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Josh Schachter:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week’s edition of Unchurned. I’m Josh Schachter. I’m not the cohost today. I’m the host. Christy and John are absent, but I’m very excited to be here with Carly Van Kirk. Carly is the head of customer success at AngelList, a really cool company I’m the beneficiary of. I’m I’m involved, indirectly through, through what they do, maybe directly as well.

Josh Schachter:
So, Carly, we wanna hear all about you know, she’s in this role now for going on seven, eight months, and we wanna hear more about, you know, getting going in this leadership position. Welcome to the program, Carly.

Carly Van Kirk:
Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. So I know AngelList very well. I’m sure a lot of listeners out there do as well, but I’m sure there’s a certain percentage that are not as familiar. So tell us a little bit about AngelList, what you do, and then we wanna get into, you know, your role and and your organization within the company.

Carly Van Kirk:
Sure. Yeah. AngelList is, has a very unique branding journey. But right now, we are a service and platform provider to the venture community. So we offer accounting software services, private markets intelligence data via AI, and a full service fund management solution that essentially powers the venture ecosystem. So our core customer is and has been the emerging GP. But moving upmarket, we focus increasingly on winning, top VC firms, you know, starting with Scout programs at Sequoia, General Catalyst, a sixteen Z and then expanding from there. And then our customers, customers, the institutional LP whose experience has to be perfect because they dictate to GPs and subsequently to portcos, which provider to use for fundraising.

Josh Schachter:
So I I know this predates you because you you’ve been there for for less than a year now. But during COVID, I think there was, like, a big spike in this. Right? A lot of folks that are like, oh, I wanna run a syndicate. I wanna be a an emerging GP, you know, new to the to the VC world. I don’t necessarily come from that track, out of school or whatever the case might be. So it sounds like, I mean, there’s been this mushrooming of of of people on the platform, of investors on the platform. You wanna cater to a lot of those, like you said, the emerging, partners that whether they’re part of an institution or just kind of doing it on their own, you’re helping to facilitate their investment strategy.

Carly Van Kirk:
Yes. We did see a ton of growth during COVID. We actually, we created a new concept called a rolling fund, and we just saw so so much generated revenue that way, because it was a low barrier to entry to investors, and it was very tech enabled. So that’s that’s kind of the uniqueness of AngelList. It’s a high context business with a very unique solution set, but we we define and and create new categories of investing vehicles. So I think that that’s really what drove me to be interested in AngelList, as well as they used to have a number of other brands like their their talent platform. So overall, the the idea behind AngelList has always been how can we increase innovation because we truly believe that that moves the needle for society.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you. On behalf of my company, UpdateAI, we have a syndicate that has invested a couple times in Update, and so we appreciate the mechanisms that you guys rolled out to enable that. Tell us a little bit about your role at AngelList, as the head of customer success and and also just about the way that the, you know, the the group is organized, the segments of customers that you’re mostly, you know, helping to manage. Let’s go into that a little bit.

Carly Van Kirk:
Sure. So if I had to say, you know, what my core competency, what I learned that it is, you know, over, my career, it’s really team formation and augmentation. And AngelList is at a point of significant growth at the moment, like I said, moving from serving emerging GPs and perhaps smaller syndicates, SPVs, and smaller funds to really catering to an institutional grade experience. And because of that, they, restructured the formerly known as customer relations team, which was very operationally execution focused to be more of a strategic adviser and to have a more scalable structure akin to a customer success team. But you’re not talking about traditional SaaS CS focused on end user adoption, usage, deploying seats, you know, training and education, all of the, user administration elements that comes with the SaaS platform. We’re really talking more akin to professional or managed services advisory teams. It is a post sales function. Right now, the team is about 30 people focused on serving, general partners.

Carly Van Kirk:
And then we also have a, kind of like a tiger team that’s focused on the institutional LP experience. But, you know, we’re leveraging years of repetition as a fund admin and full service provider to guide these GPs. And because of that, you really need to be a very high context and adaptable individual. So we have, you know, junior paralegal type profiles, tech experts, compliance officers, etcetera. And in understanding those nuances, we need to have incredibly robust training materials internally, but also be incredibly customer centric in, driving outcomes for the GPs. It’s a very nuanced, segment, I guess. And we did just create a we restructured our customers. So, we have what did I just do? The the math on 28,000, customer accounts.

Josh Schachter:
These are these are these are GPs or these are end user? Okay.

Carly Van Kirk:
These are 28,000 unique syndicates, on the platform, and we also manage billions of dollars in assets through the platform because we’re a fiduciary as well. So you see where I’m going with this. There’s a lot going on here.

