Kevin Kerner: 0:00

Hey everyone, this is Kevin Kerner with Tech Marketing Rewired. If you think the old go-to-market playbook alone still works, forms outbound cold ads, you may be wrong. In this episode, I sat down with Elaine Zelby, founder of Tofu, and we got into why the traditional demand gen model is collapsing, how influence and authenticity are driving the next wave of go-to-market and why your future buyers are starting their journeys by gathering in small, trusted circles, not clicking ads. Elaine brought a lot of energy and ideas to the conversation. Make sure you have a notebook handy. Let's get to it. This is Tech Marketing Rewired. Okay, welcome to Tech Marketing Rewired. Today I've got Elaine Zelby on the show, founder of the amazing Tofu, which I've been hearing a lot about lately, and someone who's building something that is really at the forefront of B2B go-to-market, so I'm super excited to talk to you. Great to have you here, elaine. Thanks for joining.

‍Elaine Zelby: 0:59

Thank you for having me, Kevin.

Kevin Kerner: 1:00

Yeah, yeah, I know you're super busy because I saw your posts about your toddlers. So I know you're super busy because I saw your posts about your toddlers.

Elaine Zelby: 1:11

So I know you have some toddlers. I don't know how you make time for this and tofu and all that stuff.

Kevin Kerner: 1:13

So I do appreciate it. Ruthless prioritization, that's right, that's good. Yeah, I needed to steal that, okay. Well, I'd love for you to give a little intro on yourself and maybe talk a little bit about Tofu, just to get us kicked off.

Elaine Zelby: 1:27

Happy to. I always joke to people that I have the most bizarre background you'll ever see. I was a biomechanical engineer doing med device stuff. That then moved into B2B marketing at early stage startups somehow found my way there, then moved into venture capital. I was a partner at a venture capital firm called SignalFire and then started Tofu. So super linear path there.

Kevin Kerner: 1:49

Yeah.

Elaine Zelby: 1:51

The fun thing about Tofu is it's combining so many pieces of my life together. I actually started playing with generative AI in 2018, coming from the marketing background, and I'm also obsessed with podcasts, so love your podcast and a hundred others. I consume information in auditory format and I wanted to be able to turn a lot of these blogs that had really rich, really good content into audio. So, using GPT-1 in 2018, if you can believe this built a tool called SoundSpot that could ingest your blog and then spit out a podcast, an actual RSS feed, and it felt like magic at the time. If you go back and listen, you'd laugh how horrible it was. But that was the first thing that was getting me extremely excited about generative AI. I followed the trend through the venture capital days and in 2022, I really started getting a lot of companies pitching me on these thin wrappers around GPT-3. That was the kind of flavor du jour and I'm meeting these companies and I'm like you know there's something here, but this isn't it.

Elaine Zelby: 2:54

But it was clear that there'd been a step function change in terms of the quality of the AI. So I started thinking about the biggest things I wanted as a marketing practitioner and leader and where I thought the puck was going in terms of AI, and to me there was also another thing at play, which is rebundling. So I forget who said it, but there's the famous quotation of there's only two cycles unbundling and rebundling. And I had been talking to hundreds of CRO CMOs, through diligence with the VC. Everyone was telling me the same story Fewer tools don't want more tools. So it was clear rebundling was going to happen. So I started thinking what would it look like to rebundle or actually bundle for the first time? The MarTech stack using generative AI at its core, and that was the kernel that led to where we are today with Tofu Wow, cool, that's awesome.

Kevin Kerner: 3:47

And there's so many now, right? So you were early on in this, so you must have learned a ton about the AI space as it relates to MarTech. It's really, really cool. I want to get into the Tofu platform in a bit, but I really want to seeing that you've been doing this for a while. I really wanted to get into what's broken in the traditional go-to-market. We talked a little bit about before the call about the use of influence and how influence is becoming more important, and authenticity maybe is another thing that's becoming needed, because there's just so much AI slop out there, I guess. But I'm curious for your take on how the go-to-market motion seems to be evolving over the last year, especially given that you run a platform that is in the go-to-market stack.

