Ignite Startups: Max Greenwald on Precision Demand Gen with AI Agents | Ep208

Ignite: Conversations on Startups, Venture Capital, Tech, Future, and Society

Max Greenwald is the co-founder and CEO of Warmly.ai, a platform building AI agents that warm your TAM and route hot leads to sales. A former Google PM who helped ship Google’s viral “Where’s Waldo” Maps April Fools (played by ~100M people), he’s navigated six pivots and the gauntlet from idea to real GTM repeatability. With on-the-ground experience from Techstars Boulder to scaling revenue and team, he offers hard-won insights into finding (and keeping) product-market fit, building a sales-then-marketing engine, and using AI across the stack. In this episode, he discusses his open/close framework for PMF, why Warmly embraced AI agents early, what’s changing in MarTech, and how to lead through the messy middle.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss

00:01 Intro and guest setup

01:12 Princeton to Google path

02:45 Leaving Big Tech to found Warmly

04:10 Early rejections and resilience

05:30 Co-founder dynamics and roles

06:50 The Open/Close framework

08:05 Defining ICP and not-for list

09:18 Six pivots, one mission

10:40 From de-anonymization to conversations

12:00 AI concierge on high-intent pages

13:22 Multi-signal lead scoring

14:45 Routing with context to AEs

16:10 Dogfooding and feedback loops

17:35 GTM systems and repeatability

18:50 Omnichannel orchestration

20:15 Content atoms and proof assets

22:00 Metrics that actually matter

23:30 Pipeline quality over volume

25:05 Hiring the first great AE

27:20 RevOps cadence and signal reviews

29:10 Buyer intent vs interest

31:00 Demand gen without waste

33:05 Agents as always-on SDRs

34:40 Near-term roadmap and vision

36:06 Closing takeaways

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