Patrick Thompson's First Pitch: Building an Autonomous CRM

Introducing The First Pitch, a biweekly podcast where Patrick Thompson (Co-founder and CEO of Clarify) and Somrat Niyogi (Partner at Recall Capital) interview venture-backed founders about their very first pitch that secured them funding.

For episode one, Somrat turns the mic towards his co-host, Patrick, to hear the full story of Clarify’s earliest days. You can watch the full episode below or read about it here.

When Patrick Thompson started thinking about building Clarify in early 2023, he didn’t open a pitch deck. He wrote a memo. He also made an unusual career move: asking to switch from reporting to Amplitude’s CPO to reporting to the CRO, so he could spend a year embedded with the sales team before writing a single line of code.

That groundwork shaped everything about how Clarify came to market and how Patrick thinks about pitching. In the debut episode of The First Pitch—the podcast he co-hosts with Somrat Niyogi of Recall Capital—Patrick shares the unfiltered version of that fundraising journey, the questions that tripped him up, and the framework he now gives every early-stage founder he advises.

Start with the memo, not the deck

Patrick and his co-founder built both—a Figma Slides deck and a long-form memo—but the memo came first and did the heavier lifting. His reasoning: writing forces clarity in a way that designing slides doesn’t. By the time they sat down with VCs, the deck was almost secondary.

“As soon as you jump on a call with a VC, you’re off the script. If they’re leaning in and engaged, you’re off the slides in the first five minutes anyway.”

He also has a practical reason to front-load the memo: every investor who writes a check needs to draft one internally anyway. “Why don’t I just do that work for you?” By making the memo their lead artifact, they shortened the investor’s path to conviction.

Lead with pain, not with the product

Patrick’s opening move in VC meetings wasn’t a product demo. It was a question: “Tell me about your experience using a CRM.” Most partners hated their CRM. The connection to pain was immediate.

His logic: if you lead with the solution, you’re probably selling the wrong one. Startups iterate significantly—Clarify’s first shipped version, by Patrick’s own admission, “sucked.” What sustains a company through that iteration is a disciplined process of discovery, not a fixed answer.

“You might find product-market fit, and you might lose it just as quickly. If you don’t have that process nailed, it doesn’t really matter that you got lucky.”

Know your three reasons to say no—and disqualify fast

Going into every meeting, Patrick had a framework: identify the three strongest reasons an investor should not fund this company. If he could get someone past those three objections in the first few minutes, the rest of the conversation would flow. If he couldn’t, he’d end the call.

“My time’s valuable. Their time’s valuable. If it’s not there in the first five to ten minutes, it’s not there.”

He treated VC pitching like a sales call: disqualify when the fit isn’t right. He ended meetings early more than once—including one where he’d been introduced to a fund he respected—because it was clear within two minutes the partner had no interest in the category.

The hardest question: why you?

Of all the objections Patrick fielded, the one he found hardest wasn’t about market size or category crowding. It was the team question. People generally believed that CRM was ripe for disruption and that AI would accelerate it. What they couldn’t easily evaluate was whether Patrick’s team was the one to win.

Two years later, with a dozen well-funded competitors in the market, it’s still the question he gets. His answer hasn’t changed: do the work, build the product, and let people try it. Clarify leans hard into product-led growth because Patrick believes their best competitive asset is the product itself.

Talk about the risk—don’t bury it

Somrat, reflecting on the memos and decks he’s received over the years, pushed on one thing: founders almost universally hide the risk narrative. Patrick was better than most—he had a “risky assumptions” section in his memo—but even he tucked it in the appendix.

His framing to VCs was blunt: “This isn’t a 10% probability company. This is a 4% probability company. But if it works, it’s gonna be a generational company.” He offered investors a choice—a more likely smaller outcome, or a less likely massive one—and let them decide which bet they wanted to make.

Do the work before you pitch

If there’s one piece of advice Patrick returns to throughout the episode, it’s this: don’t pitch until you’ve done the work. He spent a year embedded in Amplitude’s sales org specifically to build the depth of knowledge he’d need before writing a line of code. He talked to customers extensively before he talked to investors.

“The best products are built where the founder has a high degree of empathy with the people they’re building for. If you’ve never done the job, how do you know?”

His other tactical advice: record yourself pitching. Before Clarify’s own call recorder existed, he used QuickTime. He assembled 50+ questions he expected VCs to ask and role-played answering them on camera. Repetition, not polish, is what builds confidence under pressure.

On slides: he loves the Sequoia 10-slide format. If you need more than 10, you haven’t sharpened your thinking. Every word on every slide has to earn its place—same principle he applies to Clarify’s product and marketing today.

