Founded & IPO'd @yext, @confide, @roam Virtual Office in a Computer

Miami Beach, FL
Joined January 2009
buzz feels like a new item at Taco Bell, where the beans are BELOW the cheese and above the lettuce, instead of mixed in with tomatoes but ABOVE the cheese.
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just in time for rogue agents operating inside banks to buy the stock
BREAKING: Anthropic to publicly file for IPO as early as Friday, per YF
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Howard Lerman retweeted
also wow @roam got the verified badge!
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Howard Lerman retweeted
We built a $150M ARR business twice. The first time took 8 years. The second took 2.5. Today, Podium crossed $150M in AI annual recurring revenue. Three years ago, we already had a great software business. Well over $100M in revenue, tens of thousands of customers, and a product we'd spent nearly a decade building. And we decided to start over. The business was performing well. But we believed AI was going to fundamentally change the software industry and make much of traditional software obsolete. As a founder, you pour your life into what you're building. An insane amount of time, sacrifice, and effort. The hard part is not getting too attached to it. When we started building our first AI agents, we had to confront the possibility that much of what we'd built might not be that valuable in the future. That's a tough pill to swallow. But we also realized those same 10 years had put us in a unique position to take advantage of what AI could do for our customers. Instead of protecting what we'd spent a decade building, we decided to bet the future of the company on AI employees that actually do the work for our customers. We massively underestimated what we'd signed up for. We ended up building entirely new operating systems for the industries we serve, from the AI agents all the way down to the systems of record. Now customers run their entire businesses on Podium. Reinventing our product wasn't even the hardest part. We had to reinvent how the entire company operated. When you've been running a company for over a decade, the operational inertia is incredibly powerful. We had to rethink how we build products, how we sell, how we serve customers, and how we run the business. We effectively started a second startup inside an already successful company. And we're still at the very beginning. Today, we have 20,000 AI agents working for our customers. They've helped generate more than $13 billion in revenue for those businesses. And we're barely scratching the surface of what AI will be able to do for them. And we've done all of this while becoming profitable and generating free cash flow. We're building Podium to be around for decades. Huge credit to our team for having the guts to make this bet and the ability to actually pull it off. We still have a long way to go and tons of problems to solve, but it's so damn fun to be winning when the opportunity ahead is this big. In the age of AI, you can either disrupt your own company or wait for somebody else to do it. I'd rather do it ourselves.
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til there's a marketing software called Braze and it's worth $5b
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there's no product i love more than when the website is the product
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That’s why companies love Roam ✨
Replying to @lisacrymes @roam
remote teams feel scattered without a central hub, so having a shared address and meeting space sounds genuinely steadying 🙂
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20 years ago
17 years ago today we founded Yext and I set up my first desk with @bdistel. This old doctor's office is NYC's take on the fabled silicon valley garage. I had big ideas for the future back then and I still do today.
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Howard Lerman retweeted
The biggest bottleneck at work is waiting on each other. Today Town is announcing its $108M Series B, co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures, to fix it with multiplayer AI assistants for work. Most AI assistants are built for one person. Work doesn't happen alone. I think the moat is multiplayer. Everyone at a company gets a Townie. Townies ask each other questions, share only what their person would share, and do the work. The more a team works together, the more useful Townies get. What's the thing you're always waiting on a teammate for?
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Introducing Connect Your AI! Easily connect your favorite AI assistants, including Claude, ChatGPT, Muse, Grok, and more, to Roam. Ask questions about your Roam meetings and chats directly from the AI assistant you already use, without switching apps. In the new AI Assistants tab in your AInbox.
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every rich person i know grumbles about some other richer, but dumber, person they know who made a bunch of easy money doing something trivial
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Yea sooo, I’ve been using @roam instead of zoom annnnddddd I kinda like it yall
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Signs you've made it: - Forgetting what day it is - Turning down 90% of meetings - Being nearly impossible to reach The goal was never to be busy.
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Yext was left for dead. Now every incremental dollar funds its own growth. Michael Walrath on the magic of an 80% gross margin business.
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On this weeks @theallinpod @chamath @davidsacks @jason spoke with Ben Horowitz from @a16z about how this buildout is different from the internet bubble buildout in the late 90s. Ben’s take is smart and he identifies a real difference. That doesn’t mean he’s correct. I spent some time thinking through HOW Ben might be wrong about this. NOT a prediction, but well worth discussing the risks.
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anyone have a human contact at Microsoft Advertising? my account is shut down because they think i'm malicious and I cannot convince their AI Agent otherwise.
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Howard Lerman retweeted
Cars ARE flying... 😏
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how is their not a southpark episode about the Druze
Netanyahu apparently displayed this map as part of his national security policy presentation.
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Howard Lerman retweeted
What’s happening in Paris and Milan is no surprise to anyone who has spent time around young people in Europe during the 2010s: Virtually all of them were working on their 4th masters degree in social welfare, were unmarried, attended communist dinners every night, and regularly participated in riots. Now the economy is suddenly transforming and they have nothing to show for it.
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