You probably haven’t heard of AI startup founder Zoë Weil. But if you’ve recently hunted for furniture at Wayfair or booked a trip on Priceline, you’ve likely been influenced by her handiwork.
Her $1.4 billion startup, Sequen, is building what it calls the ranking intelligence layer of the internet. Go browse a retail site optimized by Sequen, and you won’t see the same layout twice. But that reordering is subtle enough – and, Weil believes, helpful enough – that you won’t even notice, let alone mind.
One way to think about what Sequen does would be to picture your Instagram or TikTok feed. The algorithm, for better or worse, is funneling you content it thinks you want, might purchase, reshare or engage.
At its core, Sequen is doing the same for the internet. The time of day, what brings us there, the mood that the site makes us feel – all play a factor in whether we pull the trigger on buying something or not. Sequen is doing it without the infamous internet tool of the web ‘cookie,’ instead predicting what you want, and personalizing it as you scroll.
If that sounds complicated, it totally is. Weil jokes she’s a failed mathematician, but she was taking graduate level classes while still a teenager, and her pivot into computer science took her deep into the complex math behind search. At Etsy, she generated $1 billion in sales lift, helping to drive a turnaround, before setting out to build similar tools for everyone else.
Fewer than 100 people in the world can do this work, Weil says, and in just two years, Sequen has hired nine of them. And in a casual comment on the show that had my jaw on the floor, she even hired one away from a nine-figure job.
What the heck? Why?
Sequen already makes its publicly traded customers – the smallest does $4 billion in revenue – billions of dollars in additional sales, Weil tells me.
”To really become a trillion-dollar company, you need to have a market that’s big enough where you can generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue,” she says. “That’s why you would leave nine figures, because you can make significantly more by joining Sequen.”
I respect that confidence. And I love that Weil is such an under-promise, over-deliver guest. Here’s the woman CEO of one of New York’s newest startup unicorns, pushing huge amounts of real money, while remaining mostly unknown.
It’s such a classic Upstart story. And that’s before we get into meaty questions like what the right ethical level of influence is on consumers, how this could work in advertising and sports events, and the fact that she started the business with her husband and brother.
Last week, we were excited to have one of the startup ecosystem’s biggest names, Ramp CEO Eric Glyman, on the show. And we’ve covered some crazy ideas in this batch of episodes, from a new kind of compute market to parking tech, a new-age health scanner and a project to bring back the woolly mammoth.
But in a noisy podcast environment where many shows seem to platform the same few tech CEOs over and over, I’m so glad to be able to introduce you to founders like Zoë Weil.
I hope you’ll learn something from our conversation, which goes into a kind of AI wholly different from the large language models you constantly hear about, and how as a four-person startup at the time, she won over business at corporations with 200 person teams working on the same goals.
This is our last episode for a little bit. A big thanks to Atlassian and Chargebee for supporting these recent episodes. We’ll be back recording with some more jaw-dropping founders as soon as next week at Slush in Helsinki. If you’ll be there, or have feedback on how we can continue to improve the show, please drop us a line 👋
As always, my favorite insights from the episode are highlighted below. Thanks so much for watching and listening.
How Sequen wins the Fortune 500
CTOs as salespeople
Influencing AI agent shoppers
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How Sequen wins the Fortune 500
Today, Sequen helps customers train and run their own models, on their own data, so that they can optimize their sales experience exactly the way they want for a consumer.
But initially, it was more of a black box ranking model that Sequen was pitching to these corporations, and it would get awkward.
”We would go in and we would say, ‘Okay, our ranking model is gonna do better than whatever your scientists are doing,’ which kind of is an uncomfortable position to be running internal teams,” Weil says. “They’re like: ‘Get out of here.’”
Initially, Sequen broke through by offering free pilots and A/B testing to prove its value. But that created awkward working environments with the customer who had been bested, and Sequen doesn’t do that any more.
But with the benefit of hindsight, Weil says that just “showing up” and continuing to change people’s minds was Sequen’s biggest challenge that it overcame. That required constant patience and communication about what they were doing.
“It takes a lot of education to be like, ‘Yes, you’re doing Search. You’re trying to help people find things. I’m actually trying to get you to see this entire problem through a different lens.”
But as that paid off, it created a flywheel.
CTOs as salespeople
Sequen is just starting to think about a real go-to market function. By coming on this show and chatting with other reporters, Weil is starting to do press.
Historically, she hadn’t felt the need. That’s because among the Fortune 500 type customers that Sequen signs, she was already getting a boost from C-Suite word-of-mouth.
“ The biggest source of pipeline for us has been CTOs and CEOs of very, very large companies talking to each other like, ‘This is killing it for me.’
And one CTO of a publicly traded company said to another CTO: ‘I know this is the most important decision you’ll make as a CTO because this is the most important decision I’ve made as a CTO.’”
In the moment and even now, I would have expected those CTOs not to want to share such a valuable tool with each other. But Weil explains that while these execs want to do good work for their own jobs, they are invested in their friends in similar roles succeeding, too.
“ They wanna deliver results, and they see it as a little bit of rising tides lift all boats. I was very pleased to see this outcome.
But no, I understand your intuition, because it’s the same kind of thinking that I had. I didn’t expect it to kind of lead to so many introductions.”
Influencing AI agent shoppers
Weil believes that agents will change online shopping fundamentally. (We wrote about another company seeing this first-hand, co-branded credit card and loyalty startup Imprint, yesterday.) She says it’s naive to think otherwise.
But she does believe that people will still want to browse for many items themselves, just as they still want to go inside brick-and-mortar stores.
”Certainly people do a lot of online shopping, but people also enjoy just going to the store. By the same token, I think that as agentic commerce, starts to really take off, I think a lot of the shopping behaviors, whether it’s for trips or media consumption or what have you, that don’t really lend themselves to personalization and become a logistical task, end up going to agentic commerce.”
Specific flights or household items like diapers make sense for an agent to manage, Weil argues. But the good news for Sequen: those types of purchases have never been core to the consumer experience the startup is trying to influence. Agents will be influenced more by their version of search engine optimization, or SEO – whether we call it generative engine optimization (GEO), AI SEO, or any other term.
“A lot of the time, people delegate to their agents the tasks that they don’t want to do. Those are often repetitive tasks, or things they were going to buy anyway, which means they weren’t really open to being influenced as much.”
Sequen shines when you’re a human, but it doesn’t need to know who you are. “What we really care about is the real stream of events.”