https://ama.smallgenai.com/ Every answer from the Clay community's Ask Me Anything sessions with Eric Engoron and Mishti Sharma. Search by topic or guest, or swipe through an AMA in a few minutes. en https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_pIGqpw3pmTOH msg_pIGqpw3pmTOH Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:57:56 GMT The thing that made me so excited about Clay in the early days was that they saw the importance of integrations at Scale, and the thing that really sold me on it was Kareem’s conviction and his emphasis on creativity and not business. The main things to focus on when choosing between startups, as cliche as this may sound, is can you get behind the vision. I fundamentally believe that your… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_sSboUriMN0a5 msg_sSboUriMN0a5 Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:55:09 GMT The way we decided what gets built next has changed over time. However, it started with people on a demo using Clay and telling us what was missing. That turned into customer requests as we grew. It continues to remain customer requests depending on our customers data and AI needs. We do a weekly review of every request and decide what would be the most impactful thing to build. Does anything… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_pXdMS8PYlQJB msg_pXdMS8PYlQJB Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:51:04 GMT The biggest thing that changed was our need for controls. We built Clay in the early days very much like the business we wanted to build. It was a business of full transparency, anyone can see anyones workflows and help them iterate on them. Transparency is key when you want to build full alignment. With that being said, as we continued to grow, Enterprise’s needed controls on who could use… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_DjT1o1RJNYK1 msg_DjT1o1RJNYK1 Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:48:32 GMT I’m not sure I would actually build Clay all that differently in full transparency, as I think that each step we’ve taken as defined who we are now, and I think each of those successes, mistakes, and periods of Clay are part of that development. Additionally, I think adoption of MCPs depends on the types of companies in your customer base. Larger enterprises may struggle to adopt MCPs as… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_JsYkbV4UfeQY msg_JsYkbV4UfeQY Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:43:13 GMT In my mind, the most underutilized feature is also my favorite. I’d love to see more folks use our Google Slides (and similar integrations coming soon 👀) to generate dynamic slide decks, and allow you to be fully creative at scale. https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_OdvdR3XE2m4v msg_OdvdR3XE2m4v Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:41:51 GMT The biggest thing I’ve learned as my literally job has become sharing context with all of Clay is that nobody wants to read docs anymore. So, the biggest thing that I can suggest is: • Make sure that decisions between coding sessions are logged in a wiki (it can be ai written) and make sure that future sessions are pointing to that wiki • For context between team members, documentation… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_AHi1g95ik4OW msg_AHi1g95ik4OW Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:38:12 GMT Focus on building the primitives that AI can build upon. You can get those primitives from existing libraries, existing public system prompts, looking at the open-source codebases of brands you admire. If you focus on having essentially an OS of primatives that an AI can build on top of, you’ll have less duplicated code, and less management of code later on https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_vfL9WTOzblLY msg_vfL9WTOzblLY Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:36:26 GMT My favorite Clay feature that I built has to be our Google Slides integration. Before Claude Design, being able to generate custom slide decks off of a meeting brief, in seconds was incredibly powerful and just spoke to my brain as the creative engineer. The feature that I built that taught me the most lessons was Shared Tables in Clay. We viewed shared tables as the biggest growth driver at… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_GfDyv7nUw1GV msg_GfDyv7nUw1GV Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:32:42 GMT I’m going to loop this one into this response: Giving AI business context has become far more important than writing code 🙂 https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_eUZK6yTQtE58 msg_eUZK6yTQtE58 Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:31:57 GMT My planning process is gaining as much business context as humanly possible. Then, translating that into a spec that includes context on what’s already been built. Then I ask AI to present a plan for how it would build that spec, and I fact check each part of the plan and I ask more questions about why it made certain decisions. Then, I ask it to update the plan with my feedback and only… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_iR3zZ5vbyfs8 msg_iR3zZ5vbyfs8 Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:25:16 GMT To me, the future of GTM Engineering is two fold: • 1. Making sure that all of your systems are working together effectively • 2. Making sure that you’re taking feedback from users of those systems, and making improvements and iterations to those systems. By working together effectively, what I really mean is that AI will build a bunch of separate systems that achieve similar things, if it… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_VaKvmrH7qTBj msg_VaKvmrH7qTBj Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:04:59 GMT As an engineer, I don’t create many lists, so this is probably a better question for our GTME team, but my general advice here is to start targeted, use creativity, and then scale when you find what