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Two to three years ago, software companies were still planning product roadmaps in years and quarters. Today, as one of our guests put it, the only question that matters is “what are we shipping this week?”
That guest was Chano Fernández, co-CEO of Klaviyo. He joined us to explain how AI agents are reshaping marketing and customer engagement, why taste may be the biggest moat AI companies can build, and what it really takes for a public software company to stay relevant when the ground keeps moving.
Chano held senior leadership roles at SAP before becoming co-CEO of Workday, where he helped expand its global and enterprise business. He was then co-CEO of the AI-native talent platform Eightfold, and spent two years on Klaviyo’s board, most recently as interim executive. In January, he became co-CEO alongside co-founder Andrew Bialecki. Andrew focuses fully on Klaviyo’s AI vision and products, while Chano runs go-to-market, operations, and G&A. Klaviyo now serves more than 200,000 customers, with around 9 billion profiles and 250 billion transactions a quarter on the platform.
In our in-depth episode, we discuss:
Why email may become less relevant as AI agents start reading it for us, and why Klaviyo’s 14 years of data and infrastructure can’t be replicated with vibe coding
Inside Composer, Klaviyo’s agentic marketing tool: seven or eight sub-agents, and why getting a campaign to come out “80% or 90% right” for a CMO comes down to taste
Where software pricing is heading: from seats to consumption to outcome-based deals, and the 5% to 6% revenue share Chano is seeing emerge across the industry
How 70% to 80% of Klaviyo’s code is now written by AI, why its Friday product meetings show what shipped that week, and why a new product only needs to be 60% to 70% ready at launch
How the co-CEO model works in practice: a written operating agreement, two to three calls a day, and why only a handful of decisions each year really need both of them
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Download the transcript 👇
Timestamps
(0:00) Intro
(1:10) How AI is changing marketing
(2:24) Is email dead?
(5:15) How Klaviyo has evolved
(7:10) How Klaviyo stays relevant
(10:35) Where business owners are focusing
(14:10) What owning your audience means today
(15:07) Building AI model partnerships
(16:54) Would Klaviyo build its own AI model?
(21:32) What great taste looks like
(23:23) What great taste is missing
(24:32) Are customers worried about pricing?
(25:46) Shipping Klaviyo's latest products
(28:17) Is the future of software headless?
(30:43) An AI co-worker for Klaviyo users?
(32:38) Is trust the new moat?
(35:05) The role of the product roadmap
(36:33) Klaviyo's favorite AI models
(38:10) What's missing from the Klaviyo stack
(39:22) Is SaaS pricing dead?
(44:19) How much code AI writes
(47:05) Keeping up with the speed of change
(51:10) Will more companies have co-CEOs?
(58:17) Running a public company
(59:42) Is the market correcting?
(1:01:45) Ollie becomes Chano's Chief of Staff
Lessons from this episode with Chano
1. Agents will read your emails for you
Chano thinks email’s role changes once AI agents start acting on our behalf.
“I believe it will become less relevant, just because some of those agents will be the ones consuming many of those emails going forward.”
Email won’t disappear. It will stay one of the cheapest and most efficient channels. Chano also expects agents to do more than read: they will use what they know about us to surface better products, offers and services. For brands, the challenge is personalizing at scale, and that is where automation and agents come in.
2. Marketing and service are becoming one
Moving Klaviyo from a marketing tool to an AI agent platform wasn’t optional.
“The boundaries between marketing and service have become more indistinct.”
If a customer has just complained or asked for a refund, the next thing they want is not a promotion. Most brands can’t see that, because their data sits across six or seven disconnected systems with no real-time view. Chano says this is where Klaviyo’s infrastructure gives it an edge: around 9 billion profiles, 250 billion transactions a quarter, and the ability to send 100 million messages in 20 minutes.
3. Taste is the hardest thing to automate
Klaviyo’s agent, Composer, builds campaign calendars and campaigns for brands that are short on people or ideas. Getting the output right comes down to taste.
“If you’re a chief marketing officer, you want to see the campaign the agent is creating and say: wow, this is really my brand, my image, my language.”
Code is fairly deterministic: good code is good code at any company. Brand voice is different for every customer. Klaviyo measures progress through thumbs-up ratings, how many campaigns go live without edits, and direct customer feedback. Each edit a brand makes feeds the next model.
4. Stay model-agnostic and route by task
With AI labs shipping updates every few weeks, Chano says no company can afford to lock itself to one model.
“It’s important to be as model-agnostic as possible.”
Composer runs on at least seven or eight sub-agents, covering email templates, flow templates and campaign taste, and each can sit on a different underlying model. Klaviyo’s engineers test new releases quickly and change the routing when a better model appears. Chano expects model capabilities to become more standardized, so routing well will matter more than picking a winner.
5. Pricing is heading towards outcomes
Klaviyo had a head start on the shift away from per-seat pricing.
“We were never on seat-based pricing like many other SaaS companies.”
Klaviyo’s pricing has always tracked sends and profiles, rising and falling with seasons like Black Friday. Its customer service agent already charges only when it resolves a conversation. Chano sees the industry settling on a base subscription with usage on top. Outcome-based deals come next, where the vendor takes a share of attributed revenue. The benchmark he is seeing is 5% to 6%.
6. Launch at 60% to 70%
Around 70% to 80% of Klaviyo’s code is now written by AI, and the planning cadence has changed with it.
“Two to three years ago, we were still talking about product roadmaps in years and in quarters, and the conversation today is: what are we shipping this week?”
Every Friday, a group of engineers presents what shipped that week. The hard call is when to launch. Customers have less patience than in the old SaaS era, when a product had 12 to 24 months to mature. AI products can also improve dramatically within weeks. Chano’s threshold is a product that is 60% to 70% ready.
7. Co-CEOs only work with trust, complementary skills and low ego
Chano was on Klaviyo’s board when the company decided Andrew Bialecki needed to spend all his time on product vision.
“It’s not an easy model, but it’s a very effective one.”
The two wrote down how they would run the company and speak two to three times a day. Andrew owns product; Chano owns go-to-market and the rest of the business. At first they held joint one-to-ones with leaders, which are no longer needed. Chano’s view is that only a handful of decisions each year, on strategy, culture and organization, need both of them. The rest can be made by either and reversed if needed.
8. Focus on inputs, not the share price
With Klaviyo’s stock down 35% this year at the time of this recording, Chano says his answer is to focus on what the company controls.
“If you take care of the right inputs, the outputs will take care of themselves.”
For Chano, the inputs are innovation, happy and referenceable customers, the right culture, and getting the few big decisions right. He sees the market as trying to separate AI wrappers from companies with durable moats. In his view, that will get easier as more AI-native companies go public, and it could take anywhere from two to six quarters.
Where to connect with us
Follow Ollie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ollieforsyth
Follow Chano on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chanofernande
Vist Klaviyo: https://klaviyo.com
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