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Dennis Steele

Dennis Steele

Co-founder of Podium, the AI-led customer communication platform for local businesses, which he built with Eric Rea through Y Combinator to a $3B valuation.

Sep 24, 2026

14:39
Mm-hmm.
14:39
This is the BDC agent to take on leads back in 2023.
14:43
So it's been almost three years since we've had an agent live in a dealership working, right? So that's kind of a long time, like, in, like, uh, in AI sense, right? And you have this first wave of progressive early adopters, and they're all over it, right? They see this technology and they're like, "Okay, we're gonna try this thing and just figure it out." And so you had that wave, and I still think at that point there was, like, legitimate questions around how much value can AI really help, like, h- how much can this really do for my dealership? And now we're in the wave of, you know, the- the early adopters have done it.
15:18
We have plenty of data to show that there's tons of value that you can add to your business, and now we're seeing that- that second wave of dealers being like, "I don't wanna be last to the game."

15 MINS LATER

30:22
Yeah.
30:22
Yeah, because n- now that we've set it up this way, the use cases that come in, I mean, it's, it's, it's unlimited.
30:28
And so the use cases come in, and sometimes we're surprised.
30:30
So the one I was reading the other day, um, uh, a- Head of, head of 37 dealerships.

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