Elaine Zelby: 4:32

I think there's a few different ways to slice and dice this. Number one is you have macroeconomics at play. So when you look at what things have shifted there, it is harder and harder to land net new logos, which means people are trying to look at more net dollar retention. How can I go and get more from my existing customer base? What can I upsell, cross-sell? There's been more emphasis on that. When it comes to the go-to-market motion, additionally, more SMB churn in this situation, which means every company I talk to is trying to move more upmarket. That is the most common thing I hear, and when you move more upmarket, it tends to also lead itself to different types of go-to-market Lots more of ABM, lots more of sales enablement. Everything that marketing is doing tends to be in service of pipeline gen and sales. So there's a shift in terms of team construction. There's a shift in terms of channels and strategies and how campaigns are executed and run and then what that relationship looks like between marketing and sales. So that's macroeconomic.

Elaine Zelby: 5:32

Next, you have something that I feel like is very under-talked about, which is demographic shifts. So we now have millennials who are in, now buying positions where they never were before. You have Gen Z and even coming into play, gen Alpha, who are now in the operator seats. And the way that people buy in these generations is different. They have more peer groups and communities. They do a lot more research offline. They're a little bit more tech savvy. Potentially they want to see executives on social media and understand the culture of a company in making a buying decision. These shifts are different and these shifts actually force companies to think differently about how they market themselves, how they sell, how do they go to market. And so that's number two. And then number three is obviously technological shifts.

Elaine Zelby: 6:21

So what is AI doing right now? We are in the early innings of this and it is moving so fast. Even being at the epicenter, I can't keep up, and I don't think anybody can. It's kind of like I was in the crypto space in 2016, 2017, and there was similar things happening. Just felt overwhelming the speed and the volume of stuff that was going on With AI. There's a few things that are obvious. Number one SEO has changed. Google is now surfacing things in a single answer in their Gemini AI response, which means trying to optimize for being on the first page and understanding how to reverse engineer Google's algorithm is no longer important. People are now trying to figure out what is the new GEO, aeo, ll, mo, whatever we're calling it and how can I optimize for this new channel? People love new channels. Anytime a new channel opens up, people want to exploit it.

Elaine Zelby: 7:15

Number two AI has made it easier than ever to spam people. It is very easy. We already had the Tinders in place, the Apollo Zoom. Zoom info is the way to get contacts at scale. Now we can do personalization at scale, and what people have done is they've taken crap, quite frankly, and used AI to just expand the scope and expand the scale. So email is now a channel that has very diminishing results, just because people are being bombarded and overwhelmed and the majority is not good, quite frankly.

Elaine Zelby: 7:50

Other channels calling.

Elaine Zelby: 7:53

Some people claim that calling is still working for them.

Elaine Zelby: 7:57

I have not seen the reality here, nor have I picked up my own phone in a decade if I don't know the number. And again, this kind of comes to my point. Before, around millennial or just generational shifts, different people would answer a phone and now, when you have your buyers who are in the younger generations, they're not answering phones, like for them. The phone is the actual phone. Call is the least used app on their entire phone. That's right. So you have a few of the channels that just were working before that aren't. So what am I seeing shift? In-person is having a massive comeback physical events, direct mail, meeting in person, influencers as a category, peer groups and I'm not saying giant communities, I'm seeing more small peer groups where it's truly trusted peers who potentially have a longstanding relationship, where they share information and they're your go-to people to ask for advice, especially when it comes to technology, managing your team, go to market motion, things like that. So all of that stuff is kind of happening at the exact same time right now.

Kevin Kerner: 9:00

Yeah, the demographic shift. I don't think it's talked about much, but I think you're right. I mean just the way people of that generation consume information and look for authority or seek out authority or communities. This is changing everything. How has that changed your own approach in your own marketing?

Elaine Zelby: 9:17

A few things. Number one is I'm not a social media person. I'm not a public person. I have had to force myself to be much more public on LinkedIn because two things. Number one lesson in go to market is understand your ICP and learn where they live in the physical and digital world and be present there. So where's my audience? They are on LinkedIn. I have to be on LinkedIn. Number two is to the point before around the demographic shifts, they want to see authenticity. They care about brand, they care about executive presence. That is very important to this new wave of buyers. So it's really important for me to build up my own and through me, tofu's brand and to be as authentic as possible. And I think for me I also guide people is no matter what. It has to be authentic.

