Somewhere in 2018, inside Google's campus, a product manager named Max Greenwald convinced his team to hide Waldo inside Google Maps as an April Fools' joke. The gag went global. Millions of people hunted a fictional striped character across satellite imagery of the actual world. That is, in one compressed image, Max Greenwald's career: find something real inside something massive, make it feel like a game, and get people to pay attention who otherwise wouldn't bother.
He does the same thing with sales. Warmly, the revenue orchestration platform he co-founded in San Francisco in 2020, is built on a simple and slightly subversive premise: B2B sales has a cold problem. Not a volume problem. Not a technology problem. A warmth problem. Companies spray emails at databases of strangers and call it pipeline. Max thinks that's embarrassing - and, now, unnecessary.
"I wish I had warm leads. And I was like, wait - my company's called Warmly..."
- Maximus Greenwald, on the pivot that finally clickedThe Princeton Flanker Who Wanted to Hack Education
Max grew up in Colorado, went east for Princeton, and studied Computer Science and Public Policy simultaneously - the combination of someone who wants to understand systems and then argue with how they work. On the rugby field, he played flanker: the position that has to be everywhere, doing the jobs nobody notices until they stop getting done. That instinct shows up in how he builds companies.
At Princeton, Max ran HackPrinceton and organized TigerTrek, the annual trip that bused students to Silicon Valley so they could see what the actual tech industry looked like up close. Before he graduated, he had already built IgniteSTEM - a nonprofit that packaged hackathons into a portable kit so schools without tech infrastructure could run them anyway. He called the kit "Hack-In-A-Box." The ambition was to democratize the culture of making things, not just teach kids to code.
After Princeton he spent time at the FTC's Cyber Security department - an education in how large institutions protect themselves from exactly the kind of disruption he was planning to cause - and then landed at Google as a product manager, cycling through Photos, Maps, and Chrome.
Five and a Half Years of Overnight Success
Max calls himself "a five and a half year overnight success." That framing is exact - not modest, not self-deprecating. Warmly launched in 2020 as a Zoom tool (Zoom virtual backgrounds that displayed your name and company info on calls). It was the pandemic moment, Zoom was everywhere, and it seemed inevitable. Within months, they realized it was very difficult to sell something that felt optional. The first pivot came quickly.
What followed was a kind of methodical dissection of what "warm" could mean in a commercial context. Warmly cycled through digital identity platforms, video meeting enrichment, warm intro networks, and website visitor identification. Each version taught the team something the previous one had obscured. The lesson Max keeps returning to: you learn faster from market feedback than from internal conviction, but you have to ship something real to get that feedback.
By 2023, during Techstars prep, he had a moment that sounds almost too neat in retrospect: he was lamenting that he wished he had warm leads. Then he caught himself - his company was called Warmly. The signal-based selling pivot - using real-time intent data to identify who's ready to buy, right now, and routing them to the right rep - finally created the product that matched the brand promise the name had always implied.
"Hire for slope over y-intercept. The person with the highest learning velocity is almost always the better long-term bet."
"Focus maniacally on tossing a ton of spaghetti at the wall - but track which strands actually stick."
"Do 30% more with AI, or you're underperforming."
"Learning from failures is crucial in the entrepreneurial journey. The only real mistake is the one you don't extract a lesson from."
What Warmly Actually Does
Warmly identifies who is on a company's website in real time, what they're interested in based on multi-source intent signals, and then routes them to the right sales motion before the moment passes. It connects to CRMs, sequences tools, and enriches contact records automatically. The TAM Agent handles outbound - scoring accounts, mapping buying committees, and running multi-channel signal-based sequences. The Inbound Agent handles visitors: AI chatbots, personalized landing pages, smart popups, live chat routing, and meeting booking.
The pitch is that most B2B companies are sitting on a goldmine of intent signals they're not acting on. Website visitors leave without converting. Job changes happen and nobody follows up. Funding announcements go unnoticed. Warmly watches all of it, scores it, and tells the sales team who to call - and when, and why.
The company integrates with 40+ tools including Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and Slack. It went through both Techstars Boulder and Y Combinator (Summer 2020) and has raised from Felicis Ventures, NFX, Zoom Ventures, F-Prime Capital, Maven Ventures, and RTP Global.
Warmly Funding History
The "Purple Cow" Side of Max Greenwald
On Twitter (now X), Max runs a series called "Purple Cow" - named after Seth Godin's concept of what makes something worth noticing. The series profiles remarkable entrepreneurs with the kind of specific, generous detail that most founder content skips. He's been doing it for years, quietly building a library of what actually makes businesses worth paying attention to.
The series reflects something genuine about how Max thinks: he is more interested in the mechanism than the outcome, more interested in what made it work than that it worked. His interview appearances are unusually candid for a CEO still in the thick of building. He talks about the pivots that failed and why. He talks about the hiring mistakes. He talks about the moment he almost gave up and the specific piece of feedback that made him keep going.
That candor is strategic - Warmly's brand is warmth, and a CEO who admits failure is more trustworthy than one who projects inevitability - but it also reads as just who Max Greenwald is. He organized hackathons at Princeton because he thought more people should experience building things. He worked at the FTC because he thought government should understand technology. He built a Google Maps Easter egg because a serious project should be allowed to have a laugh.