He raised $41M in one year to replace enterprise accountants with AI. | Yogi Goel, Founder of Maxima

Yogi Goel (00:00:00) :
We were forced to open a bank account because there were customers who were like, "Where should we send the money?" So that was a great sign for us early on. Startup building is like a layered cake. You have to focus on the right things at the right time. Right now, a kick ass product with very happy customers is what matters to me. The moment I stop worrying is the day we will die. Think about it, all the best coaches who are in the NFL. Is there a single game where they worry about not losing? They worry about it every day, but they have the confidence that if they execute and they play well. They will win and that's my state.

Previous Guests (00:00:38) :
That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is product market fit.

Pablo Srugo (00:00:50) :
Do you think the product market fit show, has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests, thank you. Yogi, welcome to the show, man.

Yogi Goel (00:01:07) :
Thank you for having me.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:08) :
So pretty wild on the fundraising front. I was just going through a Crunchbase here. You raised an $11 million seed round early last year and then by the end of the year, you raised a $30 million Series A. For what it's worth, the median seed is about $3 million. The median Series A is about $12 million. So you're raising 3, 4x the median round. So you must be doing something right on the company building front and obviously on the fundraising side. And then, going through your background, you were at LinkedIn for a few years, you were at Rubrik for seven years, and then you started Maxima about two years ago or so. Maybe walk me through the tail end of Rubrik and kind of what led you down the startup path to begin with.

Yogi Goel (00:01:45) :
Yeah, absolutely. So the real story is that I was actually never targeting to start my own startup. I was on the CFO path. I had spent twenty years being an auditor, then setting up a finance accounting function at companies like Rubrik, and when I saw the problem of how painful it was to put together accounting books at companies which had scaled to a certain point, I decided to solve it myself. It was a hair on fire problem. It was number one, number two, number three priority for the Rubrik CFO and all the CFOs I had worked with in the past. And here I could see agents and LLM providing finally the way to unlock the problem. So we decided to roll up our sleeves, put the team together, and build the company.

Pablo Srugo (00:02:31) :
Maybe tell me a bit more about how the problem manifests itself. What are the things that you're seeing that lead this to be a number one pain point?

Yogi Goel (00:02:39) :
Yeah, so very quickly for your audience. So Maxima is an agentic platform for enterprise accounting, where we do the accounting work that happens inside a company on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, and if you think about how pervasive this problem is. Any business which is doing any economic value exchange, which is the reason for the business to exist. They have to maintain their books and do the accounting of things as per their local GAAP laws, accounting laws. So every company has to have it, whether you're a single two person grocery store, or whether you are Apple Computers. The challenge that happens inside these companies is that the money movement happens across a huge amount of various streams. It could be credit cards, it could be banks, it could be payroll, it could be procurement systems, and so on. And then obviously you have revenue coming from different ways. And, a lot of the economic value also gets exchanged in the form of non cash stuff like stock based compensation and such. So the problem for the accounting team is to wrangle all that financial transaction data from different upstream systems where these transactions are happening. Transform it as per the applicable accounting and tax laws. Validate it because you cannot afford a point zero, zero one percent error in this space, and then present it on as fast as of a basis. Because the SEC requires you, the stock exchange requires you to file your financials within forty five days of the quarter close and if you don't. Then your stock could get delisted. So the speed matters. You can't just say, you know, I'll do it three months later and it also stops you from taking a lot of business decisions. Because if you don't know how much money you have left in the bank today, how will you green light the proposals for the future? So all these accounting departments have today are these transaction systems and a dumb database called an ERP where they store the final numbers. But the stuff that happens in the middle has to be done manually by people. They repeatedly download data over and over again. I saw that, they repeatedly wrangle the transaction data into accounting entries and they do various kinds of validation checks to ensure that there was no fat fingering, there was no mis-compliance with the local tax and accounting laws. And all of that just requires a lot of headcount. At many companies which are clients of ours like ScaleAI, Rippling, Glean, and many others as you scale up. The problem is exponential.

Pablo Srugo (00:05:13) :
And is that the main problem then? It's a matter of spend, the amount of money they're spending on accounting? Or is it a problem of accuracy? Is it a problem with time? What is the biggest issue for the CFOs of enterprise?

Yogi Goel (00:05:25) :
Number one problem is accuracy. So the number of public companies in the United States, which are restating their financials because they found some errors in it has peaked, and those lead to massive amount of stock correction. There's a company in Boston, Symbotic, which had like $10 million restatement of their revenue, and the stock dropped from I think $25 billion by forty percent. So for a $10 million restatement, your stock dropped forty percent and, this is happening over and over again. Macy's had a $135 million restatement.