Elaine Zelby: 10:06

The way I speak on LinkedIn is the way I speak in private conversations and situations like this. I try to lead with value. I try to add a little levity and humor to it. I try to be a bit self-deprecating, but at the end of the day it's. Did this provide value to the people I'm trying to provide value for? If so, great, that is a useful post. But if not, it's not worth my time, it's not worth theirs. So I think that is how it's playing into us.

Elaine Zelby: 10:36

The other thing is really understanding those pockets of influence, and that looks like a few different things. Number one I actually had written a newsletter for about four years called Three Things. It was a weekly newsletter with three business ideas why now? How I'd build it and how I'd monetize it. And back in either 2020 or 2021, one of the newsletters included an idea around a B2B influencer marketplace. So I saw that B2B influencers was going to be a thing, and this is something I've kind of been waiting for for a while, and last year it finally felt like, okay, we're ready for this, this is a thing. And so what I wanted to do was find people who I felt their content was already speaking exactly the way we would speak. Their audience is already the audience we're talking to. We are extremely aligned, and how can I make their sphere of influence my sphere of influence and vice versa? And so, finding very specific people I'm not trying to go for huge influencers. I'm trying to go for people who, again, have very tailored content to a very tailored audience and making sure that they would be posting this content, whether we were providing information to them or not. So that's been that strategy which is working very well for us.

Elaine Zelby: 11:45

The other strategy around the spheres of influence is finding these pockets of mini communities. So if you go and ask 100 marketers, where do you go for information? What communities are you a part of? You're going to get an insane number of answers. But if you start to hear little pockets of overlap, that's where I try to dig in. I also find certain people tend to be natural connectors or natural central pivot points. If you can find some of those people and, better yet, if you're naturally aligned with them and really make them a champion of yours, you now have this champion who's going to be this jumping off point to a bunch of other, these small communities and small spheres of influence. So that's also been how we're trying to navigate that. Can we find some of those people, can we equip them, enable them, champion them, and then, by proxy, we're brought along for the ride.

Kevin Kerner: 12:40

Yeah, wow, yeah, that's really great. What's been the effect for you using some of these tactics? Is it working? What's working and what's not working? Because I'm curious, because we did it ourselves.

Elaine Zelby: 12:51

It's working really well. We are still, to date, 100% inbound. We've done no paid inbound. We have doing. We've done no paid um digital paid. We are doing. We're starting to do more events like physical events, but owned we do small dinners across different cities.

Elaine Zelby: 13:09

That's working extremely well. Uh, too, that also pairs well with those pivot people or, like the, you know, the champions. We're trying to bring them into the conversation to make it not just about us but make it about them, have them be able to invite some of their people and do joint things. We also tend to partner with events, so we find another company or a recruiting firm who recruits the exact type of people that we want to talk to, somebody again who's really aligned, and to make this much more of a community as opposed to a tofu pitching event or things like that. So that's working well.

Elaine Zelby: 13:46

On the influencer side, working extremely well. And again, I think that people have sometimes misaligned expectations around what an influencer program looks like For us. I'm very aware and very confident that today's buyers are doing so much behind the scenes, before you ever see them, before they ever come to your website, before they ever talk to somebody, before they fill out a form, and part of that story is how they're seeing us show up in other people's content. And so I know, because I can look at calls, call recordings, that so much of this is being influenced by those people, or that's where they heard about us, or that's where they were reminded about us, and that's where they went to our site and started researching us, or that's how they understood what we did, and so helping to shape that narrative using other people and not just us has been super, super important. I think that there's a lot more we can be doing, quite frankly, but I think what we've started with is definitely performing well.

Kevin Kerner: 14:42

Yeah, I saw that happen today. I sent you a note today about the MarketOne note. You guys were listed as the top third out of the three. You know, probably I guess there were like 20 or 30 platforms. You guys were one of the three biggest boxes of something I think people wanted to try, looking forward to trying, and I don't think you had seen that yet forward to trying and I don't think you had seen that yet. So it's just something that just showed up, which is so. Whatever you're doing, it's working. In that case, it's a community that you want it to be known, with your message aligned with what they talk about, and somehow they had found you and gotten there into, or somehow their community had found you and in the survey they did, they mentioned you as a platform they're interested in using.

Elaine Zelby: 15:20

Really interesting and again, this is intentional right. We know that that is an influential place for our prospects and our customers and we want to make sure that we are showing up in places like that. So, while I hadn't seen that exact article, it was extremely intentional that we should get mentioned in market one content.

