May 18, 2026

# Transcript: 2026-05-18

> 1 time blocks from 8:01 AM to 8:43 AM

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### Casual morning team check-in
**8:01 AM - 8:43 AM PDT** | *meeting*

**Microphone:**
Let me show you my local health network app, where they took you out of it. Can't help you anymore. Crazy. Yeah, no, actually had marked that out after an hour and a half. Four hours to listen to.

All right. What's up, Cam? Todd? Good morning. Alright. Not sure this year. We'll see. Yeah, I don't know. But my buddy Curtis Gardner—he's best friends with Hatfield. He's, you know, very good friends with Hatfield and lives in San Francisco, and I've become friends with him. His son was the long snapper. That Thursday night and I think he's gonna come out to the Bears training camp or spring camp. I would—to the Super Bowl this year. They were very close last year.

What I've done consisted of implementing and testing some changes to the relationship map work that I had spent a couple days on, combining the work of my two PRs into one and removing some less important changes. I'll make sure to implement any final testing and get that merged today. Beyond that, I began testing on what Michael worked on. Did a couple other dependent PRs. And then a little bit of work just making sure that the scripts that I had put together for Hydraulics connectors were working. I need to make sure to go and send those connector invitations to the 123 hydraulics connectors, or I believe 117. After that was isolated for that Allison woman, and that's not gonna—that nobody else is gonna figure it out. I didn't look at it closely. Any record I addressed would have encountered the same issue. So in that sense, yes.

Okay, cool. After us time out this morning. And yeah, that's basically me. How about you, Todd?

More of the same on Friday and basically summarized it. And then I actually went back to the actual code because there were like system debugs and debugging in there in the existing PRs and all that stuff. So, hopefully I forgot that I didn't close the PR—probably just closed this morning—but hopefully I can get our thing out there. I suspect we're probably getting close to maybe needing that. With what I've learned from it, I think it's actually a decent start. So I'd like to professionalize it, remove some of the stuff, and add more things like possible logging, iframe, and then like an actual test and probably an R org. But yeah, I would just wait on that. Hopefully when it's needed it'll be something hopefully as simple as using the endpoint with the existing base controllers and then the existing JWT or, geez, J-div, LWC.

The one thing I did notice is that I did kind of do the auto—oh my gosh—like deployment of a new user, an auto assignment. Yeah, create a new affiliation user that back out of these PRs because that was the base. Not indication, auto. Anyway, you guys know what I'm talking about. Yeah, that was in there as part of that process where if somebody who doesn't have a user can still use Salesforce, it doesn't get, you know, bad experience. Stuff that's going on. So yeah, trying to just touch this up so it'll be ready to roll when needed.

Six PRs, a crazy amount of code, but essentially this removes the old SFDC syncing tables and makes—includes adding companies, enriching them, have users. It also creates those user records or creates those soon enough. Having to add then need wrap that project up again. All pushed out just for the most part. The first is starting in on the UI and UX for the new relationship map page. Now that can't wrap up—well, he has wrapped up a tool. So there'll be more coming. Hidden that can show up in Salesforce. And then the other thing I'm going to start working on is we are deeply locked with WorkOS because we need to be, and then we can send invites and things like that without running to the problems we keep running into. But that won't be until next week. You won't be working on that on a few hours a day. So that is where I'm at.

Yes, as I told the team I think on Thursday or Friday—the SOC 2—we've reviewed it all. There was a bunch of mistakes, which kind of makes sense. Final report hopefully today or tomorrow I would assume. I don't know why it takes so long so we shall see.

Okay, so with potential for it and, you know, Todd and Michael, all the work you guys are doing in Salesforce, like one of the reasons was Salesforce for them. Like he was like, the fact that you guys have these ratings that are... It's not, it's not. I need to chat with you a little bit about that. Okay, cool. And then Cam, you may have said this too, but the deactivations for OWL, SQL, cool, like sturdy deal. And anyway, we got the PO number, we've invoiced them. I reached out to Nassim to sort of, you know, get a kickoff call. It's now visible in Salesforce. And like, he's like, this is what's great about this one is it's a committed 12 months. There's no 90 day out. We're invoicing them for the whole amount. So it's a solid win. Mike Woods, our guy there, reached out to me on Friday. He's like, hey, our legal is asking about final details. Stay tuned, Woods, but that would be the ones of course we've already talked about like Nerdio and uh, feedback and help reconciling some of the data. But this week I'm really committed. Solo, rate anything. So going to work on this.