Pablo Srugo (00:05:59) :
Just because it introduces risk and other questions about, how real this company is. What else is going to get restated?

Yogi Goel (00:06:05) :
Exactly, so when you are an investor sitting outside your hedge fund or your mutual fund. Now you completely lost faith in that company. Yeah, this small thing seems off. What else is hiding in the cupboard? So they sell first and ask questions later. The number one priority is accuracy, and compliance after a certain scale. And then it is time, I cannot explain to you how important it is to put together your books fast. It has to be done on a monthly basis and many companies spend three weeks every month. Three weeks every month just to put together accurate financials from the prior month. They take two days break and they start again, and they start again. And realistically, no investment banker or auditor will sign your books and take you public. If you cannot close your books in five to six days. So companies have to go from twenty days to five days. Some of that requires change in your processes. If you have weird processes where you are retroactively changing people's salaries or retroactively changing pricing of a customer. Then that's a process problem, that's a CEO problem. But in many places, it's just the manual grind of grabbing data, transforming data, changing it as per the different laws, and validating it in many, many different ways. It's a very complex problem.

Pablo Srugo (00:07:29) :
And you're seeing this, and what's the moment when you decide, that, you know what? I'm going to go and I'm going to solve this myself. I mean, it's obviously a big decision.

Yogi Goel (00:07:37) :
Yeah, so this problem that I had seen had been repeated in front of my eyes for twenty years. First, as an auditor at all of our clients, they were shooting bricks. They were very unhappy saying, you know, this thing is most painful, right? Accounting processes inside companies is a little bit like health systems inside countries, nobody's happy. The people receiving the health are not happy. People giving out the health care are not happy. The payers are not happy, and so on. So it was a known problem that this has to change and if you look across the world. There's an estimate there in the US alone, I believe that one to one and a half million people are doing the work manually. And they're leaving the profession in droves. Because they don't want to deal with long hours, they don't want to deal with mundane repeat work. Because it's kind of like being in a hamster wheel. If you check on Reddit, there are moms crying in bathrooms at like Saturday at 02:00 a.m., saying, I want a break from this. So I knew this problem all along. I had faced it, I had grayed my hair on this and what changed for me was the ChatGPT moment. I think when I saw there’s this tool which can understand structured and unstructured data. And then follow instructions to spit out things in a half reasonable way. Obviously, you and I, when we tried ChatGPT in November 2022. It kind of wasn't perfect. It felt a little gimmicky but if you squint, you could see what was to come and we squinted, and we saw this as a real thing. I had a commitment to Rubrik to take it public by April 2024. I did the IPO, gained a lot from that and then after a quarter, I left to start my company. In fact, the Rubrik CEO was my reference call for all the VCs, and the Rubrik CFO is a huge mentor of mine. So yeah, they know the problem we are solving.

Pablo Srugo (00:09:32) :
Did you already have the initial co-founding team figured out by the time you took that step?

Yogi Goel (00:09:37) :
Yes, I had the co-founding team but I took a long time in figuring out that co-founder. I think I took about eighteen to twenty four months to figure that out. I went through twelve co-founders.

Pablo Srugo (00:09:48) :
This is while you're at Rubrik? Like, post-GPT but before leaving?

Yogi Goel (00:09:52) :
Correct, correct, I'm sort of figuring out who to build it with. Obviously, there's chemistry and all that. But what was really important for me is someone who could build accurate systems. This is not one of those spaces where you break things and build fast, right? You cannot break things. You want accurate systems who can operate at large scale. Our product works for enterprises, complex things, across twenty currencies, across millions of transactions, and they can serve it to the people in a very elegant way. Hiding the complexity behind it and I was talking to a lot of people, and Akshay and Jack were the ones who I got introduced to through my common network. Who had built these systems, with sort of companies that already have solved these problems. The fintech companies, so if you think of Robinhood, if you think about payment tech companies. They hide a lot of the complexity behind, and they make things very easy, but yet are very accurate. If I sent you twenty five dollars and thirty one cents, they have to explain to me that you received twenty five dollars and thirty one cents, and we were looking for that. So we've hired a lot of people from consumer fintech, from companies who have built these systems for Netflix internally and such.

Pablo Srugo (00:11:08) :
But your co-founders were from those companies or they were from Rubrik?

Yogi Goel (00:11:11) :
No, no, my co-founders were not from Rubrik. They were from these companies. They were introduced to me by my Rubrik colleagues, but because they had worked at some other companies together. So I took a lot of work and once I saw that I had found these co-founders. Who could build a product and who had the co-founding skills I needed, like agility, seriousness, get shit done, ability to hire tech talent. Then I felt it was time to take the plunge.

