This week, Avanish sits down with Drew Sechrist, CEO and co-founder of Connect The Dots (CTD), to explore how trust, relationships, and networks have always powered enterprise growth—and how AI is finally making those invisible connections visible. A Salesforce veteran who helped scale the company from zero to over $1B in revenue, Drew shares how the classic “connect the dots” motion inside Salesforce inspired the creation of CTD: a platform that turns real relationship data into a repeatable go-to-market advantage. Throughout the conversation, Avanish and Drew unpack the evolution from product-led growth to enterprise sales, why warm introductions outperform even the best AI-generated outbound, and how CTD is building a trusted relationship layer for modern go-to-market teams—all while maintaining enterprise-grade privacy and security.
In this episode, Avanish and Drew discuss:
Host Avanish Sahai
Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and served as a Board Member of Hubspot from 2018 to 2023; he currently serves on the boards of Birdie.ai, Flywl.com and Meta.com.br as well as a few non-profits and educational boards. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow. From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase. Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early to mid-stage startups in Silicon Valley.
About Drew Sechrist
Drew Sechrist is a Salesforce veteran who helped grow the company from $0 to over $1B in revenue. As the #1 global sales manager and account executive, Drew mastered the art of leveraging relationships for warm introductions to close deals faster and bigger.
With co-founder Ian Swinson, another Salesforce alum with deep expertise in CRM and social networks, they’ve built Connect The Dots™ to empower professionals and companies to harness the power of their networks. The vision? A free, intuitive way for individuals to carry their relationships with them, while helping companies replace expensive, ineffective cold outreach with strategic network intelligence.
About Connect The Dots (CTD)
CTD is the Relationship Activation Platform that helps go-to-market teams instantly find and request introductions to key decision-makers using real relationships from across their company, board, investors, advisors, customer champions, and more.
Whether it’s a warm path through your CEO, a trusted investor, a strategic partner, or even a personal connection, CTD reveals who actually knows your target buyers and makes it easy to request and track trusted intros at scale. We turn hidden networks into a repeatable, high-impact channel for modern sales teams. Learn more at www.ctd.ai
About Tidemark
Tidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale. Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years. Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.
Relevant Links
Avanish Sahai (0:1.973)
All right, everybody, delighted to welcome you to another edition of the Platform Journey. Today, Drew Sechrist, CEO of Connect the Dots, and I'll ask Drew to introduce himself and talk a bit about Connect the Dots. Drew is an old, doesn't look old, but he is an old hand from Salesforce, was one of the first, and one of the top sales guys at Salesforce, has had an amazing journey since and I think is building something super cool in the age of AI. Drew, welcome to The Platform Journey.
Drew Sechrist (0:38.956)
Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Avanish Sahai (0:40.695)
Fantastic. So talk a bit about, before we get into the thick of it, just talk a bit about your background, which is fantastic, and then talk a bit about how you came up with Connect The Dots, and then we'll get into the meat of it.
Drew Sechrist (0:57.294)
Yeah, so, well, how far back do you want me to go? I grew up in Pennsylvania and I kind of knew after college that I wanted to end up in Silicon Valley. But I went to school in North Carolina, which is pretty far from Silicon Valley. So I ended up working for a company in Research Triangle Park that was essentially a systems integrator implementing Salesforce automation systems at the time. Names that you may remember like Goldmine and SalesLogix. And yes, it's great. I love to talk to people who don't look at me weird when I say those names. They actually recognize them. And also Business Objects, which was actually Seagate Crystal Info and Crystal Reports back then. We would integrate all that into a functional CRM system for our mid-market customers.
Drew Sechrist (1:53.102)
And when I was reading the Wall Street Journal one day, I saw a front page article about this new emerging industry called, they were calling it “ASP” back then, and Avinash maybe you'll recognize that too, Application Service Provider. And it was in line with what we were trying to do with our system integrator at that point, which was we were gonna host applications for our customers so that they didn't have to deal with all the mess of installing it on servers and dealing with bugs whenever there are problems with the software and basically just delivering it over this new thing called the internet. So there was this article about the ASP industry and some interesting companies that were starting up that were taking advantage of the internet to deliver software like this. And one was called salesforce.com and a guy named Marc Benioff had just left Oracle with $2 million from Larry Ellison to go do this salesforce.com thing.
