S14E2: Alex Halliday, Founder of AirOps, on Content Engineering and the AI Marketing Stack

when it's respective markets. So whether that's on the growth side of the business that I've done a lot of work,

or the product side, being very clear about what the operating rhythm of the team looks like, that could really lead to increased learning velocity. Welcome back to the room podcast season 14. Hi, Mads. Hi, Claude. So excited to be here. So excited to be talking about everything that's going on in 2026 in tech. There's so much to discuss. Each season, as you all know, we sit down with some of the most thoughtful, insightful people building on the

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We are diving into sweets of innovation from early product decisions to navigating rapid

moments of growth, to acquisitions, IPO exits and truly the conversations that offer a window into how great companies are built. And if you enjoy the conversations, which I think you will,

“make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And of course, if you want to stay connected,”

we would love to have you at our community events like our annual Inside Summit. And you can subscribe to our newsletter to learn more at theroompodcast.com. Thank you so much for being a part of the community and welcome to season 14 of the room podcast. We used rippling at my startup drive and one thing that really stood out was how much it simplified workflows that are usually incredibly manual with other tools onboarding a new hire, setting up payroll, provisioning apps,

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and focus on what really matters, like your product and your customers, you need rippling. Right now, venture back startups can get six months of rippling startup stock for free. Head to rippling.com/theroom and sign up today. That's rip.lyng.com/teh-e-r-o-o-m to sign up for six months free today. Focus on what you're building. Leave a rest of rippling. Rippling.com/theroom. Perkins QE supports the most innovative entrepreneurs and investors in fast moving in high

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startup percolator offers access to programs, resources, and rich dynamic content. Designed to assist entrepreneurs on their startup journey. To learn more, go to startup percolator.com and Perkins QE/C-O-I-E.com. Welcome back to the room podcast. I'm Claudia Lori, and this week we're joined by Alex Halliday, founder and CEO of AirOps, a platform helping companies build AI-powered content workflows

and automate complex marketing operations. AirOps sits at the center of a rapidly emerging category, the AI marketing stack. And instead of simply generating text with a single prompt, the platform helps teams orchestrate structured workflows that combine AI models, data integrations, and human review to produce high-quality content at scale. The core insight behind AirOps is deceptively simple. Great AI-generated content doesn't come from a better prompt. It comes from

better systems. In this conversation, Alex shares the unlikely journey that led him to that realization. From building a viral fan websites as a teenager to becoming the youngest CEO of a publicly traded company in the UK. His career has followed the arc of the internet itself, from early web experimentation to the modern AI era. We talk about the concept of content engineering, and why the real challenge with AI isn't generating text, but operationalizing it inside of

organizations. Alex also shares why focus matters more than ever in the AI era, how AirOps decided to access over marketing teams as their core customer, and why narrowing down your opportunity

“can actually be the key to building a great company. And beyond product and strategy,”

we also discuss the emotional reality of founding. Why startups really move in a straight line,

and how learning to manage a reaction to uncertainty is one of the most important skills

a founder can develop. And with that, let's open the door. This is the room podcast with Alex Halliday of AirOps. First of all, Alex, thank you so much for joining us in the room today.

with all of our guests, so we're curious, where did you grow up, and how has that shaped your view of the world? I grew up in North London for those who know it well, a place called Muswell Hill, both my parents were academics. I grew up around a really eclectic group of writers and professors and teachers. And like many kids, I wanted to do the exact opposite of my parents. And so, from a very young age, was building things, making things, got into computers like,

as soon as I occurred, weren't they still had a green screen. And the dial-up modem was painfully slow, but I saw that as being my path. I was so drawn to it and it's been my world ever since.

“So in that vein of early identity, did you always think you were going to become a founder?”

I thought it really is a path to a sense of freedom, professionally, like creation and creating things and having the skills to be able to build and make and ship things. And so, I think I didn't really know at that young age what a founder was. And this was before, I won't give away my age highly, but this was before sort of founder culture and startup culture. I think it could really hit, but I did have this deep sense of wanting to master building products and the web as it was

starting to emerge. And I had my first real taste of it around 15 when I had this collection of websites

go incredibly viral and it gave me this taste for what success felt like. And in many ways, you could argue, I've been chasing the eye ever since because it was just such a moment of having a real identity something I could be proud of and something that I think allowed me to show my skills a bit of the world. Let's hone in on those viral links for a second. Is this when