Pablo Srugo (00:11:37) :
And when did you raise the seed? Was that right as you left?

Yogi Goel (00:11:40) :
Yeah, so actually it was before I left. I was officially associated with Rubrik September 2024. I had started talking about leaving April 2024, and we got the seed in August 2024.

Pablo Srugo (00:11:52) :
Tell me the story of how that happens. I mean, $11 million, obviously you've got a pedigree and so does your co-founders. But $11 million is, it's a big seed. How, what's the story there?

Yogi Goel (00:12:00) :
Yeah, so I wish I could know how VCs found out, but I think they have a very deep network. I often joke with my VC friends that there's only one network stronger than the CIA network, which is the VC network. So somehow they had found out, and we were getting inbounded. I was part of Alstom Capital's Product Market Fit cohort, where we really wanted to learn product market fit and go to market selling. So we were there for two months, and they were impressed with us. We were impressed with them. Word got out, we were getting a lot of inbounds and I felt like Kleiner had a prepared mind. If you look at what Kleiner Perkins has done, they have clearly seen that in areas or professions which require highly specialized repeat work. Where there is lots and lots of labor required. They would be, iconic companies built. So they funded Harvey in the very early days. They funded Open Evidence, which is for doctors, early days. They made a similar bet on us for accounting and finance, and so on. So we were talking to a lot of VCs. I think it happened within an eight hour time frame where we got the term sheet from Kleiner.

Pablo Srugo (00:13:09) :
And did you set out to raise around $10 million or how did you figure out the amount?

Yogi Goel (00:13:13) :
It was a smaller amount. We were thinking of a smaller amount, but then they felt like, given the team and the engineering horsepower you need. They felt like you need the right amount of capitalization to go chase this thing well. This is not a product where you hire two people in sort of outdoor software development in Eastern Europe and India, and then they kind of build big things together. In fact, if you look at the legacy in this space, they are all checklists and they talk a lot about this, built by accountants for accountants. And in my mind, an AI product which is built by accountants. And by the way, I'm a former accountant, will not scale fast. People shouldn't be using the AI product that I'm coding. They should use the AI product that I'm architecting, because I can tell you what the problems are, how to build it but just like a Formula One driver shouldn't be building the Formula One car. He should be giving inputs, or she should be giving inputs, on how the car should be designed. Similarly, we have taken a very strict stance that our product is architected by accountants and built by AI engineers.

Pablo Srugo (00:14:15) :
You talked a bit about the problem earlier but now that we're kind of moving towards, starting the company. What was back then your idea of the solution and how it would work?

Yogi Goel (00:14:26) :
Yeah, I think we focus a lot on the customer value, and the value problem was to solve the customer problems across three dimensions. Increase the accuracy and compliance, or reduce the time to close and do it in a cheaper way. And there are a lot of secondary benefits of it, which is a happier team, higher retention, more agility to the business. But the first order value prop was that, and we felt the only way to do it is by building a tool or building software which can do the job for the accountant. The du jour solutions in this space have been to do all the work manually and log it into like an Asana type of product to show the auditor that on February 3rd, 11:23 a.m., this work was done. So that auditor says, pass, you did the work and we felt like that was maybe interesting ten, fifteen years ago. But we have moved from the days of checklists and drawers, and shelves to someone who actually does the job. And that's what the customers were asking us to do.

Pablo Srugo (00:15:24) :
Is this replacing the existing accountants and just having a smaller team or how would this play out?

Yogi Goel (00:15:29) :
Yeah, so what you see is in companies which are highly complex and growing. They have a very clear mandate that our revenue will grow eighty to ninety percent in the next one or two years. But you have to do more with less, which is you have to keep the account flat and invariably what happens is, and I saw that at Rubrik. I was there for seven years, so 350 Fridays where every Friday I would go home and I would be dissatisfied with the amount of high-value stuff that I wish I had done. The high-value stuff, like helping my companies launch into new geographies. I couldn't support it because I was doing this work, which I would call like licking the envelope every day, right? High-value stuff like launching new pricing and packaging, because marketing can't launch a new pricing and packaging if accounting doesn't know how to account for it. Supporting new commission plans, doing GPU data center accounting, because all I was doing was licking the envelopes. So I don't think we should be thinking about this in the lump of work type of narrative. We feel over and over again, there's a lot of high-value work that accountants want to do and can do. That's what the CFOs want them to do. Like one of our customers, Josh Waldron at ScaleAI. His big remit to his team even before Maxima is I don't want my team just to be the bean counters. I want them to tell me where the beans are coming from and how can we make more beans. So yes, bean counting is important but do the other two stuff as well and they saw our product. They had been using legacy checklists, and they're like, "This thing is amazing." Now, not only do I have less capacity for people to do the more high-value stuff, which is growing more beans but also I can make decisions faster.