And I read it. And I checked out their website, which is like, you know, one page, no graphics, really pretty bare bones at that point. And I was like, this is it. I think this is the future. Because I had been implementing, you know, client server, Salesforce automation systems, and the big problem is really the client server nature of it. That there was software on your computer, on all your computers, your salespeople's computers. And, you know, back then literally meant you'd have to FedEx a new computer out to somebody when their database would corrupt on their laptop. And was just a mess. It was just a lot of waste. So I emailed Marc Benioff, I found his email on the website and said, “Hey, I'd like to resell your product when you come to market.” It wasn't out yet. And he got back to me almost immediately and said, sorry, we're not going to have any kind of reseller program, it's just going to be a direct sales team. But he said we should talk about something else. And he said, fly out to San Francisco. Let's meet.
So I flew out to San Francisco, met with Marc and it was a very short interview. Like he asked me why I was there and spent the whole day flying across the country. Talked to him and I explained to him, basically, I just explained to you this whole mess of clients over technology. This architecture was wrong and I love the vision. And he's like, you're hired. And stood up and he opened the door and said, Nancy, get through what he wants.
And Nancy was the Head of HR. I was like, what do I want? I mean, I didn't even interview for a job. I didn't know what he was talking about. I didn't know what he wanted me to do. So he said, go sell. I think you should go sell this product. And so I did. I went and I sold it for 10 years. And it was great. We didn't have any paying customers when I got there. And when I left a decade later, we had over a billion dollars in top line ARR.
I learned a lot during that period, obviously. It’s like the best MBA you could ever hope for is to walk into Marc Benioff's office in 1999 and get hired to join the rocket ship. So I did that and it was fantastic. And I learned a lot of stuff on the way. You had asked about how that informed what I'm doing now with Connect The Dots. And one of the big things that came out of that was that Marc obviously set an amazing culture for the company.
One of the elements of that culture was “we're all in it”. We're all in it together. And so I guess this is one team, one team, one dream. And so whatever we could do to make any of us successful, we would do it. anything, full stop. And that meant leveraging all the relationships that we had at our disposal.
Avanish Sahai (5:25.481)
Yep.
Drew Sechrist (5:40.888)
Part of the reason this goes without saying in Silicon Valley, everybody had equity in the company. So we all wanted the company to succeed, but that's really important. A lot of companies don't understand that and they really should because that's how you become a world beating company. Hire an amazing team, got a great culture and all their incentives align with equity. And so we leveraged our network, the people that we knew collectively very well to get introductions to our sales targets.
And I learned that early on, I grew up on the East Coast and I didn't have any friends or family west of the Mississippi when I came out to San Francisco in 1999. So I didn't have any network and I was a kid. I was pretty fresh out of school at that point. But I had now plopped into this Silicon Valley company with a lot of people who had worked at companies like Oracle and had been in Silicon Valley for a while and had gone to universities locally.
They were pretty well networked and I figured I don't have a network but these people do and I'm gonna leverage it. So I did, I got really good at it somewhere along the lines or along the path, we codified this into the way that we sold and we came up with this thing called the Success Formula, which Avanish you probably have seen that.
Avanish Sahai (7:3.612)
Absolutely. Lived it.
Drew Sechrist (7:8.366)
The acronym success, S-U-C-C-E-S-S, one of those C's stood for connect the dots. The guy who popularized that was one of our legendary sales leaders, Dave Rudnitsky. He beat the drum that you always got to get your face in the place and you got to connect the dots. And that meant you had to go get in the office of the companies that you want to sell to and make sure that you figure out how to leverage our collective relationship network to get the meetings with the hard to meet executives that you need to meet in order to close those deals. And it was awesome. It was so great to be part of that team.
Avanish Sahai (7:48.757)
Yeah, I think the only comment I'd make is, again, a lot of people obviously have known Salesforce, right? But the original Salesforce was the original product-led-growth. You just sign up and go. But what you were talking about is, how do you move into the enterprise? That's a question all the current companies also ask, right? Which is, hey, you make it easy to adopt, sign up and go, but when you start selling to the large accounts, you start selling to the enterprise, it is not someone who signed up and went. You gotta connect those dots. You gotta find the influencers, the buying groups, the decision makers, the economic buyer, all those things. And that's really what you're talking about here. Those are the dots you gotta connect.