Josh Schachter:
No. I was gonna say, I mean, for because from my exposure, have having had some of the syndicates invest in our company, like, the last mile delivery always involves somebody helping from AngelList. And and and this I think it’s already been, you know, close to a year since the last time that happened. So maybe this is this is there’s, this is pre Carly and post Carly. Right? So this is all pre Carly. But I but I can imagine that you’re dealing with two things and which makes the job difficult. You’re this is people’s finances. So the the margin of error is probably very low because whatever, you you know, the the GPs, the people who are running these funds, these syndicates, are reliant on you to help them with an impression to the people that are participating into their syndicate, which is incredibly important.

Josh Schachter:
So no margin for error. And I’d imagine 28,000 GPs, partners that are are helping to to to raise these funds. You’ve got what is I mean, probably, like, 20,000 of those people probably don’t know exactly what they’re doing. This is first or second time that they’re doing this, and so they’re confused and they’re they’re leaning on you. I can only imagine it is a very tough role to manage.

Carly Van Kirk:
Yeah. And as a leader as well, I mean, 20 to your point, 20,000 of those, maybe they are pretty inactive, because they either weren’t successful. It’s not easy to be successful raising a fund, especially with, you know, target allocation that you’re looking for. But the, you know, the core customer base that we just resegmented, the tier one GPs are probably in the, probably have about 2,000 of those, we’ll call it, and then tier two, tier three, and so on. And it’s a really interesting exercise. I’ve done it a number of times in my career now. But you have to retrofit your, you know, segmentation logic to be very, very context heavy within the business that you’re trying to solve for, and also not sacrificing service quality as you make adjustments and, you know, perhaps let a less sophisticated GP or a GP that just doesn’t require as much of a high touch know that, hey. You know, we actually aren’t going to provide dedicated account management services, but we do have a very robust tech enabled, you know, low touch service option for you to self serve through AI and through knowledge materials that we’ve been working on for years of experience.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. So you’ve had this this role since q four. It’s a very tough time for a lot of people to be transitioning into new roles. Mhmm. Especially at the leadership level, it’s their pyramid and there’s less opportunities. Is there any interesting story about how you came across this role or is just now applied on LinkedIn and and, we can move on?

Carly Van Kirk:
Yeah. This is, I don’t mind sharing, because I think a lot of people are in this position. But last year, I was really looking for a change. I had been running, any type of post sale or presale, supporting sales teams at a variety of fintechs. And, you know, usually, I’m hired by a CRO type, executive role, sometimes a COO or a chief customer officer, but typically a CRO. And, I had been servicing the same type of customer for quite a while. It was always, you know, an HSBC, Wells Fargo, a tier one wholesale or or retail global bank, and I intimately understand their their business problems. I really enjoy working, through change management and digitization efforts with banks, but it can become monotonous at times, you know, especially going through twelve to eighteen month sales cycles.

Carly Van Kirk:
There just isn’t that instant gratification. So I was really willing to to take some time off and do some consulting work to see if I got any kinda, like, peaks of interest and, you know, any inspiration outside of my typical niche in fintech. And, through doing that, I probably cold called or cold emailed over 300 CROs at companies that I was interested in. Most of them were AI focused. Most of them were fintechs. But, I wanted to try to catch that clip of an upswing of maybe they were recently acquired by a new private equity firm, and I felt that the firm were were good operators. So I was really trying to to go for this this niche role. And AngelList actually, was brought to me by a known executive recruiter, James Campbell.

Carly Van Kirk:
He’s great, in the industry, works in New York. And he was like, you know, this is kind of a a little bit of a different vibe. But similar to your background in them wanting to go upmarket and them needing to restructure their team, lots of internal change management, lots of organizational development decisions. What do you think? And I, you know, I was like, well, I work for start ups and scale ups, but I don’t work on the venture side. You know? I don’t work in capital markets in a capital marketplace. I don’t work in private markets, from a fundraising or fund services side. So I I definitely don’t have imposter syndrome at this point in my career in most cases, I’m happy to say, but I was a little reticent in just, you know, will the executive team have confidence and faith in me that I have enough, you know, wherewithal to, not have the domain expertise and still set the team up for success and understand the customers. But I I took a, you know, I took a bet on Angelus.

Carly Van Kirk:
They took a bet on me. So far, it’s working out pretty well, and I’m learning a lot. So it’s a really unique place, and I think there’s just a ton of potential in continuing to to scale this team.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Great. Great. Great. So in your first hundred and eighty days, and you’re just out of those hundred and eighty days now, first half year, what have been some of your top priorities coming in as new leadership?