What was the next? Oh, Postman. So Postman. But, you know, this is the week for us to really pump that up. Per the contract that ends this Friday, I've extended it for them through the month of May so that we can show an effect. We'll invoice them, sure. I'm gonna, you know, do what I can do there too. But all hands on deck on Postman. Send them something later this week. I can't remember what I shared with him, but I'm trying to move forward.

It's cool to see Michelle excited about this and that they're going to open this thing up to all their employees. That's kind of a big risk for them, so it's great for us.

I'll bring on Marceau really across the board. I'm still kind of without someone dedicating themselves to sales full time. I mean, yeah, I've got to figure out where I can spend my time. Because there is a market out there, and I've shared this with you guys, that's high-touch and clean. Maybe they make that less real, especially when we provide other data sources and do the indirect stuff. So I'm not worried about that. But they're also like almost shut off from adding new vendors, right? They're trying to build all their own stuff with agents internally because they're staffed that way.

Then you've got companies like NextGen who don't have any of that, right? They're still buying SaaS products. So I have to go after agencies or maybe consulting companies, or outside of tech, right? Business services a little bit more.

I know their team, you know, ruthlessly. I don't know if you guys have seen any of their employees just posting on LinkedIn, but it's like they're pissed. I mean, this one engineer got stock vesting over four years. I don't know, like they recognized him as one of the top performers or whatever. And the options started vesting a year ago and then, I mean, he's... but like they did because they have... as they're like, "Oh fuck, we can't do this."

This is really cool. It adds a ton of value. Our salespeople love it, right? You know, there's so much value we can deliver. He is really excited about what we're doing.

And I also, you know, we converted Clockwork. If we can convert Postman, right? If we can convert Hydraulics and if we can show momentum with investors, I guess I should say right now, until we get that momentum that I'm looking for. And I spoke to these four deal leads today with better options and we can close these four deals. Okay, let's go. I've got a conversation. I'm going to update the investor deck and let's go. This is all over the next like 30 days or whatever. That's the focus.

But I do have another conversation later today with this new guy that I haven't met that Jeff introduced me to. I posted, it was pretty funny. So Jasper from Artisan, who you guys have probably heard of, a company that doesn't hire humans. Did Ava offer this or was this you? And he got back to me and he's like, "This one was me. He's like, we do use Ava, but I like what you guys are doing. Would be worth a conversation, so I'm reaching out to you directly." And I said, "Cool. I want to focus on what you're doing." And he's done a very good job of getting visibility. You know, Jason Limkin, you know, touts them big time and is using them aggressively. And I think he's recognizing, "All right, we solved the top of the funnel, these guys solved the middle and bottom of the funnel." And I thought it was interesting that he reached out to me directly. So I'm talking to him starting tomorrow.

Sort of partnership stuff. Henry Schuck wanted to talk at one point, CEO of ZoomInfo, and he's kind of gone quiet. They had a bunch of layoffs, but he and I had emailed back and forth.

Still trying to keep the Sixth Sense stuff going, the demand-based stuff. They've been unresponsive. Can't think of the other stuff.

That's kind of what I've been thinking about these last weeks. What really will make us valuable? Like that archive pull from LinkedIn. I don't know everything that SmallWorld can use their own magic to figure out, you know, from a... I hate to use "schools" because schools to me are really risky, but there's a lot of metadata that we can get from like a full archive download. It takes hours, right? You get the one in like 12 minutes that's just the connections, but then you get the whole thing. If we loaded that into Claude and we were to sort of, you know, have our own... that Claude could sort of parse for us and organize in such a way where they see in their network, or, you know, it informs our agent to know which connector to nudge.

