Founder & CEO at @customerio. Automation enthusiast.
PDX, #remote
Joined April 2008
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The duality inside every founder’s brain right now:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
What if you add a process to give out “you cannot fix culture with process” desk signs to every person who tries to do that. That’ll work right?
You CANNOT fix CULTURE with PROCESS.
Earlier this year, one of my sales managers slacked me a new Google Form. Every sales engineer (SE) would have to fill it out before every customer call. FOREVER.
I get why he created it.
A rep on his team showed up to a call the prior week unprepared. The SE was there too, just as unprepared. He spent the call asking the customer questions we should have known the answers to before we ever dialed in.
They wasted the customer's time.
So he did what most managers would do: "I'm going to create a process so this never happens again - so now before an SE or an AM gets on a call to show the product, they have to fill out this form."
Then he spent his Saturday - his Saturday - building a 14-question intake form. Required for every SE. Before every customer call. FOREVER.
That is not the answer. You don’t fix unprepared reps with a form.
You build a culture where nobody shows up unprepared in the first place.
Every process you add is a TAX.
And you CHARGE that tax to every person on your team who never had the problem - every day, forever - to fix the one person who shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Stack enough of those and you end up with processes on top of processes and everything slows down.
Some processes are worth the tax. Most aren't. This one wasn’t, so I told him to kill the form and do this instead:
Before you build a process, say the standard OUT LOUD.
Get the team on a call, tell them what happened and tell them what the standard is.
In our case: “Competing with ZoomInfo should be a DAUNTING experience for ANY of our competitors. This is NEVER acceptable. Showing up unprepared to a customer call doesn't live up to that. Full stop.”
Point back to that standard every time someone misses it. Let the people who can't meet it self-select out.
Manager: "But Henry, what if it happens again?"
Then it happens again. And you have the conversation again. Louder this time.
Process fixes broken systems - it doesn’t fix broken standards. Start with the standards.
Love it.
This fills my dark heart with glee.
A lot of refinement to ship yet, but mOperator + @CustomerIO is going to get MOPs out of the bottleneck business *FAST*
Alternative headline: Imagine a world where urgent requests aren't a tax on mental load.
Every family trip we rent a minivan. I love them. I wish the rentals had more power. Rear wheel drive. Last one was a Kia carnival which is a beast for carrying luggage and people.
Come on people let’s make minivans cool again.
The takeaway is: yes, we can handle your scale.
By migrating our petabyte-scale MySQL fleet to Google Cloud Hyperdisk, we doubled peak disk throughput while cutting block storage costs in half.
Eliminating doublewrite not only has improved our peak disk throughput, we observed improvements in our foreground flush latency as well.
Read the full article to learn how: customer.io/learn/how-we-wor…
At the end of our company all hands a few hundred people watched a puppy playing. It was really special and heartwarming.
LFG 🚀
"appear to be independent of user instructions"???
How does the bank know what the prompt was? And yeah, if you don't give your users MCP access, their agents will fumble around the UI. I hope they're working on this instead of just spreading FUD.
SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios.
The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond, multiple industry and bank executives told Axios.
Several banks are now preparing for worst-case and even “day after” scenarios, including how to rapidly secure or restore customer accounts if things go wrong, the people said.
Several bank executives told Axios they're struggling to distinguish between human users and AI agents. One executive said banks also struggle to determine whether agents are authorized by customers or potentially operating without their permission, more akin to rogue agent behavior.
Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…
This is how they get cha. Gotta keep that max plan around even when you're on enterprise otherwise you miss out.
For $100 at kinkos and the right camera angle, you too can have the biggest billboard in times square. (this is not AI)
Congratulations to the Braze team on their exit to Salesforce!
In 2013 a year after we started Salesforce acquired ExactTarget and turned it into Marketing Cloud. We will see if they do it differently this time and leave braze standalone like slack.
I decided to make my first iOS app; a mobile client for an internal tool we are working on. I integrated @customerio to power live activities while watching my kids play soccer.
Every saas CEO I've talked to about pricing and packaging changes has struggles with it in their company.
Who has figured out how to do lots of pricing and packaging testing without it taking a long time and the stakes and pressure becoming huge? How?
Is he imagining teams are 10 people rather than 2?
Larger teams working on a project absolutely benefit from in person time: “we won’t leave until the decision is made.”
Smaller teams of 2 or 3 less so though in person time is valuable. Deep work + exchange of ideas is still effective on a remote team. The nature of work is absolutely changing.
David Vélez on why AI makes remote work less valuable:
"AI also in a perhaps counterintuitive way, increases the argument to spend time in person more.
Because increasingly the work that AI can do is more or less the work that people at home individually could do.
And so the individual at home will be competing with AIs, and we'll lose that battle.
But the work around collaboration and coordination in presence physically is something that needs to be happening inside the office."
I’m watching the first episode of East of Eden on Netflix.
Man it does this book justice.
Still early but I’m excited for the rest.
You can glimpse the future and it’s not quite ready. I worked with my dot “Sammy” to organize all my inputs to my taxes.
It looked at last years taxes, my email, and what was already collected to come up with the list of stuff to gather.
It was helpful to give me all the login links in one spot and annoying I had to log in.
It was helpful to organize all the files my accountant didn’t yet have and annoying it wouldn’t upload them for me because “safety”.
Tasks that dot or bot or muse should do in adverts instead of booking flights:
- draft my taxes
- aggregate family calendars from other apps so kids get to practice/etc on time
- remind me about important birthdays + suggest the right gift
- monitor local music venues for shows I might enjoy and proactively bring them up to me + book tickets if it’s a yes
- give me a recap monthly on my spending and suggest ways to optimize it
- keep an eye on cool events happening in my local area and bring them up to me in advance
- help me maintain great personal and professional relationships with suggested outreach to ppl at the right times
- Never let me miss an important newsletter or essay that I wish I would have read
- highlight subscriptions Im paying for a not using + cancel them when given the green light
So many options, let's skip the travel one