Twitxy Saved

Eric Rea

Verified account Podium

@ericwilliamrea

Co-founder & CEO of @PodiumHQ 馃嚚馃嚘/馃嚭馃嚫
Hiring builders podium.com/careers
Utah, USA podium.com Joined October 2009
455 Following 4.9K Followers 1.6K Posts

Latest posts 5

Pinned post

Eric Rea Verified account @ericwilliamrea
We built a $150M ARR business twice.

The first time took 8 years. The second took 2.5.

Today, Podium crossed $150M in AI annual recurring revenue.

Three years ago, we already had a great software business. Well over $100M in revenue, tens of thousands of customers, and a product we'd spent nearly a decade building.

And we decided to start over.

The business was performing well. But we believed AI was going to fundamentally change the software industry and make much of traditional software obsolete.

As a founder, you pour your life into what you're building. An insane amount of time, sacrifice, and effort. The hard part is not getting too attached to it.

When we started building our first AI agents, we had to confront the possibility that much of what we'd built might not be that valuable in the future. That's a tough pill to swallow.

But we also realized those same 10 years had put us in a unique position to take advantage of what AI could do for our customers.

Instead of protecting what we'd spent a decade building, we decided to bet the future of the company on AI employees that actually do the work for our customers.

We massively underestimated what we'd signed up for.

We ended up building entirely new operating systems for the industries we serve, from the AI agents all the way down to the systems of record. Now customers run their entire businesses on Podium.

Reinventing our product wasn't even the hardest part. We had to reinvent how the entire company operated.

When you've been running a company for over a decade, the operational inertia is incredibly powerful. We had to rethink how we build products, how we sell, how we serve customers, and how we run the business.

We effectively started a second startup inside an already successful company. And we're still at the very beginning.

Today, we have 20,000 AI agents working for our customers. They've helped generate more than $13 billion in revenue for those businesses. And we're barely scratching the surface of what AI will be able to do for them.

And we've done all of this while becoming profitable and generating free cash flow. We're building Podium to be around for decades.

Huge credit to our team for having the guts to make this bet and the ability to actually pull it off. We still have a long way to go and tons of problems to solve, but it's so damn fun to be winning when the opportunity ahead is this big.

In the age of AI, you can either disrupt your own company or wait for somebody else to do it.

I'd rather do it ourselves.
172 replies 84 reposts 824 likes 358K views View on X
Eric Rea Verified account @ericwilliamrea
We have AI agents whose job is to make our other AI agents better.

They run inside Edge, the system we built to watch how our agents perform, find improvements, and test them in real customer conversations.

One spotted a better way to handle customer hesitation when car buying. Edge turned it into a test across 202 agents.

It randomly assigns conversations to the old or new instructions, then compares results. Did the customer reply? Did the agent complete the goal? What did it cost?

Winning changes roll out automatically.

1.18M conversations in live experiments so far.

Our customers get an agent that keeps getting better at helping them. They should spend time with customers, not review AI conversations or rewriting its instructions.
1:10
8 replies 0 reposts 15 likes 930 views View on X
Eric Rea Verified account @ericwilliamrea
It鈥檚 one thing for your engineering team to build some agents that sit on top of your existing software. It鈥檚 an entirely different challenge to rebuild your entire company to take advantage of the insane pace of AI progress.

I think a lot of traditional SaaS companies are fooling themselves into believing that building a few agents that do some work for their customers is enough to avoid being disrupted, while the rest of their organization continues operating like AI doesn鈥檛 exist.

At @PodiumHQ, one of our biggest challenges is pushing ourselves to rebuild every part of the company to be AI-native. Organizational inertia is insanely powerful, and it takes a tremendous amount of energy from leadership to constantly challenge how things are done and force the changes required to keep up.

I think this is a big reason why founder-led companies have such an advantage right now. Professional managers are unlikely to tear a company down to its foundation and rebuild it. There鈥檚 just too much personal risk (and hard work) involved, and the short-term incentives of hired CEOs don鈥檛 align with what鈥檚 required for the long-term survival of the company.

It鈥檚 much easier to give everyone a Gemini account, tell the board you鈥檙e going all in on AI, and call it a day 馃槵
Aaron Levie Verified account @levie Oct 30
It鈥檚 almost incomprehensible how wide the distance is between someone who鈥檚 working at the frontier with AI and basically everyone else right now.

The crazy thing is these lines are not converging, but only growing farther apart. If the curve of AI progress had leveled off, it would certainly have given most people and companies time to catch up or implement their workflows in a standardized way. The technology would have neutralized competitive advantage because everyone would be using it the same way.

But what鈥檚 happened is the opposite. The curve of AI progress is basically going vertical right now, which means if you had codified your processes 3-6 months ago you鈥檙e likely already behind again. Now imagine most companies that kicked into gear a year ago and thought that they were done. Even further behind now.

I鈥檝e never seen a technology in my life and career that improves at this rate, which consequently means you need to upgrade your expectations at a similar rate. Our brains weren鈥檛 wired for this, and our organizational change management processes certainly weren鈥檛 either.

With any form of recursive self improvement, things just get wilder. It鈥檚 a time when you will need to be constantly reevaluating the things that didn鈥檛 work just a couple months ago to see if they now can be solved. AI native companies certainly have a strong advantage due to this right now, so now it comes down to can the bigger companies keep up. Wild times.
View quoted post on X
Eric Rea Verified account @ericwilliamrea
I heard about this three years ago from someone at Google. It looks incredible! Can't wait to replace Zoom meetings with this.
Josh Woodward Verified account @joshwoodward Oct 26
馃嚭馃嚫 For a deployed service member, missing family moments adds up. Baby鈥檚 first step. The first performance. Sharing a laugh.

In honor of National Day of the Deployed, we鈥檙e excited to partner with @USArmy and @The_USO to bring Google Beam to 20 locations so deployed service members can experience lifelike, 3D video connections with their loved ones.

馃帴 Watch the docuseries below
View quoted post on X