How do you win in a market where everyone’s building at the same time? According to Decagon Co-founder and CEO Jesse Zhang, it’s all about focus and pace. We’re willing to take his word for it: in just two years, he and his team have built a leader in the enterprise agentic AI market, with a valuation of $650 million and already trusted by customers like Notion, Webflow, Substack, and Duolingo. In this conversation with Accel partner (and Jesse’s former Niantic colleague) Ivan Zhou, Jesse shares how they’ve focused relentlessly on customer needs, the differences between B2B and B2C founders, and why he thinks general AI agents don’t work.
Conversation highlights:
00:00 – Ivan loses a bet to Jesse
03:20 – The difference between building a consumer and B2B company
05:24 – How Jesse knew it was the time to jump and start Decagon
8:30 – How to recognize signal during customer discovery to inform product direction
14:30 – What Jesse’s learned about winning in a space as hot as AI-native enterprise applications
19:00 – How AI is transforming customer support into a strategy driver
24:20 – Why scaling frameworks – for teams and products – can be a distraction
31:28 – Demonstrating efficient, quantifiable time-to-value as a lever for enterprise sales