“you founded social goal? So this was long before social goal. So I would basically find really”

big fans of UC artists online who were creating forums and collecting use and I would offer them a mixture of hosting. I would give them technical support and I would help with advertising and share the advertising royalties with them. And ended up building this network of 30 or 40

websites including we had the third most popular Britney Spears fan site we had like the biggest

buff in the Vampire Slayer website and we often would outrank all of the official websites and it would start selling ads on them and this was before ad targeting. So we were selling mortgages and life insurance 12 year olds trying to see what has happened in next week's episode of Buffet. So the arbitrage was real and then Adnet works shared I got some really funny phone calls from Network CEO's being like, we're paying you $20,000 a month and we know this is

like completely ridiculous. The music is gonna stop pretty soon but that age it was

“pretty fun to be honest. Absolutely there was so much to just build on the internet because there”

was no order essentially. Okay. And a little bit it was happening to stay with AI but we'll get

there in a second. How did this evolve then into you becoming the youngest publicly traded company

CEO in the UK? That's the funny story. So I the advertising golden age that I was occupying came to a very abrupt end in November 2000. So that's a long time ago. I then continue my education. I was still building websites for people. It went to the LSD briefly when my dad was actually head of department trying to do the academic thing and then the same day I started a startup. So I moved into my university halls of residence in the South Bank in London and my

startup office on the same day in short-etch on Rivington's. And we started building a social network platform. And this was before Facebook groups had taken off and the only real compact so we had was Mark Andrews and starts up at the time which was called Ning. And so we started creating this social networking platform for groups that wanted their own space and it was similar to kind of what circle is now for those familiar. And we bundled along for a bit for about a year and then we found

this investor that was really interested in the company and around that time things really took off for us and part of the way we financed the business was we took over a shell company on the Julia market in the UK. So I have this weird thing of being the younger CEO of a publicly trading company but it's not as it may first appear. But I did have to go to AGMs as like a 23 year old. We're very spikey blonde hair that people were very upset about

investor forums and answer all these questions about where social networking was going. It was really intense and the problem for me as a founder at that point they didn't have any of the basic playbooks of running stuff. I was stubbing my toe all over the place. I didn't know the things that we now have our fingertips for company building fundraising team building. This just didn't really exist for me at that time. So it was harder than it should have been but at the same time

it's a formative experience. Social Go wasn't your only stop at founding something. You found it another startup then went and had pretty senior product roles at companies like Masterclass,

around this arc and ultimately how that informed your decision to found a company again in 2022.

For me the social Go experience was five years, very intense and after that point I got really clear that I wanted to be around the smartest people I possibly could as a next step which I actually wish I'd done first but no do I was and so I decided to start in your company in the legal tax space and at the same time form some relationships with venture investors in San Francisco who were visiting in London. There was a lot of Silicon Valley comes to the UK, these kinds of programs.

We actually flew the team out for the legal startup to San Francisco and ended up getting a term sheet from Founders Fund contingent on me moving San Francisco and the founder Thunder

“like you can't start a serious company in UK. You have to come San Francisco for a bit and get”

immersed in this culture and so I came initially on a tourist visa doing my 90 day visa runs and my co-founder and I got a co-work space that's so much as you do hung out the creamery which was all the rage back then and then I'm not being a good fit for me actually and this is one of the lessons you've learned as a founder which is the idea of kind of founder market fit and which opportunities to fit you like glove and you just thrive in and others which I think are much more

challenging and this was one where I spent six to nine months on it and I think it was a great for me personally but I really loved being in this environment of San Francisco and this I think

those years of 2013 to 2017 San Francisco were just incredible and I don't know if it will ever

see anything quite like it again obviously AI is now reintegrating the city but back then I feel like you'd run into every single name, adventure and startups just at the local blue bottle and there were lots of small dinners where you would get exposure to these incredibly smart people and so I felt very much at my core that this is where I wanted it to be and it was where I would get the best sense of what good really looked like and the kinds of playbooks and things that I could

then take forward in my career so I remember speaking to Sam Altman in a lucky group and they were

“talking about this company called T-Spring which was taking off I think of that point it was like”

