George Dilthey leads Support at Clay, a workflow automation platform for go-to-market teams. He started his career in the arts world and marketing analytics before falling into support at Mutiny and hasn't looked back since.
This is a ~30 minute conversation about what happens when you build a support team from scratch at one of the fastest-growing companies in tech: hiring new grads, rotating them through the company, navigating AI deflection, and staying obsessed with customer outcomes even as everything around you changes.
What I loved about our conversation
The Wheel is a talent engine, not just a rotation program. New grads start in support full-time, become product and customer experts, then rotate 70/30 across the company. The result: "support alumni" embedded in every team, carrying the customer voice with them. George gets three DMs a week from leaders asking for a Wheelie.
First contact resolution flipped on its head. George used to chase high FCR as a quality signal. Now he sees it the opposite way: if a human can solve it in one shot, AI should probably be handling it. Dropping FCR for humans actually means the team is doing the harder, more consultative work.
Response times are a customer experience decision, not an efficiency metric. Clay doesn't measure response times in seconds. They go into headcount conversations starting with the experience they want (one to two hours), then figure out what they need to maintain it. Not the other way around.
"You should just build." George was feeling guilty about getting into the weeds instead of doing "leadership things." His boss Jess told him to block time to build. Now he's back to shipping Fin automations, Notion agents, and workflows and pushing that same mentality across the team.
