---
title: "AI vs. Human Connection: The Future of Sales & Marketing"
episode: 53
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Khurram Kalimi"
guest_title: "Co-Founder & COO, VinnCorp"
date_published: 2025-10-29
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:43:58
word_count: 7088
topics: ["ai-in-gtm", "gtm-strategy", "outbound-sales", "demand-generation", "sales-leadership"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/khurram-kalimi-ai-human-connection/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# AI vs. Human Connection: The Future of Sales & Marketing

_VinnCorp co-founder Khurram Kalimi on why authenticity beats automation, treating your brain like an LLM, and building a network that opens doors_

**Episode 53 · The LeanScale Podcast**  
Khurram Kalimi, Co-Founder & COO, VinnCorp · Hosted by Anthony Enrico  
Published October 29, 2025 · Updated July 22, 2026 · 00:43:58  
Canonical: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/khurram-kalimi-ai-human-connection/

**Topics:** AI in GTM · GTM Strategy · Outbound & Sales Development · Demand Generation · Sales Leadership


## Executive summary

Everyone in 2025 is racing to bolt AI onto their go-to-market. Khurram Kalimi — co-founder and COO of VinnCorp, a remote-tech-teams firm, after formative sales careers at Oracle and Microsoft — comes on the LeanScale Podcast to argue the counterintuitive case: AI is genuinely efficient, but the moment you push sales and marketing through it, you strip out the human angle that actually moves people to buy. His whole thesis is delivered, he notes, from his own head — not a report, not ChatGPT — which is itself the point of the hour.

The problem is visible in everyone's inbox. Auto-generated emails and LinkedIn 'saw-your-podcast, buy-my-product' messages have become spam, and both Khurram and Anthony describe markets so starved for authenticity that a genuine, empathetic message now stands out precisely because it is rare. Khurram frames the flood economically: before 2019 maybe fifty companies chased a hundred customers; the tech boom pulled five hundred sellers from every corner of the globe toward the same shrinking US and UK buyer base, and a disturbed demand-supply equilibrium is exactly what manufactures desperate, automated outreach that does not work.

The most memorable ideas are Khurram's mental models. 'Whatever you stop using will die' — immobilize a finger, cover your eyes, and they atrophy; the same is true of the creative and critical-thinking muscles people are quietly offloading to AI. His signature reframe is that your brain is itself an LLM whose training data is people: interact with ten and your model gives poor predictions, meet ten thousand and it sharpens — so the operator's job is to load that database by meeting people, and to curate the inputs, staying close to the 'noises of yes' and away from the noise of 'no.' Woven through it is a hard-nosed founder philosophy: there are no shortcuts or growth hacks, only consistent work and trusting the process, and the antidote to burnout is getting out of the three boxes (office, home, club) and into nature for the perspective that produces real ideas.

The back half turns practical and personal. Get reps in front of real humans even when it hurts (Khurram's own legs shook before his first pitch); qualify hard toward people who own the real problem (Anthony's 'selling the cure to cancer' test); and understand that motivation and purpose — not tools — are what let people figure it out, echoing the surfer/surfboard/wave framing a VC guest gave a few episodes earlier, where the surfer (founder) matters most. His single strongest piece of advice: stop being transactional and invest in long-term relationships, because his own first ten to twenty customers were referrals from fifteen years of colleagues and bosses he never stopped calling — the same pattern behind LeanScale's referral-driven book of business. He closes with his story: computer science and an MBA in Karachi, Oracle, Microsoft, VMware, seven companies in fifteen years that built the network, and VinnCorp today at fifty-five employees and a hundred fifty customers, now expanding from pure engineering into creative marketing and content.

Who should listen: founders and sales and marketing leaders trying to break through an AI-saturated market without becoming part of the noise. The takeaway is not anti-AI — it is a plea for balance: use the tools for efficiency, keep exercising your own mind, and remember that we sell to people, through people, so the human connection has to stay at the core of the go-to-market.


## Key takeaways

1. **AI is efficient but misses the human angle at scale** — Khurram's core claim is that AI helps you build technology fast, but sales and marketing are about understanding what the buyer actually wants and will pay for — and AI struggles to understand humans at a mass level. Pushing outreach through AI reaches more inboxes while connecting with fewer people.
   _Why it matters:_ Use AI to accelerate the build and the busywork, but keep a human deeply in the loop on messaging, empathy, and understanding the buyer's real problem — that is where deals are actually won.
   _For:_ Founders, Sales Leaders, Marketing Leaders

2. **The spam epidemic is a demand-supply problem, not just a tooling problem** — Before 2019, roughly fifty companies chased a hundred US/Europe customers. After the tech boom, ~500 sellers from across the globe now target a shrinking buyer base. That disturbed equilibrium is what drives desperate, automated LinkedIn and email spam — and why it stops working.
   _Why it matters:_ You can't out-volume an oversupplied market. The move is to differentiate on authenticity and genuine problem understanding, not to send more automated touches into a saturated channel.
   _For:_ Founders, Sales Leaders, Marketing Leaders

3. **Use it or lose it — offloading creativity to AI causes real atrophy** — Khurram's visceral metaphor: immobilize a finger for six months or cover your eyes for a year and they stop working. The brain is the same. Anthony adds the emerging research that students using AI for schoolwork show declining critical-thinking and novel-problem-solving skills.
   _Why it matters:_ Treat your creative and analytical capacity like a muscle. Deliberately keep doing the hard thinking yourself so AI enhances quality instead of quietly hollowing out the skills you rely on.
   _For:_ Founders, Marketing Leaders, Sales Leaders

4. **Balance, not abstinence — use AI, but keep using your brain** — Khurram is explicit that he is not against AI or progress: like the knife, the TV, or the smartphone, the technology can't be un-invented and has real upside. The failure mode is dependency at the cost of your own thinking, personal time, and human connection.
   _Why it matters:_ Set an intentional line between where AI does your work faster and where it starts doing your thinking for you. Run awareness conversations on your team so people adopt AI for efficiency without surrendering their judgment.
   _For:_ Founders, Sales Leaders, Marketing Leaders

5. **Markets are starved for authenticity — the 'organic food' backlash is coming for AI comms** — Anthony's metaphor: processed food was celebrated in the '80s and '90s for being fast, cheap, and convenient, then people revolted and demanded real, organic food. AI-written outreach is the processed food of go-to-market — and buyers are already sick of it and craving genuine human connection.
   _Why it matters:_ Authentic, empathetic, human messaging is becoming the scarce and therefore valuable option. Lean into real relationships and creativity precisely as competitors automate themselves into sameness.
   _For:_ Marketing Leaders, Founders, Sales Leaders

6. **Your brain is an LLM — and its training data is people** — Khurram's signature framework: your brain is a database with a learning model, and the data you feed it is people. Interact with ten people and your model gives poor predictions; meet ten or a hundred thousand and your analysis, predictions, and instincts sharpen dramatically.
   _Why it matters:_ Make meeting people a deliberate, high-priority activity, not an afterthought. Networking and in-person time are literally how you train the model you sell with — engineers grasp this framing instantly.
   _For:_ Founders, Sales Leaders, Marketing Leaders