Pablo Srugo (00:17:13) :
But Maxima would do what exactly? It would tie into many different systems and pull information and then push it into its own ERP effectively instead of the human having to do that manual piece?

Yogi Goel (00:17:22) :
That's a great segue. So let's understand the product a little bit. So we mimic the action of a human and right now we do things in a very deterministic, one hundred percent accurate way. Right now we do things for low to mid judgment work, right? So the customers using us as they connect us to their transaction systems, their credit cards, their banks, their salary systems, revenue systems, and so on. And we don't force people to replace the ERP. We feel ERP is a system of record, like any other database where data comes to rest. But we take the step of taking that revenue and payroll, paid entry and, as per the country-specific accounting laws. Convert it into a journal entry and then we, with evidence and with one hundred percent proof, will post it into your journal ledger. Then before we post it, we run validation checks that you are supposed to do. So audit requires you to check across dimensions between your payroll system and your general ledger. What was really done, so we do that and then we explain it in words as well. So we'll explain it in words along the way that, "Hey, the fifteenth of the first month for the US employees, you are paying fifteen percent more in salary. That's because you have had twenty percent more employees and five percent attrition." And that becomes a running commentary on your business, which allows you to find anomalies and we do anomaly detection as well in a variety of ways. Hey, this vendor to whom you used to pay $70,000, suddenly there's an invoice for $700,000. What's going on? Take a look and you'd be surprised how often there is fat fingering going on. And this stuff cannot be done until you have a transaction lineage. Until you have transaction-level context and ERPs don't have transaction-level context, as you know. They like to smoosh everything together into one chunky transaction.

Pablo Srugo (00:19:12) :
And so then going back to the narrative. I mean, because you understand the problem. I'm curious, did you go right into building or did you do the traditional like validation, discovery, talking to a bunch of CFOs, that sort of thing?

Yogi Goel (00:19:23) :
No, no, we did a lot of discovery. We did a lot of discovery. So a lot of that discovery happened through my conversation with my colleagues inside and outside Rubrik to just know how real this problem is. And most of the CFOs that we went to, they asked us that they do not want to swap their ERP. They said swapping the ERP is like doing brain surgery to reduce weight. I want to reduce weight. I want to do stuff, but I don't want to do brain surgery. So they said, my problem is the manual work.

Pablo Srugo (00:19:51) :
How many CFOs or whatever would you say you spoke with?

Yogi Goel (00:19:54) :
One hundred and fifty.

Pablo Srugo (00:19:55) :
So a solid amount and then did you start just building or did you right away get a design partner or a few design partners? How did you set up that initial, let's say the six months right after you left?

Yogi Goel (00:20:07) :
Yeah, so we took the design partner approach. From my experience at Rubrik, I've seen the Rubrik journey very early on. The best validation of our company is paying customers and we decided to go after enterprise very early on because I knew from experience that the problem is a lot more complex and valuable at the enterprise level. When you are a thirty to forty percent company, it's not interesting. When you have a thousand percent company, it's interesting and very complex. And the dollars come after that because you just have exponential increases. Because you have real board meetings happen, real audits happen, you have to go public, and all of that. Very early on, we landed Scale AI as a customer. Very early on, we landed Rippling as a customer, SpotOn and these are like real businesses.

Pablo Srugo (00:20:50) :
Yeah, tell me about maybe one or all of those. How do you land a customer like that so early on?

Yogi Goel (00:20:55) :
Yeah, so we had a point of view that this is the area we're gonna go. We had planted a flag that this is a problem, like, we'll go to the CFO orgs inside these areas and everyone we spoke to said, "Yeah, this is a problem." And some of these people were willing, as we spoke to them very, very early days, this is pre-product. They said this is such a big hair on fire problem for us and I can explain why we touched on that early on. Both the things, risk, headcount, and time delays. Is that if you build this thing, it will pay you. So we landed design partners very early on.

Pablo Srugo (00:21:30) :
So was it a natural fallout of those one hundred fifty CFO conversations? Effectively, some subset of those was like, you know what? So much so that when you build this, let me know. 

Yogi Goel (00:21:39) :
Correct, correct and that also helped our venture around. Probably because they saw signed POCs or a letter of intent and they were working with us on a weekly basis, giving us feedback. They were holding our feet to the fire when things were not working correctly. So we saw this very real thing.