Kevin Kerner: 15:40

Yeah, you've turned it into somewhat of a system, right, it's not just a, it's not just something you do as a hobby, it's an actual system for you.

Elaine Zelby: 15:47

Yeah, I think less, I think a bit less is like a system, because, again, yeah, and it's it's more of a it's, it's a strategy and it's intentional.

Elaine Zelby: 15:56

Yeah, the things we're doing and the people who we're building relationship with, and I think one of the things that's really important to me, too, is that at the core of all of this, especially when you're talking about using other people or other people's platforms, is it's relationships.

Elaine Zelby: 16:17

At the end of the day, it is building deep, trusting relationships where there's mutual benefits and it feels like it is a long-term relationship. It is a long-term relationship and I think that if you can start from that place as opposed to what can this do for me it will, in turn, pay back in spades. I think so many people enter a lot of these things very one-sided. I always tell younger people in their career the number one thing I did in my career in my twenties to get me to where I am today is I gave away my time for free, with zero expectation of return, and even now, as we're doing things, I try to give as much away as I can for free, spend as much time, provide as much value without any expectation, though knowing just from history that it will come back and serve us.

Kevin Kerner: 16:54

Yeah, yeah, I was. I'm a little bit older than you and I always did that too, and now the the technologies in place make it so much easier to build these relationships. You can build relationships all over the place with people both online and offline. It's really incredible. I think one of the things you mentioned around more authenticity, and I wonder if the reason why events and other communities are forming is because there is so much uncertainty right now with what to do. Things are so disrupted. There's an opportunity now to talk about things. There'll be a new voice, or a fellow voice, let's say, with people that are trying to figure all this out. Do you agree with that?

Elaine Zelby: 17:33

I think that's a piece of it. I also feel like there's a lack of trust with so much digital stuff right now that in person is the antidote to that. What I mean by that is number one. So much of the stuff is now machine produced and that removes that human element and also removes some of that trust. On top of that, social media in general has created a facade of how people show up. It is very far from reality and I think people have gotten burned a bit by that. There was that whole Be Real app. I never actually did it, but I understand why that rose in prominence and I think that when people are meeting up in person, all of that's removed. It is real people showing up as their real selves. It just feels like that trust is there versus. I think there's just so much unknown and distrust on the digital world right now and that's only getting exacerbated. It's not getting better, and so I think the more that happens, the more people will swing to in-person as a source of refuge.

Kevin Kerner: 18:34

Yeah, when you're thinking about the topics, the things that you talk about, that you want to align with, what do you find that those topics are that are getting the most engagement, getting the community most involved? What are people most interested in right now?

Elaine Zelby: 18:48

People want real examples of stuff. So many people whether it's at an event where you're on a panel, or online on LinkedIn, on other channels people speak in a lot of high-level fluff without giving the actual tactics. The. Here's exactly the play that we're running. Here's exactly the pool set and how they connect with each other. Here's exactly how we did our AI hackathon. That was successful.

Elaine Zelby: 19:15

I mean, just saying you should do a hackathon is great, but that's not the level of depth that people are looking for, and I'm finding the conversations that engage people the most is when it gets very real. So here's exactly what we did. Here's exactly what worked. Here's what didn't work. Here's how we changed it. Here's where we are, even if you're really early in the process. Here's exactly what we're experimenting with. Here's what we wanted to experiment with. Said we were going to and didn't because of bandwidth or whatever. It's those type of conversations. Ai is the center of every conversation right now. No question, people have talked a lot more than they've done. So in general, there's been a lot less activity than people would make it seem, and I think because of that, people get caught up in this. I have to look like we've done a lot too, but in the reality it's new for everybody. Everyone is at early days and experimenting, but people want real things that will help them and their teams utilize some of this technology to help, and that's what they're craving.

Kevin Kerner: 20:15

Yeah, I agree my email inbox. I delete stuff real fast, but I've got a whole glut of emails right now that are from people that actually have a list of things like here is what's actually done. Like here's the platform, here's the tools, here's how we connected it together. Here, maybe, is a list of playbooks that I've created and they're literally like the playbooks those are. Those are the things that I save and, um, uh, you know I got to get through all those emails now because I got a ton of them, but it's like the Kyle Poyers of the world and they're really good at finding content and explaining it in a very actionable way. So I completely agree. When you take now this influencer authenticity approach that you're doing as a company and you think about the marketing technology that you're building, where does that come into play? Now, talk a little bit about how you're seeing MarTech being maybe a complement to some of the stuff that you might be doing on the influencer side of things.