7. **Curate your inputs — stay close to 'yes,' away from 'no'** — If your brain is an LLM, you can poison it with bad data and you have no safety team to filter it out. Khurram's rule: stay away from the noises of no's and close to the noises of yes, and fill your database with people who believe things are possible.
   _Why it matters:_ Audit what you consume and who you spend time with the way you'd audit training data. Negative environments and chronic naysayers degrade the model you make decisions with.
   _For:_ Founders, Sales Leaders

8. **There are no shortcuts — trust the process** — Khurram is blunt that growth hacks are nonsense: there are only two paths, consistent long-term hard work, or compromising ethically to get there fast. Everything he's built — photography, a book, the business — came from patience, not overnight wins. Anthony's fitness analogy: it's just diet and exercise, done every day.
   _Why it matters:_ Set expectations for the long game and get comfortable doing the boring, disciplined work daily. Chasing hacks is a signal you're either wasting time or cutting corners you'll regret.
   _For:_ Founders, Sales Leaders

9. **Get out of the three boxes — nature and perspective produce your best ideas** — Khurram credits wildlife and nature photography with changing his life: humans were designed for the outdoors, not to move between three boxes (office, home, club). His craziest ideas came after excursions; a night watching the moon through a telescope left a room of friends silent for an hour, reset by how tiny they are.
   _Why it matters:_ Schedule breaks in nature as an investment, not indulgence — once or twice a month minimum. It reduces stress, restores energy, and reliably surfaces the breakthroughs a packed 'optimizer' calendar never will.
   _For:_ Founders, Sales Leaders, Marketing Leaders

10. **Purpose and motivation beat tools — motivated people figure it out** — Khurram has never seen a motivated, ethical, hardworking person fail to make it, and never seen an unmotivated person succeed no matter how good the tools or advice. The difference between a rich and poor mindset in the same situation: 'I have no money, I can't do anything' versus 'I have no money, I should do something.'
   _Why it matters:_ When hiring or investing, weight purpose and motivation above credentials or equipment — it echoes the VC surfer/surfboard/wave framework where the surfer (founder) matters most. Motivated people build the missing skills and pivot their way to a win.
   _For:_ Founders, Sales Leaders

11. **Invest in long-term relationships, not transactions — referrals compound** — Khurram's strongest advice: society has gotten transactional and it's hurting everyone. His own first ten to twenty customers were referrals and introductions from fifteen years of colleagues, bosses, and juniors he never stopped calling. Anthony confirms almost every early LeanScale customer came the same way — care for people, get introduced to the next one.
   _Why it matters:_ Treat your network as a decade-long asset, not a job-hopping byproduct. Build history with people and do it with integrity; those relationships become your most durable and lowest-cost pipeline.
   _For:_ Founders, Sales Leaders, Marketing Leaders

12. **Kill the 'this is not my job' mindset — range compounds into a founder's edge** — Over fifteen years Khurram repeatedly did work that 'wasn't his job' despite colleagues asking why he bothered with 'zero-result' tasks. All of it — different companies, bosses, cultures — became learning and network he later used in his startup. He advises juniors to switch jobs every three to four years to widen exposure and referral options.
   _Why it matters:_ Volunteer for work outside your lane early in your career; the accumulated range and relationships pay off disproportionately when you build something of your own.
   _For:_ Founders, Sales Leaders


## Frameworks

### Your Brain Is an LLM (Data Is People) (21:46)

**Definition:** Model your own mind as a large language model: a database with a learning layer whose training data is the people you interact with. The more people you meet, the richer the dataset and the better your predictions, analysis, and instincts.

Meet ten people and your model gives poor results; meet ten or a hundred thousand and it sharpens. This reframes networking and in-person time as literally training the model you sell and make decisions with — a framing Khurram says engineers grasp immediately.

### Feed Your Model 'Yes,' Not 'No' (24:52)

**Definition:** Because your brain-as-LLM has no safety team to filter bad inputs, deliberately curate what you consume: stay away from the noises of no's and stay close to the noises of yes, filling your dataset with people who believe things are possible.

Negative news, chronic naysayers, and bad ideas poison the model you use to decide and sell. The counter-move is to audit inputs and environments the way you'd audit training data, weighting toward possibility.

### Use It or Lose It (Creative Atrophy) (04:22)

**Definition:** Any capacity you stop using atrophies — a finger immobilized for months, eyes covered for a year, and the brain the same way. Offloading creative and critical thinking to AI quietly weakens the very muscles you depend on.

Khurram pairs it with the strength-training analogy: you build brain muscle by using it. Anthony adds early research on AI-assisted students showing declining critical thinking and novel-problem-solving as supporting evidence.

### The Disturbed Demand-Supply Equilibrium (02:59)

**Definition:** The outreach-spam era is a supply glut: pre-2019, ~50 companies chased ~100 US/Europe customers; the tech boom pulled ~500 sellers from across the globe toward a shrinking buyer base, so desperate automated outreach was inevitable.

When equilibrium is disturbed this hard, spamming LinkedIn and email becomes the default and stops working. The escape is differentiation on authenticity and problem-understanding, not more volume.

### No Shortcuts — Trust the Process (14:31)

**Definition:** There are only two ways to succeed: consistent, disciplined long-term work, or compromising ethically to appear successful overnight. Growth hacks are nonsense; you have to move through the natural process with patience.

Khurram applies it across photography, book-writing, and business; Anthony reinforces it with a diet-and-exercise analogy — no hack builds muscle or loses weight, just showing up daily and doing the boring things.

### Get Out of the Three Boxes (13:14)

**Definition:** Modern life moves people between three boxes — office, home, and club — which caps thinking and energy. Humans were designed for the outdoors, so escaping into nature once or twice a month restores perspective, energy, and ideas.

Khurram's craziest ideas followed excursions and wildlife photography; a night watching the moon through a telescope left friends silent for an hour, reset by their own smallness. He frames the break as an investment, guided by 'failing to plan is planning to fail.'

### The Surfer, the Surfboard, and the Wave (31:00)

**Definition:** A VC framework Anthony relays: evaluate a startup on the wave (market), the surfboard (product), and the surfer (founder) — and the surfer matters most, because a great surfer finds the right wave even on mediocre equipment.

It maps directly onto Khurram's point that motivation and purpose beat tools: a motivated, purpose-driven founder builds the missing skills and pivots to a win regardless of the starting hand.

### Long-Term Relationships Over Transactions (33:52)

**Definition:** Treat your network as a decade-long asset instead of a job-hopping byproduct. Build history with people and do it with integrity, and those relationships become your most durable, lowest-cost pipeline.

Khurram's first ten to twenty customers were referrals from fifteen years of colleagues and bosses he kept calling; Anthony confirms nearly every early LeanScale customer arrived the same way. Getting transactional, he warns, quietly hurts everyone long-term.