The First Pitch drops new episodes each week. Each one follows a founder through the story of their original pitch—what held, what didn’t, and how the journey has evolved.

Transcript

The First Pitch, Episode 1 — Patrick Thompson & Somrat Niyogi

PATRICK — 0:00

Every founder has a first pitch—the one they stayed up all night building and bet everything on. I’m Patrick Thompson, founder of Clarify.

SOMRAT — 0:05

And I’ve sat across from thousands of these pitches. Some changed the world, and some didn’t make it past the first meeting. I’m Somrat Niyogi, partner at Recall Capital.

PATRICK — 0:12

And this is The First Pitch. Each episode, a founder shares the story of what started it all—what they got right, what they got wrong, and the journey since.

SOMRAT — 0:20

Let’s get into it.

SOMRAT — 1:45

So, Pat—why are we here?

PATRICK — 1:48

Well, Somrat, thanks for doing this with me. One of the things we’ve talked a lot about is the founder journey in general. You’ve been a founder and a VC. You’ve listened to a lot of founders pitch. We wanted to put something together that gave folks a real perspective on how to pitch a VC, how to think about it as a founder, and what that journey actually looks like. Really excited to co-host this with you.

SOMRAT — 2:05

I’m passionate about this. Pitches matter. And for our first episode, we’re starting with you. I remember the specific day. I remember the pitch particularly. For folks listening, we’re going to be covering founders and their first pitches—what went right, what went wrong, and how things have changed in the current environment. I’m an investor in Clarify, so excited to do this. Maybe we can start from the very beginning. Take me back to where you were when you were first thinking about Clarify—you were at Amplitude at the time. And I believe your wife was pregnant?

PATRICK — 2:30

We’d just had our first kid and were thinking about having a second. Dynamic times, for sure.

SOMRAT — 2:35

What year was this?

PATRICK — 2:37

This was ’23. I started thinking about it in Q1 of ’23. I’d been at Amplitude—they had acquired my previous company, Idroli, in ’21. I was getting itchy, wanting to go start another company. I’d been ruminating on a problem I had as a founder. I started doing customer discovery, put a memo together, and it took about a year to get to the conviction point where we were like, “Yes, there’s something here, and now is the time.” Then I got introduced to you, and the rest is history.

SOMRAT — 3:05

How many people did you pitch initially before you really felt like you’d figured it out?

PATRICK — 3:10

A lot of my focus was actually on talking to customers first—validating the problem, then validating the solution. Once we had enough conviction that the problem was real, we started talking to investors. We probably pitched 35 investors, including you. That was enough to refine the pitch over time and get clear on exactly what we were doing. We jumped ship and officially started Clarify in January of ’24.

SOMRAT — 3:35

Tell me about that first version of the pitch. Did it change before you even got to VCs, or was it essentially the same throughout?

PATRICK — 3:42

It definitely evolved. One piece of advice I give founders: work your way up to the people you actually want to raise from. We had a lot of shots on goal just trying to get better, to get more comfortable answering hard questions. When you’re taking on a category like CRM and going after an 800-pound gorilla, you get a lot of pushback. I remember one investor saying, “If I hear another pitch with Linear for CRM, I’m out.”

PATRICK — 4:05

You learn to narrate better, understand what questions VCs are going to have, and prepare good responses. The other thing is—we weren’t really trying to pitch. We put a memo together and wanted the narrative to speak for itself. In hindsight, I realized you’re always pitching and always essentially selling yourself and the team. We probably should’ve been more prepared.

SOMRAT — 4:30

Tell me about the memo. Do you believe in it as the primary artifact for preparing for a pitch?

PATRICK — 4:35

I do. For me, drafting and writing is how I think through things. You can put a pitch deck together and tell a visual story, but doing a long-form memo forced me to really wrap my head around how I wanted to describe what we were building. I recommend it 100% to other founders.

SOMRAT — 4:55

But if a founder says “I already have a deck, why do I need a memo?”—what do you say?

PATRICK — 5:00

I say do both. We had both. The memo was our lead artifact. Once you jump into a pitch, you’re not going slide by slide anyway—if a VC is leaning in, you’re off the slides in the first five minutes. So the memo was where we made sure the story was right, because the pitch becomes a conversation. You’re not really controlling the narrative once you’re in it.

SOMRAT — 5:30

So let’s talk about the actual first version of the story you were telling about Clarify.

PATRICK — 5:35

The pain points we were highlighting—a lot of it was pulling investors in by asking them to share their own experience with CRM. For you, you’d been a founder who’d been at Salesforce, tried every CRM, even started a CRM company. You knew the pain. It was easy to connect. Most VCs hated their CRM. From there I could connect to the pain point quickly.