500 or 700 million dollars over a barrel through the Facebook feed, a hypergrowth and I went and met them in their office which was this falling apart building with parrots flying around and a lot of patience from there were wards inside this building as well so your patience wandering around parrots flying around and then everybody was working on the floor with their laptops and I remember walking in and just being like this is so fun I need to be here so I took a job there

did you work with Walker? Walker Jack Altman sat next to me so he was like the personality pillar of

the company and Art Levy who now runs Brexit like BD and then the new real guys Sam it's basically

like this really interesting little group there that's so funny we backed forth while at Walker's next company at my last firm yeah it was a crazy time I think at that point they were the third fastest growing e-commerce platform of all time behind eBay and Amazon they were also a cautionary tail a bit like Zinger a single channel risk which we can definitely dive into and then it started this wrong of three very different companies that I got to be part of through their series A to D E

grunt. What do you think were the one or two key lessons learned from your time operating seeing kind of hypergrowth in many different industries and how that ultimately informed you now as a founder of aerops. It was like nine years or something all in there's probably some books to

“be written on the lessons I think one thing is designing for learning velocity in these teams because”

especially when things are changing quickly which back then we thought we knew what that meant and now we're being shown that it's all going even faster but I think the rate at which an organization can learn is pretty indicative of the rate at which it can be successful and when it's respective markets and so whether that's on the growth side of the business that I've done a lot of work or the product side being very clear about what the operating rhythm of the team looks like

that could really lead to increased learning velocity so without experimentation volume or prototyping or contact with customer really just looking at a month of progress and understanding how much did we deepen our understanding in this opportunity is a good measure of success so I think that takes a lot of thoughtful design and experimentation and culture setting so that would be one I would definitely take forward in anything I do. Well you definitely employed that with aerops

digging it a bit you founded aerops in early 2022 with Matt Hamill and Bernard Gonzalez nearly a year before a chat she beat he was launched an interesting time the company actually started in the database not in AI content what was the original insight what was your home moment

We at bungalow had a incredibly large set of front-length teams that spent all of their time on a Sunday night sending CS fees around to each other just to try and get reporting in order

“debt creation I remember sitting there with Matt and we were like this is it's saying there's”

going to be a better way than this the first thread we started to pull knowing full well by the

way that we might pivot but we were like okay let's explore this for a bit and see where it goes was could we create a authoritative library of data assets that front-length teams could use can they use them in the tools that they want to kind of report on a variety of front-length teams from and that would like Google Sheet slides code or notion we bring these data assets give them to teams let them just operate fast off of great data that was where we started and

inside of that product was this workflow tool that we built it's just like hey great loads together and you can have different steps functions and our first floor is elements pre-charging PT was having elements steps in there so you could use DaVinci 3 and leaves like very rudimentary models but they were magical and as we started to develop and pull the thread on out I had this moment right in sleep for three days I remember I was using the models for a mixture of sequel generation

and other tasks and I was just like this is just melting my brain specifically it was I saw the laws of physics that govern software melting down in front of me I just started thinking this is the biggest technology shift of my lifetime in front of my eyes and so I was in you all into the time

and I told Matt's like we have to lean into this the first six months of that looked like

experimenting all over the place we had hovered education building workflows on the platform for teaching us students we had all sorts of crazy use cases but there was this one white hot center of usage which were these technical CMOs that would build on our nights of weekend they would do crazy things we would think that writing an article is like a five step workflow they would make something that's a hundred stats because they're so opinionate it's so high taste and ultimately

it's actually pt launched and we spoke of application layer just below and all of these businesses cropping up I remember feeling like if we're horizontal we are going to disappear into oblivion we have to pick a customer that we are excited to obsess about build with partner with talk to every single day and these marketers were amazingly creative and they were so willing to contribute to our business and ambition that I was just very excited to pick them if felt too narrow

at the time but when the pie is expanding these things it feel really narrow at any one time

per car hundred million five hundred million AR businesses as the pie expands and it was a

story that repeated itself multiple times because every time we down selected and focused the business accelerated well by the way I used you guys at Harvard I was a each guest last year and then took a club fun and they had and it's so funny because at the beginning of the hour I said I was playing around with it more for the podcast this morning and I was the workflow looks so similar I was like I don't know if I've been in this tool before and then I totally have

“yeah we still have a few folks like that hanging around but I think that the culmination of the”

logo flywheel the truth point is getting really deep in a high economic value use case as fast as you can when is it all this noise around is just such a shortcut to grow but what you're really talking about here which is the big aha behind air ops is what is content engineering in the age of AI and this is really the idea that great content requires sometimes 50 to 100 step workflows not just better prompts tell us a little bit more about what gave you conviction

that the future wasn't just better models at a time where everyone's building on models and trying to improve models but really better implementation layers on top of them the big gap between a model can do a thing and a model can do a thing to the level that you are happy as a brand put your stamp of approval and publisher is about a hundred times wider than most people realize and this was an insight that we got very early on working with high taste brands

