Optimizing for Human Connection
How Clari CEO Andy Byrne’s focus on human relationships led him to reimagine the revenue process with artificial intelligence.
BY ATHENA FROST
PUBLISHED JANUARY 24, 2023
When Andy Byrne was a child in the late ’70s and early ’80s, he remembers being fascinated by the stories his father, Donn, told when he came home from work. Donn ran a commercial real estate business, leasing space to tech startups in the greater Mountain View, California, area. He talked at the dinner table about companies like Fairchild Semiconductor turning ideas into transformational technology. Byrne was mesmerized with the promise of the burgeoning tech scene. “I just loved the idea that you could create something from nothing,” Byrne says.
But the dinner table conversations changed when Byrne was a young teen and his parents divorced. His mother, Joyce, worked to support herself, Byrne and his two siblings. Joyce had always played guitar, so she turned her hobby into a teaching business. Byrne recalls cranking out tablature mimeographs in the garage, which Joyce had turned into a music studio with carpeting lining the walls and floors. At the same time, she started another business selling space in coupon books. Byrne remembers stories of his mom sliding coupon books in mailboxes across town. He watched her transform her little coupon business into a successful publishing company, printing chamber of commerce books from San Jose to Walnut Creek.
Byrne paid attention as his mom gradually grew her businesses. “Kids would come to the back, and she would teach guitar,” Byrne remembers, “and then her salespeople would come in, five or six of them, and she’s training them on how to sell,” he says. Watching Joyce hustle, observing her passion for people—her guitar students, her sales reps, her customers—Byrne was inspired to live up to his mom’s example.
Athena Frost is a writer living in Los Angeles. She works with Epic Stories as a story hunter and archival producer on pieces such as The Big Cigar on Apple+ and the critically acclaimed documentary The Beauty of Blackness. Find her work via her Twitter @AstroAthena and Instagram @athenafrostwrites.
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