Paul Doerfling

At Kernel, we've raised $14M to give enterprise RevOps teams CRM confidence with an AI-native alternative to Dun & Bradstreet's entity and hierarchy data. RevOps teams at Gong, Navan, Zip, Remote, GoCardless, and many others use Kernel's AI-native data at enterprise scale. ➡️ How did we get here? Three years ago, we started building an AI SDR, but we were solving the wrong problem. AI promised RevOps magic, but turned the spotlight on a fundamental truth: the data behind the data was broken. CRMs with 8 duplicates of Vodafone, missing subsidiaries, wrong company names, and the list goes on. The bigger vision wasn't about AI automation; it was about restoring confidence in the data foundation that powers enterprise decision-making and AI. In our experience, enterprise RevOps teams have only had one serious option to try to increase CRM confidence: buy Dun & Bradstreet, combine it with a mass action and cleaning tool, and perhaps add some AI enrichment. This setup creates unscalable manual data hygiene work for reps and RevOps, and undermines CRM confidence. ➡️ Why do current solutions not work? Dun & Bradstreet has extensive market coverage, but it was built in a pre-AI world. AI enrichment tools and mass action tools don’t have a notion of entities. Only human data correction can close the gap to build trust in the CRM. When you need human correction to hold together different tools at enterprise scale, trust in the CRM can break down quickly: 🚨 Your hierarchies don't match reality → territory disputes, reps not targeting the right accounts. Low close rates. 🚨 Your market coverage is a fraction of what you think → massive underinvestment in sales capacity. Missed revenue.  🚨 Account names and websites don't match → AI automation for the wrong company. Reputational damage. Sales reps spot obvious mistakes, and RevOps takes the blame. RevOps gets stuck in maintaining data rather than leading strategic initiatives. Alongside our Series A, we're launching the Kernel Platform: Tooling to clean, enrich, and complete your CRM like a human would, but at unlimited scale. Powered by our entity database, purpose-built for AI. What happens when the data behind your data works: ➡️ Reps target the right accounts because hierarchies reflect how they sell. ➡️ RevOps can plan confidently with complete market coverage. ➡️ RevOps can successfully deploy AI on clean entity data.  ➡️ RevOps stops defending data quality and starts building credibility through proactive insight. Our mission is to fix enterprise AI’s garbage-in, garbage-out problem at the source. Today, we're announcing that we've raised a total of $14M in funding through our $9M Series A led by Kinnevik and our Seed led by Moonfire. Special thanks to Tatiana Shalalvand, Charles Martin, Mathew Joseph, and Georgi Ganev from Kinnevik and Akshat Goenka, Mattias Ljungman, Mike Arpaia, and Alice Pillar from Moonfire.

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Back to Basics: Role Clarity A quick breakdown of CRO vs CSO vs CCO. There's a lot of intermingling of these titles and roles (and at times confusion even in orgs that have these roles), but they carry very different scopes of ownership, so I decided to break it down as I've seen it. Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) - Owns all revenue: new business, renewals, upsells, and expansions. - Typically oversees all aspects of these organizations: Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Partnerships. - North Star = hitting the company's revenue targets (new logo, renewal, expansion and beyond). Chief Sales Officer (CSO) - Owns new business sales: pipeline, bookings, quotas, and sales org performance. - Usually focused on net-new logos but can also focus on expansion in many orgs. - North Star = driving predictable sales growth (generally focused on landing new customers) Chief Customer Officer (CCO) - Owns the customer lifecycle post-sale: onboarding, adoption, retention, and expansion. - Typically oversees Customer Success, Support, Implementation, Professional Services, and sometimes Renewals/Account Management. - North Star = Gross revenue retention and net revenue retention (NRR). In short: CRO = all revenue, end-to-end. CSO = net new revenue. CCO = existing customer revenue + experience. What are different versions of this you've seen? Or does this align?

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''Why did you decide to build Intryc (YC S24) and in the CX Quality space?'' This is one of the most common questions I get asked in founder and friend circles. For 6+ years as a CSM and a CS leader at Navan and Confluent, I frequently dealt with our most serious and urgent customer issues. Truth is most of those issues didn't need to happen in the first place. Most seemingly 'came out of nowhere' and 'nobody could have predicted them'. Every time I'd wonder, "Why does this keep happening?" I spent many evenings digging through details, trying to understand what went wrong. Usually, the answers were right there; missed customer notes, incomplete onboarding, overlooked messages, misunderstood instructions, or simply put lack of compliance to our team's best practices and onboarding guides. At first, each situation felt unique, but soon I saw common threads: 👉 Important guidelines or instructions were dropped by teams. 👉 Unclear product or CX expectations were set. 👉 Customer details were missed or communication between teams and customers wasn't clear. Unfortunately, we only saw these things after they had already grown into major problems, for both the customer and the business, and now needed a full team effort to sort them out. Teams always worked hard to fix these issues, but constantly solving problems after the fact was tiring and frustrating for everyone involved. My co-founders saw similar issues in their previous roles at Revolut and Amazon, dealing with fraud and transactions handling. That's why we decided to build Intryc (YC S24). Today, most customer interactions happen online, making it easy to connect quickly with many customers. This is great, but it also means CX teams have a lot more to manage. Customers often feel frustrated when automated chatbots or systems can't really understand their problems. Instead of feeling excited about a new product or service, customers end up disappointed and frustrated, wishing they could talk to someone who really cares. At Intryc (YC S24), our mission is to help teams show that they really care. To get ahead of issues before they snowball into becoming huge headaches, media headlines, or simply and most importantly break their customers' trust. Customer support doesn't have to be exhausting or reactive. In the words of one of our customers, 'it's the company's last opportunity to earn their customer's trust back'. I would also add that it could the company's best opportunity to earn their customers' trust at every single interaction. P.S. Intryc is the best-performing AI QA engine for Customer Support in the market. World-class teams at companies like Deel, Blueground, Deliverect, SadaPay, Djamo scale their QA operations efficiently while reducing overall operational costs and maintaining human oversight. If you're in the journey of scaling and streamlining your CX QA, drop me a DM! Always happy to chat and share notes!

