Episode 448 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Benj Cohen, Founder & CEO of Proton AI.
The wholesale distribution industry in the US is a massive $9 trillion-a-year market yet one that most tech founders know very little about.
Benj’s connection to distribution runs very, very deep. His family’s history in the industry spans four generations, going back 100 years to his great-grandfather selling dental supplies out of a suitcase and starting a dental supply company that still exists today. He was engrained in the family business to the point that he actually made his first sales attempt when he was just four years old, while tagging along with his dad on sales calls.
While studying applied mathematics and rowing crew at Harvard, Benj realized that while wholesale distribution runs on massive amounts of transaction data, the core systems running these multi-million dollar businesses were 30-year-old green-screen mainframes. He saw an opportunity to leverage machine learning to help distributors modernize, cut through manual friction, and drive sales.
This led to him star the company while still in college and fast forward to today, Proton is the first industry cloud for distribution. Its growing suite of modular products connect on one AI-powered platform, so distributors can grow revenue, protect margins, and give their people time back. The company is backed by Felicis and Battery Ventures.
In this episode, we cover:
- Key advice on building a Vertical AI company and why you must know your customer well enough to do their job.
- Benj’s background growing up in Pennsylvania and what he learned from the family business.
- Building on top of legacy green-screen mainframes and pulling multi-source data into an AI native stack.
- How Proton expanded from their original CRM application to other products and the decision around the timing to do so.
- The importance of having core company values that actually have meaning and how it translates to an effective hiring straregy.
- Proton’s GTM strategy.
- And so much more!
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