works. https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_r2KpHcxhExPs msg_r2KpHcxhExPs Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:03:52 GMT My biggest advice here is that, especially as you’re starting to build out new workstreams, targeted lists are your best friends. Instead of just running a search for 50k engineers in NYC to send outreach to, try specific subsets of engineers, find what works, and then scale that out to others. Additionally, using things like audiences to save the data you’ve already enriched, so you don’t… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_NaED9Vitbjdz msg_NaED9Vitbjdz Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:59:50 GMT The biggest skill I wish I learned earlier on was how to better convey my technical thoughts to external providers. As you’re building these integrations, you’re working with a variety of different engineers. Each engineer has their own style and their own way of building things. However, what works for a company building an API, and what works for Clay in terms of how we build with it can… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_0TDZz2NTNI6E msg_0TDZz2NTNI6E Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:56:54 GMT Another great question here! To start, I think I’d reframe the notion of surface-level integration work. Sure, certain things in the world of integrations might be simple, like setting up a webhook when a form is submitted to then go to a slack channel. However, at the same time, those surface-level things are also super complex if you look a little deeper. For instance: • This automation… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_vJrmQwriQrCE msg_vJrmQwriQrCE Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:51:18 GMT This is a great question! The answer has actually changed over time. In the beginning, we would actually take each integration provider, and tailor the responses to work better in Clay to match with other providers, so it would be easier to use. So, we’d rename fields, remove the fields that were confusing (i.e. a revenue amount without a currency or cents vs dollars), and then make sure… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_jbsLSAevgnnI msg_jbsLSAevgnnI Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:45:20 GMT Oh I really like this question. We’re going to get quite personal with this one 🙂 My most meaningful achievement is that, with my role at Clay, I was finally able to become who I wanted to be as an engineer. More specifically, I was never the engineer that really fell in love with algorithms, or liked thinking about things in terms of computational complexity. Sure, I could do it, but what I… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_veb3xXzEgTqK msg_veb3xXzEgTqK Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:34:31 GMT I think the gap between enterprise grade production code is certainly lessening as AI becomes more advanced, but it’s still very prevalent. As mentioned in previous threads, AI is only as good as the context it is given. So, a lot of the pain points come from AI not having enough information about who you are as a business, how things should be run, how you think about scaling to thousands and… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_iEMhHeie7EJ5 msg_iEMhHeie7EJ5 Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:28:00 GMT This is a fun question! My first job at Clay was actually getting on calls with Varun, and building whatever came out of those sales calls. We would do this thing called the “reverse demo” where, instead of us demoing our product, we’d give our product to the prospect and then say, “What’s missing”, and literally just watch them go through it on a Zoom call. Then we would do a quick retro on… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_keqnBj0O7rTI msg_keqnBj0O7rTI Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:23:58 GMT The biggest advice that I could possibly give anyone trying to become more technical is that creativity is your greatest strength. It’s funny, because traditionally non-technical roles (i.e. marketing, brand, etc) are traditionally seen as the creative ones, but in my experience, my creativity is how I’ve been able to really build my own engineering knowledge. In this sense, what I mean by… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_CK2ieArNOX1k msg_CK2ieArNOX1k Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:18:37 GMT The biggest mistake people make when vibecoding is assuming that AI knows the proper way to build things without validation and that AI thinks of all of the edge cases, so that you do not have to. The unfortunate truth is that AI only thinks about the context that you give it. So, if you don’t bring up things like security, the fact that you’re building something multi-user, the fact that… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_YYPKOOGr1r1H msg_YYPKOOGr1r1H Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:11:53 GMT The biggest thing that I do that is not a part of the traditional engineering mindset is spending my mornings chatting with product folks. Especially in the world of AI, your context is the most important thing you have. Combine your technical knowledge, with business context, and you have a winning combination. Often times, engineers are given projects from PMs, and just build to spec, but… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_HpjICKPq7aex msg_HpjICKPq7aex Thu, 10 Sep 2026 18:00:19 GMT Love this ❤️ One thing that's made a big difference at Clay is simply having our leader, Kareem, really obsessed with craft, art, and good storytelling. A lot of culture flows from the top so the fact that he was open to creating a grant program for creative projects, creating a book benefit, funding some of our more ambitious internal video projects, and investing in really good design and… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_ntNdUBtAdCjS msg_ntNdUBtAdCjS Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:56:56 GMT I think Daayem is spot on. I'd actually