Zayd Ali is the founder and CEO of Valley, an AI-native LinkedIn outbound platform he describes as 'the AI SDR for LinkedIn' — a clone of you that prospects on LinkedIn 24/7. He built and exited two LinkedIn outbound agencies before founding it: the first, started at 17 with a friend, connected financial advisors with clients right before COVID and exited in 2021; the second replicated the playbook for emerging fund managers hunting LPs in 2022 and exited in 2023. The genesis of Valley was recognizing that the human services agencies layered on top of old-guard automation tools — research, personalization, lead scoring, and prioritization — could be roped into a single AI-first piece of software. Valley has raised a significant funding round and counts the CRO of Brex and senior sales/GTM leaders from Rippling and Datadog among its advisors.
“You could think of Valley as the AI SDR for LinkedIn, or a clone of you that's prospecting on LinkedIn 24/7.”
“My journey started — I was 17, started this outbound agency with a buddy of mine, really serendipitously. I think we initially connected on Snapchat or something.”
“A lot of what we did when we took the old guard of LinkedIn automation tools, we layered services on top — researching, personalizing, scoring leads, prioritizing leads. In a post-AI era, all of that could be done by an AI-first, AI-native outbound tool.”
“Instead of sending 30,000 messages at the bottom of the funnel, send 30 and book 10 meetings because they're hyper qualified, hyper relevant.”
“With a lot of AI tools you get four vectors for how the thing is going to sound — casual, direct, formal, or funny. And all of them sound like AI slop.”
“Think of this as taking out a sticky note, jotting down notes on how you speak or how you write, and handing that to your newly hired SDR.”
“If LinkedIn is pushing content to people about a specific topic, chances are LinkedIn has identified a signal that says this person is looking to learn more about it. Those are amazing, bottom-of-funnel, warm leads.”
“Send messages on Sunday. They perform 20 to 25% better than during the week — people scroll LinkedIn on Sunday evening because it still feels professional.”