## Quotes

_Speakers inferred from an undiarized transcript — verify before attributing._

> "AI is very helpful and efficient in some ways, but it's very counterproductive in a lot of ways. Once they try to do sales and marketing through AI, they miss the human angle."
>
> — Khurram Kalimi, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 53 (00:46)

> "It's not important what you have built, what you have made, how much you know. It's important what they want, because they are the one who will be paying for it."
>
> — Khurram Kalimi, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 53 (01:26)

> "People are sick and tired of auto-generated emails and LinkedIn messages and approaches. It's spam."
>
> — Khurram Kalimi, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 53 (01:26)

> "The market is just so starved for authenticity that it's really, really tough to stand out — but for some people, there's a big opportunity too."
>
> — Anthony Enrico, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 53 (02:10)

> "When the demand-supply equilibrium is disturbed like this, this is bound to happen."
>
> — Khurram Kalimi, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 53 (02:59)

> "Whatever you stop using will die soon. Exactly the same with the brain. If we stop using our brain, it will be unusable."
>
> — Khurram Kalimi, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 53 (04:22)

> "Use AI, use whatever, but please keep using your brain too."
>
> — Khurram Kalimi, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 53 (05:53)

> "When the knife was invented, you can use it to cut fruits, but you can use it to kill someone. Exactly the same with technology."
>
> — Khurram Kalimi, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 53 (06:41)

> "At the end of the day, it's blood in our veins. We are not robots. We need human connection, we need community, we need people around us."
>
> — Khurram Kalimi, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 53 (08:48)

> "Just putting your mobile out on a frame and talking is not content now, because it's clutter. To be creative, you have to understand humans."
>
> — Khurram Kalimi, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 53 (10:58)

> "We were not designed to live in these boxes — from one box of office to one box of home to one box of clubs. We were designed to live outdoors."
>
> — Khurram Kalimi, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 53 (13:14)

> "There are no shortcuts. Growth hacking, those fancy words, that is nonsense. You have to trust the process and move through the natural process."
>
> — Khurram Kalimi, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 53 (14:31)

> "If you are failing to plan, you are planning to fail."
>
> — Khurram Kalimi, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 53 (17:22)

> "Consider your brain to be a database with an LLM. The data fed to that brain is people — so our brain is literally an LLM. And to make it sharp, you have to load it with people."
>
> — Khurram Kalimi, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 53 (21:46)

> "We are people. We are selling to people, through people. So if you have to sell good, you have to understand people — and to understand people, you have to meet them."
>
> — Khurram Kalimi, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 53 (23:26)

> "Stay away from the noises of no's, and stay close to the noises of yes."
>
> — Khurram Kalimi, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 53 (24:52)

> "I've never seen in my life someone motivated, ethical, and hardworking who hasn't made it. I haven't seen it so far."
>
> — Khurram Kalimi, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 53 (32:20)

> "We as a society have stopped investing in long-term relations and connections. We are getting very transactional, and this is hurting everyone in the long run."
>
> — Khurram Kalimi, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 53 (33:52)


## Practical advice by role

### Founders

- Invest in long-term relationships from day one — Khurram's and LeanScale's first customers were both referrals from years of relationships, so build history with people and do it with integrity instead of going transactional.
- Find your purpose and motivation before your tools; motivated, purpose-driven people figure out the skills and pivots they need, and it's the surfer, not the surfboard, that catches the wave.
- Reject the 'this is not my job' mindset early — the range and network you build doing extra work becomes disproportionate leverage when you start your own company.
- Expect no shortcuts. Set long-game expectations, do the boring disciplined work daily, and treat scheduled breaks in nature as an investment that produces your best ideas.

### Sales Leaders

- Get reps in front of real people even when it's uncomfortable — confidence only comes from doing it, and the early discomfort is the brain-muscle building that makes them good.
- Qualify hard toward people who own the real problem — like selling the cure to cancer, start with who actually has the disease, and don't get discouraged sifting through the no's.
- Stop leaning on spammy automated outreach in a saturated market; treat networking and in-person events as the way you train the 'model' your team sells with.

### Marketing Leaders

- Make authenticity and creativity the moat — as AI makes building easy and outreach commoditized, genuine, empathetic, human messaging is the scarce and valuable option.
- Understand that 'content' is no longer just talking to a camera; the volume is clutter, so real creative messaging requires deeply understanding humans and leading with empathy.
- Use AI for efficiency, but keep humans on the creative and empathetic core — buyers are already revolting against processed, AI-written communication the way they revolted against processed food.


## AI takeaways

**Thesis:** AI is a genuine efficiency tool, but over-relying on it for sales and marketing strips out the human connection that actually drives revenue — and quietly atrophies the operator's own creative capacity. The winning move is balance: automate the busywork, keep exercising your brain, and put authentic, in-person human relationships back at the center of go-to-market.

- **AI misses the human angle at scale** — It builds technology fast but can't understand buyers at a mass level; sales and marketing are about what the customer wants, so automated outreach reaches more inboxes while connecting with fewer people.
- **Automation created a spam problem** — Auto-generated emails and LinkedIn messages have become spam buyers are sick of — worsened by an oversupplied market where authenticity, not volume, is now the differentiator.
- **Creative and critical-thinking atrophy** — Whatever you stop using dies; offloading thinking to AI weakens the muscles you depend on, echoed by early research showing AI-assisted students' critical thinking declining.
- **Guard what you feed your own model** — If your brain is an LLM, you have no safety team to filter bad inputs — curate consumption and company, staying close to 'yes' and away from 'no.'
- **Mind the data and privacy risk** — A ChatGPT glitch briefly indexed private conversations into Google searches; Khurram warns against oversharing secrets with AI and treating it as a confidant.

**Agent & automation ideas**

- Use AI to eliminate go-to-market busywork (research, drafting, scheduling) specifically to free up operator time for in-person events and relationship-building, not to replace the human touch.
- Build an authentic-outreach assistant that drafts genuinely personalized, empathy-led messages grounded in a prospect's real problem — with a mandatory human review step — rather than mass auto-generated sequences.
- Deploy a 'relationship CRM' agent that surfaces dormant past colleagues and customers to reconnect with, operationalizing the long-term-relationships thesis into a referral engine.


## Operations takeaways

### Pipeline & marketing ops

- **Authenticity beats automation.** Spray-and-pray automated outreach is now clutter buyers ignore; genuine, empathetic, problem-aware messaging is the scarce option that breaks through.
- **In-person is back.** Networking events and real human interaction are heating up again as the market reacts against AI-generated noise — treat them as a primary channel.
- **Referrals are the compounding channel.** Khurram's first 10–20 customers and nearly every early LeanScale customer came from referrals — durable relationships are the lowest-cost pipeline.
- **Qualify to the real problem.** Like selling the cure to cancer, start with who actually owns the problem your product solves; the yeses from real problem-owners are the fuel that keeps you going.


## Metrics mentioned

| Value | Metric | Context |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 21 years | Career length | Khurram's professional journey across sales and entrepreneurship, the basis for his 'from my own data' perspective. |
| ~50 sellers → ~500 sellers | Demand-supply shift | Pre-2019 roughly 50 companies chased ~100 US/Europe customers; the tech boom pushed ~500 global sellers toward a shrinking buyer base — the root of outreach spam. |
| 55 employees · 150 customers | VinnCorp scale | The company Khurram co-founded ~8 years ago, spanning global talent and clients including 2 Fortune 500s and 7 unicorns. |
| 7 companies in 15 years | Job history | Khurram's deliberate job-switching built the network that produced his first customers; he advises juniors to change roles every 3–4 years. |
| First 10–20 = referrals | First customers | His initial VinnCorp customers were all referrals and introductions from 15 years of maintained relationships — the core of his advice. |
| 300 people, Oracle, 2008 | First sales event | Khurram's formative 'brain-muscle-flexing pain' moment being pushed to work a room with no script. |