Elaine Zelby: 21:20

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of what we're doing from a technology perspective is really trying to enable marketers in general and our influencers are marketers right, they're marketer practitioners and the idea is we're not trying to remove humans from the equation. It's never been our goal. You know, there's a bunch of companies that are like no more SDRs. We're not that. That's not our tactic whatsoever. We are trying to say hey, one person, there's always been that concept of a 10x engineer. There is going to be 10x, pick your discipline, 10x marketers, 10x ops people, 10x salespeople. And I think those are the people who really feel like they have hate to use this term because it's overused. But they have these co-pilots, they have these team members, they have a tool that they can rely on to offload a lot of the stuff that is not strategic or creative, where I think the human element needs to be plugged in, otherwise we revert to lowest common denominator. Everything and everything sounds the same is the humans need to be the creatives. What is our messaging? What is our positioning? How are we talking about our differentiation? How are we talking about our customers, our ICP? That's a lot of the creativity. What is our brand meant to feel. What emotions are we evoking with people? People are emotional. People buy emotionally, and a lot of good marketing is how do I connect at an emotional level to a buyer, and that's where we really need the humans is how do I connect at an emotional level to a buyer, and that's where we really need the humans.

Elaine Zelby: 22:43

The second piece of strategy, strategy. Ai, is really good at synthesizing information. It is really good at showcasing a bunch of stuff to you. I think what it's not good at is understanding the broader landscape and helping to make strategic decisions who are we targeting and why? It can help you surface patterns. It can help you identify that for financial services, you have 3x ACVs and half the close time, the sales cycle time, but what you do with that information is putting in place a holistic, go-to-market strategy. That I think only the humans can do and that's where people like to spend their time.

Elaine Zelby: 23:19

That's the fun work and I think, the more we can allow individuals to do that whether you are a content writer, lifecycle marketer, customer marketer, demand gen person, abm-er, like any of those different disciplines allowing tools to offset all the rest is where the world is moving, and that's really what we've always been trying to do and trying to say and I think even the people who are an extension of us, that's what they're saying and they're doing too. And it's been fun for us to also allow our influencers, our champions and fans who are external but helping us to be able to use the product for whatever they're trying to accomplish. And it's so cool to see the to use the product for whatever they're trying to accomplish. And it's so cool to see the different use cases and the variety. And that's the nature of building a platform, which is hard.

Elaine Zelby: 24:04

It's hard to build a platform from day one, but I think we made the right strategic decision because if you see how many point solutions are popping up for every little discipline, and if you see how easy it is to build some of these AI point solutions, people don't want 18 tools. They're specifically saying can I replace a lot of tools or can I buy one thing that's going to cover 80% of all my use cases? And so I think we did make the right strategic decision. Obviously, it's hard, and it's hard from a messaging perspective of like we do these hundred different things, and I think that's something I'm still figuring out, but that's where we are today.

Kevin Kerner: 24:39

Yeah, I completely agree with you on the strategic part too. It's like the fun work. The thing that we're focused on now is that we're taking away a lot of the manual work, a lot of the things that we really don't want to do, so we can spend more time on creativity and strategy. And the AI as a thought partner is fantastic, and I'm so excited about the tools like yours and a couple others that are out there that are doing this, where they're serving up the information in a way that gives you, let's say, three different angles that, with the context that you have as a marketer, you can actually think about what the AI has given you and take off in another direction. It's a great thought partner. How are you operationalizing some of that inside of the Tofu platform? What are the types of use cases? Are you building? What's the technology trying to do that helps with some of that assist human assist, I would say.

Elaine Zelby: 25:26

Oh, love this. Okay, I'll give you some of the ones that are less obvious. When I talk to prospects and customers, one of the areas when I ask them where do you feel like you have gaps or not doing a good job? Everyone is now leading into events. As we said earlier, almost every single company without me leading the witness will say we are not doing a good job of event follow-up. And here's why, number one, most of the time you spend so much effort putting on this event and people feel like that is it, we're done, event over. That's half of the battle. The second half of the battle is turning that into pipeline. So typically what's happening is people just chuck the list of registrants or attendees over to SDRs or sales and they may or may not follow up. There's no control over messaging. They probably don't even know what the event was about or what was discussed or anything.