But a lot of it was also grounding it in our own experience—from our CDP days, having worked with a thousand companies trying to help them automate their go-to-market motions. We’d watched the full state of the landscape. Then LLMs emerged. We wanted to tell VCs: this whole thing is about to be disrupted, and there needs to be a new CRM built from the ground up with AI.

We didn’t want to have to convince anyone that future should exist. We wanted to find VCs who already believed it.

SOMRAT — 7:05

You started with customer pain—not with what the technology could do. Was that intentional?

PATRICK — 7:10

If you’re solution-oriented, you probably have the wrong solution right out of the gate. Most startups iterate a lot. Our first version of Clarify wasn’t good. The goal was to be problem-oriented—do I understand this problem better than any other founder? Do I have a discovery process that keeps adapting as the market evolves? We’re in a dynamic market. You might have the right solution at one point, but if you can’t keep up with the pace of change, it doesn’t matter that you got lucky. You didn’t have a systematic approach. So: lead with the pain. Always.

SOMRAT — 8:55

The classic CRM objection is that it’s a crowded category, really hard. Did you go into meetings with a mental model of the objections you’d face?

PATRICK — 9:05

Yes. The framework I really liked was: these are the three reasons you shouldn’t invest in this company. If I could get people over those three objections early, it was an easy conversation. If someone said “It’s too crowded,” there was nothing I could say to change their mind. So I’d suss that out fast. My time’s valuable. Their time’s valuable. If it’s not there in the first five to ten minutes, it’s not there.

SOMRAT — 9:35

Would you actually end the call if you got that sense?

PATRICK — 9:38

I ended some meetings early. “Hey, thanks so much for your time—I don’t think right now is a good time. I’ll keep you posted.”

SOMRAT — 9:45

Would you recommend that to founders?

PATRICK — 9:46

100%. This is sales. If I’m on a sales call and I disqualify someone, why waste their time? Same logic applies. If it’s not clicking, end it respectfully. If it’s not there, it’s not there.

SOMRAT — 10:30

What’s the difference between a great VC meeting and a bad one?

PATRICK — 10:35

A bad one—I got introduced to a partner at a fund I genuinely respect. I walked in, and within the first two minutes I knew they were out. Not interested in the category at all. Part of that was me not doing enough research before the meeting. I tried to recover, couldn’t, ended it early. Lesson learned: don’t pitch people who don’t believe in the future you’re trying to create.

A great meeting is when you find someone who already believes in that future. You’re not convincing them of anything—you’re just telling them why you’re the team to build it.

SOMRAT — 11:30

What was the hardest question you got?

PATRICK — 11:33

“Why you?” People believed the category timing was right. They believed AI would automate a lot of what go-to-market teams were doing. What I had to put myself out there on was: why is this specific team the one to win? Two years in, with a dozen well-funded competitors, it’s still the question I get when I talk to VCs.

SOMRAT — 12:05

Has the pitch changed since you first raised? What’s stayed the same, what’s evolved?

PATRICK — 12:10

The things we believed AI would automate have proven true—and AI can now do probably ten times more than we expected two years ago. The AI-native CRM category is real. The one thing that surprised us: we assumed switching from existing CRMs would be much harder than it has been. We haven’t had to educate the market. A lot of people are ready to switch. We’ve built tooling that can migrate a go-to-market stack in days instead of weeks or months.

SOMRAT — 13:10

Has the vision itself changed from what you originally shared with me?

PATRICK — 13:14

The compound startup vision—building an all-in-one solution—has stayed the same. What’s evolved is how we think about it as an ambient solution. Something that runs in the background, agents that just work. We were probably the first CRM with full AI-based automation capabilities. And now we’re leaning harder into meeting customers where they are—whether that’s Slack, Claude, iMessage. Customers’ expectations about how they engage with tools has shifted. They don’t want to log in.

SOMRAT — 14:10

With twelve-plus competitors now, how has that changed how you talk about Clarify?

PATRICK — 14:15

You have to sharpen the pencil—get really clear on why you, why your product. My lean is always: have you tried it? We invest heavily in the product experience and push people to be as product-led as possible. I don’t think our competition spends as much time there. We want the best product to win. In a competitive deal, we say: let’s get you up and running, do a bake-off. If we’re not the best product for you, we want your feedback. We want the product to win on its merits.

SOMRAT — 15:20

Any hypotheses from the original pitch that the market surprised you on—where reality went a different direction?

