outbound-sales
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Nima Hakimi and the Art of Starting Over
A favor for a cousin became Convoso. For Nima Hakimi, keeping it alive meant rebuilding the software, learning to lead, and deciding which calls were worth making.
Zayd Syed Ali and the useful art of changing your mind
Two agency exits taught Zayd Syed Ali how to get people into a meeting. Building Valley has taught him when to leave an idea behind, when to keep asking, and when to let someone else take the wheel.
Ashok Kammara Left Derivatives for the Messy Math of a Ringing Phone
After 13 years in financial services, Klenty's founding marketer chose a less orderly ledger: the missed calls, burned numbers and human follow-ups that decide whether an outbound team works.
Xiaohan Shen
Xiaohan Shen is the co-founder and CEO of Coldreach (YC W23), a San Francisco startup that uses AI to find ready-to-buy leads by watching public buying signals and to personalize cold outbound at scale. A University of Wisconsin-Madison computer science and data science grad, he calls himself an 'outbound nerd' after writing more than 1,000 cold emails by hand at his first startup, EasyJobs, which he and co-founder Hankel Bao grew to 20,000 monthly active users before pivoting into the tooling problem they lived themselves.
Jason Dorfman
Jason Dorfman is the co-founder and CEO of Orum, a live conversation platform that uses a parallel dialer and speech recognition to help sales reps skip busy signals, voicemails, and dead numbers so they reach live prospects faster. He built the idea out of a problem he lived through as the first sales hire at Rubrik, where reps dialed 100 times a day to get a handful of pickups. Since founding Orum in 2019 with Karthik Viswanathan, he has raised more than $50 million and grown the company into a widely used tool across outbound sales teams. He is based in Austin, Texas.
Nelson Jones
Nelson Jones is the co-founder and CEO of Kular, a London-based AI lead generation platform that only charges customers when it delivers actual sales leads. An Oxford law graduate who started building businesses before he finished his degree, Nelson moved from legal-sector sales at Luminance into Entrepreneur First, where he met co-founder Saaras Mehan in the LD16 cohort. The pair launched in 2021, went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, and pivoted from an AI business-development tool for law firms into Kular, which today generates leads for over 1,000 companies via email, LinkedIn, and AI voice notes. Kular's signature bet is radical alignment: pay only for results.
Zayd Ali
Zayd Ali is the founder and CEO of Valley, a New York based AI SDR that runs LinkedIn-first outbound for B2B teams by learning a company's product, cloning its best reps' voice, and booking sales meetings. He sold his first appointment-setting company for seven figures while still in high school, briefly studied at Columbia, joined Antler in 2022, and after starting and shelving a founder-VC network called Fish, pivoted into Valley. He took 136 investor meetings before closing a seed round that grew to roughly $3M from backers including Antler, Jason Calacanis, and General Catalyst's Fellows program.
Dan Lee
Dan Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nooks, an AI Sales Assistant Platform that automates the manual busywork of sales development reps so they can focus on the human side of selling. Born in Manhattan and raised in New Jersey, Lee studied AI at Stanford (BS '21, MS '22), did ML stints at Scale AI and Cerebras Systems, and co-founded Nooks in 2020 with Stanford classmates Rohan Suri and Nikhil Cheerla. The company has raised $70 million in total funding, including a $43M Series B led by Kleiner Perkins in October 2024, and was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 AI honoree in 2025.
Mei Siauw
Mei Siauw is the Co-founder and CEO of LeadIQ, a San Francisco-based B2B sales intelligence platform that helps sales teams prospect smarter and faster. Born in Indonesia and educated at Cornell (CS) and Wharton (MBA), she spent a decade at Oracle before co-founding LeadIQ in 2015 with Angelo Huang. Under her leadership, LeadIQ raised $42M in total funding (including a $30M Series B in 2021 led by Cathay Innovation), built a fully remote team spanning 33+ countries, and serves 20,000+ sales professionals globally. A tireless advocate for outbound sales and data-driven prospecting, Siauw has become one of the most prominent voices in the sales tech space.
Collin Stewart
Collin Stewart is the Co-Founder and CEO of Predictable Revenue, the B2B sales outsourcing company that has booked 10,000+ meetings for 55+ companies including Toptal and Vox Media. A self-described 'failed musician' turned one of North America's most trusted voices in sales development, Collin built his company from 1,100 LinkedIn messages and near-bankruptcy to $1M ARR in under a year. He hosts the Predictable Revenue Podcast (400+ episodes) and published his debut book, The Terrifying Art of Finding Customers, in October 2025.