Dan Lee, CEO & Co-Founder of Nooks – Interview Series

Can you walk us through the journey of founding Nooks? What inspired you to start the company, and how did the idea evolve over time?

My cofounders, Rohan Suri, Nikhil Cheerla, and I were close friends from Stanford. We all studied AI and did research together. During the pandemic, we started hacking around with “virtual office” ideas. It seemed like the perfect time—everyone was remote, and collaboration tools were becoming essential. We were particularly excited about the idea of making the virtual office “smart”. Always-on collaboration generates so much data and engagement, and we saw an opportunity to leverage that to automate work and help people get better at their jobs.

We noticed that sales teams, particularly SDR teams, were our most engaged users. They’re inherently social, and being early in their careers, they benefited a lot from the tighter collaboration these tools enabled. Spending more time with them, we saw how much of their time was spent on tasks that AI could easily handle—writing emails, researching prospects, updating CRMs. It made us wonder: would AI eventually replace these roles?

But the deeper we got, the more we realized how human the SDR job is. It’s not just about tasks; it’s about understanding people, building relationships, and adapting in real-time. That’s when it clicked. AI wasn’t here to replace them—it could empower them.

For me personally, I’ve always been fascinated by human-AI interactions. Building a product that enhances what people do, rather than replacing them, felt fulfilling. Sales became this natural extension of our virtual office idea, and with the market opportunity aligned perfectly with our interests, Nooks was born.

The pivot from a remote collaboration platform to an AI-driven sales assistant was a bold move. What were the key indicators that convinced you it was the right decision?

Not only was there huge demand for Nooks from sales teams, but there was also an enormous market opportunity, impact, and really interesting human-centered AI problems to solve.

Over the past few years, foundation model companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have competed to push the boundaries of intelligence with LLMs. But the practical applications to solve real business problems remain under-developed.

Sales is one of the biggest opportunities for AI to transform millions of jobs. In the U.S. alone, there are ~3 million inside sales reps, spending much of their time on repetitive tasks. These activities are time-consuming and distract from higher-leverage actions. Now that AI can automate much of this busywork, it’s become clear that AI will transform the role of the sales rep. AI-powered teams will be able to sell orders of magnitude more effectively than traditional teams. Leading companies know that this kind of investment in sales is most companies’ key lever for growth.

We not only built conviction in the market, but we also found the applied AI problems in sales particularly interesting. Unlike domains like support or compliance, where tasks are more deterministic, sales is about dynamic, high-stakes human interactions. Success relies on nuanced engagement: identifying the right stakeholders, earning trust, and persuading buyers of a product’s value. This complexity makes AI “assistants” the ideal application for sales, amplifying human efforts rather than attempting to replace them.

Nooks has transformed sales processes with tools like AI Dialing Assistants and Prospecting Assistants. What makes your technology stand out in the crowded AI sales assistant market?

The sales AI space is super crowded with new entrants every day. And sales reps already use dozens of sales tools in their daily workflows—CRMs, email platforms, LinkedIn, prospecting databases, enablement tools, and more. Nobody wants just another AI sales tool so it’s really important we’re intentional about standing above the noise.

1. Fast, tangible ROI. Most AI sales tools don’t work or don’t deliver clear results. In a two-week trial of Nooks, we’ll double your meetings booked per rep. Demonstrating our value up-front has helped us stand out against other tools that are little more than a cool demo. We power 70%+ of sales pipeline for some of the world’s fastest-growing companies like Deel, Webflow, Verkada and Fivetran.
2. Sales reps love Nooks. Historically SDRs & BDRs have not gotten much love from software tools and often don’t command the budget. But things are changing, and end-users are empowered to help shape buying decisions. We’ve been very intentional about building for the rep, our end-user. Nooks gives reps superpowers whereas other tools can feel like a chore to use. The average rep spends 3hrs/day using Nooks. And we’re at the top of the leaderboard in review sites like G2.
3. Human-first. We’ve started with human-centered tasks like calling because it’s important that, as technology progresses, customers use your product more and more. Other companies that start with things like email or research will find that sales reps use those products less and less over time because these sales tasks can be mostly automated with AI. We’re excited to build human-AI hybrids that can out-pace the best human reps and out-smart the best pure AI sales agents.

Could you share more about the role AI plays in optimizing sales teams’ efficiency? For example, how does your AI Parallel Dialer skip common pain points like answering machines or spam?

Sales is both an art and a science. With Nooks, human reps master the art—building relationships, empathizing with customer challenges, and crafting creative solutions—while AI helps with the science. Nooks assistants analyze every entry in the CRM, scour the web for relevant insights, and handle repetitive tasks like placing calls, writing emails, and updating records.

