From Google to Founder: A Tech Startup Story with Warmly,
This episode of the Tech Startup Stories Podcast features Maximus Greenwald, CEO and founder of Warmly, with host Natalie Binns. In this episode, Max shares how a failed Tinder-for-co-founders app taught him everything about sales and marketing, why he refuses to hire from big tech companies, and how building AI agents is reshaping the way sales and marketing teams actually work together.
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Available on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
Max Greenwald was the last person you would expect to build a sales and marketing platform. As a software engineer and product manager at Google, he had never touched sales or marketing in his career. But when he left to start a business, the business idea he chose was spectacularly bad: an app to help people find co-founders by swiping left or right. Predictably, nobody wanted it. What Max discovered in that failure was far more valuable than any successful launch. He was terrible at sales and marketing, and that realization became the foundation for Warmly.
The origin story no one saw coming
Six years ago, Max left Google with a vision but no real plan. The co-founder matching app bombed, but the experience forced him to confront a gap in his skillset. Rather than learn traditional sales and marketing methods, he asked a different question: could he build software to do it for him? That question kicked off a journey that eventually became an AI agent platform designed to help salespeople and marketers find warm leads, nurture them, and book meetings without the endless cold outreach that defines so much of B2B sales today.
The early version of Warmly, was built around intent data, the concept that you can identify leads who are already showing signs they need your solution, even if they have never heard of you. Max and his co-founders, Alan and Karina, spent years refining this approach with customer feedback until it evolved into what Warmly is today: a set of AI agents that handle data discovery, inbound engagement, and outbound follow-up.
Sales and marketing, finally on the same team
One of the most interesting shifts Max talks about is how sales and marketing are merging into a single function in many organisations. He calls it the go-to-market team, and it reflects a practical reality: outbound drives inbound, and inbound drives outbound. The old model of having separate teams own separate channels, one doing ads, another doing content, another managing SDRs, created internal competition and attribution wars. Max is seeing more companies reorganise around horizontal ownership of the funnel instead. Rather than owning a channel, teams own a stage: top of funnel, middle of funnel, or bottom of funnel. The result is alignment, less infighting, and a clearer path to pipeline.
Warmly sits in the middle of that evolution, giving both teams visibility into the same leads and preventing duplication of effort. The platform currently offers three AI agents in market: a data agent that finds warm leads, an inbound agent that engages visitors on your website through chatbots and pop-ups, and an outbound agent that chases those leads to book meetings. A marketing operations agent is coming soon to prioritise and score that data before passing it along.
Building culture by doing the opposite of Google
Max does not mince words when talking about his time at Google. He describes it as bloated, bureaucratic, and full of smart but unmotivated people. The experience shaped how he built Warmly's culture, mostly by doing the exact opposite. He does not hire from big tech companies. He sees it as a red flag that someone is used to moving slowly, playing politics, and not taking real ownership. Instead, he hires scrappy startup people who can move fast and break things without asking for permission first.
His rule is simple: if no one on the team has messed up something big at least once a year, they are not moving fast enough. He would rather celebrate fast iteration and course correction than spend time getting approval from every stakeholder. That mindset has helped Warmly grow to a team of 55 people spread across the globe, from North Macedonia to Pakistan to the Philippines, all working on US hours to serve a primarily North American customer base.
The hardest part was not the product
When asked what the hardest part of the journey has been, Max did not hesitate: messaging. He believes building a good product is easier than most people think, especially today. What is hard is getting the messaging right so that it actually lands with buyers. He spent years iterating on how Warmly talked about itself, using a framework he follows called “open-close”. The idea is to brainstorm multiple messaging options in an open phase, commit to one for a set period in a closed phase, write down new ideas that come up without switching mid-stream, and then return to an open phase to decide whether to stick or pivot. Each time you restart a closed phase, you extend the timeline. One month becomes five months becomes a year becomes three years. It forces focus while still allowing for iteration.
Max admits the framework is partly retrospective, something he stumbled into by doing what felt right and then codified later. But it worked, and now Warmly has messaging that resonates with demand generation teams at B2B companies with 50 to 500 employees.
For anyone still stuck in corporate
Max's advice for people dreaming of leaving a comfortable corporate job to start something is blunt: get out and just try it. He sees staying at a big, sleepy company as the riskier choice, especially if you value lifelong learning and meaningful work. Even if a startup does not lead to financial success, the skills you build and the experience you gain are worth more than a steady paycheck and internal politics. He acknowledges that financial responsibilities like mortgages and kids complicate the decision, but suggests that if you are in a partnership, one person can focus on steady income while the other takes the swing.
When he is not building Warmly, Max skis. He grew up in Colorado and spent a month in France this past winter, skiing every morning before working from noon to midnight thanks to the time zone difference with the USA. He also freestyles raps with friends to keep his mind sharp and creative. It is a long way from Google, and he would not have it any other way.
Listen to the Podcast
Available on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
Connect with Maximus Greenwald and learn more about Warmly,.