“to use our platform and we were humbled honestly at the beginning of the complexities and”

intricacies of real organizations real brands with a lot of constraints a lot of new ones so a complexity and so we were very early in this mini FDE model of like really pairing with brands to understand their realities and how we get these models from like that's really cool to that's really valuable content engineering has emerged as a response to this increasing need for accurate up-to-date content in organizations that are mature and I have high taste bars and one of

the slightly I think under appreciate effects of AI search and chat GPT is that these models and experiences give consumers information synthesis superpowers like my attention span for buying headset for long-haul flights used to be 30 seconds and now it's two or three hours of equivalent

the quality precision or ferretine freshness of that content has never been more important but the

existing way of working of like hey we're gonna refresh five blogs this month guys it just isn't sufficient to really help modern brands keep up with this sociable appetite for content and

“specificity and so content engineering is emerging as this is like really important MVP”

and that one marketing log to be able to address that get to scale with AI content with humans in the loop along the way but with the precision that actually adds something to the conversation is informing the consumer and ultimately persuading the agents and so originally this was very oriented around traditional search and then about 13 months ago AI search just was a rocket booster to this narrative and it's become just this incredible trend that we're a part of and hopefully

leaving you've mentioned there's a lot of high taste brands doing some pretty complex things maybe

since the last 13 months what is the craziest use case you've seen one of your customers employ I've got a good one so I actually can't mention the specific company unfortunately but we had a company that wanted to do like usage guides for their API and so they wanted to tell all these stories about how to use their API for all of these things and that's like common for us right it's like how do you get to the long tail of these cases blend things like social proof and kind of customer

proof points with use case guides to give you shots like that kind of thing is like a very common error of use case but what made this interesting is they actually wanted to have valid code in the actual articles that people could copy paste and so we had to build a agent that would be able to test the code that it was proposing from various use cases before it went into the article and that's like an example of something that's like if you ask the average person can charge you be

see right a blog post you like of course like why do you do content engineering platform color like it's 2026 but then the real value is actually just out of reach for one restaurant or another and that's where marketers come to us with these like we love it when it's a little impossible we're like oh gosh right we need to code we actually need to validate the code runs and we need to run lintes and other things on it and let's build that into a content engineering workflow that

“that's what makes the job interesting so that'd be one example it's nice to see when you take”

a step back and actually focus a product on a niche you actually almost create like more abundance in use cases and clearly that's resonating with the capital market you've gone on to raise north of 60 million today which was most recently led a series beat by Greylock at a 225

million dollar valuation so first of all congratulations on those milestones so thank you we are curious

though who was the first person to say yes to investing in you and air ops? I would love to give props to all of our investors along the way because the link between all of them is they got to conviction quite early in the process before the venture sort of blob caught up I love that like independent thinking in your board members and people that can sit in a room without listening to the noise are really valuable as board members not something I look for the very first check came from

Zach to it at wing and if you're a founder thinking about raising money I would talk to Zach all day long and recommend him he and I work together at bungalow he was a board observer and wing was an investor and so we had this wonderful overlap in a different subject matter different business but he'd get to see me operate and present at board meetings I would get to see him wrestle with interesting business questions and his intellect from through but actually like Zach I say

there's every single time I say this at the wing partner meetings Zach is the person you call when you're having one of those days because he is this ball of energy and enthusiasm nuanced and precise he's not delusional but there is this like sometimes a founder you just need someone to tell you reflect back your progress you've made help you zoom out reframe the challenge and set you on

“your way and I love him for that I think he's been amazing as we've gone through you know several”

rounds with this business and we couldn't have done it without him but it honestly the check from wing at the beginning was very quick you round of very quick high conviction process I actually deemed him on Twizz X and have his number for some reason and I think we had the seed check on the Monday afternoon well that is fast conviction a high taste one might say and really helpful to to paint that picture of also that partnership that you had early on and how that has pulled through

as your subsequent rounds of financing we're talking about a little bit these processes can be opaque and at the same time the AI bubble or just AI excitement around the venture ecosystem has created a really interesting dynamic in fundraising today curious how you would think about advice for fundraising right now. This is actually related to the previous story I don't believe in this thing of only taught investors when you're raising at any stage actually I've been given the advice by a lot of

every single investor that we have added to the cap table we've percolated the relationship a bit

before you know we've slowed the seeds and the strategy in the space and we've given them things to think about we've made asks of them as well and sort of a battle tested their thinking so I do think relationships especially in the early stages it's about the conviction they have in you as an operator obviously and I think it's so hard in a fast fundraising process as an investor to really have enough time to get a sense of you as a person and the space so I think

fast piece of advice is like just trend build relationships and make those relationships a valuable for the investor before you've even started the fundraising process which it looks like sharing interesting things getting there takes on things asking what they think about interesting topics and then I think right now the sort of software is being built in many cases at the speed of inference and there's a lot of questions about where the value is going to lie at the application layer