Drew Sechrist (8:30.686)
Absolutely. Yeah, the PLG motion got our foot in the door, know, with typically with lower level people who were experimenting and, maybe like frontline sales managers who had a problem because their company had some terrible SFA system and they couldn't really use it. And so they would just like, they'd swipe their credit card and set up their, yes, which later we had to go, we had to pay the piper later.
Avanish Sahai (8:49.064)
Yeah. Under the radar, totally under the radar.
Drew Sechrist (8:58.574)
Yeah, correct. For all of those skunkworks projects that pissed off IT. Then eventually we had to apologize to IT. And when we moved into the enterprise, that's another story. But yeah, you're 100 % right. We would land and expand, often with the PLG motion. And then we would figure out how to connect the dots to get to higher power. And then we'd run a proper enterprise sales cycle.
Avanish Sahai (9:21.558)
Yeah, yeah. So the insight was finding those, identifying those relationships, you know, and in the old days, literally, I'm assuming you went person to person and said, who do you know at XYZ with these kind of roles and titles? Can you introduce me? Can you send an email? Can you copy me? I'm not exaggerating very much, right? That's how it was. Now, bring us to ctd.ai. How did that insight, the old-fashioned way, how did that translate into what you're doing now?
Drew Sechrist (9:58.136)
Yeah. Yeah. So just to you're 100 % right. LinkedIn didn't even exist yet when we started Salesforce. And so LinkedIn came along a few years later, and you know, LinkedIn was very helpful at seeing who knew who in the early days, kind of ironically, I would say more useful than it is now. It was a much smaller network then, but it was like, they were actually like, Avanish, if you were connected with Jim, it meant you really knew him.
Avanish Sahai (10:27.446)
Yeah, and you were a bit more circumspect, to be honest. You were a little bit choosier than now, right?
Drew Sechrist (10:27.730)
Yes. And LinkedIn was, if you remember in the early days, establishing culture is important in companies and also in online communities like LinkedIn. And in the early days, they really said, hey, if you've never met this person in real life, don't link in with them. Yeah, don't do it. And that's gone out the window.
Avanish Sahai (10:48.928)
By a long shot.
Drew Sechrist (10:56.556)
Long out the window now. So in the early days, literally we were 36 people when I got there in one office in downtown San Francisco. So I could walk around the corner and ask Marc if he knew somebody at Apple or Cisco or Symantec or whatever company we're trying to sell to. And chances were pretty good with Marc, honestly, that he would know somebody. And it wasn't just Marc. It was also like my bosses, like Carl Schachter was my boss for a long time.
He went to Stanford locally and he worked at Oracle and he was a well-connected guy. And so he knew a lot of people too. And I could ask Carl and just kept going. And then later we brought in Jim Steele and who knows everybody. So I heard your episode with Jim and Jim was talking about the 30 interviews that he had to go through to get hired. I was one of those 30 interviews and I gave him both of my thumbs up and after he got hired, said, Drew, thank you so much for giving Marc the thumbs up to hire me. How can I repay you? I was like, Jim, so glad you asked. This is my territory. These are all the accounts that I'd like to sell into. And he's like, this is great, Drew. And then we sat down and went through it and we found a bunch of companies where he had relationships. And he just knew, like Jim, at that point, Jim just knew in his mind, he catalogs this stuff. His brain is.
You hear about Bill Clinton, like, you know, just catalog every human being that he'd ever met and just have it at his fingertips. And Jim's kind of like that. And it's really impressive. So that's what we did in the early days. Yeah, it was a lot of asking and trial and error and groping around in the dark. Whenever we found one of those relationships that we could leverage, it was amazing.
And we leveraged LinkedIn when we could. And I would say in the early days it was great. Ironically, as things got bigger and as the company got bigger and we had an even bigger network, theoretically a bigger network that we could tap into, it just became harder and harder to really see who had the real relationships that we could leverage. And I think it became less of what we did. It's not like it went away. Connect the dots was always a play at Salesforce, still is. But it was just hard. If you really can't see all the relationships at your disposal, then it's hard to do it.