Carly Van Kirk:
Yeah. I mean, my approach typically is, you know, I’m I have a professional services and implementation background, so I’m very, very keen on a SWOT analysis, in pretty much how I approach everything.

Josh Schachter:
They still do those? They still do SWOT analysis?

Carly Van Kirk:
They do analysis in in some way, shape, or form. MECE, SWOT, all of the, you know, all of the management consulting

Josh Schachter:
Very consulting ask. Yes.

Carly Van Kirk:
Yes. So, you know, I and also my staff sponsor who hired me, he’s been at AngelList for quite a while, and he was very cautious to say, you know, don’t come in here and think that you can put in an old playbook, and it’s going to work for for our model, for our customers, for our teams. Please listen and observe before you make any hard recommendations or form any serious opinions. And I’m like, alright.

Josh Schachter:
Two ears, one mouth.

Carly Van Kirk:
Yeah. Right. So, I mean, that’s what I did. I spoke with as many people as possible. I listened into calls. I you know, when I would go for a run-in the morning, I’m listening to a Gong call. I was really all in, you know, fourteen, sixteen hours a day trying to consume as much context as I could to conduct an assessment of, you know, what is the team configuration? Do we have the right tools? You know, where the So

Josh Schachter:
what what did what did you learn? What were the, like, the top? You’re like, okay. These now I’ve done this assessment. Here’s the three big rocks that I gotta focus everybody on.

Carly Van Kirk:
Yeah. One was purely creating a foundation. We didn’t have a baseline for metrics at all of understanding what our team performance was. And, you know, that sounds so table stakes, but it is you know, it’s a a business that has changed very much over time. And because of that, you know, you need to make sure that we’re, I guess, tuning the KPIs and metrics to the current task at hand and the current focus. So total gap in tooling from that perspective, from a performance management perspective, and couple of other foundational items too. Do we have, you know, the task relevant maturity for each person on the team to be in their role and to understand, you know, do they have clarity of their role? You know, kind of basic things that needed to be identified, but it was really just creating a stable foundation. What are the benchmarks to put out there for the team? How are we gonna be operationally stable? And then the second tranche is really, now that we know we are highly inefficient, you know, we have an incredibly high bar for customer service, and we deliver very well to that degree, but it’s in incredibly manual as well.

Carly Van Kirk:
And as a company that’s focused on powering innovation for, you know, society in many different sectors, why are we not internalizing that approach and, you know, kind of dogfooding? Why why don’t we have efficiency within our team? So I’ve built out an an automation road map, making sure that we are, not just flirting with AI, but we are, leveraging large language models for customer interactions, making sure that we can, create repeatable processes very quickly. So the automation road map really gave us a little bit more scale and efficiency to create additional bandwidth for the third tranche, which is focusing more squarely on proactive efforts, strategic advisement, and, expansion opportunities with existing customers like a real customer success team. So shifting the mindset internally from a customer relations operation focused team to a customer success team best in class that is working hand in hand with the customers is still very much in progress, but that was the immediate goal in six months.

Josh Schachter:
Wow. Okay. So I I heard three things there. The first is understanding the the measurements, and I I well, not understanding, putting in place the the goals and the outcomes and the measurements and KPIs and all those things, and then mapping those to the roles within the team. Yes. Automation workflow, so enabling you to really kinda help scale higher, better touch and interactions to, to this customer base, and then, being more proactive, really serving in and for the success of the customer, not only really the support and the more tactical types of things. Those are the three?

Carly Van Kirk:
Yes.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. Great. Let’s go into one. We didn’t prep this before. Which one do you wanna go into? I wanna deep dive into, like, as much as you’ll as much as you’ll uncover for us.

Carly Van Kirk:
Oh, I think the the efficiency angle is I I I would say that’s where we still are.

Josh Schachter:
Okay.

Carly Van Kirk:
You know, we really are kind of executing on this automation road map that I ideated on with a number of the team leads.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. Go. Start. I wanna I wanna unpack. I wanna do the SWOT analysis. So the strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities, the threats. Yeah.

Carly Van Kirk:
Let’s start

Josh Schachter:
with the weaknesses. Right? Weakness, and then we’ll go to strengths.

Carly Van Kirk:
Okay. Weaknesses, I would say that there were too much there was too much fracture in the toolset. So a very brittle infrastructure to build upon. The the team already had, you know, automated workflows or at least, workflow routing mechanisms in place. And then

Josh Schachter:
You’re talking you’re talking like like Zapier types of of workflow routing mechanisms?