PATRICK — 15:27

Building the integrated call recorder from day zero was non-obvious. We could have just integrated with Otter or Fathom. We said no—let’s build it. We shipped something in weeks that customers loved and that gave us access to all the data we needed to automate the work. Every competitor has since followed suit.

The other non-obvious thing: leaning into being a headless CRM early on. We have a great developer API and probably the best MCP support on the market. We didn’t know if MCP was going to become the de facto standard, but we wanted to be first. We’re also moving toward being one of the first tools where AI agents can fully sign up and spin up Clarify as a headless go-to-market stack. That’s a bet we’re making now.

SOMRAT — 17:10

If you could go back and change something about the original pitch, what would it be?

PATRICK — 17:15

The narrative around replacing human labor versus accelerating human potential. We positioned Clarify as accelerating what people could do—not replacing them. I still think that’s the right value prop. But the reality is most buyers expect efficiency gains from AI. They’re thinking about increasing rep quota or getting more done with fewer people. I was uncomfortable talking to VCs about the labor replacement angle. I still am, honestly. But it’s a real part of the story.

SOMRAT — 18:40

What advice would you give a founder working on their first pitch right now?

PATRICK — 18:45

Two things. First: do the work before you pitch. The more work you’ve done to prove the problem and the solution exist, the easier the VC conversation is. Customer validation is the work—how well do you know the problem, the competitive landscape, the path to winning?

Second: love the people you’re building for. Startups are genuinely hard. If you don’t love the people you’re trying to help, you’re not going to do a good job. There are easier ways to make a living. If this is just a wealth play for you, that will come through. The founders who make it are the ones who would do this regardless.

SOMRAT — 20:35

Do you have to communicate that love in the pitch itself? Like, do VCs need to see evidence of it?

PATRICK — 20:40

Probably not explicitly—I don’t think you ever pressed me directly on it. But it matters in how you talk about customers, how deep your knowledge goes, how you describe the problems you’ve seen. You can tell the difference between someone who’s done it and someone who read about it. And when startups get hard—when it would be easy to quit—that’s what keeps you going. If you love what you’re building and love who you’re building it for, you’ll find a way.

SOMRAT — 22:05

Let’s close with some tactical stuff. Deck plus memo—you said start with the memo.

PATRICK — 22:08

Start with the memo and let the deck come out of it. Memo first, always. And practice getting completely off the script—you should be able to do the entire pitch conversationally.

SOMRAT — 22:20

Any rules of thumb on slides?

PATRICK — 22:22

I love the Sequoia 10-slide format. If you need more than 10 slides, you haven’t sharpened your thinking enough. Every word has to earn its place. Design by subtraction—if something doesn’t add value, remove it. The Mixpanel decks from the Amplitude era were my model: simple, clear, every slide does one job.

SOMRAT — 22:45

And practicing the pitch?

PATRICK — 22:47

Record yourself. Before we had Clarify, I used QuickTime. I wrote out 50-plus questions I expected VCs to ask, then recorded myself answering them and watched the footage back. Repetition is everything. Practice with your co-founder. If you’re a solo founder, grab a friend. Just do it over and over.

SOMRAT — 23:15

One thing I’d add: don’t hide the risk. Founders almost universally bury it. You had a risky assumptions section in your memo—it was there, but it was in the appendix. The risk conversation should be more central.

PATRICK — 23:30

Fair point. My framing to VCs was direct: “This isn’t a 10% probability company. This is a 4% probability company. But if it works, it’s going to be a generational company.” I’d rather give investors an honest choice—a higher-probability smaller outcome versus a lower-probability massive one—than pretend the risk isn’t there.

SOMRAT — 24:00

And it is a partnership. Be transparent about what you need to prove in the next period to get to the next milestone. There’s often misalignment between what a founder pitches and what an investor believes needs to be true.

PATRICK — 24:15

The other lesson from my first company: get your investors in the boat. At Idroli, I actually wrote investor updates every month—and never sent them. This time, I send them every single month, and I’m completely transparent about what’s working and what isn’t. If you’re on the cap table, you’re rowing. There are no free rides. I expect my investors to help and work, and I keep them informed so they can.

SOMRAT — 25:00

And for what it’s worth, he does send the monthly updates—and I appreciate them.

PATRICK — 25:05

Appreciate you saying that.

SOMRAT — 25:08

This is The First Pitch. Thanks for kicking it off, Patrick. There’s a lot here—how to think about the deck, the memo, storytelling, risk, and what it actually takes to go from first pitch to a company that works. Excited to do this with more founders.

PATRICK — 25:20

You’ve been an incredible investor, Somrat. Really excited for the episodes ahead.

SOMRAT — 25:25

Looking forward to it. Thanks.