For example, think about the typical process for making a call: looking up a prospect’s number, doing some pre-call research, dialing, and often reaching voicemail or no answer. Multiply that by dozens of calls each day, and it quickly becomes a major time sink.

AI transforms this process by automating the tedious parts. It can dial multiple lines at once, leave voicemails automatically, and connect reps instantly when a live prospect answers. This lets sellers focus their energy on conversations, not manual tasks.

When a prospect does answer, AI goes a step further by providing relevant research and context, enabling reps to have more impactful discussions. The outcome? More meaningful conversations that drive pipeline growth.

Training bots and call scoring are intriguing. How does Nooks ensure these tools are accurate and truly beneficial for sales reps and managers?

Call scoring and training bots are shaping how sales teams reinforce and scale best practices. Traditionally, managers had to sift through call recordings, selectively scoring and identifying areas for improvement—a time-consuming process that left reps with limited feedback and growth opportunities.

AI changes the game by analyzing every call and correlating performance with success metrics. It provides scalable, comprehensive feedback for all reps, ensuring consistent improvement across the team. Managers can customize scoring criteria, focusing on key stages or objections in the sales process to align with their strategy.

Training bots take this further by using real-world call data to simulate conversations with prospects. These bots identify winning behaviors and challenges, allowing reps to practice unlimited role plays based on real scenarios. Managers can fine-tune these simulations to add complexity or target specific objections, creating tailored training experiences.

Nooks enables managers to audit and optimize both training bots and call scoring to ensure accuracy. Combining AI’s scalability with manager-driven customization, sales teams can elevate their coaching and training programs to drive better outcomes at scale.

What advancements in AI and machine learning do you foresee playing a crucial role in Nooks' future development?

Advancements in AI like improvements in reasoning, speech models, and browsing models such as Anthropic’s computer-use and OpenAI’s upcoming “Operator” model are a huge benefit to Nooks since we have the richest data and highest user engagement at the top-of-funnel. Improved intelligence means we can cut out more busywork more quickly and our assistants are able to develop a deeper understanding of customers’ sales processes.

But it’s really remarkable what AI models can already do today. And the practical applications of this intelligence to solve real business problems are still catching up. We have a lot of exciting product updates planned that will feel futuristic to reps, but don’t really require model intelligence beyond what we already have today.

We’re particularly excited to build AI workflows that span across our AI assistants, helping them work together seamlessly and eliminate the need for reps to act as “human glue” manually connecting disparate tools. This will help bridge intelligence and workflow gaps across today’s fragmented tool stacks.

The sales industry is valued at $3 trillion, and legacy players like Salesforce dominate the space. How does Nooks plan to carve out a larger share of this market?

We have tight integrations with platforms like Salesforce. They’re incredible for CRM and managing deal pipelines, but they don’t solve the day-to-day challenges reps face in the trenches of selling. That’s where we come in. In this new world of AI, replacing legacy tools is not very exciting. The real opportunity lies in redefining people’s jobs.

AI-driven tools often face skepticism about replacing human roles. How do you address concerns about automation replacing jobs versus enhancing human productivity?

Sales is fundamentally a human-centered challenge. Unlike other domains beginning to leverage pure AI agents—such as support, coding, or legal—the output of a sales rep is not a straightforward, deterministic task. Rather, it’s a complex, dynamic human interaction.

In many other AI domains, the “consumer” is actively seeking the results. For example,  a customer asking for support or an engineer is producing code. In sales, however, the buyer is the consumer. They’re probably not actively looking to be sold to and their inboxes are already flooded with AI-generated outreach. As a result, being human stands out.

Sales AI must focus on amplifying human creativity and trust. Thus, the ideal AI applications for sales are “assistants” that empower humans rather than AI “agents” attempting to replace them. AI-assisted reps will out-pace the best human reps and will out-smart the best pure AI sales agents.

Looking ahead, where do you see Nooks in five years? What larger impact do you hope it will have on the sales industry?

There are millions of sales reps in the US and their jobs are about to evolve. Nooks is poised to lead this transformation. Automating the “busywork” and enabling reps to focus on what they do best—building relationships and driving top-line growth—we envision leaner, AI-powered teams achieving orders of magnitude more effectiveness than traditional teams. AI assistants will become indispensable, just like top sales reps, because they won’t just support the sales process—they’ll be executing it.

In this future, AI-powered sales teams will not only deliver unprecedented growth for their companies but also set a higher bar for what sales can achieve as a discipline. Beyond productivity gains, we hope to empower sales reps to deliver more value to their customers.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Nooks.

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