Elaine Zelby: 26:18

So one of the areas that we've done, I would say, a pretty good job inside of Tofu and now enabling customers is when we do events, tofu handles the entire follow-up. So now we have the information about the event because we've already connected our event site. We have all of the research that gets run automatically. So when the list of people registrants and attendees gets ingested into Tofu, it automatically triggers a ton of research. So we have connection to our CRM. Have they done other stuff with us before? Have they had a meeting with us? Have somebody else from their company had a meeting? Plus all the demographic and firmographic information. So things like what industry are they in? What persona are they? All that From there, we craft custom follow-up, we craft custom nurture, depending on behavior, and I think that's one of the areas that's been really impactful for us to offload a lot of that.

Elaine Zelby: 27:10

The other thing is this is a fun party trick but for every single person we're talking to, we create one-to-one content. So any company we're talking to, we immediately, automatically in Tofu, create one-to-one landing pages, emails, one-pager content. In general, everything is bespoke because we can and that's something again that just being able to, you know, when somebody even has an interaction with us for the first time, immediately sending them a landing page that's personalized to them gives them a glimpse of what is possible on their side.

Kevin Kerner: 27:47

Yeah, like hyper personalization yeah.

Elaine Zelby: 27:49

Exactly and in a thoughtful way and I think I'm trying to use the term contextualization just because I think personalization has gotten a bit of a bad rap and what I mean by contextualization is really understanding what is the next best action and the next best thing for this person at this time and on this channel.

Elaine Zelby: 28:06

And by understanding the historical information, behavioral data, plus all the demographic information, we can now create a pretty nice picture of what are their biggest pain points, what are our value propositions, how far are they in the cycle and what should we provide them, and then use that to contextualize the information, whether it is a section on a landing page, an email, an ad, any other type of content. The last thing I'll tell you and this is our brand new feature, which is probably already my favorite feature we can now create decks, and the deck is going to be you upload your corporate template, so your entire brand template, and Google slides, powerpoint, and then we can spit out a deck and that new deck in your template for things like one-to-one sales decks, webinar decks, product launch decks, feature specific decks, presentation decks and it feels like magic, because figuring out how to take information and lay it out in a compelling way in a deck is so hard.

Elaine Zelby: 29:03

So we save people hours per deck and that's been pretty magical.

Kevin Kerner: 29:07

Yeah, that's awesome. I mean I have a GPT set up for my decks and I've looked at Manus and a couple other things, but they're just okay. It sounds like you're really trying to build a lot of those features into a single platform. It's a single platform approach. What are you working on? That's the next set of features, maybe not feature-led, but what are the requests you're getting from customers down the road where you're like I think we might go in that direction.

Elaine Zelby: 29:32

The one that we've already started and we're, I would say, baby steps, but we're getting. There is ads, and we've always been able to do ads, but not the images that are also corresponding, the image models. For us, we're always trying to stay call it one to three months behind where we think the model is going to be ready. So right now we're about one to three months away from image gen being very good. Today we can generate images that are on brand.

Elaine Zelby: 29:59

The things we can't do is I cannot constrain it to a certain dimension. So for LinkedIn ads, that's fine because I can generate it in any format and we can publish that. But for things like display ads, I can't tell it to do a leaderboard ad like 160 by 600. It will not do it, not possible In three months. I guarantee you that will be possible. So I think for us we're always trying to anticipate three months ahead of like where do we think the model is going to cross that chasm of being good enough for production, and so we've already launched some of the image gen and the ad gen stuff. Now it's just still pretty raw. We'll give it three months and it's going to be really good.

Elaine Zelby: 30:34

So the idea here, is whether it's one-to-one ads, one-to-few ads, ads for an ebook, it does not matter. We will be able to ingest any of your content notes, briefs, anything like that, auto-generate all of your ad variations and then deploy them to the platforms.

Kevin Kerner: 30:50

Has MCP been any factor in your business at all? The ability to connect into LLM.

Elaine Zelby: 30:56

Do you have any thoughts?

