NEW EPISODE of Long Strange Trip with the CEO of Clay, Kareem Amin Clay is one of those companies where iykyk. The Go-To-Market Platform for the AI Era that went from $1M ➡️$100M ARR in two years. But it wasn't always that way. Everyone I spoke to about Kareem, from employees to investors, to former colleagues and even competitors describe him as more of a philosopher who happens to be scaling a 🚀 than a typical CEO. They aren't wrong. Kareem is different. A few things we get into → Why "9-9-6" is performance art and sometimes a sign you just don't have a moat → How they run the company with “just-in-time” decision making, not exact team meetings (love this) → How they named a category instead of trying to invent one, and turned the Go To Market Engineer into a movement → Being a momentum detective & where a CEO should actually spend their time → Why he answered a pricing backlash by publishing his exact internal reasoning → Building from wholeness, and not the overplayed chip on the shoulder → The silent-retreat realization that changed how he thinks about building → The Hegelian Product Flip strategy → Why future thinking can be detrimental 00:00 Introduction 01:35 Competitive Fire and Drive 03:06 Building From Wholeness 06:42 Living in the Present 09:31 Contrarian Founder Style 14:40 Five Years in the Desert 27:35 Naming GTM Engineering 35:49 Winning Content Battles 36:10 Naming the Category 37:27 Building the Agency Channel 40:19 Pricing Backlash Playbook 43:15 Momentum Detective CEO 52:32 Trust and Tough Calls 01:03:49 Calling Out Elephants 01:06:41 Closing 👇Full episode in the comments