“but what remains is sort of a during thing that you need to prove is that you have a deep understanding”

of the buyer the real reality of that person what are they facing in 2026 that you're going to be a solution for how do you make it into their top one or two problems that they want to solve do you have relationships already that are representative of your buyers you have people that are like interested in the problem you're solving if you don't have a product yet I get a lot of pitches and things sent to me and some of them are like we're imagining a data analytics with

LM so it's like this cool demo and I'm like yeah but who is really going to be like super motivated to go to that few with the CFO to go buy this and like early safe founders are like whoa that's so far down the line but if you actually start with a real high value economic problem obsessed about it and become the person to go to for that the software now and other elements so the process I think become a lot easier and actually this was a lesson I had to really learn

and my co-founder was coming from a friend of mine took him like three or four months to drill this into me because I was like we're going to build this platform and you can build anything on it and he's like okay but what specifically are people going to want to do who is going to write a hundred thousand dollar check for this platform and why and I was like no you don't

“you don't see the vision but it was like you have to kind of hit real commercial reality early”

right now to convince investors that you understand the problem deeply enough you're building excitement in real buyers and then obviously execution and building the company comes shortly after. Rippling is something I actually relied on when I was building my startup private and I think it speaks to a broader truth about startups. Most people don't start companies because they love running payroll or managing HR and compliance but somewhere between hiring your

first employee and raising your next round you end up deep in HR, IT and operations and it can

really pull you away from building which would be simple things onboarding payroll, setting up tools, start to take over your life. That's what brippling was built to solve. Rippling is a unified platform that lets startups run HR payroll, IT and finance in one system from day one. Rippling startup stack replaces disconnected tools that don't sync with a fully connected platform. So if you want to stay focused on your product and your customers you need rippling. Right now venture back

startups can get six months of rippling startup stack for free. Head to rippling.com/theroom and sign up today. That's r-i-p-p-l-i-n-g.com/th-e-r-o-o-m to sign up for six months free today. Focus on what you're building. Leave the rest to rippling. Rippling.com/theroom. There's this interesting tension right now where especially a lot of non-AI founders when they go out to fundraise they're being pushed to be like what's the big vision what's the $100 billion company and then similarly

some founders that have that big vision often don't actually have those use cases that have a

clear path getting to that first 10 million ARR 100 million of ARR that's a very helpful sort of

orientation for us. In that pursuit we know that the founder journey is not always a straight line. We were talking earlier that it is often a slog and sometimes you just have those days. As you are referring to earlier can you share a moment where something just was not working or did not go as planned? In the last 20 years of doing this I think most of the time things are not working quite as you want. 47% of the time a day show up and there's an element of a customer is

churning or something or a compressor launch is something. One of the most important things as a founder is to reduce how reactive you are emotionally to things that happen is very easy to be on the court I think we say now building a company and to not value all the opportunity that's existing

“in this disruption and only focus on the things that are going wrong but you have to take it as”

the whole picture. We are all dealing with one of the biggest shifts in knowledge work and software of our lifetimes and preparing your mindset for a lot of curve balls of a disruption or a

I think for me like early last year we were being a little bit unclear with our customer,

what our posture was towards AI search is this mega trend. Our view is like you can come and

“use the platform for whatever you want in content marketing teams will figure it out and I think”

that was in a world where there was a lot of competitors who are speaking directly to that urgent problem like we weren't resonating deals were not closing as fast as we wanted and there was a few weeks of real heartache around that then what we tend to do is write memos internally of different directions we could take and try and sell it as a clear coherent articulated direction. We ran that process for this and I think it tipped us all into high conviction mode that talking

to AI search and helping that to get adoption of aerops, pioneer content engineering and more would unlock the business and when we did that we had our biggest quarter ever by factor of four

and things to cough. But I do we think the really hard periods tend to be followed by breakthrough.