## Entities mentioned

- **VinnCorp** (company) — Khurram's company, where he is co-founder and COO; helps founders and companies hire remote-first tech teams fast — ~8 years old, 55 employees globally, 150 customers including 2 Fortune 500s and 7 unicorns, now expanding from engineering into creative marketing and content services. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/vinncorp/
- **Oracle** (company) — Where Khurram spent ~3.5 years early in his sales career; he credits Oracle and his bosses there for his sales principles, enterprise-selling skills, and relationship-building foundation, including his first 300-person sales event in 2008. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/oracle/
- **Microsoft** (company) — Khurram's post-Oracle role; cited as a company that gave him enormous learning, exposure, and horizon before he started thinking about building his own company around 2013–2014. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/microsoft/
- **VMware** (company) — The company Khurram joined after Microsoft, part of the seven companies in fifteen years that built the network he later leaned on to launch VinnCorp. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/vmware/
- **LeanScale** (company) — Anthony notes almost every early LeanScale customer was a referral — no net-new pipeline hack — reinforcing Khurram's long-term-relationships thesis. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/leanscale/
- **Google** (company) — Referenced via a ChatGPT glitch that briefly indexed users' private conversations into Google searches — Khurram's cautionary example of oversharing secrets with AI. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/google/
- **Khurram Kalimi** (person, guest) — Co-founder & COO of VinnCorp; ex-Oracle, Microsoft, and VMware sales leader turned entrepreneur, author, and coach. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/guest/khurram-kalimi/
- **Anthony Enrico** (person, host) — Co-founder of LeanScale and host of The LeanScale Podcast. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/guest/anthony-enrico/
- **ChatGPT** (tool, AI Assistant) — Cited as an example of AI overreliance and a privacy risk — Khurram uses no report or ChatGPT for his answers, and warns about people sharing secrets with it after a glitch indexed conversations into Google.
- **LinkedIn** (tool, Social Platform) — Named as the primary channel now flooded with auto-generated spam messages, and also how Khurram tells listeners to reach him.


## FAQ

**Q: Is AI good or bad for sales and marketing?**

A: Both. Khurram Kalimi argues AI is genuinely efficient for building technology and handling busywork, but counterproductive when you push sales and marketing through it, because it misses the human angle. Sales and marketing are about understanding what the buyer wants, and AI struggles to understand humans at a mass level — so the answer is balance: use AI for efficiency while keeping authentic human connection at the center.

**Q: Why has automated cold outreach on email and LinkedIn stopped working?**

A: Because it has become spam in an oversupplied market. Khurram frames it as a disturbed demand-supply equilibrium: before 2019, roughly 50 companies chased about 100 US/Europe customers, but after the tech boom around 500 sellers from across the globe began targeting a shrinking buyer base. That glut drives desperate, auto-generated LinkedIn and email outreach that buyers are now sick of and ignore.

**Q: What does 'your brain is an LLM' mean?**

A: It's Khurram Kalimi's framework for why meeting people matters. He models the brain as a database with a learning layer whose training data is people. If you've interacted with only ten people, your mental model gives poor predictions; if you've met tens of thousands, your analysis and instincts sharpen. The implication is that networking and in-person time literally train the model you sell and make decisions with.

**Q: Does relying on AI hurt your creativity and thinking?**

A: Khurram warns it can, using a 'use it or lose it' analogy: a finger immobilized for months or eyes covered for a year stop working, and the brain is the same. Offloading creative and critical thinking to AI weakens those muscles. Anthony adds early research showing students who lean on AI for schoolwork exhibit declining critical-thinking and novel-problem-solving skills. The fix is to keep doing the hard thinking yourself so AI enhances rather than replaces it.

**Q: How do you cut through the noise in an AI-saturated market?**

A: Lead with authenticity and genuine human connection. Khurram and Anthony compare AI-written outreach to processed food — buyers are revolting against it and craving something real. The move is empathetic, creative messaging that shows you understand the buyer's actual problem, plus getting back to in-person networking and events, which are heating up again precisely because automated communication has become clutter.

**Q: What's the most important piece of advice for founders in this episode?**

A: Invest in long-term relationships instead of being transactional. Khurram's first ten to twenty VinnCorp customers were referrals and introductions from fifteen years of colleagues and bosses he never stopped calling, and Anthony confirms nearly every early LeanScale customer came the same way. Build history with people and do it with integrity, because those relationships become your most durable and lowest-cost source of pipeline.

**Q: Are there shortcuts or growth hacks to building a company?**

A: No. Khurram is blunt that growth hacks are nonsense — there are only two paths: consistent, disciplined long-term work, or compromising ethically to look successful overnight. He compares it to fitness with Anthony: no hack builds muscle or loses weight, just showing up and doing the boring things every day. You have to trust the process and be patient.

**Q: Who is Khurram Kalimi?**

A: Khurram Kalimi is co-founder and COO of VinnCorp, a firm that helps companies hire remote-first tech teams, and an author, podcaster, and coach. Originally from Karachi, Pakistan, he studied computer science and earned an MBA, then moved into technology sales at Oracle (~3.5 years), Microsoft, and VMware — seven companies in fifteen years — before launching VinnCorp, now about eight years old with 55 employees and 150 customers.


## Timeline

- **00:00** — Intro: Khurram Kalimi and how AI may hinder go-to-market
- **00:46** — Where AI misses the human angle in sales & marketing
- **02:59** — Demand vs. supply: why outreach stopped working
- **04:22** — Creative atrophy: use your brain or lose it
- **06:41** — Balance, screen time, and AI dependency
- **09:34** — The processed-food problem with AI communication
- **11:41** — Cutting through the noise: nature and the three boxes
- **14:31** — No shortcuts: trust the process
- **17:22** — Planning your breaks: failing to plan is planning to fail
- **21:46** — Your brain is an LLM: data is people
- **24:52** — Feed your model 'yes' and get in front of people
- **27:42** — The cure-to-cancer test: find the real problem
- **28:48** — Motivation and purpose over tools
- **30:16** — The surfer, the surfboard, and the wave
- **33:00** — Advice: invest in long-term relationships
- **35:17** — 'This is not my job' and doing the boring work
- **38:40** — Khurram's story: Karachi to Oracle, Microsoft, VinnCorp
- **41:27** — VinnCorp today and how to reach Khurram


## Related episodes

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## Full transcript

_Machine-transcribed and not diarized; speaker attribution is inferred._  
_Transcript only, as a separate file: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/khurram-kalimi-ai-human-connection/transcript.md_

### 00:00 — Intro: Khurram Kalimi and how AI may hinder go-to-market

**[0:00]** Today we have Karan Kalimi, who is an electric sales and marketing leader that has been at tech powerhouses such as Oracle and Microsoft, and is now the co-founder of Vincorp, which helps companies hire remote-first tech teams fast. He's an author, podcaster, life coach, tech guru, and founder. He has basically done as much as you can in the world of tech, and today he's going to share a very unique perspective on how AI may actually be hindering the sales and marketing process. Karan, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. To kick it off, I would just like to dive in on your perspective of how AI is impacting go-to-market today.

### 00:46 — Where AI misses the human angle in sales & marketing

**[0:46]** Yes, so AI is very helpful and efficient in some ways, but it's very counterproductive in a lot of ways. I am doing all my responses based on my own data. I'm not reading out of any report or chat GPT or Google. This is my own personal data. The thing is, with the help of AI, people can make technologies quickly and efficiently, but once they try to do sales and marketing through AI, they miss the human angle. Sales and marketing and spreading the message around is all about understanding them. It's not important what you have built, what you have made, how much you know.

