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From Zero to $1.5B Unicorn in 2 Years | Decagon, Jesse Zhang

EO11:47Added Aug 31, 2026

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  1. Intro

  2. 00:11My name is Jesse. I'm one of the co-founders here at Decagon.
  3. 00:15Decagon builds AI agents primarily for large corporations on the customer
  4. 00:19support customer experience side.
  5. 00:20As a team, we're able to hit seven figures RR in about six months and have been growing quickly since then.
  6. 00:26We're always just looking for more customers, more folks to work with, and we're growing the team as well.

  7. Jesse's bio

  8. 00:38I was born and raised in Boulder, Colorado.
  9. 00:40I grew up doing a lot of things like math contests, science research, stuff like that,
  10. 00:45and I ended up studying computer science at Harvard.
  11. 00:47I would say I was very focused on trying to build something,
  12. 00:49and so most of the time I spent outside of classes was towards like learning how to build things,
  13. 00:55talking to my friends about building things.
  14. 00:56I finished college fast for a bunch of different reasons.
  15. 00:59I thought that I had already gained what I needed to from from college,
  16. 01:02and I was excited to just start building things.
  17. 01:04And so at Harvard, there was a program that allows you to graduate a year early pretty easily.
  18. 01:08After Harvard, I started my first company. It was a very different startup.
  19. 01:11We eventually got acquired by Niantic, then decided to start this company.
  20. 01:16So specifically, the problem we're solving is a lot of these companies have very large, not that efficient

  21. Beginning of Decagon

  22. 01:22operations in terms of answering customer questions,
  23. 01:25looking up data, dealing with tickets, and many of them will outsource to large bpos and things
  24. 01:31like that to have a lot of human agents answering it.
  25. 01:33And so if you're able to use some of the new generative AI technology, you're able to automate
  26. 01:37and just improve the customer experience by answering a lot of these questions,
  27. 01:41automatically, looking up data, automatically, doing all of the sort of things that a human agent would do.
  28. 01:45Every startup's biggest advantage is you're obviously able to move quicker.
  29. 01:48You can kind of cater towards the customers a lot more and make sure that you really capture their needs.
  30. 01:53A VC might ask you, it's like, okay, what do you do when Google starts doing this?
  31. 01:57Honestly, a lot of our advisors or investors were telling us, hey, support is going to be too crowded.
  32. 02:01It's such an obvious idea.
  33. 02:02But on the flip side, that's also a great good thing because it allows you to get to adoption
  34. 02:06very quickly because our customers also see the value when they start using it, they immediately get ROI.
  35. 02:11This is what our customers are telling us.
  36. 02:12Our customers are telling us that there's a need here, that they're willing to pay for a solution if it works.
  37. 02:16And so that's kind of what led us there.
  38. 02:17That's also what's made us successful in terms of competing against the older generation of chatbots,
  39. 02:23because if our customers were happy with those, then they wouldn't have told us in the first place.
  40. 02:28They want to have even mentioned that, hey, we're willing to try you out.
  41. 02:31And so we were able to basically capture a lot of the the newer needs and a lot of what was not
  42. 02:35possible before by building from the ground up,
  43. 02:37using generative models, a lot of older players, they will have a huge product built already,
  44. 02:41and they probably have hundreds of customers.
  45. 02:43And so when they're shipping new features, they have to build things
  46. 02:45that kind of satisfy the average customer.
  47. 02:47They're slower to adapt because they have to carry along all this product they've already built out.
  48. 02:53So I think when you're a startup like us, we've done a good job at executing.
  49. 02:57And so we we moved really fast. There's been a new technology introduced.
  50. 03:01Right. Large language models.
  51. 03:02If you just think about the more traditional chatbots where there's some intelligence built in,
  52. 03:05but it's not AI, it's not generative.
  53. 03:07And if you're able to adapt faster, then you have a big advantage when you're competing against them.
  54. 03:11- I think we've just built a better product. - Hi, I'm Taeyoung from you.