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Interviewing for a Customer Success Manager role? Most CSMs wing it. Top performers come prepared, with STORIES. Here are the 7 most common CSM interview questions I ask (and how to stand out when answering them) 1️⃣ How do you define and measure success in your role? Talk about metrics like NRR, adoption, and product usage, but also strategic wins like building trust and creating value. Get specific, don’t just say that you had a 100% NRR rate. Talk about the details underneath, how much of that was driven by expansion, churn and what the total portfolio was you held. 2️⃣ Tell me a story of how you grew seat utilization or expanded an account. Be specific. Walk through the signals you saw, the conversations you had, and the value you delivered. 3️⃣ How have you handled a renewal that was at risk? Show commercial acumen. What data did you use? What stakeholders did you engage? What was the outcome? How did you plan the strategy out, did you multi-thread and how… 4️⃣ What are early warning signs that a customer might churn? Mention things like drop in engagement, exec turnover, missed QBRs, and how you take action fast. Show that you have a bias towards action. 5️⃣ What’s your playbook when an account goes dark? Go beyond just “follow-ups.” Think multithreading, value emails, and reactivation campaigns. How are you really adding value for your customers? 6️⃣ How do you partner with Marketing or other teams to drive advocacy? Share a real example of a case study, webinar, or customer story you co-created. 7️⃣ What’s one way you’ve sped up time-to-value or onboarding? Show your process thinking. How did you reduce complexity, improve documentation, or drive engagement early? Which of these would YOU want to be asked in an interview? Let’s hear your strongest story in the comments.

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Want to break into Customer Success? Cool. But stop following bad advice. I've been recruiting a lot lately. Here’s what no one tells you, but I will. When I pivoted into CS leadership, I was already at the top of my game in Support. I didn’t “start over.” I translated what I already knew from my years of experience: - Solving messy enterprise problems - Reading between the lines when customers don’t say what they mean - Innovating on process and being a creative problem solver - Analyzing data to build scalable, repeatable success That edge didn’t disappear. I sharpened it. But I also had to unlearn a few things. Here are 4 rookie mistakes people make trying to get into CS and how to do better: ❌ “I’m a people person!” That's great, but that’s not the job. ✅ Be a translator, someone who can listen, understand a customer’s goal, and map it to product outcomes. 📤 “I submitted my CV. Fingers crossed.” Nope. ✅ Show how your skills transfer. Tell them why you’re the one for this company, not just any company. This one. Float above the noise. 📽️ “I’ll demo every feature to show how much I know!” That’s not impressive. It’s chaotic. ✅ Show you can listen, adapt, and curate. What matters to this customer? Why these features? 📚 “I skimmed the website, I’m ready.” You’re not. ✅ Go deeper. Know the product. Know the users. Show why you get it more than the next 10 candidates. CS is not a vibe. It’s not just a step up from support or other roles. It’s a shift in mindset. But if you’ve got the instincts, the resilience, and the ability to connect dots. You’re already halfway there. That’s what I learned making the switch. 👀 What skills from your past job became your secret weapon in CS? Let’s give the next wave something better to work with👇

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The CSM role is quietly breaking. Too many accounts to own, without enough time to deliver. Adoption. Renewals. Onboarding. Risk mitigation. Product feedback. QBRs. Expansion. Escalations. Strategy. CSMs are being asked to do everything and become domain experts too. At Momentum.io, we’ve been lucky to learn from one of the best: Dione Hedgpeth (CX Executive & former CCO at Sumo Logic, and one of our favorite Momentum advisors). This week, she joined us for our latest AI Advantage webinar to unpack what’s really going on behind the scenes. Here’s what stood out for me: 1. CSMs aren’t failing, leadership is. The role has been poorly scoped for years. And AI won’t fix that, but it can enable better team design. 2. Strategic guidance beats administrative output. AI should handle prep, updates, follow-ups, and status pings; so CSMs can spend time building trust, spotting expansion signals, and driving real value. 3. Org structure is evolving fast. With the right AI infrastructure, you can finally hire for domain expertise, not note-taking. The future of CS is humans + agents. Your CSM might still run the QBR, but it’ll be supported by AI that handles documentation, risk detection, timeline flags, and product signal routing. That’s leverage. Huge thanks to Dione Hedgpeth, Jonathan M K., and Alphonso H. Calanoc for such an honest, tactical, forward-looking session. If you lead CS or RevOps and missed it, it's worth the replay. “Solving the CSM Conundrum with AI” (link in comments) #AI #CustomerSuccess #CSM #RevenueOrchestration #GTM #AIinCS #Momentum

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