**[1:26]** It's important what they want because they are the one who will be paying for it. Then AI is struggling and understanding the human at mass level, and people are relying too much in sales and marketing on AI, which is getting very tough and difficult to crack through people. Plus, on the other hand, people are sick and tired of auto-generated emails and LinkedIn messages and approaches. It's a spam. What is going on? Now, I think we are going back in some ways. In-person relationship building, networking event are getting hot now. I meet so many founders every day. They have built the coolest technology, but they are struggling in sales and marketing.

**[2:10]** Yeah. I am seeing the exact same thing. My inbox on LinkedIn and my email is completely inundated with, "Hey, I saw this podcast. Just buy my product." That's not an authentic message. You don't know who I am, and it's just a lazy way of doing things. I do think you're right. I think the market is just so starved for authenticity that it's really, really tough to stand out, but I think for some people, there's a big opportunity too. Yes, and I think I know why it is happening. If you allow me, I would love to share. Basically, one thing I've learned, my career is now 21 years, that demand supply is still the main driving force.

### 02:59 — Demand vs. supply: why outreach stopped working

**[2:59]** Before 2019, there were, for example, 100 customers sitting in US and Europe, and 50 companies from the world were trying to sell to them. It made sense, but then after the technology boom, everyone saw technology people making a lot of money, so now 500 companies from all across the globe are trying to sell to customers in US and UK. When the demand supply equilibrium is disturbed like this, this is bound to happen. There are so many supply of developers from all across the globe, and there are limited or maybe shrinking customers. That is why this is becoming difficult, and that's why founders are trying desperately

**[3:44]** from all across the world to sell to US market, and then they are doing this spamming of LinkedIn messages and emails, and it's not working. Yeah, I don't think there's any way of getting away from those fundamentals of economics. There are people who have problems, and there are people who create solutions to those problems. I think the marketing is just finding a way to really understand those problems, build the things that can actually solve them, and then finding a way to communicate to them and get in front of them, but I do think AI has, in a lot of ways, made people lazy on the

### 04:22 — Creative atrophy: use your brain or lose it

**[4:22]** authentic side of marketing, and people are relying so much on the automation, but kind of missing the point in the process. In a lot of ways, I think there's some mental or creative atrophy that's going on because they're not using those capabilities that they're used to. Let me tell you a very interesting, fun fact about human body. A lot of people know this, but they don't remember this actively in their mind that everything in your body, like your fingers, muscles, brain, eyes, whatever, whatever you stop using will die soon. For example, if you put your finger in some straight thing for six months, and after six

**[5:08]** months, you remove that thing and you try to move your finger, it will not move. Even if you cover your eyes for one year and don't open them, and if after one year you try to open and use them, you will be blind. That's a medical fact. Exactly same with brain. Whenever we are trying to build our muscles, we are lifting weights, we do strength training. Exactly. It's the same. If we stop using brain muscles or brain, it will be unusable. That is what is happening. I'm not against AI or growth or progress or technology, but it has to have a balance. I think this is the number one debate happening in the world right now in all the corporate circles.

**[5:53]** Guys, use AI, use whatever, but please keep using your brain too. Yeah. I think that's such a visceral example. I know there are a lot of studies coming out too where students who are using AI-assisted programs for their homework or for tests, it's showing that their critical thinking skills are declining, their ability to solve novel problems is declining. I think figuring out the right way to use AI to enhance quality, but maybe not completely offload the creative process or the human process, you have to strike that balance. Basically, you cannot completely kill it. It's the same debate humanity has been doing for centuries.

### 06:41 — Balance, screen time, and AI dependency

**[6:41]** When the knife was invented, you can use it to cut fruits, but you can use it to kill someone. Exactly with technology, exactly with TV, television, exactly with mobile phone. Again, you will not be able to kill this, but obviously, we should be doing awareness sessions. We should be talking about it so that people use, again, AI as well in the benefit of all the humans, not like declining their intelligence and all that stuff. Yeah. Makes sense. Personally, I have three kids, and I think something that's been a lot of research on is how much screen time do you let your kid have? We know it's dangerous.

**[7:21]** We know it's not something that is just something you can give your kid and let them watch an iPad all day and think that they're going to be completely okay. It's not good for their brain. It's not good for their mental health. I do think there are some components where the ways in which people are interacting with AI, we don't know exactly what the impacts are going to be yet, but I do think we're starting to see those early signs. In the next few years, we'll definitely know. Usually I'm already seeing signs. I know people who are sharing maybe their secrets with chat GPT.

**[7:58]** One month back, there was this glitch that accidentally chat GPT started indexing those things in Google searches. That's scary. That's scary because I remember when in 2000s, the phone and internet and smartphone came. The story was that you can be connected to the whole world, but what happened eventually is we got disconnected between families and we are glued to our phone and this no new thing I'm talking about. Everyone knows this, seeing this and experiencing this. Again, we are again at the cornerstone of history that we should use AI just in the benefit or efficiency of our work, doing our work quickly and easier in a better way, not

**[8:48]** at the cost of our personal time and dependency and loneliness because at the end of the day, it's blood in our veins. We are not any robots. We need human connection. We need community. We need people around us and we should be mindful about it. Absolutely. One more metaphor I have that I think is similar to how you were mentioning earlier, people are just, I think, starved for some of those in-person experiences and finding actual true connections with people in a sales and marketing context too, building those real connections. I feel like food in the United States especially, there is so much push towards processed food,

### 09:34 — The processed-food problem with AI communication

**[9:34]** convenience, affordability, and 80s, 90s, this is all seen as a really good thing. Like, "Wow, I can get affordable food. I can get it fast. I can stay on the go, get moving," and then it just turned into this absolute disease and epidemic. Then people were saying, "I cannot have another bit of processed food. I need organic. I need real vegetables. I need real food. I need something that's really healthy for my body." That's where I feel like all of these AI communications is just like, people are just sick of it. I can't see another AI written email in my inbox.

**[10:09]** I need to connect with real people who actually know the problems that I have and have a genuine empathetic way of solving for them. Completely on board and I'm even like pivoting my business around this. I meet a lot of founders who have built their very good looking, good deep technology with the help of AI efficiently and quickly, but almost everyone is struggling towards sales and marketing side. This is one thing, the fresh idea creation, creativity, and marketing, AI will find it very difficult to take that role. I'm pivoting my business as well, adding marketing, content, video, all those kinds of services, but content also is a grand word.

**[10:58]** Just putting your mobile out on a frame and just talking is not content now because it's clutter. Everyone is doing it in the whole world. You have to be really creative about messaging the content and to be creative, you have to understand humans. You have to do a lot of empathy. Right. Right. Well, I think that's a really good frame of the problem and I think it's very real. We're seeing signs of it now. We're seeing a lot of companies get impacted by not being able to break through the market with the right messaging and go to market strategy. Anything that we're sitting in this world of abundance of AI, abundance of communication,

### 11:41 — Cutting through the noise: nature and the three boxes

**[11:41]** abundance of the clutter, as you put it, what do you recommend? How do people cut through the noise and what do people do in an environment like that today? I will share my personal experience. I think there's a big impact of all of this on the overall culture in the society, especially in office environment, corporate culture, like I'm hearing so many tough and heartbreaking stories of people behaving, not behaving in the right way. They're not social. They're not understanding each other. How I fixed it, I think my life changed a lot when I started doing photography and wildlife and nature photography maybe nine, 10 years back.