Now I'm like well this really sucks but I feel like it's this energy building for us to then make some very clear decisive actions. I genuinely don't worry about them anymore as much. He says he says quietly jumps off in the corner. Exactly. It's clear that something is working. You scale incredibly well over the last four years and have incredible brands and customers building on the platform companies like ramp, webflow, chime, even kayak. The marketing and

SEO tool space has a few incumbents. We're curious how you thought about going ahead to get against existing SEO platforms and in complement to many of the kind of work classic AI writing tools we've seen. We are really trying to talk to the marketers that have the big ideas and need a canvas to bring them to life. A lot of them have like a traditional analytics tool. Where they really struggle is we have the data layer here for traditional search signals.

We have all of our documents internally but then how do we bring these big campaigns to life at strategies? How do we move from doing work across seven or eight tools to create those at work products we can push to actually being able to start to hand off more of this work to

“LMS with precision with human, with all these boxes and important boxes checked. So I think we”

see ourselves as creating a new category and one that I think is going to fill up a lot of steam this year as this hand off to LMS becomes more and more accelerated. Now, boxes are some of the most creative people in the world. They have big ideas. They have tastes. They have a lot inside and they have a lot of energy and they need to push that into a tool that can capture that and bring it to life in AI. They can't wipe market their way to a lot of their ideas coming to life.

In our experience having a platform and a team that could work with them to do that is where we really play. One thing about categories is that VCs love to talk in terms of category creation and I find it a little bit amusing in a world where things are changing so quickly and I understand they want an order view of the universe that's going to talk about that upon the meeting. But I also think that the category that we're in and we are creating

is still unfurling itself and definitely have our perspective on it. But it's anything about baked, despite what things some people might think. Yeah, absolutely. You're leaning into this like entire shift in a workflow experience for the end user and playing around in the platform

“myself. I think I got initially a little bit overwhelmed even by just having to select a grid”

and having to select a workflow and I just didn't even know which was the right mode. But then I noticed you guys had a generative search bar where I could just type the flow that I wanted. So I used that instead and I found that a lot more intuitive because now I've just started thinking in free form texts and I do expect the computer that AI to actually be able to help me and

a part of that is because I work at first selling. I use V0 every day. So I'm just very familiar with

a V0 style workflow to that end. I'm curious what you're seeing in terms of trends out the end user level, like what parts of the platform and the product experience is really taking off, how are you guys building into the either like technical level of your end user or lack their other. In order to get LMS to be as precise as our customer needed, we had to create this platform that almost felt like a developer tool. Unfortunately, maybe someone else has solved that problem.

But for the last generation of models, it was like decompose the problem to really small testable pieces, allow marketers to build their workflow, have really good observability, unfortunately, quite a high technical bar to build some of the more complex things. So we've had to really provide a lot of support and build things like co-pilot that help with it. But I think the precision and the decomposition and the procedural nature of the current

workflow product was incredibly successful. We've spent a lot of time as you can't keep all how to use it and teaching them some of these concepts. But for the existing product we have out there, I think the precision really hit and then on the grid standpoint, collaboration,

I'll be able to do diffs and versions and all the things that developers actually do, but bring them to marketing and side of the grid is also being incredibly important. And then we do a lot of work behind the scenes to do context engineering and import. So we can bring as much of the business context into the platform for these use cases and often prepare it

“for the use case. So social proof, call transcripts, the list goes on. So I think it's this,”

the context layer, it's multi-party approval, and then it's precision, workflows. I do imagine that all three of those concepts will look well if you're different in a few months. To be honest with it, we are in a different era right now and it's one that we're excited to lean into, but there's a ton of very exciting things happening right now. How is your team staying nimble and adapting where we're actually shifting consumer queries away

from the existing platforms? Of course, like Google into charging PT and other search experiences. Like obviously open eyes and sharing exactly their roadmap with you. So maybe they are starting to shaking your head a little bit. So we love a sneak preview there. But you're enabling the end users. How are you helping them stay ahead of where search is going?

We definitely have never sold like our push a button and we do all the work for you type solution.

