In 2017, Andre Charoo of Maple VC, a seed-stage fund, wrote Clay’s first check. Clay is now valued at $7B.
I asked Andre what other investors missed about Clay. He named two things.
1) The vision. In 2016, with coding bootcamps everywhere, Clay’s founders told him the world would never produce enough engineers.
So they wanted to give “superpowers to non-developers,” with a tool everyone already used: a spreadsheet, connected to the internet.
He’d heard that before. When he joined Uber as one of its first 25 employees, his smartest friends in the Valley laughed at him for joining a limousine service.
2) Speed. Clay spent 6 years rebuilding the product before it landed on sales.
Investors expected a new round every 18 to 24 months, so that pace read as a bad sign.
Andre watched something else: the team wasn’t burning cash and never pretended to have product-market fit.
“People think it was a pivot. It wasn’t. AI capabilities caught up to their ambition.”
Once Clay landed on sales, it was “instantly monetizable,” Andre says. It went from zero to more than $150M in revenue in three years.
In the episode, Andre also tells me why he still doesn’t feel accepted in Silicon Valley, even after Uber and a 300x on Clay, and why he’s positioning Maple around the talent the Valley overlooks.
[YouTube] → [Spotify] → [Apple Podcast]
Or jump straight to the key moments (YouTube):
[01:29] Why Andre still doesn’t feel accepted in Silicon Valley
[22:09] The vision behind Clay’s first check
[24:41] Why other investors misread Clay’s six-year journey