**[12:29]** What changed was I started going out in the wild. That gave me inspiration on how to eat, how to live healthy and it gave me a lot of energy back. I literally feel whenever I am walking barefoot on the beach, I'm walking barefoot in a garden or maybe out of the city seeing some amazing stargazing, sunset and sunrises. That gives us a lot of perspective, a lot of energy, a lot of motivation. We are basically not charging ourselves. We were not designed to live in these boxes where we live in. We were designed to live outdoors. In big cities, you cannot do it, but once in a while, maybe twice a month, one should be doing it.

**[13:14]** That thing will give you perspective also. Once you are here in boxes, your thought is limited. I have got the craziest of the ideas after I have done some excursions, some wildlife photography, some tour, some going to a big riverside far away from the city. This connection to nature and also it will give you perspective bigger than yourself. You will question your existence. You will question what is happening. You will question other stuff, but when you are living in boxes, from one box of office to one box of home to one box of clubs, so we are moving between three boxes.

**[13:54]** I love that recommendation and I think a lot of people are, especially in the worlds that we are in, if you are in the tech industry, if you are on the sales and marketing side, a lot of people are optimizers and are saying, "How do I get hyper productive? How do I get the most out of my day? How do I cram in as many meetings?" There is this idea of what productivity feels like, but when some of those things, it does not feel like you are being productive when you are going on a walk on a beach, but some of those things are necessary in order to get the ideas and breakthroughs that you need to move your company forward.

### 14:31 — No shortcuts: trust the process

**[14:31]** Basically, let me be very honest and clear in my life experiences with others and myself. There are no shortcuts. There is no hacking, growth, those fancy words, that is nonsense. It is not happening. There are only two ways. It's the consistent, hard work, long-term game, or if some people are trying to get successful overnight, they are compromising. They are doing something wrong, something unethical, something which we should not be doing. Rest, if you want to be successful, and also the definition of successful is different in different cultures, different ages, different countries and different cities.

**[15:18]** It's very, very basically subjective, but there are no shortcuts. You have to trust the process and you have to move through the natural process. I have done so many things in my life, but all the things day one my expectation was, "I should be very successful at photography. I should become the best author day one." But my learning is, when I started the company, when I was talking to my friends that, "Hey, this is my target for the first year of the company," and now I laugh at it and think, "Oh, my God, what I was thinking." Basically, my main learning, either it's photography, book writing, content, my business, technology,

**[16:00]** sales, you have to trust the process and everything will take time. It will all come to you, but you have to be patient and you have to give time to the process. Yeah, and I fully agree. I think I've been in plenty of companies. I agree. There's no hacks, growth hacking, whatever it is, it's not real. I fully agree with that. What is real is waking up every day and then being dedicated to the process and being disciplined. Then being okay doing the boring things, but doing them every day. Some things like to use a fitness metaphor, it's no secret, it's diet and exercise. There's no hacking to getting more muscle and losing weight.

**[16:44]** It's waking up every day, going to the gym, and then eating right every day, but there's no huge hack to do it. I think the same applies. We are here. We have to pass this. We have to cross this together and with patience. Right. In your opinion, I think just to give people a litmus test, because you mentioned, "Hey, going out in nature, make sure you carve out time to do that. Make sure you carve out time to have experiences that give you a different perspective." This might sound a little optimizer-y for people listening, but how would you recommend baking that into a typical busy schedule?

### 17:22 — Planning your breaks: failing to plan is planning to fail

**[17:22]** Do you have a weekly or quarterly or annual kind of rhythm where you say, "Hey, I want to make sure I'm carving out at least as much time"? With busy schedules and with my kind of life, I'm an entrepreneur managing team of 55 people globally and 150 customers. I know it's tough. There is this very important and very popular saying that if you are failing to plan, you are planning to fail. These things are my planning time. That's my break. Basically, it's an investment. Once you get the rhythm of it, you will find time yourself. When I go back 10 years back in my life, I was not doing it. I was not happy. I was making a lot of money.

**[18:08]** I was gaining a lot of customers and whatever, but I was not happy. Once I tasted this, I cannot go back. Now I know. I felt it. We have to be conscious about things. Consciously, I felt the difference. Once you have felt the difference and you appreciate this lifestyle, you cannot go back. It will come from within, but my point is for people to try. Try that and once they get the feeling, then they will get time out. Also I think recommendation wise, if you prioritize it, if you have the intention, maybe once in a month or once in two months is a must for me and for everyone to take that break.

**[18:56]** Trust me, you will get amazing ideas and you will live life in a less fearful way and more like creative way. Yeah I love that. I think it's just about people giving themselves permission to do that and then like you said, being intentional and carving it out as if you don't plan for it, then your schedule will always fill up with something. Exactly. It's on you what you prioritize because another thing, the best thing which changed my life and perspective is once you go out in the wild because you are also nature and you are very tiny, like the thing which completely changed my perspective.

**[19:36]** There was a night when my friend bought a telescope and we set it up on a rooftop of a hotel and we set it up and we watched moon for like two to three hours. That night after watching that, all friends were sitting in silence for almost an hour. We were sitting in one room and not talking to each other. That thing changed the perspective and that told me the reality of how tiny we are. So once we go to nature, we see stars, sunrise, sunset and we naturally question us, question existence, question what is happening, what is happening with other people, like our horizon, like broadens. Yeah. No, I think it's really profound.

**[20:22]** I think carving out that time because then you also, it also reduces the stress because you're saying, okay, I'm only one person. There's only so much I can do. So if I sprint myself into overdrive, it's not even going to make that much of an impact. So I might as well live balanced where I can stay happy and healthy and the end results will probably be pretty similar as long as I'm doing a good job every day and being a good human to other people. But kicking in an extra couple hours of work a day is probably not really going to move the needle of the universe that much. Yes.

**[21:01]** And that gives you an opportunity to get out of yourself and see what is happening around. Right. To set things in perspective. Right. Well, and I think tying it back to AI, tying it back to go to market, I think that's a lot of people are missing that. They're missing the authentic in-person, like you said, we're not robots, so we need that in-person time. We need that human connection time. It inspires us. It makes us more human. It makes us understand other people's problems. So I think from a business perspective, how do you recommend people approach their go-to-market strategy? Are you layering in a lot of in-person events?

### 21:46 — Your brain is an LLM: data is people

**[21:46]** Are you doing in-person meetings? Are you doing things that kind of come out of the mold of just email and LinkedIn messages? Let me explain it in a funny way. This idea just came to my mind in the morning when I was thinking about what we'd be talking about today. Perfect. Consider your brain to be a database. And consider your brain has an LLM, it's a learning model. And the data to be fed to that brain is people. So if you have interacted with 10 people, your large language model is not giving good results. If you have met with 10,000 people, or if you have met maybe 100,000 people to see your

**[22:35]** database is filled with so much data, so the predictions, analysis, results, progress will be according to that. So our brain is literally a LLM AI machine learning model. And to make it sharp, to make it effective, you have to load this database with data. And data is people. So how much you interact with people, how much you enrich your database, your machine learning model will give very good results. So that is the philosophy I apply on sales and marketing and networking and business development. Because we miss one fact that we can be very cool with blockchain and AI and databases and systems and data centers, whatever, but who we actually are.