So, okay, fast forward to today. So a years ago when we started Connect the Dots, what did we do there? Obviously inspired by that play at Salesforce. We realized that there's a big opportunity and a big problem that enterprise sales teams had. And the big opportunity is they have a massive network, if you're a big company, you have a massive network of people who should be well aligned.
Assuming everybody's got equity in the company and they're good team players, then everybody should want that company to succeed and should want the sales team to get in front of the right executives quickly. So there's incentive there. There's motivation for everybody to figure out where they can help out and make introductions so that you can get directly to the right leadership that you want to sell to.
The problem was visibility.
And the best thing, the standard became LinkedIn. So everybody would look at LinkedIn. But LinkedIn has a bunch of challenges. So one is now in 2025, it's a very polluted network. The noise to signal ratio is extremely high. And so when you spread that out across an entire organization, you're trying to figure out the best relationships to leverage, it becomes very fatiguing for everybody involved if you ask,
question like if I say Avanish it looks like you have a strong relationship with Bob at XYZ company and you say Drew sorry I don't know who that person is. Okay then I ask you again and again if I ask you three times and it's like Drew sorry I don't know that person, at some point you're gonna tune me out at some point I'm gonna not just even ask you anymore because it's just fatiguing for everybody. I can, you can, feel the social capital burning up quickly.
So the entire industry has been trying to solve this problem. Because they know the opportunity is huge. If you can figure it out, if you had all of the relationships at your disposal that you could really truly leverage with the people who are aligned with you to make those introductions, that's a game changer, particularly in 2025 when AI and automation are making all of the outbounding efforts so noisy. They're good, well-written outbounding efforts. But it's just, we're all drowning in them.
And if you get those emails from these AI SDRs or BDRs, basically all you can do is delete them. That's all you can do. But the thing that cuts through the noise is if I get an email from Avanish and I know Avanish, I'm going to open it. And if it turns out that somebody that knows Avanish said, hey, Avanish, would you send this email to Drew? Because I think Drew could benefit from our service or product or whatever.
And if you think you have to use your own judgment. You're probably going to think, well, is Drew going to appreciate this or not? And if you think, yeah, Drew might appreciate this. Yeah.
Avanish Sahai (16:20.597)
Does it make sense for him? Is this a good ad value? Is this something that, based on what I know about Drew and their organization, their company, their role, is this worth my time and their time and frankly the social capital as you call it, right?
Drew Sechrist (16:26.222)
Yes, and the best scenario is if you actually earn social capital. Let's say you say, hey, Drew, I'd like to introduce you to Bob. He wants to invite you to 50 yard, Super Bowl tickets to talk about the really cool AI tool that's going to help your company. Well, I'd be like, Avanish, please send those to me any time they come in. Thank you. But you have to use your own judgment, if it's going to be positive for all the people involved. That's what we enable.
And the way that we enable this, the big insight that we had, the big technical insight was there's effectively a latent social graph that's been building up automatically, undetected, secretly over the course of the past three plus decades. And that latent social graph is all of the communication exhaust between people.
So if you and I email or send text messages or WhatsApps or...Slack messages or whatever, the fact that you and I have communicated back and forth indicates that we know each other to some degree. It might be very light. But then you can use some pretty simple techniques to see how many times we've communicated across, you know, how long a period of time and when, and how recently, and is it a bidirectional communication? So as opposed to me spamming you and you never replying. So there's a lot of signal there that, which with some intelligence, can distill it down into a really simple indicator of how well two people likely know each other. And that's what we've done. So that's the core.
Avanish Sahai (18:16.565)
That's awesome. So you gave some examples of different elements of the signals. Do you have a sense now that you've been around and you've built this platform, are there particular signals? Is it frequency? Is it density? It, you know, and as you look through, do you look through the content of the emails to see what is being discussed? Because I mean, ultimately this is an AI play. But it's all as good as the model that you build around that. So what are some of the insights that you guys have found so far of where that, the strength of relationship can be measured accurately?