Pablo Srugo (00:21:58) :
I'm going to ask you for a small favor, a tiny little favor. In fact, it's not even now that I think about it. It's not even really a favor for me. I'm actually trying to help you do a favor for you. Just hit the follow button. You won't miss out on the next episode. You'll see everything that we release. If you don't want to listen to an episode, you just skip it. But at least you don't miss out. How did you structure these? This is another big topic, which is the decision to go enterprise, landing those design partners, and then structuring them to actually get the most value. Were they paying? Were they not paying? What was the length? What were the kind of key results that you were tying to? I mean, how did you think about all that?

Yogi Goel (00:22:34) :
For me, I absolutely want things to be paid. I feel like free things do not get valued in the world. So you need to get paid. There was another reason I wanted to get paid, was I have been inside companies where to pay anything after. So usually you can spy credit card inside companies for $2,000 to $3,000. But above that, you need a purchase order. If a purchase order has to go through, you need permission from IT, you need permission from legal, you need permission from the bosses, the CFOs, and whoever. And for me, while that was friction, that was important. Because that told me that A, I was following the right problem, and B, there was a champion. The person was not just saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, go build something." And it turns out we build it, and then you're like, "I don't know, I can't help it because, for whatever reason." So we wanted this pain very early on and we saw that customers were willing to stick their neck out, saying, you know, so the money started coming into a bank. In fact, we were forced to open a bank account because there were customers who were like, "Where should we send the money?" So that was a great sign for us early on and the structuring was very simple. Early on, anybody who will take a risk on you, they want a risk-free thing. So we would tell them that, you know, you have to pay. But if it doesn't work out, then we will refund you the money and that was fine. No problems there.

Pablo Srugo (00:23:54) :
And did you set like a specific time frame? Like, in six months, you know, we go to this or once the product is here, we go to full contract. What was the?

Yogi Goel (00:24:01) :
Yeah, that was set up. Exactly, so the token money, we stuck with a high amount. You have to pay that amount. I think it was $5,000 or $10,000. So it was not something that you could just sort of wash your hands off type of thing and then it was that, "Hey, we will build this for you after three months or six months. If we succeed, then you will pay us a good chunk of change." It was five figures, but it was above $50,000.

Pablo Srugo (00:24:27) :
What was success? Was that clearly defined?

Yogi Goel (00:24:29) :
No, I disagree with this very, at least in our space, very clear definition of success. It was around when we will deliver this module to you, XYZ, which will do XYZ. But in terms of success, I feel like the customer adoption is the clearest metric. Because if we build something which they're using, why would an enterprise employee who's getting paid $150–200k a year and she's busy with so many things that she wants to get done. Why would she skimp me on it if she's using a product which works? So it was fine. We were just, you know, if it works. The thing people have to understand early on, by the way, I've been on that situation. Where I was a senior director of finance and I had startups come to me and the problem is, when you're on the other side of the seat. There's a huge trust, right? They don't know you from anybody else. They don't know if you'll disappear from the earth later on. They don't know if your company will survive. So they are taking a huge bet on you and if you get too much into T&Cs and, you know, we will only provide ninety eight percent accuracy and therefore you will pay. Then you are forcing them to think too much early on and you are forcing them to cover their ass too much early on. And then they'll be like, "You know, it's not worth it. I'll just go with the known vendor." So we were like, "Look, you have the right to fire us if we don't produce things and the proof is we're performing the job in whatever conditions you need. You need accuracy, we'll deliver that. You need auditability, we'll deliver that." And it worked out. And we should talk more about how that journey went. But some of our customers were, you know, when they started with us. They were sort of putting a short amount of dollars. But then afterwards, they were sort of, you know, they started with, posting $200 million worth of transactions with us in a month and then every month, while they were giving us a lot of feedback. And they were telling us, build this, build that better, we saw by month seven, month eight, they were processing. They were putting $50 billion worth of transactions into our product.

Pablo Srugo (00:26:36) :
Wow.

Yogi Goel (00:26:37) :
So the proof is the usage. Because if they were not confident, they will not use our product.

Pablo Srugo (00:26:42) :
And how do you manage the flip side? So I understand what you're saying about kind of finding the sweet spot balance. But the flip side problem that can happen is the enterprise, knowing that they're just way bigger, way more powerful than a startup. Is kind of in this mode of, hey, build this, build that. But then when it comes time to pay the big enterprise fee. It's like, well, when you build this, build that, then we'll move to something like. How do you kind of give enough to get them there, but not so much that you just kind of keep pushing that further away?