Now what we don't have is... It was just an idea to use Claude sort of more broadly to say, okay, how do we... I think... But anyway, I don't know what you guys think about that or if you have any reaction to it. But it seems like if we've got the target companies and then we can get this full data, I think Claude is probably one of the more expensive options as far as what we could do and what could be scaled. With that to do over a large set of connectors could be potentially prohibitively expensive. So that's one thing that comes to mind. But I mean, generally speaking, I don't see why it's worth it, or if they're able to pan for gold, or if it's just a fool's errand.

Yeah, and I haven't looked closely at what we're already getting. But I thought it was worth looking into. There is a lot of data in there.

The other one that I thought of: if we were to take Salesforce contacts that our customers have and they blessed it from a security perspective, bi-directional sync where we have those names and we can... and then have those people showing up under... and maybe they get tagged somehow, you know, through SmallWorld. So it's like, in other words, you have a hundred accounts in Salesforce, you have three contact names per account. You know, who knows them throughout the company? And seeing who in your network matches, then we need you to do that. But in the absence of that, we would have to have some way of saying, okay, these 5,000, you know, here are the 250, right, that are high priority accounts or whatever we want to call them, right, the target accounts. Work with Salesforce for those 250 high priority accounts. Yeah, our current relationships model where strengths are rated is predicated on people having a connection with somebody that isn't... but it does work right now.

So before we do anything on that, we need to prove that's actually valuable. And I think the only way to do that is through conversations—those contacts are worth exploring as an idea before we put code to it, I would suggest.

Yeah, and so the catalyst here is more LinkedIn, right? So to your point, we don't have a way of reconciling that person today. But if you think about the Gmail context option for us, that future could be built, and that's not a problem. But it also doesn't necessarily give us anything else besides that future to start with.

And so for that connector who isn't ever going to sync, it pulled data from Salesforce. And we were able to say, okay, this is a way for us to present—that would be incredible.

No, I agree with that. My understanding is that they're loading arbitrary contacts that they don't know they're connected to. Just because they're loaded into Salesforce doesn't tell us that they are connected.

It definitely could. That was the part I mentioned first, right? Recognizing that for those that don't sync, if we want to show specific people that are relevant, we need the LinkedIn signal.

If we were to do that—because to your point too, if LinkedIn, there may be no LinkedIn data behind them, right? They're just using org chart data from that company to add those names into the CRM.

We do see with all of our contact names—we're using the LinkedIn ID to verify who that person is. So there's not necessarily that same parity between what they would see in Salesforce and what we would be able to show in our system.

I mean, we do have a precedent for modeling relationships without a LinkedIn person, but it's only on one-offs, right? We had a running process scheduled that would algorithmically generate relationships based on how long someone worked at a given place. They got turned off because in some cases it would be very irrelevant depending on the size. And other times we would get no relationship or weak relationships.

But that was about as close as we got to being able to do it without LinkedIn data.

The API, as it's called in the activity channel—are we burying those names for now? We haven't been getting them for a couple of months. The good news is we have a clear path forward. In other words, if we do the OAuth, it just ends and no data ever comes in from it.

No, it's a successful connection. Actually, we're not doing anything with it.

That's interesting because you would think whoever those connectors are would say, "Hey, I did this, right? I'm not seeing anybody here. What's going on?" But they're pretty much well along the engaged path.

Yeah, okay. There are still a lot of navigators out there, right? And Team Link is still our biggest competitor by far. And so even though people are trying to build this in-house, if there's a way at some point—maybe six months down the road—to move off this dependency on LinkedIn data.

It was called Point Drive. He sold his company about the same time as Luke Broad did. We chatted about that. He said there's eight billion in revenues on the recruiting and talent side, and one billion in revenues on the Navigator side. Now that we're owned by Microsoft, getting stuff done is that much harder.

There's definitely an opportunity for something like what you're doing because they're just not going to put a lot more into Sales Navigator. It's basically just a huge network of people. I thought that was interesting—just another reference point.

Thanks, team.

