Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Friday, January 24th. Today on Forbes, Clay, a secret weapon for

Anthropic and Open AI, boosts valuation to $1.3 billion. When Clay CEO Karim Amin logged

off in September 2021 to embark upon a 10-day meditation

retreat, he had the future of his business to think about.

Four years of work on the New York-based startup had seen Amin tinker on a few ideas in pursuit

of a grand vision of making programming more accessible for everyone, developers and

non-coderes alike.

But Amin felt like he was at a crossroads.

Clay had landed on a product that functioned as a no-code internal app builder for anyone

in a business, be they an accountant, marketer, or salesperson.

A supercharged spreadsheet connected outside data sources for them in one spot. Other software

helped them manage workflows. Another allowed them to program in whatever else they wanted.

But with users, one unglamorous application for Clay's software was resonating above all.

Go-to-market efforts, centered mostly on the spreadsheet part. There, growth teams

responsible for filtering up the best leads to their sales colleagues were collecting intel,

like what other software tools prospects were already using, who their own clients were,

and where potential decision makers used to work. This wasn't the highest-impact use case that Amin could

imagine, but it was what customers needed, he realized. Instead of building the biggest possible tool,

Clay just needed to build something useful. Amin told Forbes, quote, I had this internal pressure

of ambition about the kind of impact we could have in the world, we would

switch from one manifestation of the idea to another. Removing that, paradoxically, has allowed us to

potentially realize that ambition. Narrowing Clay's aperture from a do-anything horizontal

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