Drew Sechrist (18:56.238)
Yeah. Yeah, and let me say, what I explained to you is like, those are all things that you could measure. The thing that we do measure right now is email metadata. It's a volume, frequency, recency of communication on email. Now we're expanding that to include all the other things I've just discussed or that I just mentioned. So what we don't do today is we don't look at the content of the email and we don't do that on purpose. Because it would be actually quite trivial to just look at the content of the email and do sentiment analysis and a bunch of other stuff.
What we don't want to do is be creepy. We want everybody to feel comfortable that this is a really simple, benign thing that you're doing when you are on Connect the Dots with anybody else. And one other thing I should clarify is we sell to enterprises. So we'll sell it to a company, and they turn it on the Gainsight, for example, has turned it on for everybody in the company.
Drew Sechrist (19:54.942)
And so we analyze all of the email metadata for all the employees. build a graph for everybody. Then anybody in their organization can see who knows who and how well. But you can also set it up personally as an individual. Like, Nick Mehta at GainSight has done this. So he has connected his personal email account plus his work email account plus his LinkedIn. And the cool thing then is he gets a view of his entire network all consolidated into one.
So we're a hybrid product. There's a version for you as an individual. You get to set up an account and keep it for life, just like you can kind of set up a LinkedIn account and keep it for life. And then we have the collective version that you can use as an enterprise, so you can all share visibility across each other's networks and see where you can help each other.
Avanish Sahai (20:41.205)
And full disclosure, I do use the personal version. So I should say that because you approached me with it some time back and I have found it to be quite useful actually. And my Gmail runs..20 years of Gmail. So it's a powerful, very powerful visibility tool.
Drew Sechrist (20:51.854)
All right, awesome.
Drew Sechrist (21:2.382)
I'm glad to hear that. Yeah, mean, this is one cool combination. This is one cool area where I don't necessarily like getting older. But in this area, it's kind of cool because my Gmail account came out the first year Gmail came out. Same with you. And so there's a lot in there. And there are a lot of good nuggets. I remember I played kickball with some guy. And I was on an email thread back in 2002 about a kickball match in the Marina on the Marina Green and that guy is now CTO of some significant company.
And it's like he's one of my 44,000 contacts that I would have just lost in the ocean of time. Now nobody's lost. Everybody is neatly indexed, organized by their current company, all their past companies. I can search for any role that I'm looking for and I get a lot of serendipity that pops up as an individual user of the product.
Avanish Sahai (21:56.170)
So Drew, the theme of this podcast is the platform journey and we're not gonna put words in your mouth but what I've sensed is, you were at Salesforce long enough to see that journey there, there's a platform opportunity here, right? You talked about email first but then there's other forms of communication. There's other forms of, whether it's Slack, WhatsApp, messaging, et cetera.
Drew Sechrist (22:2.135)
Mmm.
Avanish Sahai (22:25.961)
Can you talk a bit about that? Do you see that evolving? Do you see CTD as an emerging platform that'll have that business graph? Because it doesn't exist out there, right? I mean, that is, one would have thought someone else would have done it. They haven't.
Drew Sechrist (22:45.112)
That's what I thought too. And so I just decided to go do it because it needs to happen. Yeah, very much so. So our vision is that we are going to be the trust layer across the internet and across life. For every purpose, every reason that you need to know who knows who and how well, who has trust with whom, that's missing. You can't see that today. And you think about your inbox, there's zero trust in all of the outbounding that you get. There's zero trust. When somebody unknown sends you an email. And the thing that catapults you straight up to 100 % trust is when it's somebody you already know and you trust them. And there you go. It's the binary difference.
Avanish Sahai (23:29.423)
And by the way, think again, you know, I've been in the enterprise business for a while, right? One of the most powerful tools, which typically is used, “hey, let's do a dinner with 15 prospects and bring in one senior customer who is going to speak on our behalf.” What's really happening is not that the person is a great pitch, it could be, but they're not necessarily a great pitch person for you. They're putting trust, right? They're exposing themselves to say, “hey, I trust this company, this team, this account executive, et cetera, and therefore you, my peer group, should as well.” That means that's how we've done that for decades. And I think, is it fair to say that what you're bringing the digital version of that across touchpoints and saying, “we understand that that model is expensive and it doesn't always, you it's not always easy to do. There is a proxy for that, which is what, what CTD really is providing.”