**System Audio:**
So it was nice. He's excited, definitely. So you guys, get your Bears gear on, man. They got Georgia, signed with the Bears. So he's a rookie trying to make the team. I'm going to see Hat Thursday night, and I think he's going to come out and join us for my buddy Curtis Gardner. Curtis is best friends with Hat, very good friends with Hat, and lives in San Francisco, and I've become friends with him. His son was the long snapper.

Yeah, no, totally. I went back to the actual code because there was system debugging and debugging in the existing PRs. I've learned from Eric Bischoff about stuff like that, so hopefully I'll remember. I didn't close the PR, but I closed it this morning, but holding again. I suspect we're probably getting close to needing that. I was getting ready on the LWC that I've started with the other PR in this Salesforce repo. Working on that iframe and then an actual test and probably an R org. I would just wait on that. There's an affiliation user for a person when they come from Salesforce. Anyway, you guys know what I'm talking about. That was in there as part of that process where if somebody who doesn't have a user can still use Salesforce—bad experience. 

The SFDC sync instead of asking for lists of requesters, just say, hey, we're going to pull every single person from SFDC and allow you to directly enable per client within minutes. It includes adding companies, enriching them for companies or clients of ours who have six PRs. It's like a crazy amount of code, but essentially this removes all but whatever you need support-wise to get through QA and push one by one. There are some pretty strict rules. The first one should project up. The Postman sync—Serby still hasn't clicked their buttons, and so I reached out again. Today I'm just about to run the Postman sync to keep them up to date, and then also check with Serby. For the most part, there's a new relationship map page, probably another big two PRs, but that won't be until next week. I won't be working on that—only a few hours a day. That is where I am at.

We are deeply locked with WorkOS because we need to be able to send invites and things like that without running into the problems we keep running into. That'll be another big page that can show up in Salesforce. Then the other thing I'm going to start working on is the users' invites and all of that system just to make sure that page is done later this week, maybe, depending on the target company stuff. That will also have me intersect with Todd as we start building a version. He's wrapped up a tool, so there'll be more coming. That way we can start building that framework with the hope of getting something out, even just as a hidden feature.

Did Michael mention the modal for the offer help thing? Is that already in? Kind of makes sense given the pressure. They have accepted all of them. They agreed, but they misspelled stuff. So now they're just waiting for the auditor to sign off on it. 

On Thursday or Friday, the SOC 2—I've reviewed it all. There was a bunch of mistakes. Todd and Michael, all the work you guys are doing on Salesforce—one of the reasons was Salesforce for them. The fact that you guys have these ratings now visible in Salesforce is great. This one is a committed 12 months. There's no 90-day out. We're invoicing them for the whole amount, scheduled, and some more to come there.

Kobe, Mike Woods, our guy there, reached out to me on Friday. He's like, hey, our legal is asking about people like Sturdy deal. We got the PO number. We've invoiced them. I reached out to Nassim to sort of get a kickoff call scheduled down there. He reached out to me on Friday. So those are kind of the new ones. The next gen got back to me late last week and said all talk cumulative, stuff that I'm working on, so stay tuned.

Outstanding strength requests—I think even introduction requests—we need to start asking, okay, are we delivering value here? What's the culprit? I feel like Ryan Weber's got a ridiculous network, and I haven't seen him rate anything. So what was next? Postman. We're on the clock. Michael, thanks again for paying. As an example, there's been 200 strength requests, and we've gotten back 60. Out of the 140, we can do there. We have seen some good data, scrutiny of—nothing on Splashtop. Hydraulics is leaning in. They've also been doing a lot, and it's cool to move. Then this new guy that he sort of delegated something to—maybe he was expecting him to kind of run with it. So if we don't get something today, I'll reach out to actors if they haven't signed up. Cam, anything we can do there too? But all hands on deck on Postman to sort of see where value can be captured and presented. The conversion is a big one. It's $30,000 more that we'll invoice them for, assuming we can show that value over the next two weeks.

So you know, this is the week for us to really pump that up. Per the contract, it ends this Friday. I've extended it for them through the month of May so that we can show enough value. I see Michelle's excited about this and they're going to open this thing up to all their employees. That's kind of a big risk for them. We need to watch that pretty closely.