“I think what we want to do is make sure we provide really good guidance on how to build systems”

that can deliver a long-term growth that's sustainable. I think one of the great shifts from the world of SEO in the old days to one of the old days, I guess like two or three years ago too, this new world is I think the models are getting better and better at information synthesis and finding really novel fresh context to them provide to users. And so we really see the kind of durable place to invest for brands, being quality information gain content that's fresh,

which is a lot. But it's basically like you've got to get more stuff from inside the experts in your company, your systems out to the models so that consumers can understand your product and buy from you. We do a lot of work there. We're about to launch a product called Page 360, which shows you entire picture of your pages, which pages a stale, which pages are nearly working, which pages chat you see is reading but not sighting. All these splices of your content that

“really you should be going and improving. And then we're also doing a lot to provide best practice,”

workflowers, for refresh and other things. And so we're trying to create as many of these primitives that marketing teams can build with and we're trying to give them a data foundation that they can use to do really great work. And we invest a lot in research as well on the side so we run research experiments constantly with customers to see what's really working. So all customers of our upscale real evidence that we've collected that certain tactics work, FAQs,

freshness signals, author bios, what's the actual lift that folks see from an AI search visibility standpoint when they're employed. We're all students of this moment and we just try and provide as much information and education and knowledge sharing as possible to keep people ahead. Absolutely. And this is clear why you've previously said that value is going to occur more so

at the implementation layer than just at the model layer because ultimately you're driving the

business impact here through the applied approach. I'm curious then for the air off stack, how have you thought about what you want to own to be your points of differentiation and where are other components that you are willing to not have to be like the core owner of innovation on? We can start at the bottom which is proprietary inputs, platforms need to have really high-quality model ready inputs for these use cases. So we have a whole team working on that. There's a really

cool roadmap of things and that's a mixture of signal from the market information we go collect or buy from the market of what's happening, how's the consumer behavior changing, but also preparing context from inside the business ready for the model. So that context layer and that foundation for all of the workflows and agents is something we 100% want to continue owning. And then I think this is where the story changes a little bit. The best marketers are building

their own apps, they're using NTP, they're working in Claude for work. And I think we're going to embrace that. I'm really excited to see how people can build on our data and we can enable more precision governed access to data and almost like a go-live e-vowels for brands that want to enable content creation across multiple platforms, but need context and guardrails to do so. That's all kind of aerops everywhere piece. And then I think the other is what does the ideal user

experience for multi-team content creation look like? And I think that's one where we'll have some new soon, but I'm pretty excited. It's a very interesting, very creative time in software. And I think the brands that kind of shy away from that are going to be irrelevant. Okay, I'm kind of a vibe podcasting with my next question because it wasn't a prepared one, but when agents are inside of aerops in the future, doing this on behalf of marketers, how are you

deciding which other third-party platforms to then recommend inside of aerops? If you need to be doing

how are you guys thinking about informing your recommendations to like an gigantic experience? Yeah, I think there's lots of pieces to that, particularly as it pertains to like developer or pseudo developer tools, which I would include us in. We actually are starting a new partnerships motion to answer this question a little bit. We are working on like an MCP preferred vendors list. I think a lot of people want to bring their own MCPs into this as well, but I think the bit that

needs to sit on top of a great MCP catalog is the right playbooks and reasoning chains to make the most out of them. So I think that's a core asset of any agent runtime, which is to understand

“the best way to leverage MCPs for specific use cases, and that will be a foundation for recommendation”

for us. So I'm slightly vibrowed now, but I think that's definitely going to be important. MCP is something which I think is a little bit misunderstood right now. It's seen as this like connect or you can pull information, but if you look at the roadmap, it's actually got some really ambitious features that they want to add for longer and longer running processes. And so I actually think there's a world where MCPs become like the primary access of platform is for

much more complex longer running projects than what we see today, where it's like go fetch motion dark or linear take it. So this is all unfairly right. I don't have all the answers, but I definitely think that the kind of connected ecosystem around your platform, the discovery of that, and how you make sure those connectors are used in ways of drive real economic values, like one of them is interesting questions to software right now. I absolutely agree. We'll have to do a special on

model context protocol and diving in a little bit deeper. In that vein of actually serving and customer as this optimized AI driven efficiency continues to occur, how do you simultaneously preserve brand voice, authority, and trust for the end buyer? Thanks a great question. The really good marketing teams that we speak to are spending a lot of time on foundational context

for the models right now. It's like one of the most important assets to have to drive

precise acceleration. Otherwise you're just like blood being outstuff right, no one wants that.