Carly Van Kirk:
Yes. Zapier plus, a homegrown CRM tool that we have. And we also use Front as our customer facing communication tool. And then, you know, of course, the engineering product design teams have their own way of tracking when we need to escalate something to them, etcetera. So, you know, trying to get a sense of, you know, what’s the taxonomy within this CRM? You know, what is the potential within this CRM? If I touch this, is it gonna break that? And then, you know, am I gonna have, like, a legal snafu on my hands? Because to your point, we are touching touching money here. It’s a real serious business. And

Josh Schachter:
And your CRM is homegrown. Correct? This is what you you may have just said this, but it’s a homegrown CRM?

Carly Van Kirk:
Yes.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. So really kinda observing how the CRM is the, like, the gravity, around which you’re operating.

Carly Van Kirk:
Right. And on top of that, you know, we just have really, really bright individuals. So there were a couple of bots that people across the company had built for searching through our disparate knowledge bases, and those things are helpful. Like, how do I really operationalize that in service of the customers in a in a in a neat little packaged way? And I’m still working through that answer, to be honest. But, but it was it was helpful to know that the weaknesses were we have a lot of great tools. We’re not using them in harmony. So, you know, what is the ecosystem with which we wanna move forward and maybe get rid of some of these tools or combine them combine them more cohesively, and understand, you know, what best practices work for one team versus another team or even an individual. There were there were a lot of gaps in in just the cohesive approach with which we deliver at scale.

Josh Schachter:
How do you systematically go through that understanding, you know, what’s working well and where there’s gaps in the systems and then what phase two needs to be as far as bringing things in or consolidating or chucking things, jettisoning them? Where like, how do you approach that, and where are you right now?

Carly Van Kirk:
Yeah. One specific thing that I did was I spent a lot of time with our, our sentiment analysis engine looking through positive and negative responses from customers directly. And then, you know, keywording, are there similarities?

Josh Schachter:
Like, like, NPS types of of, what’s the what’s the channel through which this is coming?

Carly Van Kirk:
It’s coming through a business intelligence tool plus our CRM, and then the notification is integrated in Slack, in a large, like, channel readout. So, again, like, lots of different places to find information. Just getting that altogether took a a considerable amount of time. But just reading through the actual responses from customers was very helpful, and also looking at the performance on a classification basis because we have some LLMs that we’ve, you know, bootstrapped together with our workflows and our and our customer interactions. We we have a pretty great idea of, you know, what inquiries cause pain points, you know, where are there black boxes, in the customer delivery or the timing for, you know, creating time to value to a customer. We had a pretty good understanding because of the of the sentiment analysis that they already had in place, but we weren’t doing anything about it. Mhmm. So, you know, if we’re talking about, post close actions, for a GP and a Portco, How do we, you know, cut down that time and disambiguate the process so that so the customer understands what the outcome is going to be in which relevant time? And that’s what we’re moving through now of operationalizing more automation in each of these workflows, so that we have time to value kinda like at the tip of our fingers for a given workflow.

Josh Schachter:
How were they managing time to value, and how are you managing it now? I’m sorry. I’d say man how are you defining it?

Carly Van Kirk:
It is, it’s a little bit of a subjective definition, because there, you know, there’s so much operational due diligence that is required in in many of our workflows on the GP or on their legal team. We also have a legal team, so we offer, you know, our own advisement as well as a structure in our contracts. But, essentially, it’s, you know, did we get to the right outcome? So some of the some of it’s binary and some of it is subjective. For instance, if we’re doing a, a wire for a deployment, it’s pretty binary whether or not that wire went through. But how was the experience to the to the customer and to their end customer? You know, did they feel that it was smooth, that there were clear instructions, that there weren’t too many hiccups, that we, you know, performed due diligence but didn’t put the onus on them to exhaustively, you know, provide KYC details and and multiple factor authentication checks. So I think time to value is, did we get the job done binary? And, you know, was it a valuable experience on the outcome?

Josh Schachter:
And you’re measuring that through different types of surveying tools and and channels?

Carly Van Kirk:
Yep. Yep. The LLMs on sentiment analysis, CSAT surveys and NPS help with the qualitative aspect, and the quantitative aspect is, the time to to resolve a given inquiry without any operational drops.

Josh Schachter:
And you so okay. So LLM. So you you spit out the buzzword there. We’re gonna talk about AI in a moment, but but is there a particular are you using internal LLM that the company has has built, or or is it kinda off the shelf type of stuff?

