Hightouch's CEO Kashish Gupta on activating data for personalization

Hightouch's CEO Kashish Gupta on activating data for personalization

Author: Unusual Ventures February 25, 2024 Duration: 34:53

Hightouch is a composable customer data platform. It helps companies collect and sync user data into ad platforms, CRMs, email tools etc. Last valued at over $600M, Hightouch has over 600 customers, including the NBA, Spotify, Plaid, Calendly, and more.

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Kashish Gupta, co-CEO and co-founder of Hightouch. 

Join us as we discuss: 

00:00 Switching personas to find product-market fit

1:44 Evolution of the Data Integration Space

2:42 The Concept of Reverse ETL

5:41 The Origin Story of Hightouch

8:01 Exploring Different Business Ideas

12:06 Early Design Partners and Product Strategy

14:46 Transition from Founder Selling to Hiring Sales Team

16:48 Go-to-Market Motion and Marketing Strategy

18:39 Hightouch's Product Vision and Future Direction

22:55 Challenges in the Market and Building User Certainty

27:01 Co-CEO Arrangement and Founder Team Dynamic

31:04 Advice for Aspiring Founders in 2024

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at sandhya@unusual.vc and 

Twitter 

LinkedIn 

Kashish Gupta is the co-CEO and co-founder of Hightouch
Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.


Behind every so-called overnight success in software, there's a long, often messy journey of finding exactly what customers need and how to deliver it. That's the central theme explored in Startup Field Guide by Unusual Ventures: The Product Market Fit Podcast. This series is built for those in the trenches of early-stage software companies, from founders just starting out to leaders tasked with building something from nothing. Each episode moves beyond theory, offering grounded conversations with people who have actually navigated these challenges. You'll hear them unpack the real work of identifying a true market need, the nuances of early hiring decisions, and the practical steps of crafting a go-to-market strategy. Fundraising, often a opaque process, gets broken down into more understandable components. The focus remains consistently on the actionable and the specific, providing a kind of audio manual for the foundational phase of a business. Tune in for a candid look at the less-glamorous, critical work that separates an idea from a viable company, all brought to you by Unusual Ventures. This podcast serves as a resource for turning those initial concepts into a sustainable operation, one hard-won lesson at a time.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 53

Startup Field Guide by Unusual Ventures: The Product Market Fit Podcast
Podcast Episodes
Jyoti Bansal on how Traceable found product-market fit [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 29:49
Jyoti Bansal is the CEO of @Harnessio and @TraceableAI . He is also a co-founder of Unusual Ventures.In a special episode of the Startup Field Guide podcast, Jyoti sits down with John Vrionis – his co-founder and friend…
Clay CEO Kareem Amin on AI-powered outreach for growth [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 39:35
Clay is an AI-powered platform for sales prospecting that gathers data from over 75 sources to build lists and help growth teams send personalized outreach messages. Recently valued at over $500M, Clay has several high-p…
Scribe CEO Jennifer Smith on documenting workflows [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 28:04
Scribe makes it easy to share how you do your work by creating automated documentation. Scribe raised a Series B recently and has grown to millions of users with enterprise customers like Gong, LinkedIn, and Shopify. In…
Eightfold AI CEO Ashutosh Garg on managing talent with AI [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 36:38
Eightfold AI is a talent management platform used by hundreds of large organizations like Vodafone and Activision Blizzard. It helps them leverage data to find great people with the skills they need, both internally and…
Monte Carlo CEO Barr Moses on data reliability [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 39:15
Monte Carlo is an end-to-end data observability platform that monitors pipelines for missing or inaccurate data. Last valued at $1.6B, Monte Carlo has over 150 customers, including data teams at companies such as CNN, Je…
Perplexity CTO Denis Yarats on AI-powered search [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 35:14
Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine that answers user questions. Founded in 2022 and valued at over $1B, Perplexity recently crossed 10M monthly active users and is growing fast. In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chat…
Everlaw CEO AJ Shankar on how AI is accelerating legal tech [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 39:58
Everlaw is a legal tech company started in 2011 that helps law firms and corporations run what’s called “e-discovery”— essentially a process of investigating often massive piles of documents to find the key pieces of evi…
Deepgram's CEO Scott Stephenson on Speech AI [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 41:11
Deepgram is a voice AI company that has built an incredible reputation in the market for the quality of its speech recognition. Last valued at over $250M, Deepgram has over 500 customers, including NASA, Spotify, and Twi…