**[23:26]** We are people. We are selling to people through people. And the whole world is also people. We are not understanding the product, rather we are trying to understand a subproduct which people have made. We are selling some cool technology, but who we are selling to, we are selling to people. So if we have to sell good, you have to understand people. And to understand people, you have to meet them. The engineers will get this one very quickly because I've explained to them that your brain is an LLM model. I think that's a great way of thinking about it. It's almost like we've put technology on a pedestal above people when it really should

**[24:12]** be the other way around. I guess it's a tool that we use that can help us get connected. But we kind of flip the level of importance. And when you're talking about your brain being an LLM, it also makes me think, be very careful about what you need that LLM. So you could put bad data into that model, and you don't have a safety team to help sift through good ideas, bad ideas, and help take things out. Anything that you expose yourself to, any information. It's like negative news or whatever it is. People filling your head with bad ideas. It's really, really tough for your model to sift that stuff out.

### 24:52 — Feed your model 'yes' and get in front of people

**[24:52]** 100%, 100%, and stay away from the noises of no's, and stay close to the noises of yes. So you should fill your database with all the people of yes. Because we are seeing a lot of people of no's everywhere. No, you cannot do it. No, you should not do it. No, it could not work out. No, it is bad. So we have to say less of no and more of yes. So for someone listening tactically, how do they get in front of people more? Some tangible advice, like if they're like, hey, got a great product, but we got to get in front of people. What are some things you recommend that they do that will help them help them do that?

**[25:37]** When you go to the gym day one, you try to put like, like, you know, you lift weights, and then you have pain the next day, you have resistance. It's exactly the same when I remember the moment in 2008 when I was doing my first sales event when I was in Oracle, and I went to this event with a whole full of 300 people, and my boss's seniors were with me. And they really pushed me. You know, go meet them. And I said, what will I talk about? And they were laughing that you are in sales and you're asking what I'll talk about. Go. I don't know. Just figure it out. Just talk to them. So that was the pain. The muscle, brain muscle flexing pain.

**[26:20]** So I went through that journey. So this you have to basically, you have no other option. How I see it is whenever you're trying to find a job, whenever you are a founder, you are trying to basically you are selling. You are always selling. You just don't know. So if you are always selling, you have to be good at it to interact. And also practice makes men perfect. So we have to practice and the confidence will only come when you start doing it. You will not be confident day one. I still remember 2002 when I was giving a presentation at my in my college in front of 100 people, first time ever, I remember my like my legs literally shivering.

**[27:06]** So but if you have to grow, you have to be successful, you have to do something, make your name. You have to go through this. There is no like there is no shortcut. It will like. And also, as I said, when you sit with people of yes, you will get the confidence that yes, you can do it. Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. And it is scary. I mean, there's one thing, you know, because I've been in sales for other companies. So you're selling a product which may already have some traction. For anybody who's going out on an entrepreneurial journey, you know, you're not going to have that track record with the company.

### 27:42 — The cure-to-cancer test: find the real problem

**[27:42]** So you're going to get a lot of no's the first time. And just for anybody listening, I think it's okay, go ahead and sift through the nose. And one metaphor I've used is, I think the coolest job in the world if it existed would be to be the salesperson for the cure to cancer. If you were selling the cure to cancer, that'd be the best job ever. And what would you do, like, okay, if you were managing a territory, the first thing you do is say, hey, who's everybody who has this problem? Who's everybody who has cancer? Let me go talk to them. And if you go talk to somebody who doesn't have cancer and you're trying to sell them

**[28:14]** the cure, like, I don't need this, it sounds expensive. Why do I need the cure to cancer? Like I don't even have cancer. But you shouldn't be discouraged if you're running into that situation. It's when you meet the people have the real problem that your product or service is there to solve for. And you hear those yeses. That's the fuel that keeps you going. And anybody who's created a product or service, like first thing, go find the people who have a real problem. And you built it for a reason. You didn't build it just because you thought it would be fun or interesting. You built it probably because you had a serious problem that you wish was solved.

### 28:48 — Motivation and purpose over tools

**[28:48]** And you know there's other people who share it. And you're going to have to sift through a lot of people to figure out who has and who doesn't. I'll step back to I'll step back two steps. And main thing which I've seen is behind people doing something or not doing something, there has to be a motivation or no motivation. So someone's motivation might be money, success, fame, traveling, someone's motivation might be fate, might be faith, they might believe in something, purpose of life. So first thing everyone should be doing is find purpose, try to understand what is happening, why we are here, where we are coming from and where we are going.

**[29:33]** And that will give you motivations, purpose. And once anyone has motivation on purpose, they will figure it out. And the people who I know have no purpose or no motivation, you can give them the best tools, best advice, best knowledge, it can be useless. And the person who have nothing but that person has motivation, they will figure it out. So you know the human brain and like with AI and chat GPT, human brain is still very effective. So if you have the motivation, your brain will literally give you ideas and next steps, whatever. When I was starting my journey eight years back, I didn't know I will be here in eight years.

### 30:16 — The surfer, the surfboard, and the wave

**[30:16]** But you know, traveling the whole world, exploring, understanding, you know, trying to understand universe, world, what's happening with humans and whatever in the whole universe. This was my motivation to start the company and I just like stepped out of the job and started working. So if anyone has the motivation and they have found purpose, they have found clarity, they will figure it out. Yeah, I think that's really sage advice. And we had a VC on the podcast a few weeks ago. And I was asking her, what guides your investment decision making process? And she's typically looking for seed stage, series A stage so pretty early on.

**[31:00]** And she says we're looking for three things of a combination. We're looking for the metaphor she used as a surfing metaphor. We're looking at the surfer, the surfboard and the wave. The wave is the market. Is there some market opportunity? The surfboard is the product. And then the surfer is the founder. And she said the most important thing of all of those is the surfer. Because if you have a really good professional surfer, they're going to know how to swim out and find the right wave. They could be on a not so good surfboard and still catch that wave. They don't need the best equipment. And they don't need to just sit around hoping a wave comes.

**[31:40]** And I think to your point, people who are motivated and have purpose, that purpose will drive the ability to go build the skills they need to achieve their goals. And they'll pivot or figure out a way to win regardless. So I think, yeah, if anybody's looking for a company to join, if you're an investor looking to invest in a company, it's always coming back to that. Is that person motivated and purpose driven? Yeah, I've never seen in my life that I find someone motivated, ethical, hardworking, and they haven't made it. I haven't seen this so far. That's a good point. And he says, oh, I've just been dealt so many bad hands.

**[32:20]** I'm like, I don't know if it's the hands you've been dealt, or there's one common thing in the equation of every single situation. So yeah, so I was just, you know, these reasons and stuff, the algorithm is very smart. So I was getting, I saw this reel and it was like showing rich mindset and poor mindset. Poor mindset, or maybe I can like rephrase it, but there are two mindset. One is, hey, I don't have money. I cannot do anything. And the second one is, hey, I don't have money. I should do something. The same situation, the mindset, the motivation, the motivated people will think that, you know, I don't have money. Let's let me do something.