Carly Van Kirk:
It is it is open source, but we have our own, you know, tweaks and variations on top of it.

Josh Schachter:
Yep. Cool. Cool. What what do you see as the future? Let’s let’s shift in that gear. What do you see as the future of of AI at AngelList and for for leaders and aspiring leaders in customer success, post sales in general?

Carly Van Kirk:
For for AngelList, I like I said, we’re quite early in our journey here, and we love such a personalized touch, that it’s been very, very manual, our interactions with with customers. But, you know, as the as AI becomes more prevalent, the average investor, the average fundraiser is naturally going to need to become more, comfortable with interacting with AI. And because AI is increasingly conversational, in natural language, I think that that will be okay. So maybe it’s the tier three customer that perhaps doesn’t want to directly self serve, but they are comfortable with a tech enabled approach because the AI performs pretty damn well. You know? So, I think the future is having a copilot internally for my teams, and also having a, a first line of defense, that would need to be that would deflect a significant amount of repeatable inquiries.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. And and hopefully, they’re speaking to the same system, so they’re both accessing the same information.

Carly Van Kirk:
Yeah. And we also just did a, a beta launch of, a new tool for, what we feel is going to be a search engine of of sorts for private markets. So our CEO built that out directly himself, and it’s gathering and anonymizing, all of our private markets data plus hooks into, SEC data and so on so that you can query while you are looking to make an investment, your own past investments and other similar data to make an informed choice. So that’s more pie in the sky, you know, kind of being a super app for private markets and in the future. I don’t think that it’s too far in the future, but it’s certainly taking shape right now as we test feedback with early adopters.

Josh Schachter:
That that that’s that’s AngelList’s productization of AI AI as a commercial center. It may it makes so much sense. We we, we we spoke to Crunchbase, you know, a couple months ago, and they’re doing all sorts of things with with AI now, and I know others as well. For a company like AngelList that’s just sitting on troves of data, it’s gotta be a really exciting and probably overwhelming time right now because you can just go in any different direction. So you wanna make sure you get the right one because we know things are just moving so quickly. On that note about the commercialization of things, so I I asked you earlier if you check back in one year. I wanna I wanna end on this note here. If we check back in one year, what would be the one thing you’d you’d really hope to accomplish? And you meant you said activation of customer success as a commercial center.

Josh Schachter:
So, yeah, help us get into that a little bit.

Carly Van Kirk:
Yeah. I I I’ve never been a direct rep in my career, but I had a CRO that told me once that, you know, if you’re in a go to market function in any role, you’re a salesperson. And, you know, that really resonated with me. That was pretty early in my career. So I actually really I view myself as a revenue leader. I find it stimulating and, certainly, you know, making your role and your team’s function mission critical to the business means assisting with generating revenue or at least retaining that revenue. So where AngelList is right now from a CS perspective is we are focused on revenue retention, customer retention, and a phenomenal customer experience. But because my team, you know, they are so context driven, and they have the repetition of so many, funds over time, different configurations of funds, different fund structures and nuances, they’re really subject matter experts.

Carly Van Kirk:
And what I view customer success as moving forward with increased, AI prevalency is just you need to be a subject matter expert in order to help your customer because we’re not talking about user administration anymore. We’re not talking about seats and, you know, do we have the right roles and training for our users? We’re talking about truly partnering with them to create bespoke solutions to solve their unique business needs. Not everyone’s needs are the same. Everyone’s on a different journey. And I feel that my team moving forward really needs to be part of that revenue generation story because of their unique subject matter expertise, even more so at times than the reps that don’t necessarily have as many touch points throughout a fund life cycle to, provide guidance and to really understand what they want to replicate in their next fund.

Josh Schachter:
So I’m hearing professional services from you. Yeah.

Carly Van Kirk:
Yeah. I mean, I I guess I can’t shake the professional services edge, but I think, you know, customer success leaders and customer success professionals need to become more comfortable and more tactical, in offering solutions to their customers because it’s it’s just not good enough to provide check ins to customers and expect that they want to pay for that. You need to provide value in the interaction.

Josh Schachter:
So you’re setting up the foundations now, and then hopefully end the year, there you go. Off you are to the races of of the the commercial center for post sales. Carly, this was great. I’d love to have you back on in close to a year and see how all these goals, you know, have netted out. I’m sure you’ll be off to great things. But, in the meantime, thank you so much for being on the program.

Carly Van Kirk:
Thank you. This is great. Thanks so much.

Josh Schachter:
Awesome.