Why I'm all in on Rilla

When I first started writing this blog, it served as an outlet to share my excitement about the early-stage AI ecosystem and my fascination with a unique breed of startups that show the potential to become unicorns. By definition, a unicorn is a company valued at over $1 billion, but intrinsically, my obsession with finding unicorns extended to any early-stage startup with astronomical growth potential. However, the "golden path" for most investment banking analysts leads to the buyside, and for the longest time, I had envisioned pursuing my interest in early-stage technology as an investor in the space. But sometimes an opportunity arises that requires a leap of faith – here's why I'm all in on Rilla.

If you go to Rilla's website, the first thing you'll see is our tagline – the end of ridealongs. But unless you work in the trades industry, you've likely never heard of a ridealong before. Let's start with some context. In the trades industry – especially in home remodeling and home services – the primary sales motion is based on selling to customers in their own homes, where the product itself is located. A ridealong is a process in which a manager physically accompanies a junior sales representative or service technician throughout their day to provide feedback on their performance. Before Rilla, this was the only way managers in the trades could train their employees. Now, sales representatives can record their conversations and use Rilla's AI to analyze them, empowering managers to deliver personalized feedback to their teams. This eliminates the need for physical ridealongs, which can take several hours and are not a scalable practice for larger teams. The value proposition for managers is clear, and because they typically influence their organization's enterprise SaaS buying decisions, the product practically sells itself. This has translated into hyper-explosive growth (>30% month-over-month) with extremely sticky customer cohorts (>150% net revenue retention).

The biggest misconception about Rilla is that virtual ridealongs represent our entire business scope. In reality, they're simply our most accessible go-to-market channel, enabling Rilla's vision to index all offline commerce. Since virtual ridealongs are such a mission-critical use case, it enabled significant breakthroughs in the product development lifecycle. Soon, Rilla will power all offline commerce, which – despite the prevalence of e-commerce – still accounts for a dominant 85% of the $7.2 trillion in annual U.S. retail sales. By becoming the go-to offline sales intelligence platform, Rilla will capture and analyze one of the last remaining data sources yet to be indexed – human-to-human conversations. This will soon become one of the most lucrative data assets and will completely transform how companies understand and use consumer intelligence. Most companies still rely on customer surveys, focus groups, and large information services firms (like Nielsen) to understand their customers – the effectiveness of which are questionable at best. Rilla will be able to provide companies with unfiltered, real-time insight into how their customers think and feel about their products, revolutionizing consumer intelligence as we know it.

I first came across Rilla in January and immediately sensed a special energy that runs through the company. Since joining, I've realized it's a result of two things – a product that customers absolutely love and a team with exceptional talent density. Speaking to customers firsthand, I was completely blown away by their overwhelming love and appreciation for Rilla. Combined with a team that works 9-9-6 (which means 9am to 9pm for 6 days a week), being at Rilla feels like being on a rocket ship.

At Rilla, I'll be focused on the best problem a startup can have – we're growing too fast. The operational foundation that supported Rilla through its first $30 million of ARR will look quite different as a $100 million ARR business. The key lies in developing processes and structures that scale using a first principles-based approach.

I'm super pumped to contribute my part in Rilla's success and for my own personal growth in this new chapter of my career!