“So I think the first thing is like let's be really clear on what good looks like, and you'd”

be surprised at how many brands do not agree on this internally. But definitely gain to what does good look like? How do we sound? What's our speaking voice? What's our different product lines? What's the positioning of our products? It's a bit like when you bring in something like a DBT into a growing company and you suddenly have to agree on what the metric definitions are because you're starting to codify them, marketing teams are now starting to bring agents into

do more and more work and they have to agree on all of these things that rolled up to their brand and the perception of their brand. So I think that's one and then the second is really making sure that you're very aware of information gain and the information gain just here around content. How are you adding to the enormity of information out there? And that can look like internal data systems and tunnel experts, cost like client interviews, transcripts and other things. But like

we spend 70% of our time on this topic with brands because you don't want to just recycle content.

“That's not a durable long-term strategy. And I think the third pillar is as content goes live,”

really making sure you have good checks and balances and you have really clear rules and God Rails around what's going live. Every single one of our customers is spending time on review and editing and feedback. But what you're doing is you're pushing humans to the top of their license and you're stripping everything below. So you know we're not taking this human input time to zero but we're trying to focus on where they can add value and actually in many cases create

better outcomes than they would have hit with all handwritten. We spent a lot of time today talking about the founding story of aerops. You're founding story as a founder as well as some of the nuts and bolts of what aerops is doing in this new world that we're living in. So as we look to the last two minutes of our time together, I'd love to ask what's next for aerops? So many things.

We had a great year last year. I think we went from two to 13 and a half billion in

an era and obviously that's for me that's also just to watch the team achieve that and be private. And then big plans for this year. Certainly European expansion is one. My mum will be have a bit of London more. I think thinking about New Market's new verticals for us is a lot happening with the gented commerce right now and we've not done a ton on that specifically. There are some adjacent options. There are a bit more in the weeds. I think a very good first

think about because just for context 70% of aerops world is more to be. So that would be a great shift. And then from a platform and technology standpoint, I think we're in like the golden age of software and creativity around software. And I think we want to lean into that in a big way, even if it means disrupting ourselves a bit. When I think about companies right now and investing

the ability for teams to meet the moment as things shift quickly is a key thing to look for.

And so we're trying to build a culture here where it's really embracing things that are happening

that we were helping them with yesterday, we're no longer the best place to help them with. You

go embrace it. And so that will look like the platform really changing in the next six months. And us being able to really make sure that aerops is playing an important role in markets getting the most out of these models and transforming how they work and how they construct their teams will be staying tuned for all those exciting changes. But maybe more on a personal level,

“how are you thinking about growth as a founder and CEO, especially now on your fourth company?”

Yeah, I think everybody is on a pretty aggressive ramp. The slope has to be high now. I get a lot of feedback from my co-founder on wasting time on things that are on high leverage. It's really hard sometimes not to dive into something, but I'm trying to get better on that front, building the right support network around me, who's had a new chief of staff join called Lauren, who is just insanely good and is gaining shape on lots of friends and a better appreciate. We also just did a

big leadership survey called Leadership Circle, which was feedback on how we're showing our power perceived as leaders. It's not a performance review. It's much more for the leader individually. And mine was like so interesting to read. I went through it on Friday and it's just one example of trying to get more information on the reality of me as a CEO right now, how people feeling, where am I doing the job, where am I not? This is the challenge of a lifetime to keep up with

this and continue to do better, quarter over quarter, communicate more clearly, make sure that people that join have information they need to do their job well. It's my life right now and it's

it's a big scary hill someday. It's another day. It's just like magical and amazing. So

totally. Thank you for sharing that. Okay, so we have a couple minutes left. We're going to ask our hero question for the podcast, who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career. On the first day that I moved into my startup office in short-edge when I was 21, I moved in with my co-founder, her name was Katherine, and she was a high-taste print designer, actually. She was like a business amazing designer, but she really had incredible taste and high-standards

and was just wise on so many fronts personally and we got to sit next to each other every single day we were building the company and she was maybe eight years older than me, but she taught me so much about myself but also taste and design and how to relate to other people and I had a lot

“of it. I just look back and I knew nothing on so many of those fronts and I think she she definitely”

gave me a great toolbox to use in life and we're still very close. Yeah, it would be Katherine, my first co-founder. We'll have to tag her once this episode is released and Alex,

thank you so much for joining us on the room today. This was incredible and super interesting.

Such a joy. I love this. This is real pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us at the room podcast. If you want more from the room every week, subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com/newsletter. We'll be back next week with a new episode and inspirational guest Tuesday 10 a.m. Eastern 7 a.m. Pacific. See you in the room. We used rippling at my startup drive and one thing that really stood out was how much it

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