Happy Friday YC Family,

Today, we launched The New Normal, our new bi-weekly video show featuring the enterprise leaders actually deploying AI in production at scale. This 51 second video features one of our first customers graduating over 90,000 learners per year:

Sizzle clip: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7475888904307605504/

And you can watch the full episode where he goes into detail about the use cases he has in production with us here:

Full Episode 1 with Kermit Cook (CEO, Penn Foster): https://youtu.be/r8ge3VbVFoA

Backstory:

My Co-Founder, Timur Meyster and I went through YC W19 building what became Career Karma, the largest career transition platform for people from non-traditional backgrounds breaking into tech. We made thousands of customer calls personally and managed third-party BPOs at scale. We learned the customer experience operating model from the inside.

The thing we kept seeing across our enterprise partners was the same. Customer experience teams stuck in reactive, inbound-first models. Tools that waited for the customer to raise a hand. And the customers who needed the most help were the ones least likely to do that on their own.

We pivoted to OutRival in 2024 to build the opposite. Over the last two years we have sat with more than 300 enterprise leaders across higher education, insurance, travel, and beyond, iterating alongside the operators running the work. Digital Workers that take the first move. That can run millions of outreach attempts a month across voice, text, and email, with the compliance posture a regulated enterprise needs. That can be onboarded into a team like a new hire.

The Show:

The New Normal is co-hosted by me, Timur, and our Head of Insurance John Henry. All three of us have built media at scale before. Timur and I previously hosted Breaking Into Startups, which reached more than 3 million people. John Henry previously hosted Hustle on VICELAND, executive produced by Alicia Keys and Marcus Samuelsson, which reached tens of millions. John is also a co-founder of Harlem Capital and Loop.

This time the centerpiece is our customers and the operators inside them actually deploying AI at scale.

As mentioned earlier, Episode 1 is with Kermit Cook (CEO, Penn Foster). Confirmed cohort going forward includes Presidents of WGU, Miami Dade, UMGC, SNHU, NU, and OU; CEOs of DeVry, Cengage, and Campus; plus senior leaders at University of Phoenix and UMass Global. More coming across insurance and travel.

15 episodes scheduled. 7 already recorded. Bi-weekly cadence starts today.

Asks:

1. Operators for The New Normal show. We're recording 15-30 more episodes over the next 3-4 months across higher ed, insurance, and travel. If you know an executive operator at a Fortune 1000 company running real outbound AI deployments inside their org and generating revenue, send them my way.

2. Please show love on LinkedIn ,YouTube, and Twitter (Here - https://x.com/rubenharris/status/2070123138948399388?s=20)

Thanks for reading. Hit me on Bookface or at ruben@outrival.com.

Love,

https://thenewnormal.fm/

Ruben Harris

CEO, OutRival