just recommend diving into projects instead of even focusing on skills too much in isolation early on! This answer might be relevant here too: https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_r0u54QOAYVo6 msg_r0u54QOAYVo6 Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:55:03 GMT This is a really great question! I do have a really particular way I use AI to edit and I find it insanely useful. Here are some of my top tips: • An essay should have clear stakes and a thesis up front. • Paragraphs in an essay need to be ordered in a way that makes sense. • Every single paragraph needs a topic sentence that previews what the rest of the paragraph is going to be about. •… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_bsy706O6WH0P msg_bsy706O6WH0P Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:50:45 GMT I like Air, Ramp, and Stripe! Duolingo for socials. Gamma could be interesting. Anthropic definitely has a certain warm cinematic aesthetic though I wouldn't say they're doing anything groundbreaking. I think what makes brand storytelling good is what makes any kind of story good: having stakes, a good hook, plot, talking about actual people, actual trends in the world, and issues, not just… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_6k9DOLYZVKj5 msg_6k9DOLYZVKj5 Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:46:40 GMT Sandra! So nice to hear from you here ❤️ ❤️ Great questions! I think the best way is to actually proactively try to help a company you're really interested in with something that you think they need, based on what you can learn about them online. The way I created my first job at another startup was just texting the founder a bunch of product improvements that I thought he should make. He… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_lWyOW014T2zj msg_lWyOW014T2zj Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:41:17 GMT Thanks for the question! We definitely didn't think GTM engineering would necessarily take off. We were just responding to an internal need when we started hiring for the role, before we even wrote about it. Then we noticed that a lot of the companies we were selling to were super intrigued by the work our early GTMEs were doing — and they wanted to hire GTMEs too! Little organic signals like… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_9IymSdsja4tS msg_9IymSdsja4tS Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:31:43 GMT Totally hear you! It's hard to figure out how to learn things described as abstractly as "systems thinking in practice." One great start, I think, would be to reach out to a business, learn what they're struggling with in their go-to-market motion (it could even be someone super local, like a coffee shop or a laundromat), and build them out a workflow that would help them. I think Clay and a… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_PTkqUlUIpnT5 msg_PTkqUlUIpnT5 Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:28:37 GMT There definitely are! I'm not sure by name exactly what different people are working on but a few people at Clay actually recently started an initiative to help nonprofits. I've heard a lot of agency owners being really interested in pro bono work. I've spoken to several friends who are at nonprofits and you're spot on that the problems are often exactly the same. Whether it's finding funders… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_lzHzKfMT0Lmu msg_lzHzKfMT0Lmu Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:25:32 GMT It's hard to give a definitive answer to this because I've been reading an insane amount since I was a really young child! I'm sure it's the cumulative effect of many authors over time. I read tons of fiction when I was young: E.B. White, Harry Potter. I studied classics so I read a lot of the ancient epics. I have always read a ton of fiction and I love the voice of authors like Jhumpa Lahiri… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_pLeZwHTja6aD msg_pLeZwHTja6aD Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:20:55 GMT Different people have different expertise areas at Clay and our LinkedIn posting usually stems from that, as well as from our personal interests and journey. For me I know I can talk the most about having an interesting career path and the storytelling/narrative role, which has been picking up a lot in the market and where Clay has done some really great work. A lot of my posts are about: •… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_SH634D2ZTAhc msg_SH634D2ZTAhc Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:18:02 GMT Thanks for this question! We're actually quite a lean team here so this has been more organic than it might be at bigger companies. For example with our fundraising video, John wrote a draft script, I edited it with him until it was final, Jake and John ran the video production based on that. I did the voiceover. Once they were done managing the post-production process with editors and… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_z9M3srF3S3kh msg_z9M3srF3S3kh Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:12:25 GMT Great question! I think at the heart of every (even complicated) product is something that can be simply explained. At clay, that's growth as a theme — helping companies grow to their full potential. A lot of things fall out of that, e.g., from macro to micro • we help businesses grow • ...that means we need to help businesses find who actually needs them • ...that. means we need to have the… https://ama.smallgenai.com/#msg_TxORHv2TIwbu msg_TxORHv2TIwbu Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:07:30 GMT love this. I usually I'm in the middle of a couple of books at once. Right now it's a few books about religious history (the way religions develop over time as its own kind of narrative art)! I'm reading Arabs by Tim Mackintosh Smith and The Story of the Jews by Simon Schama. Arabs has been extremely fascinating! I also like trying to mix fiction with nonfiction. Right now I'm in the middle…