Michael, I don't know what's possible with throttling up or throttling down, but fingers crossed, let's hope that the invite that goes out works well. There's not tons of latency on the syncing and on the rating and all of that stuff. So we'll want to watch that. Yeah, just let me know before you send the invite and I'll bring all my servers across the board.

We're waiting to figure this out together because I think we're at the cusp of next gen stuff. I found it through on-market. We're taking LinkedIn connections and throwing them in the cloud. We think we've got it figured out. This means I've got to go after agencies or maybe consulting companies or outside of tech, right? Business services a little bit more.

There's a lot of companies that don't have a team building stuff about that, but they're also almost shut off from adding new vendors. They're trying to build all their own stuff with agents internally because they're staffed that way. The ones to think about are just tech companies. You know, look at what happened with Cloudflare. They laid off 20%. Zatlin got called out. We're talking about so much value we can deliver to them that I've got to dedicate some time to it. I've got a call today at six o'clock with another investor to get them to concentrate on this.

If they concentrate on it, they're like, "Oh fuck, we can't do this. This is really cool. It adds a ton of value. Our salespeople love it, right?" There are those companies and they're cutting back on a lot of these investments. As it relates to us, am I fighting a fight with some of these technology companies? Even if it's crazy, they have so much cash. They did make it work, but there's some pretty pissed off people. The point being, it's nuts. This one guy, he's like, "I'm not even gonna wear the shirts anymore." Cloudflare, to their credit, had crazy severance. They recognized him as one of the top performers. His options started vesting a year ago and then he got laid off in this group. I don't know if you guys have seen any of their employees posting on LinkedIn, but they're pissed. This one engineer got a slug of options, Michelle.

Modified expectations on investors, I guess I should say. If we can convert, they showed a study yesterday morning and I'm like, "Oh, it's got to be Ava." They're automating their outreach so I responded, "Thanks Jasper. Noted on LinkedIn. You guys know that, don't hire humans." Bernie Sanders is calling these guys out.

Jasper reached out to me Saturday morning or was it yesterday morning? I think it was yesterday morning. He posted something pretty funny. Jasper from Artisan, you guys have probably heard of him. That's the focus, but I do have another conversation later today with this new guy that I haven't met that Jeff introduced me to. I'll keep you guys posted on that. He got back to me. He's like, "This one was me. We do use Ava."

Jason Limkin touts them big time. We should chat, even if it's like a lead sharing type of thing. This plus this equals this. I thought it was interesting that he reached out to me directly. I'm talking to him from tomorrow. I thought it would be worth a conversation so I reached out to you directly and said, "Cool. Once you guys have built, here's what we're doing. It's pretty complimentary."

Still trying to keep demand-based stuff and they've been responsive. Henry Shuck wanted to talk at one point, CEO of ZoomInfo, and he's kind of gone quiet. They had a bunch of layoffs. Michael's probably laughing because I did an example that I shared and it was more for investors. But if we were to get like a 12-minute one that's just the connections, but then you get the whole thing, and if we loaded that into Claude and had our own figure out, you know, it would be helpful. But maybe it is. Well, we do have that individual person's network with all that data.

I hate to use schools because schools are really risky to me, but there's a lot of maybe data that we can get from a full archive download to get new data points from LinkedIn that might be helpful. We've got the target companies and then we can get this full data dump. It would be interesting to see what Claude could do with it right now.

The other one that I thought of, tell me if I'm crazy here, but if we were to take the sales... Yeah. I will assume no other thoughts on that one. Not thinking about something or if it's repetitive over what we're already getting, but I thought it was worth looking into. Yeah, and I haven't looked closely at what we get with that archive, but Michael, I don't know if you were there. Shoot it down if I'm not right. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

Our customers are under 300 people that are raising 5,000. Our current relationships model - where strengths are - a potential relationship with somebody that isn't a LinkedIn relationship.

Now, the LinkedIn relationship is actually pretty arbitrary. It doesn't actually need to exist, but it does right now. So before we do anything on that, we need to prove that that's actually valuable. And I think the only way to do that is through conversations, not, you know, squeeze the juice, so to speak. Because if we, you know, that feature could be built and that's not a problem.

