# Decagon brings engineers into customer sales and support

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/decagon-brings-engineers-into-customer-sales-and-support/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Ashwin Sreenivas](https://realalpha.app/builders/ashwin-sreenivas/) · Ashwin Sreenivas is cofounder and CTO of Decagon. · Co-founded Decagon, the conversational AI platform valued at $4.5B, after building Helia, which Scale AI acquired.
- Host: [Nakul Mandan](https://realalpha.app/people/nakul-mandan/) · Host, Knuckle Up with Nakul · General partner at Audacious Ventures; his show goes deep with founder CEOs on how they build.
- Show: Knuckle Up with Nakul
- Episode: [The AI founder advice you won’t hear on X | Ashwin Sreenivas (Co-Founder at Decagon)](https://realalpha.app/v/_FmwqPzqkjY/), May 19, 2026
- Moment: 7:57 to 13:19 of the episode (5 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/decagon-brings-engineers-into-customer-sales-and-support/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/_FmwqPzqkjY/?t=477

## Quote

> “And anytime that customer has an issue, the right engineer or product leader on the team **gets added to that Slack channel** if they weren't there already.”
> — [Ashwin Sreenivas](https://realalpha.app/builders/ashwin-sreenivas/) at [12:48](https://realalpha.app/v/_FmwqPzqkjY/?t=768) · Knuckle Up with Nakul

## Takeaways

1. Sales, APMs and engineers share ownership of closing deals.
2. Engineers join sales calls instead of relying on a feedback digest.
3. Relevant builders respond directly in customer Slack channels.

## About this segment

Sales, product and engineering share deal work, and relevant builders join customer calls and support channels. This shortens the path from customer pain to product changes as the company grows.

From “The AI founder advice you won’t hear on X | Ashwin Sreenivas (Co-Founder at Decagon)”, May 19, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/_FmwqPzqkjY/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[8:04](https://realalpha.app/v/_FmwqPzqkjY/?t=484) thinking or talking through culture, how the various functions are run, how leadership works at Decagon. Let's start with the culture. So your four stated values are just get it done, invent what customers want, winner's mindset, the polymath principle. How do these actually show up on a Monday or any given week? Yeah, yeah. You know, invent what customers want, I think, was tied to, you know, the thing that we were just talking about, which is this idea of the only thing that matters is customer pain. And we really wanted to avoid this world in which, you know, at a certain point, once you get big enough, there is this pool, just because it's a little bit easier to sit in a room and say, okay, I have the perfect vision. I know what customers want.

[8:46](https://realalpha.app/v/_FmwqPzqkjY/?t=526) We're just going to build that and put it out into the world. And we really wanted to ensure that that wasn't how products got built within Decagon. And so, you know, that this idea of invent what customers want is mostly on the EPD side, right? Which is ensure that anytime you're building something, you know who it is for because they have explicitly asked you about it. Not because you think, oh, this is probably what they want. But most of the time, again, the market will pull it out of you. The polymath principle was something that was...

[9:13](https://realalpha.app/v/_FmwqPzqkjY/?t=553) That's an interesting one. I've not seen that one before. That one is actually because we consider everything within Decagon to kind of be a team sport. The fun example that I'll give is most enterprise sales teams have a gong, some kind of a gong where once a deal is closed, you have the salesperson come and strike the gong for having won the deal. At Decagon, it's not just the salesperson, it's the salesperson, the APM on the deal, and the engineers that support the deal that all kind of do it together because we believe that everyone is involved in getting a deal across the finish line.

[9:50](https://realalpha.app/v/_FmwqPzqkjY/?t=590) And we think it makes everybody better, right? Because a salesperson that deeply understands the product and the technical complexities and the engineering decisions is able to understand customer issues better and communicate why we're different. Similarly, engineers at the other end of the line that deeply understand, hey, this is what is important in a sale. This is what customers care about today, are able to build better products. So we really want to emphasize this idea that, hey, just because you're in one particular team doesn't mean that that is the only thing you should care about because you just end up doing better work, the better you understand the business as a whole. Does the polymath principle show up when you're recruiting So this does show up on the recruiting side as well. So for engineers, we spend a lot of time

[10:34](https://realalpha.app/v/_FmwqPzqkjY/?t=634) thinking through, hey, how do you think about product? How do you think about designing things in a very user-centric way? I mean, it's hard to simulate a sales cycle or things like that, but we do check for this ability to understand user problems and build against them well. And on the sales side, of course, it is, hey, how much do you have the ability to sell a more technical product to dive into details. Of these four, which was the hardest to operationalize as you've gone from two people to like 400 plus people within three years?

[11:05](https://realalpha.app/v/_FmwqPzqkjY/?t=665) Honestly, it's, you know, it's different ones for different teams. So, you know, this idea of build what customers want does often get more difficult as you scale out because you now have people that can get farther and farther away from the end customer, right? Because you have more teams that are dedicated to running that customer specifically. So we put in like very conscious efforts to make sure that that doesn't happen, right? Because on one hand, you want engineering teams to be able to stay focused, have like long periods of deep protected time, but you also, again, want to ensure that they don't build in silos. And similarly, on the sales side, it can be easier to say, hey, you know, here is the top track. Here's the top track that's worked a thousand times before. As long as you stick to these well-defined playbooks, things go well. So ensure

[11:50](https://realalpha.app/v/_FmwqPzqkjY/?t=710) that we have this kind of deep cross-cultural, cross-team collaboration, especially again, as we get bigger, we have offices in countries all over the world, ensuring that that stays well has been something we've put time into. Is there any mechanism that you guys have figured out? Sales reps listening directly from customers on what they want, or if there's friction in sales processes, or customer success orgs getting that, that the entire company gets to hear that, whether it's a weekly Slack summary or something, is there some mechanism for you to know this?

[12:21](https://realalpha.app/v/_FmwqPzqkjY/?t=741) So this is exactly where luckily the polymath principle helps us a bunch because if we were behind on a deal, right? Like the sales rep can quickly figure out why we're behind. And then the right engineers are pulled right in, right? Like they join the customer calls themselves. So we don't have to go through this process of, okay, how do we make sure that that goes into a digest somewhere that is then distributed to the right teams?

[12:45](https://realalpha.app/v/_FmwqPzqkjY/?t=765) We just make sure the right person on that team is in the sales call themselves. Similarly, if this is an existing customer and they're unhappy about something, we have Slack channels with every single one of our customers. And anytime that customer has an issue, the right engineer or product leader on the team gets added to that Slack channel if they weren't there already. And then they respond directly.

[13:05](https://realalpha.app/v/_FmwqPzqkjY/?t=785) So again, we want to ensure that there aren't these kind of long chains from the customer to the person building the thing. So this actually just solves that problem entirely.