day sales cycle
- GTN: 18 day sales cycle

Know what this means?
Selling through your network will close deals 2x-3.5x faster.

Insane.

Every seller needs this in their arsenal.

S/O to Olivier Roth + David Connors. You built something special here. Excited to help you scale it.

Whenever you feel like you're failing, just think about my DoorDash delivery driver.

Not only did he deliver my froyo 12 miles in the wrong direction.

But he was running from the cops while doing it.

Things can always be worse.

It's 2:08AM and I'm grinding away.

In 4 hours, I'll be waking up to take 5 sales calls, 3,000+ cold calls, and getting through some client work.

For the past 2 weeks, I've been swamped.

Staying up after everyone else has fallen asleep is by best opportunity to get ahead. So that's what I'm doing - at least for tonight.

I don't take days off. And every day is 12+ hours of straight work.

Throughout the day, I still find the time to play with my kids, read books, study chess (I was f**king dominated by Shakir Nasim in Kade Hinkle's recent tournament), and make time for my wife.

Not sure who needs to hear this, but "work-life balance" isn't a thing when you're running a small agency.

Every day is full-blast.

A lot of my content is rage-baity and controversial. I'll fess up to it.

However...

The biggest lie on this platform are the mental health gurus. The ones who say things like:
- You should turn your phone off a 5PM
- You should get 8+ hours of sleep per night
- You should work out for 45min per day
- You should have a happy morning routine

Respectfully, screw you.
And f**k being happy.

You people aren't serious.

Little PSA to anyone thinking about starting a business: Bring the heat. Like 100%. Go ham.

It's impossible to make it any other way.

We're bringing hustle culture back in 2026, baby.

Agency owners, here's a scenario: Prospect says "We've tried out 3 different agencies and none of them worked out. You're a stronger fit and we'd like to work together." What do you do?

You've got a couple options.

1. Identify the red flag early and decline
2. Refer them to a friend
3. Accept

If you're like me, you've made the mistake (multiple times) and went with number 3. You accepted.

Bills need to pay themselves someway. And you start to convince yourself that maybe, just maybe, you'll be the first agency that works out.

Heads up: It never works out that way.

It's always the client who's the pain. And they will sabotage the work you do for them.

Why do they do this? I don't know.

But if you come to me and say you've worked with Nate Zroh, Caleb Lee, Logan Gott, Daniel Kading 🔶, Jeremiah Calica, or Frank Velasquez and tell me, "Yeah, they didn't do a good job."

I won't believe you. And I'll put you on my "DO NOT WORK WITH" list.

Little piece of advice: If every agency you work with sucks, it's definitely you.

Rant over.

I have a dirty secret: I've been "applying" to 100+ W2 marketing roles each day. But when I get into the interview... I sell my agency service instead.

Works like a charm.

Not to mention you can do it at scale to book between 10-25 meetings/wk.

Here's how it works:

1. Find accounts hiring for a specific role (Use Floqer for this)
2. Find the hiring manager for that role (Use Floqer again)
3. Find their emails through a waterfall (Use Floqer again)
4. Find relevant info and personalize the email (Use Floqer again)
5. Send the emails using Instantly + Maildoso (Use Floqer's API to automate)

The email usually reads like this 👇

Subject: The content marketing role for [REDACTED]
Body: Hey John,

Saw the open role on LinkedIn for the content marketer you're hiring for.

Looks like Joseph, Amy, and Von have all been more active on LinkedIn lately. The job description mentioned we'd be writing for some of the C-suite team. Have you already picked someone?

Would love to work with you guys if you were up for it. I've implemented content strategies across 15 orgs.

Up to chat?

**
That's an actual email. And it was written by AI inside of Floqer.

Absolute insanity.

I get how this could feel sketchy or unethical.

But the fact is that it works.

Would you run this playbook?

I’m building an entire GTM tech stack for Erudite to replace Notion, Outreach, & DocuSign. Here are 49 things you can build with Replit's new mobile app builder:

> LinkedIn post writer
> X post generator
> X automation tool
> Social content scheduler
> Social signal tracking
> Engagement alert system
> Viral post analyzer
> Comment reply generator
> Creator content calendar
> Founder ghostwriting tool
> Profile optimization tool
> Hook library manager
> Content idea generator
> AI content repurposer
> Newsletter writer
> Blog publishing tool
> Lead magnet builder
> Landing page builder
> Mobile lead capture app
> ICP grader
> Website visitor identifier
> Prospect research app
> LinkedIn profile scraper
> Company research tool
> Tech stack detector
> Job change alerts
> Buying intent tracker
> Contact enrichment tool
> Email verification tool
> Automated email tech
> Cold email writer
> Email personalization engine
> Email sequencing tool
> Follow-up automation
> Reply classification system
> Lead scoring engine
> Lead routing logic
> CRM-lite system
> Deal notes app
> Pipeline viewer
> Forecast dashboard
> Client portal
> Proposal builder
> Contract generator
> E-signature flow
> Client reporting dashboard
> Revenue attribution tracker
> GTM experiment tracker
> Internal ops dashboards

The ability to build for mobile will change everything.

Introducing Mobile Apps by Replit
   
Building mobile apps usually means learning a specialized stack, wrestling with Xcode/Android Studio, certificates, and submission workflows. That’s a huge barrier for many.
   
Today, we’re removing it.
   
Here’s how you can go from idea to App Store in minutes:
1. Describe your idea in chat & get a React Native mobile app in minutes.
2. Scan a QR code to test your app on your phone.
3. Create an Apple Developer account.
4. Publish to the App Store directly from Replit
   
Your mobile apps can be fully functional from day one. You can integrate:
- Database
- Auth
- Integrations (OpenAI, Stripe, Twilio etc) & more
   
This launch was made possible by our partnership with Expo. Support for Play Store coming soon.

How to break into tech in 2019:

- Be likable
- Read a Chris Voss book
- Sound good on the phone
- Write human-sounding cold emails
- Learn how to use Hubspot + ZoomInfo


How to break into tech in 2026:

- Be a GTM engineer
- Use Clay, Instantly, and Orum
- Build an online brand (LinkedIn and/or X)
- Setup website traffic and social selling signals
- Create internal tools with lovable, Cursor, Replit
- Send 100K emails, 500+ LinkedIn DMs, 5K X DMs, 10K calls/mo


Both of these roles pay $50K base, by the way.

I use 3 vendors for email infra/domains: Maildoso, pre-warmed ones from Instantly, and [RETRACTED]. Domains from Maildoso were 1.9x-3.3x MORE LIKELY to receive replies.

I didn't understand this - so I asked Maildoso's founder, Nikita MAILDOSO.

Most email infra tools, vendors, and resellers suck for 1 reason.

They sell domains + inboxes and simply don't care about deliverability.

For those of you unfamiliar with cold email infra, let me explain: 
- A sh**ty infra = low deliverability
- Low deliverability = landing spam
- Landing in spam = worse results from email campaigns

There are 3 parts to a good cold email infra:
1. SPF: authorizes sending servers.
2. DKIM: signs your emails.
3. DMARC: tells inboxes how to handle failures.

All of which need to be configured for max deliverability.

Know what [REDACTED] is doing with this?
Nothin'.

And while I get how tempting it is to use the cheaper guys... just know that you're reply rates can easily drop from 4% to 1%.

That isn't just a 3% difference, by the way. It's a 75% reduction in email performance overall.

I'm officially cancelling all of my other vendor subscriptions and moving EVERYTHING to Maildoso.

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