Yogi Goel (00:27:10) :
It's a hard one. I think the number one thing you need there is a champion. You need a champion inside the company. We had two champions, one was Kenny Tran, who was at Scale AI. Who was a head of business transformation and we tested the champion where we said early on, connect us to the chief accounting officer. Get us a meeting for thirty minutes, because we could see that he's willing to put his neck out, right? So you have to test the champion and then you sort of tell them that this is a thing that we can do and not do. And in good faith, after they have put their credibility on the line. It should happen and so it has happened for us. But this is a real conundrum that a lot of founders feel, like, "Hey, what if I do all the work and it doesn't come through? I'm shit out of luck." And it might happen, I think therefore you have to do. You should do four or five of these in parallel and the game here is not the ACV in my mind. The game here is that you got a product built in a real life situation versus in a lab, and we have seen that, like, we have through this route. We have massive customers, SpotOn and Rippling, and so on. And the way our product has progressed, could not have progressed, even though I know the world really well. I could not have explained every requirement to our engineers, even if I wanted to. Because it's kind of like driving, right? You could read as much of a manual and watch as many YouTube videos, but unless you go on a bumpy ride. You just don't know how to drive.

Pablo Srugo (00:28:36) :
When did you know that the product was ready for kind of a public launch?

Yogi Goel (00:28:40) :
Yeah, this was not a moment for. It was not like we started getting pulled in the direction. So I believed in sales very, very early on. Even before the product, we were selling based on Figmas. So just on Figmas, we had a good amount of enterprise customers who were willing to give us the money and I would say around summer of last year. I could feel that we have built something special. It was month end. So usually for accountants, month end is kind of  their tax filing season. Except it happens not once a year but twelve times a year and I woke up, and we have all of our engineers, and customers connected on Slack. Our Slack channel was exploding and I saw customers sort of, you know, twenty comments out of this. This thing is busted, or this requires change, or, you know. So obviously that was fire and we have to fix the fire, and we fixed the fire in the next few hours. But that told me that this is something that's relevant to the customer. They are using our product. They are like forty, fifty of them on this product. They are doing this part of their workflow, because the biggest problem in my view of startups is not a product that fails. Because most startups can fix a product. It's irrelevance. You've sold someone a product that is sort of sitting on the side. No one gives a shit or no one talks about it. When you ask them about the feedback, they give you these empty platitudes, yeah, it's beneficial, oh yeah, it adds a ton of value. But they can't give you specifics and when it comes to renewal. They can't create a case for renewal. In our case, we haven't had a single churn. Our customers are all increasing by several multiples.

Pablo Srugo (00:30:19) :
And what is actually the specific ROI? How are you measuring that?

Yogi Goel (00:30:24) :
We measure it the way the customer measures it, right? I think you have to always keep that in mind. One of our customers, it's a $17 billion company. I work with the champion very closely. Is that, hey, how will you make a case in front of a CFO? Because now we are going from small dollars to big dollars, right? We are in some cases, our deals are expanding by 3x, 5x, in some cases increasing by 10x.

Pablo Srugo (00:30:45) :
I assume it's like six figure deals getting to seven figure deals. That's kind of the range that.

Yogi Goel (00:30:49) :
It's all over the place depending on the size of the company. Somewhere it's going from five figures to six figures and so on. So what you see is that at that point, the dollars are significant and you have to make a very solid business case. And there's always a build versus buy conversation. Why can't we build it ourselves, right? So we should talk separately about this whole lovable moment that's going on. But the way our customers talk about our value prop, number one is, hey, remember those in the next two years, we had discussed a headcount plan where I had to increase my team by twenty people, from sixty to eighty. Now I'm going to come and ask you for only from sixty to seventy. So that's a massive savings for people and remember, you were a CFO, you were very unhappy. So a lot of our customers have audit committees and the CFO, the chief accounting officer, has to go in front of the board and talk about deficiencies in their financial reporting process. One of our customers, they had audit flags from their auditors saying that you have to fix the accuracy and compliance, and auditability of your work process here, here, and here. So it was number one OKR on the CFO's book to get that fixed. We fixed it for them. So therefore, the dollars get justified in that example, and the third is, hey, remember CFO, you've been asking me for a full set of financials or a quick look of the cash flows. So that you can greenlight the CEO's ask, and we could never give you that. And we asked you to wait for three or four days. Now we can give you those financials a much faster. Which then allows you to greenlight more GPUs, greenlight more engineering headcount, and so on. So this product does that for us.

Pablo Srugo (00:32:26) :
So the OKR is like the KPIs you look at? Like, time to close the month, things like that? Headcount needed?

