prospecting
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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.
Matthew Levin
Matthew Levin is the co-founder and CEO of Lariat, an AI-native sales platform built to prospect into brick-and-mortar businesses. A UC Berkeley alum based in Brooklyn, he's a career B2B go-to-market operator whose past stops include Global Head of Marketing at Nosto and VP of Marketing at mParticle, plus early co-founding runs at Plenishable and the Switchboard project.
Nick Smith
Nick Smith is the President, CEO and Founder of Sailes, a New York-based AI company that builds personality-driven autonomous Sailebots to handle B2B prospecting for Fortune 1000 enterprise sales teams. A former sales leader at CBS Corporation and iHeart Radio, he sketched the idea for Sailes on his iPhone at the Lake of the Ozarks on July 4, 2018.
David Chevalier
David Chevalier is the co-founder and CEO of Surfe, a Paris-born sales-tech company that bridges LinkedIn and the CRM. He and Romain Ginestou dreamed up the tool during an exchange at UC Berkeley after getting fed up with copy-pasting prospects into their CRM. Launched as Leadjet, the company bootstrapped to over 1,500 paying customers and 1M EUR ARR with no sales team before rebranding to Surfe and raising a 4M EUR seed round in 2022. Customers include Google, Uber, Spendesk, Mirakl and Opendoor. Chevalier is a vocal advocate for keeping the human in B2B selling, even as he builds tools to automate the busywork around it.
David Winer
David Winer is the Co-Founder and CTO of Ciro (YC S22), an AI-powered go-to-market platform that automates sales prospecting from target identification to booked meetings. With roots in applied mathematics, a Berkeley EECS master's, and a Stanford MBA, he spent time at Bain, Pure Storage, and Google (where he served as PM for the Kotlin programming language and sat on the Kotlin Foundation board) before co-founding Ciro in 2022 with Brown University friends Richard Lee and Ross Geiger. Ciro raised $3.8M in seed funding from CRV, Y Combinator, and SV Angel, and runs on a stack anchored by Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, and Elasticsearch. Outside the office, David self-identifies as an 'exceedingly obscure internet personality' and writes a personal blog mixing statistical deep-dives with essays on bike theft and vegetarianism.
Florin Tatulea
Florin Tatulea is a Toronto-based sales development leader, founder, and creator who built a 74,000+ follower LinkedIn audience by teaching SDRs and AEs how to actually hit quota. Currently Head of Sales Development at Common Room and GTM Engineer in Residence at ZoomInfo, he founded Sales Flo to run workshops and training for reps at Shopify, Zendesk, Clearbit, and others. His Substack newsletter 'Prospecting from the Trenches' reaches 12,000+ subscribers with tactical cold email and prospecting advice drawn from real-world experience scaling teams and generating $3M in pipeline.