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  70. How Decagon talked to early customers

  71. 04:17When we first started, we were very open minded.
  72. 04:20We were not super opinionated about like, this is exactly what we need to build.
  73. 04:24We kind of just let our customers tell us what the need is.
  74. 04:28When you're early, it's hard to have a very coherent strategy.
  75. 04:31You're just trying to get as many customers as possible.
  76. 04:33And so in the early days, it was just us trying everything we could to get new customers,
  77. 04:37get new introductions, things like that.
  78. 04:38And with each customer, we would have the same process of going in and really trying to understand
  79. 04:42what they needed and what they wanted instead of trying to push our product vision on them.
  80. 04:48For a lot of our early customers, Vanta would be a great example.
  81. 04:51Vanta was one of our first customers.
  82. 04:52We just kind of came in with the mindset of, hey, you may have some issues that you're dealing with, and
  83. 04:58we just want to see if we can solve them in a good way.
  84. 05:01And I think if that's your mindset, then it makes it easier because you're again, putting
  85. 05:05the customer first and really being customer driven.
  86. 05:07Fortunately, at the time, they actually did have a very concrete situation, which is around
  87. 05:11having automation to answer customer problems.
  88. 05:14It's a complicated product.
  89. 05:15And so when people come in, they have a lot of questions, and if you're able to answer them well,
  90. 05:19then customers are happy and they're happy.
  91. 05:22So that's how we got started. We were able to ship a initial version very quickly.
  92. 05:26They liked it.
  93. 05:27And then we tested it out on on real customers and they liked it as well.
  94. 05:31And so we just went from there.
  95. 05:32For the first six months, we didn't build anything that wasn't a direct request from one of our customers.
  96. 05:37And now obviously we're slightly farther along.
  97. 05:39So we we have our own views on what makes a good product, but we still are extremely customer first.
  98. 05:45We really love talking to our customers.
  99. 05:46They give us a lot of direction and that's how we approach product building.