Yogi Goel (00:32:32) :
Yeah, so it's the same thing. Risk, time, cost efficiency, the financial reporting risk, and the controls around your financial function. A second is the time by which you put together your financials, and the third is how efficiently you're doing it. And sometimes that efficiency shows in the form of hard cost saved. Sometimes it shows in the form of future run rate cost saved and sometimes it honestly is in the form of our employees. Our team members can just be happier, because I've been there. People are crying blood inside the accounting departments where they are skipping happy hours. They are working till like eleven PM, twelve PM on Friday. They're working the weekends, and the attrition in the accounting department is one of the highest after sales. Because people just need to take health breaks and they just, they are done with this.

Pablo Srugo (00:33:20) :
You mentioned this, and I want to go on this tangent. I mean, actually looking at the market today, the stocks are absolutely plummeting. Because basically everybody assumes that software is dead and AI is going to take over. And one of the big questions is, who's going to be the beneficiary? If anybody, are people just going to, companies, let's say, just going to build? Especially an enterprise that has software at scale and a lot of software time. Are they just going to build all their own products and churn out everything? What is your thinking about what spend is still going to happen, and how do you kind of fit into it?

Yogi Goel (00:33:50) :
Yeah, so I think the huge benefit that I see from the AI wave is that it has lowered the floor and it has raised the ceiling. You know, and you see that with every computing wave. When we went from mainframe to on-prem to cloud. You saw that the software adoption increased more and more, right? Previously, software was only at the Fortune 200, who were able to write a $10 million check with crazy implementation figures, but then SaaS brought it down and, so on and so forth. And now you see the lovables of the world able to help even my dad, who has a two-person business, write something very quickly and I think that's very valuable. So that's lowering the bar, which is a great thing. I think raising the ceiling has been where people might be muddling things up. So no question that the SaaS companies or the software companies have to increase the value that they can deliver, because the game has changed. I want to be very clear that anything is solvable by anyone, right? So for example, if you or me, we put enough resources, we can build a Gmail. The question is, A, is it our core competence? B, can we build it to similar quality and the speed, and latency that someone else at Google can? And then third, do we want to maintain the headache of maintaining it for a long time? And as you know, once you are into the details of things. That's when the edge cases come in. I feel like the analysts might be getting too swept in the narratives. Where the software is that people will build it internally. You and I know we are practitioners. You are in the business of media. The small details matter, right?

Pablo Srugo (00:35:34) :
Yeah, for me, I think, for what it's worth. Just building everything yourself doesn't make any sense. The question is more, because so many more people have built it or can build it. Because the price to build it is way less, does the ability to charge decrease tenfold, right?

Yogi Goel (00:35:51) :
I do think the ROI that folks are asking from software has definitely increased. No question on that. In my mind, the simple analogy I have for old school versus new school. If you look at the checklist and kind of the old school SaaS, those are digital shelves. They provide you the shelves, and you have to fold the clothes, you have to iron the clothes, and you have to organize it in those shelves. The ask that the customer is making of you is, I don't want shelves anymore. Sure, I can use the shelves, but I want someone to fold the clothes for me, do the laundry, do the work itself. And that's what software companies have to do. And now there's technology out there which can do it. And any company which is still providing shelves, checklists, just kind of these digital drawers and calling themselves system of record. Only based on that, that we are irreplaceable because system of record, I think they'll get wiped out.

Pablo Srugo (00:36:47) :
And then maybe last question before we wrap it up. Tell me a little bit about your series A, $30 million series A is a massive A. How does that happen?

Yogi Goel (00:36:54) :
Yeah, I think similar concepts. So we had known Redpoint from a while, from before. They had talked during the seed as well. They are prolific CFO investors. They have invested as a CFO stack investor with understanding. They have invested in legacy tools in the space, which are more checklist oriented. They have invested in ERP products, and they have invested in credit card products. So they understand the CFO part well. I don't know exactly what level of diligence that they did. Remember the opaque CIA network? But they had apparently spoken to a lot of our customers. A lot of customers in their portfolio companies are dribbling and such. And they met, and they gave us a term sheet. The goal was not to raise. I didn't have a slide deck. A lot of my co-founders asked me, can you send me a slide deck? I said, I don't have it, man. So we got preempted. Even the $10 million we raised in the $11 million we raised in the seed has not been exhausted. So the goal was to look to raise in summer of 2026, but we got preempted based on the value that they were seeing and their thesis in the space.

Pablo Srugo (00:38:03) :
How many people were on the team at that time?

Yogi Goel (00:38:05) :
Yeah, I want to say about twelve.

Pablo Srugo (00:38:08) :
Okay, small and how many are you now?

Yogi Goel (00:38:11) :
We are now about forty.