Kevin Kerner: 30:57

about because I've used for a lot of the apps that I use. Today. I'm connecting Claude through MCP with some app and it's able to dig in the data and Claude's doing a really good job of building for me inside the chat window. Of course, you probably have some of that functionality built in, but, as a sort of technology developer, what do you think about MCP and how it might integrate with something like what you have?

Elaine Zelby: 31:20

There's no question that's the way everything is going to move. Everything is going to be. This is wildly simplified, but it to me feels like the modern API, the way that what we used to rely on for API is where it was. You had to configure a very specific endpoint that had very limited access and also is very inflexible. We're now going to completely upend that with the concept of MCP servers, where any data source can be a connection point and you're going to have very flexible, very unlimited access to that and be able to then deploy some kind of agentic workflows on top, and that is what I think I'm most excited about In terms of the phrase, like the word comes up in conversation every now and then with customers, I think for the most part, our buyers are not there yet. It's a little bit more bleeding edge on the technology side. We're already thinking through our product, though, of what that looks like, both in terms of Tofu being an MCP server and then how we ingest other data sources, so definitely top of mind for us.

Kevin Kerner: 32:23

Yeah, that's fantastic. I think composability is the thing right now. Being able to integrate with other stuff, it's one of the most important things that I think of when I buy some sort of tech, and so it's important. Okay, so this has been great. I was going to end with one last question. I don't didn't want to take too much of your time, and we're running up against the end here. I do this thing called AI roulette, which I warned you about at the beginning of this, and it's basically I load a question into perplexity. I've told it all about you through your LinkedIn posts, that I've seen your background and I'm going to press send here. It's going to give us a question we're going to have to answer. You can answer and then I can help you with in case you need some help.

Elaine Zelby: 33:04

Okay, here we go by the way, I think you should start every meeting you have with any external party with this it's just such a fun. It's like a better icebreaker than any other icebreaker.

Kevin Kerner: 33:22

No joke, and the questions are always better than I could ever come up with. Okay, here we go. Oh, this is okay. Elaine, you famously live life in three times speed, so it must have picked up on that. Listening to podcasts faster, juggling startups and toddlers building tofu, given that tofu is also a food known for being versatile, adaptable and sometimes underestimated. If your life as a tech leader and mom were a tofu dish, what kind of tofu recipe would it be?

Elaine Zelby: 33:45

Oh, fun question. It would definitely be something super spicy. It would be something also in like a non-traditional shape. I'm not as familiar this is a joke. I don't like tofu as a food, so I'm not going to have like the right name for the dish, but I'll describe what it would be. It would be spicy, it would be colorful, so it would have a lot of different colors in it, meaning like there'd probably be like a spicy red sauce with like green and like other things like that, like other things like that, but it would not be in cube shape.

Kevin Kerner: 34:17

It would be in a non-traditional shape, I think.

Elaine Zelby: 34:18

I always like things that are a little off, like to me. I don't like things to be in a perfect little box. I always like to do things my own way, and potentially the harder way, and I think I like life when it's a little spicier.

Kevin Kerner: 34:30

Yeah, oh, you know what you know it's so weird is, when I saw that question, the first thing I thought I was spicy. Weird is when I saw that question, the first thing I thought of was spicy, the first thing that I got in my head was spicy, so I pegged you.

Elaine Zelby: 34:41

You got it. I do love spicy food. In general, I like everything. Everything should be spicy.

Kevin Kerner: 34:46

I always tell people too.

Elaine Zelby: 34:47

When I'm doing LinkedIn Lives or other conversations, I'm like be as spicy as you want, because I always find those to be better conversations.

Kevin Kerner: 34:54

Oh yeah, and I'm from Texas, so I like some spicy food too. It's good, nice, okay, so this has been fantastic. I really appreciate you being on the podcast here, elaine. If people want to get a hold of you or Tofu I know you have the newsletter, you've got your LinkedIn profile they can go to Tofu. What's the best way that people can get more in touch with you and your community? I should say.

Elaine Zelby: 35:17

Our website is TofuHQcom. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm pretty responsive. One of my fatal character flaws is I have to respond to people. I have so much FOMO of not responding and I will respond to people. And anywhere you can find me. If you reach out, I will likely respond Well this has been awesome.

Kevin Kerner: 35:37

Great to see you, elaine, and I hope to catch up with you soon.

Elaine Zelby: 35:40

Thank you, Kevin

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