Clay Pavor

Co-Founder, Sierra · Person

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Clay Pavor — Co-Founder, Sierra. Tracked across 34 mentions in podcasts and expert conversations analyzed by Sonic.

What Clay Pavor has said

At Sierra, co-founder Bret Taylor's primary areas of focus are sales and engineering, while co-founder Clay Pavor's primary focus is on running the company, including operations, finance, and legal.

neutral·Clay Pavor

Instead of board decks, Sierra's co-founders Bret Taylor and Clay Pavor write a 6 to 10-page memo for each board meeting.

neutral·Clay Pavor

Clay Pavor uses a custom skill for the internal agent Pinecone to assist in reviewing and approving every new hire at Sierra.

neutral·Clay Pavor

At Sierra, co-founder Bret Taylor's primary areas of focus are sales and engineering, while co-founder Clay Pavor's primary focus is on running the company, including operations, finance, and legal.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

Instead of board decks, Sierra's co-founders Bret Taylor and Clay Pavor write a 6 to 10-page memo for each board meeting.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

Clay Pavor uses a custom skill for the internal agent Pinecone to assist in reviewing and approving every new hire at Sierra.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

In every one of its funding rounds, Sierra has intentionally guided to and accepted a lower valuation than it could have achieved.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

Sierra made a strategic decision not to pre-train its own foundation models due to the high and ongoing capital expense required.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

50% of Sierra's customers have over $1 billion in annual revenue.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

Clay Pavor believes US-based labs developing frontier models are unlikely to release competitive open-weight models themselves as it would create price pressure on their own products.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

Clay Pavor predicts that the steady-state cost of AI tokens for software engineers will converge closer to 20% of their salary, not 3.8%.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

Using its forward-deployed team, Sierra was able to take Cigna live in 58 days.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

Sierra has changed its engineering interview process to be "AI-native," giving candidates a budget of $150 for tokens to build an application using a coding agent of their choice.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

The cost for a token with intelligence equivalent to GPT-4 from early 2023 has decreased by a factor of 300.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

Clay Pavor has observed top engineers using AI coding tools like Claude Code and Codex spending over $100,000 per year on tokens on a run-rate basis.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

Sierra's go-to-market model, which includes a forward-deployed team, was inspired by Palantir.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

Sierra recently acquired the Japanese company Opera Technologies to establish a presence in Japan.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

Clay Pavor believes the advanced state of Chinese open-weight models is likely driven by their willingness to perform scaled distillation of frontier models from US labs.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

Clay Pavor predicts there will be effectively unbounded demand for frontier AI models in high-stakes domains such as coding, science, and legal.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

Sierra holds board meetings every 6 weeks, alternating between 3-hour and 1.5-hour sessions, because the pace of AI development is too fast for a quarterly cadence.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

Clay Pavor believes the AI agent market for enterprises will consolidate into a two-player dynamic similar to the Uber and Lyft market.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

Clay Pavor believes many open-weight models from China are derived from scaled distillation of frontier models developed by US-based labs.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

Sierra develops its own proprietary models by fine-tuning open-weight models rather than pre-training them from scratch.

Expert perspectiveClay PavorJul 4

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