Pablo Srugo (00:38:12) :
Okay. I think sometimes, from the outside looking in, you assume that the company's raising a lot of money or spending a lot of money. But in many cases, especially when you get preempted. You're actually running very, you know, relatively lean. I mean, twelve people with $11 million raised is a very strong cash position, and forty people with $40 million raised, equally so.

Yogi Goel (00:38:35) :
Yeah, we are obviously investing in a lot of these cutting edge things, but we are closing chunky enterprise deals. But then, to your point, we over invest in providing value to our customers. We haven't had a single churn. If you look at G2, our reviews, it's 4.9515. We have wide love service to our customers. I don't mind over investing in customer support. I think this has been a huge sort of attitude change for me. So in the early parts of my career, I was kind of the MBA type Wall Street guy who was very analytical, and I would analyze businesses with one brushstroke. You know, this company is not as efficient, or this startup has sales and marketing higher. The startup building is like a layered cake. You have to focus on the right things at the right time. Right now, a kick ass product with very happy customers is what matters to me and we'll think about efficiency, which is important. I do keep an eye on my efficiency and unit economics efficiency, I do keep an eye on. But it's not like I'm charging $2 where my build cost is $5 and service cost is $20. That's not the case. I'm unit economics profitable in every customer, but you can't stall for efficiency. It's kind of like growing a baby, right? I got two kids. When my daughter was six months old, I was not saying, you know, she's just eating every day. She doesn't burn any calories. She doesn't run. What is this? So you have to, you have to just sort of be thoughtful in when you want to focus on what.

Pablo Srugo (00:40:08) :
Perfect. Well, let's stop it there. I'll ask the last three kind of rapid fire questions that we always end on. When was the moment when you felt you'd found true product market fit?

Yogi Goel (00:40:16) :
I would say it was summer of last year, where we were landing customers even with features which were not fully there. Customers were signing on dotted lines with chunky deals, and the customers who had onboarded were giving us a lot of feedback, and the product was improving fast. So we felt we were solving a real problem then, around summer of 2025.

Pablo Srugo (00:40:35) :
Was there ever a time or has there been ever a time that you've doubted whether Maxima would work or you thought maybe things just would fail?

Yogi Goel (00:40:43) :
I think of the CEO's role as a coach of the New England Patriots. Where I worry about everything from players, to what will happen in the next game, to the NFL rules. I knew from the core of my heart that this is a problem that the industry wants to get out of, and they want to pay for it. I know that because I had lived that problem for twenty years. The thing that I always worry about is, are we meeting the moment, right? Can we use the best toolkits out there and tools out there to create an incredible experience for the company which is delivering a lot of value? And so far, I have not doubted it. I think this is why we put together the best engineering team in the space. Who are very obsessed with their customers, but the moment I stop worrying is the day we will die. So there's a difference, you know, you don't have to be a pessimist and sort of sit at home, and crawl up saying that we are dead. I feel like, think about it. All the best coaches who are in the NFL, like, is there a single game where they worry about not losing? They worry about it every day, but they have the confidence that if they execute and they play well. They will win and that's my state.

Pablo Srugo (00:41:51) :
And then what would be your top piece of advice for an early stage founder?

Yogi Goel (00:41:55) :
Yeah, I'll give two. Both came from Rubrik CEO, who was my mentor. One, he said something to the effect of, answers lie within, trust your intuition. Right now, we are in the world of information and wisdom overload. The reality is, we don't know your context, your situation, your customer. So we are giving you yet another blade in a Swiss Army knife, and you have to build intuition when to use which blade. So trust yourself, create quiet, don't be on forever podcast and LinkedIn loops. Give time for that information to turn into wisdom by letting things settle, by creating some time for quiet and the second is, if you are in sort of this idea maze. Figuring out what to do, and I don't know exactly which stage founders here are. This is another thing my Rubrik colleague Pranav Vaduri told me when I was in the idea maze. He said, hustle is the only indicator of success. So, are you truly hustling? Are you truly doing the hard yards of calling people, of talking to folks, working on something? And if you hustle, you will make progress. It's almost like weight loss. If you are eating clean, and you are exercising, you will lose weight. It may happen one month later, it may happen five months later, but you will. So those are the two pieces of advice I have.

Pablo Srugo (00:43:20) :
Awesome. Well, Yogi, thanks so much for jumping on the show, man. It's been great.

Yogi Goel (00:43:23) :
Appreciate it, thank you.

Pablo Srugo (00:43:25) :
Wow, what an episode. You're probably in awe. You're in absolute shock. You're like, that helped me so much. So guess what? Now it's your turn to help someone else. Share the episode in the WhatsApp group you have with founders. Share it on that Slack channel. Send it to your founder friends and help them out. Trust me, they will love you for it.