We don't have a way of reconciling that person today. But if you think about the Gmail contacts - this is synced - and we were able to sort of say, "OK, this is a way for us to present that information. Your connector has a strong relationship because they saw that name with that title." That's not LinkedIn anymore, right? You give us the contacts. We have those contacts. And again, to your point, it would require a lot of work to reconcile who that individual is.

So that was the impetus behind the idea. Definitely it could, but I've been in those companies. Again, this is - let's say we don't need this as a starting point if we have our own sort of reservoir of names.

And then you're a connector. Anyway, and Small World, that person is there. There's not necessarily that same parity between what they would see in Salesforce and what we would be able to show in our system either. Or an org chart, you know, from that company - to add those names into the CRM. So then intelligently organize them.

So again, it may be a dumb idea that I'm throwing out there. I think it's more of just if we were to, you know, because to your point too, if they're used - when have we done that? That's only been on one-offs, right? Yeah, I mean, are we just... What's that? So, has it redirected to LinkedIn, or do they have an expectation? There's no value that comes out of it. They sync, like they set it up and they can do the OAuth, but then it just ends and no data ever comes in from it. There's a path forward there, but it just requires time and effort to actually be spent on rebuilding it.

I didn't remember whether we were burying those names or what we were doing with them, just because I've seen some new data and so forth.

Now, the good news is we have a lot more tools for doing that with LevaData to enrich it much more easily based on email address. So there's a clear ability. But as you and I have talked about a couple of times now, we need to rebuild it to get the actual data out of it. But that also means we need to go further than we did in the past, actually. And then today, if somebody does use the Gmail - I decided to sync Gmail. Pretty okay - even if it was working, we wouldn't show any differentiation of those people in the system. Yeah, okay, yep.

Well, again, I don't want to get us distracted. I know we're working on a lot of stuff. The whole point here is - and by the way, I had breakfast a week ago. I don't know if I shared this with you guys - a guy named Bill Burnett, who sold his business to LinkedIn back in 2016. He continued to sort of move off of this dependency on LinkedIn data. It's a great thing for us. And so that's really kind of the reason I'm surfacing it because we're all chatting through this stuff right now.

Uh, they're still right in - TeamLink is still our biggest competitor by far. And so even though people are trying to build this in-house, if there's a way at some point, maybe it's six months down the road... He's like, "There's eight billion in revenues on the recruiting and talent side and there's one billion in revenues on the Navigator side." And he's like, "I will say like... he was on the sales side of LinkedIn. Now he's on the recruiting side. And he said, 'David - the Sales Navigator, we're not spending much time on at all. He's like, it's flat.'"

So it was called Point Drive. And he sold his company about the same time as Luke Broad did. So we chatted about that. And so it was great because, you know, he's like, "So this huge network of people." So I thought that was interesting just to share with you guys in terms of how LinkedIn sees them. There's definitely an opportunity for something like what you're doing because they're just not going to put a lot more into what Sales Navigator is or what it isn't. And it's basically just in relationship to - it's why he's on the Talent and Recruiting site now. That's another reference point.

Okay, all right. Well, we'll check in with you guys. Let me know if I can be helpful and talk to you soon. That makes sense.

This was a Monday morning team standup for SmallWorld covering engineering progress, active deals, and strategic direction. On the engineering side, Cam is finalizing relationship map PR work and sending ~117 Hydraulics connector invitations, Todd is cleaning up Salesforce/LWC PRs, and Michael shipped 6 PRs removing legacy SFDC sync tables and is starting the new relationship map UI and WorkOS invite integration. On the business side, the Sturdy deal closed as a committed 12-month contract (invoiced, kickoff scheduling with Nassim), while Postman is the top priority this week — its contract ends Friday (extended through May) with a $30K conversion on the line. Strategically, the team discussed reducing LinkedIn data dependency long-term, explored loading LinkedIn archive data into Claude for enrichment, and debated a Salesforce contacts bi-directional sync concept — all tabled pending validation through customer conversations. A partnership conversation with Jasper from Artisan (complementary top-of-funnel/bottom-of-funnel fit) is set for tomorrow.