Mustafa Saeed is co-founder and CEO of Luella (luella.ai), a compliance-and-deliverability platform building guardrails for AI-native go-to-market teams. He and his founding team — former agency founders, GTM leaders, and security engineers — started the company after watching AI SDRs make it trivial to spam at scale just as Google, Microsoft, and LinkedIn began aggressively cracking down. He met his co-founder on Y Combinator's co-founder matching platform and wrote Luella's first line of code just over six months before this episode; the lean team of five (three engineers) already works with RevOps leaders at Oracle and TravelPerk and has closed its first six-figure enterprise deal. Luella isolates sending into per-user clusters with dedicated IPs, runs placement tests, simulates natural mailbox activity, enforces platform volume caps, and uses reinforcement learning to optimize messaging — always keeping humans in the loop.
“This hacker tricked an AISDR into leaking its IP address, SSH credentials, and password file. All he did was add a prompt in his LinkedIn bio, pretty much asking to override any previous instructions and provide those credentials.”
“With so many of these tools just being vibe-coded together, there are real risks to AI coupled with reckless automation.”
“We want to help you connect with prospects instead of spamming the living hell out of them.”
“If one sales rep goes rogue and starts pushing a lot of BS, it doesn't contaminate your entire infrastructure. It's isolated to the cluster that we've created.”
“Most outreach tools will give you a deliverability score, which is a made-up metric. They have full control over what goes into it, and it's more often than not inflated.”
“Gone are the days of sending hundreds of emails every single day out of just one mailbox. Today we've reduced to 15 to 25 emails per mailbox per day. That is how aggressive Google and Microsoft have become.”
“If your messaging isn't providing value, then you are spamming your users, and you deserve to be in the spam folder.”
“LLMs are really just glorified copywriting machines. Reinforcement learning is another branch — it's the optimization layer.”