  100. Common mistakes first founders make

  101. 05:51My first company, Low Key, was very different from what we're currently building.
  102. 05:54First of all, it was a consumer company and so we didn't have paying customers off the bat.
  103. 05:59We were much more concerned about getting users and getting a lot of them very quickly.
  104. 06:03What we did was we were building software for people that played video games to capture their clips, edit
  105. 06:09them, share them and just explore clips in general.
  106. 06:12By far it was just being a new grad and not knowing much about stuff.
  107. 06:16I was a solo founder for most of it.
  108. 06:17I didn't really know, like what things were important to work on, what things weren't.
  109. 06:22I didn't really know how to evaluate if a good idea, if an idea was good or not.
  110. 06:26Every day you're working hard, but maybe you're not working on the right thing and just after a few months
  111. 06:30go by, it just feels like a lot of the time was wasted.
  112. 06:32So I think that's very natural for first time founders, because especially younger ones,
  113. 06:37because you don't really have that perspective.
  114. 06:38What kept me going was more just, yeah, being young and having a lot of energy
  115. 06:44and being a little bit naive is also helpful,
  116. 06:45because you don't really have that much perspective on how hard things are or how hard things can be.
  117. 06:49So that was by far the hardest part for me.
  118. 06:51I think being a consumer, exaggerated that a bit because there is not really like customers
  119. 06:57paying a lot of money that you can talk to and like, all right, what do you need?
  120. 06:59I'll build it. So that was by far the hardest.
  121. 07:01Once you start scaling, of course you know what you're building.
  122. 07:04But there's still that element of, okay, you know, you're at 10,000 users.
  123. 07:08How do you get to 100,000?
  124. 07:09And then once you're at 100,000 users, how do you get to a million?
  125. 07:11And the answer for those might not be the same.
  126. 07:12And you have to keep figuring out new things to try and things like that.
  127. 07:15And then for that company, you eventually have to figure out how do you make money.
  128. 07:19So that's a whole nother phase. Yeah, for me, the first part is definitely the hardest.
  129. 07:23As a founder, you can always overthink things and you can always rationalize different things,
  130. 07:27but at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter.
  131. 07:29You just have to get to a point where you have customers that really appreciate and value
  132. 07:33what you're doing, and that speaks for itself in terms of the growth of the business.
  133. 07:36So this time around, when we were in the very early stages of building Decagon,
  134. 07:41my co-founder Ashwin is a very similar background,
  135. 07:44also successfully sold the company before we just decided, hey, let's not overthink it.
  136. 07:48We just want to go out there and see what people actually want and what they're
  137. 07:52willing to spend money on, and that just made the initial ideation phase much easier.
  138. 07:57And we really did not want to spend too many cycles, you know, going back and forth in that, in that stage.
  139. 08:02So I think, number one, you need to line up a lot of customer calls.
  140. 08:06And so you can get those from asking your friends to introduce you, asking investors
  141. 08:09to introduce you, reaching out cold.
  142. 08:11And once you have them set up, you want to make sure the calls are very structured.
  143. 08:15And after you leave the call, you feel like you learned something concrete.
  144. 08:19And so part of that is, you know, you have an exploratory phase where you're kind
  145. 08:22of just listening to their problems and seeing like what could possibly be solved.
  146. 08:26And then the next phase of the call is you're generally talking about hypothetical solutions.
  147. 08:30And then the last part of the call is super important to get a sense
  148. 08:34of like how much people would pay for it,
  149. 08:35because many times you could get in a conversation where people are telling you, oh,
  150. 08:38this would be super useful.
  151. 08:40But at the end, you know, there's no budget or they would only be willing to pay a decent a little amount.
  152. 08:45And how much are they willing to pay for?
  153. 08:46It is the only real metric for how useful it is to them, really.
  154. 08:49And so if you're able to have a call like that, then after the call you're like, okay, well,
  155. 08:53we talked about these things and I feel like this would be really useful to them
  156. 08:56or it'll only be kind of useful to them.
  157. 08:59And once you've had enough of those calls, that's like the real signal.
  158. 09:02And as I mentioned before, people were telling us at the time that customer support
  159. 09:06agents customer experience is super crowded.
  160. 09:08It's like too obvious of an idea.
  161. 09:09But when we had a lot of these calls, that's what people were saying.
  162. 09:11So it just means that there's a need and people feel
  163. 09:15like there's ROI there for them to adopt something.
  164. 09:18I think when you're young, the biggest disadvantage is you just don't know how things work, really.
  165. 09:23You might feel like you're very smart, or you can work really hard, but you don't really know,
  166. 09:26like how you make revenue or you don't really know how companies work in general.
  167. 09:29So I think the biggest thing is just staying patient with that and trying to talk
  168. 09:33to as many people as possible to get that intuition.
  169. 09:35The biggest advantage you have when you're younger is you just you can put
  170. 09:38a lot of hours in and work really hard.
  171. 09:40I think for me, I would just describe the difference between, you know,
  172. 09:44a lot of successful entrepreneurs that know and not so successful ones is mainly just intensity.
  173. 09:49So I think a lot of our friends who have built huge companies or a lot of our advisors
  174. 09:53or investors, they all have intensity.
  175. 09:55I think it's impossible to build a big company without intensity, and intensity just kind of means like,
  176. 10:00you know, you're always going, you're always pushing.
  177. 10:02You have a very like, no excuses attitude where you just get things done.
  178. 10:05And that's what we admire about a lot of the folks who help us,
  179. 10:09and that's what we want to have in our DNA as well.
  180. 10:12I don't know if we have the best perspective to give advice on, like a global sort of eye space level.
  181. 10:18I think for us, the way we think about it is there's like the core fundamental players who are building
  182. 10:25new language models and building new infrastructure.
  183. 10:27We of course, sit on top of them. We are an application.
  184. 10:30We interface with our end customers.
  185. 10:32If you're building in a space that is deep enough and is complex enough to have like a bunch
  186. 10:36of features, a bunch of product decisions and a just like a pretty big and deep product,
  187. 10:41no one really is going to be able to replace your Application because, you know,
  188. 10:46the big players are building models, right?
  189. 10:48They're not in the business of building customer support agents.
  190. 10:51So I think that's one piece, which is what you're building has to be deep enough and complex enough for
  191. 10:55it to like, be its own product and be its own company.
  192. 10:58And I think there's a big advantage when you are the one interfacing with end customers,
  193. 11:02because when you're interfacing with end customers, you're the actual one that understands their needs.
  194. 11:06And this goes back to what I've said many times, which is you have to have a good relationship
  195. 11:10and a deep relationship with your customers,
  196. 11:11like, really understand what they need and everything they say and everything
  197. 11:14they do gets baked into your product.
  198. 11:16You're the only one that has that right, because all the big players,
  199. 11:20the Googles of the world, the cloud providers,
  200. 11:22like you're building on top of them, but they're never going to have that access to the exact customers.
  201. 11:27I think if you're building an application, then that's important.
  202. 11:30If you're trying to make sure that a big a big player doesn't come around and just replicate your product.