S2E32: You're going to get usurped by an Al company

Maria Colacurcio built Smartsheet into a Pacific Northwest giant. Now, as CEO of Syndio, she's betting the company on a pivot from SaaS to agentic AI. And she's not looking back.

In this episode, Maria walks Manny through the launch of Syndi, an AI pay expert that transforms how companies make compensation decisions. Instead of annual pay equity audits that send CFOs scrambling for remediation budgets, Syndi embeds fairness as a constraint in every offer, every promotion, every pay decision. The result: companies save millions in payroll waste while actually improving equity outcomes.

Maria is candid about what "burning the boats" actually looks like. She discusses the internal communication challenges of asking employees to commoditize their own product, why some attrition is inevitable during a pivot, and how she keeps her board aligned when engagement scores are dropping and Blind is lighting up. Her solution to board prep? A custom GPT loaded with her deck, messaging, and each board member's particular interests, so meetings become strategic conversations rather than rabbit holes.

The episode also covers TD SYNNEX's early adoption of agent-powered HR, why the EU Pay Transparency Directive will force multinationals to explain their pay decisions, and how Syndi tracks the network effect of compensation choices over time. Revealing, for example, that 28% of "ex-OpenAI premium" hires leave as non-regrettable attrition. For any CEO wondering whether to bolt AI onto existing systems or rebuild from the ground up, Maria's answer is clear: your faster, more early-stage competitors will quickly overcome you if you don't go native.

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