Drew Sechrist (24:34.584)
Well, yeah, I would say yes and. So we can also enable that dinner with a dozen prospects and the senior exec. So we can, the very lightweight use of CTD is we have this thing called ghost emails. And I don't know if you've ever seen that, Avanish, but you know the concept, right? Back in Salesforce, I would write an email from Marc Benioff that he would copy and paste and send it in his own voice to the senior executive at some target company.
Avanish Sahai (24:41.181)
Of course.
Drew Sechrist (25:4.142)
It worked like a charm. That senior exec would reply to Marc, so we'd get the meeting. But there was a lot of labor involved in that. So we've actually built this really slick process of this feature called ghost emails, where you can see the relationship. So I can see Avanish has a strong relationship with the CEO of the company I want to get to. I can draft the email for you to send. And it's in your voice. And then you get a notification of this thing. You just click Send. You look at it, and you're like, yeah, that's good. Or you can modify it a little bit. Or you can decline it if you don't want to send it. That's probably what you're referring to. That's the lightweight version of instead of setting up a dinner with 12 prospects and a senior exec who's a customer, you can do ghost emails and you can still get a great introduction. Now I would say, I would say don't stop the dinners, man. I love them. And we were just that one. And, and you know, that, introduction opens the door, but I also, I'm, I'm all about, you know, more in-person interactions, not less. This is not a substitute for that. But this is a great way to transfer trust. You can borrow trust from somebody and use it to get the meeting. And that is what we enable. And we enable it quickly, and we also enable you to do it in more deeply intimate settings, like a dinner or whatever you want.
Avanish Sahai (26:26.740)
Perfect. You've talked a lot about trust. You're selling to the enterprise. And you talk a bit about the things you don't do. You don't look into the content and so on. But again, enterprises are notoriously still, and maybe even more so in the age of AI. They're sensitive about who's getting access to what kind of data and what are they doing with it, where is it going, et cetera.
How are you handling that? What are some of the guardrails that you've put in place to reassure the enterprise that their data is being protected?
Drew Sechrist (27:2.894)
Well, the most basic thing is we are SOC 2, Type 2 certified. We maintain that compliance. We're built on top of GCP, which I know you know pretty well. We take a minimum-use approach to data. So your email data is incredibly sensitive. Nobody wants that to get out. And that's what we touch in order to build this graph.
We only need the email metadata in order to build the graph. We actually don't need the email itself. So the email metadata is like the, know, who's it from, who's it to, who is CC'd on it. That's the stuff we need in order to build the graph. And so we can, when you set this up as an enterprise, you can decide one of two settings. You can give us just the metadata or you can give us the metadata and also the email itself, the body itself. So if you want to be super locked up, locked down, you can choose metadata only. And that's a scope that you grant via Google, if that's your provider, or Microsoft, if that's your email provider. And so we don't actually have any access to the email body then. So that's one option for you. Now, if you do want to give us access to the email body, and there are some really good reasons for it, it's primarily so that you can see it yourself. And you probably benefit from this, Avinash, when you are looking at a, do you have the Chrome extension installed? Okay. So when you're looking at a profile on LinkedIn, like if you look at my profile on LinkedIn, then you'll see on the right-hand side all the emails that you and I have ever shared going back to the beginning of time across all email accounts. It's pretty cool. And you can click on that and it can pop up in the email. So you can say, okay, what's the last thing Drew and I talked about and click on it and.
Avanish Sahai (28:33.116)
I do, I absolutely do.
Drew Sechrist (28:52.754)
How do I know Drew in the first place, who introduced us? And you can click on it in that one. You can see all that context is amazing. So if you grant CTD access to the bodies, all that you're doing is letting yourself see those bodies, just like that.
Avanish Sahai (29:5.352)
Yeah, that data's not being aggregated in an LLM, but it's there at kind of the, there was a link, it's a link to your original email.