### 33:00 — Advice: invest in long-term relationships

**[33:00]** And the other one is, I don't have money. I cannot do anything. It's just that different. Right. Right. I love that. I love that. Well, I think you've had such a great career experience building your company. I'm hoping just for anybody listening as well as our LeanScale team or customers, what's some of the best advice you give to somebody who's out there rolling up their sleeves, building up a startup, building up a company. What are some words of wisdom that you can share that'll help them on their journey? I'm seeing people struggling with job hunt, finding jobs, like this is the biggest problem. Not in US, it's the whole world.

**[33:52]** So I think there's a big problem. We as a society have stopped investing in long term relations and connections. We are getting very transactional. This is hurting. This is hurting everyone in the long run. So we should be investing in long term connections. What do I mean by long term connections? In my business, I'm a living example that when I left the job and started the company, my first 10 to 20 customers were referrals and introductions from my previous jobs because in those 15 years, I was keeping connections with those colleagues and people and bosses and juniors and everyone.

**[34:36]** So this is no rocket science and I see people like they're senior people and they're struggling finding jobs. You know what I've been doing for 25 years that you cannot call back anyone who was your colleague maybe 10 years back. What are you talking about? It just don't get to my mind. So this is one thing. Invest in long term connections and relationships. Please for God's sake, stop being transactional or keep looking for a job after every two, three years and you will be struggling. That's a very strong point I would like to make. That is one. Second is I see another thing, the code which I just said the motivation and not motivated people.

### 35:17 — 'This is not my job' and doing the boring work

**[35:17]** So the people who are motivated, they will be doing consistent hard work and they will figure it out. And people who are less motivated, they are like, you know, not working that hard. And another thing, which I posted on LinkedIn one year back and people love that one. Please get rid of the mindset that this is not my job. In my 15 years of my career, I get a lot of things which were not my job, but I did it. Give me so much of learning and trust me that all helped me in my startup, all of it. A lot of times my colleagues were telling me that, you know, why are you doing this? This is zero result.

**[35:56]** And now I know why I was, you know, why God or the universe was pushing me to do this because that was all to be used later on. So people are, I think they're working less. They are not that, you know, they want, like they're getting lazy, they're not eating healthy. That's why they have less energy and they want to work less and make more money. That's not possible. We are still on the earth. We are not in heaven. And then you just say something and it happens. Yeah. No, I totally agree. And I think people are getting inundated with, you know, a lot of people posting on social

**[36:33]** media where it looks like they're not working as hard, but being really successful. You know, people seeing maybe business owners, like raising money, whatever it is. And it looks like that happened in a year when it's actually, like you said, you had relationships that were built over 10, 15 years that enabled you to get the first group of customers. Same with LeanScale, the first full batch of customers, almost every single customer at LeanScale is a referral. So we're not getting some net new hack to like just bring in pipeline. We did a really good job and cared for them. And then we got to introduce to the next one. It's so simple.

**[37:14]** Like in my book, chapter two is about relationship building. And there is a complete topic about building your history and integrity. So you have to build history with people and do it with integrity. Yes. Yeah. That will always help you, but generally we are getting less patient, including me, myself. But you know, so we have to be conscious about give it time because in social media, we see all those AI generated videos where there's this guy who was very poor 10 years back. And now they are flying their own planes. Like how often did this just happen? When did you last time see someone of your friend doing that?

**[37:57]** So it's a lot of fake like concepts we consume through those reels. And then we fall for it. Yep. Yep. And that goes back to be careful what you're feeding your LLM. Um, yeah, I'm really enjoying this conversation. And I think you just have so many insights to share. And clearly, just like you said, it's not an overnight success thing. You've really had an extraordinary career. I've, I've had a chance to dive in a little bit deep on myself and as you and I were prepping for this podcast, but I would love if you could just share your story with our audience, because I think you've just had a phenomenal story and career.

### 38:40 — Khurram's story: Karachi to Oracle, Microsoft, VinnCorp

**[38:40]** And I would just love if you could share that with the audience as well. So my story is a little longer, but I will try to summarize it quickly. So my journey, my professional corporate, like job and job and business journey is like 21 years now, grab by graduation. I'm a computer science graduate. I'm originally from Pakistan, born and is Karachi. And I was lucky enough to get admission in the best Institute of Pakistan for computer science after that I did my MBA because sitting at one seat for a longer time is very difficult for me. Like I love to be outdoors all the time. So I did computer science.

**[39:20]** I was coding, but I was fine doing fine, but I was not loving it. And since after my MBA, I just shifted my career and I move towards technology sales. I worked at Oracle three and a half years, very good experience of water training. What a sales organization I owe a lot of my sales principles and enterprise selling skills relationship building to Oracle and my bosses and seniors there. And then I was offered at Microsoft what what a company, what horizon, what learning and exposure I got there. And but it was 2013, 2014 Microsoft like last year's at Microsoft, I started thinking about my own company.

**[40:04]** And then I joined VMWare and but my dream of my company was not letting me sleep. So after like 15 years of in, but in 15 years I switched seven companies who does that. And you know, everyone was my father was saying, Hey, how you are searching and all that. And but that those seven companies gave me a very big network. So I advise all the junior people who are like doing jobs that three to four years maximum and you should save jobs, because that will allow you to learn different environments and different bosses, different cultures and different team members. And at the end it will increase your network as well.

**[40:42]** So that at the age of 40, you have more referral options. So after like 15 years of this, yeah, 15 years of this journey of learning, crashing, crying, laughing, partying, all that stuff. I started Vincop, which is now almost eight years old, 55 employees and 150 customers, including two fortune, 507 unicorns. And what we are solving here is basically we are helping founders, business owners and mid-size and bigger companies in their technology and marketing journey. First five years, they were focusing cold on technology only, but the market and the world is changing with AI, building technology is getting easier.

### 41:27 — VinnCorp today and how to reach Khurram

**[41:27]** So we have added marketing, video editing and like creative marketing and creative content services as well to the company. So yeah, this is my background and current situation and looking to grow. Amazing. Amazing. Well, your experience is definitely shown in what you're able to share and I appreciate you passing down everything that you shared today. What's the best way for people listening to get in touch with you personally, or if they're a good fit for Vincorp, what's the best way to get a hold of your team? I think LinkedIn is the best platform to reach out to me. Hurram Kalimi is my name and the company is Vincorp and they can email me.

**[42:15]** My nickname is KK and that is my email ID as well, KK@Vincorp.com. So they can reach me out there and they can also go to my LinkedIn. I'm also doing coaching based on my book. So I'm doing coaching one-on-one, group-based coaching as well. So people need any advice, any help, they can always reach out to me on LinkedIn and email. Amazing. Well, KK, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you so much for sharing all of the insights. I have definitely a brand new perspective on AI and making sure it's not developing a level of atrophy for go-to-market teams and finding ways to fire up that creative

**[43:01]** process and then always remembering we're people, we're selling to people, we're selling to people through people and making that human experience core at what your go-to-market strategy is and also just all the life lessons and showing that through your career as well is really, really inspiring. So KK, thank you again. Appreciate it. And I know a lot of our listeners are going to enjoy it. And as you continue to accomplish even more amazing things, as I'm sure you will, we'd love to have you back at some time. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Anthony, for having me and giving me the opportunity to share what I think. Amazing. Thank you.

**[43:45]** And whenever you are visiting New York City, feel free to visit our office and meet. Absolutely. Can't wait for it. Thank you.


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