Drew Sechrist (29:13.614)
Correct, correct. And yes, and also that is, by the way, that never is resident on our servers. We don't store that email body. So that's, you have to have an active token for your email account. And so when you click on that email to feed, what's the last thing Drew and I talked about? That's an API call. We're fetching that from Google servers or from Microsoft servers. And so if you lose access to that email account, then you also lose access to those email because you're the one who actually controls that, not us.
Avanish Sahai (29:47.112)
I follow the don't delete policy. Google will always have storage for my emails.
Drew Sechrist (29:52.558)
That’s what I'm saying, but high five because now, you know, 20 something years later, it's a treasure trove to have all that, you know, archived email now. Yeah.
Avanish Sahai (29:56.981)
That's scary amazing. Hey, a couple more questions and I want to let you go. A lot of talk in the world of AI and AI based solutions is around impact and outcomes. What have your customers, how have they defined their ability to attribute success to CTD.AI?
Drew Sechrist (30:26.904)
Yeah. I mean, the primary thing is getting access and meetings to the people that they need to sell to. The ultimate outcome is revenue, right? You want to, you want to sell a deal. We can't, you know, we can't guarantee you're going to sell a deal that's kind of up to you, your product and your sales team and your execution. What we can virtually guarantee you is you can get tons of meetings with really senior people that you want to target using Connect The Dots
Avanish Sahai (30:54.728)
Yeah. Right.
Drew Sechrist (30:56.606)
We'll get your foot in the door. So it's remarkable how easy it is. Now the one thing I will say is it's a function of your network. We basically show you the network that you bring. We have a tool and you bring your network to it. So if you connect your corporate email account and we index that for you, if you're a big company, then you're going to crush it. You have a big network and it's going to be great. If you're a smaller company, then you can still be really successful. But you need to develop your network. So if you're a big company, you're waking up on third base. You have a big network to tap into. There's nothing. Just go enjoy it. But if you're a smaller company, let's say you're a couple hundred employees, then you need to do some recruiting. You need to get your board, investors, advisors on board. You want your senior execs to connect their personal networks. And if you do that, then you can be very, very successful, even as a small company.
Avanish Sahai (31:42.714)
Mm. Advisors. Yeah.
Avanish Sahai (31:50.014)
Yeah.
Drew Sechrist (31:56.046)
But the end game is you build the network and then you leverage the network to get directly introduced really easily to the CEO or CFO or VP of whatever that you're selling to. And those are the outcomes that we provide.
Avanish Sahai (32:10.738)
Yeah, Drew, last question. What are you most excited about the future for AI and for your platform?
Drew Sechrist (32:21.646)
Well, for AI, I saw the Neo robot this week. You see that? I thought real hard about buying one. I don't think I'm going to do it. But I think that's just amazing. There's so much that's…it's changing so fast. And I really do see that we're going to enter a new era of abundance and not scarcity.
Avanish Sahai (32:25.608)
Yeah.
Drew Sechrist (32:51.532)
I think that is scary in some ways, in lots of ways, but it's also really exciting. And for us specifically, we have a network effect company. So every day our product gets better and the networks get better. And so it's really neat to see it getting closer and closer and closer to this tipping point where it's just insanely good. It's really good for our enterprise customers right now, and it's OK for our individual users.
Avanish Sahai (32:53.746)
Mm.
Drew Sechrist (33:20.110)
And there's going to be a tipping point in the not too distant future where it's insanely good for everyone. And I mean, that's just really fun to be in this position right now, inching towards that point.
Avanish Sahai (33:32.628)
It's awesome. Drew, we have a lot of entrepreneurs and investors who listen to the podcast. If they don't know of CTD and if they want to try it out, I owe you the chance to do a short pitch. Where can they find it?
Drew Sechrist (33:45.902)
Yeah, actually you gave me the chance to do a really long pitch today. Thank you, Avanish. Yeah, they can find us at ctd.ai. And you can send me an email, if you'd like, at drew@ctd.ai. That's the best place to find us.
Avanish Sahai (34:5.298)
That's so awesome. Drew, thank you for making some time for joining us on the platform journey. Fun to see how things have evolved.
Drew Sechrist (34:12.600)
Thanks, Avanish.