Matt Price On Raising $50M And Leveraging M&A Growth Strategies To Reimagine The Customer Support Experience And Disrupt A $500B Industry

For Matt Price, entrepreneurship was not a sudden leap but the culmination of decades working at the forefront of tech innovation. His journey progressed from his early days in the UK tech scene to executive leadership at Zendesk and to launching Crescendo.

Crescendo has secured funding from top-tier investors like General Catalyst, Alorica, and Celesta Capital.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Matt Price transitioned from corporate operator to founder by recognizing AI’s potential to reshape customer service.
• Crescendo combines AI and human support to deliver outcome-based customer service that aligns business and consumer interests.
• The company reached product-market fit rapidly by partnering with a pre-built tech team that joined as co-founders.
• Milestone-based funding from General Catalyst allowed Crescendo to focus on execution rather than constant fundraising.
• Strategic acquisitions brought operational capacity and hundreds of customers, accelerating Crescendo’s growth.
• Crescendo challenges industry norms with its “only pay for outcomes” pricing model, driving measurable results.
• Matt’s leadership philosophy emphasizes alignment over control and the power of surrounding yourself with expert advisors.

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About Matt Price:

Matt Price is the Founder and CEO of Crescendo, a groundbreaking service that blends AI and human expertise to provide exceptional customer service.

A seasoned software executive with deep expertise in scaling high-growth companies. Matt has a proven track record of running sales, marketing, product, and M&A, having worked for five high-growth companies, three of which went public and two were sold.

As the founder of Zendesk’s European operation, Matt helped to establish the company as a global leader in customer service software.

Matt is passionate about working on interesting projects and helping innovators and founders to scale their visions. As a cross-functional leader, he excels at building consensus and executing tactics through to strategy. He is action-oriented and dedicated to achieving ambitious goals.

Connect with Matt Price:

• LinkedIn
• Crunchbase
• TheOrg
• RocketReach

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: All righty. Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Dealmaker Show. Today we have with us a fantastic founder — a founder who basically went through the ranks in corporate and other exciting hyper-growth companies, and then decided to get going as an entrepreneur. Today, we’re going to be talking about the founding story of the business, which is quite unique, as well as the way they think about growth by acquisition.

Alejandro Cremades: And then also raising money and how to build incredible teams. A very inspiring conversation. Brace yourself for what we have ahead of us. And without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Matt Price. Welcome to the show.

Matt Price: Hey, thank you, Alejandro. It’s a real pleasure to be here.

Alejandro Cremades: So, originally born and raised in the UK. Give us a walkthrough down memory lane. How was life growing up for you?

Matt Price: You know, I grew up in a small town in England. A big memory for me that’s relevant here is that I saw my first computer in a department store way back and was immediately intrigued by it.

Matt Price: At that point, I had to wait until Christmas to get the computer, and I didn’t want to do that. So I’d just go into the store and teach myself to code there. They thought I was a sales guy — and that’s because I ended up selling more computers than anybody else in the store.

Matt Price: So they let me stay there.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s amazing. So then for you — what happened next? It sounds like problem-solving is in your DNA.

Matt Price: Yeah, maybe it sounds like that. I wasn’t a great academic student and I wasn’t a book guy. I managed to get through college just on my computing skills. And then my life just opened up when I was able to land a job at Borland at that time, which was one of the fastest-growing PC software tools companies. That was like my hands-on MBA — an amazing experience.

Matt Price: The people I worked with there were amazing. People like Marc Randolph was running direct marketing and went on to found Netflix. Just an amazing caliber of people and such serendipity to fall into that environment.

Alejandro Cremades: I mean, it sounds like you were doing the whole tech thing in the UK all the way until Zendesk. Zendesk was what ended up bringing you to the U.S. But I guess — talk to us about that journey and what were some of the biggest lessons before Zendesk crossed paths with you?

Matt Price: Yeah, it was interesting working in operating roles in companies. I think the biggest lesson, or the thing I’m most grateful I did, was that I joined companies that were growing — and I didn’t care about the role.

Matt Price: I felt like if I could get into a growth company — and I think this was mostly driven by my interest in technology — I loved a good piece of technology and a business idea. So I ended up in very innovative businesses.

Matt Price: And as they grew quickly, I was able to take on many different roles. It was a great foundation.

Matt Price: I had the opportunity to work in many different roles and on many different projects. So really, I was a founder and an innovator within a corporate environment for a long time, but just hadn’t found the idea or the business that attracted me to go it alone — until Crescendo.

Alejandro Cremades: We’ll talk about Crescendo in just a bit, but Zendesk was pivotal for you — pivotal because you came to the U.S., and pivotal because you were able to experience hypergrowth.

Alejandro Cremades: How did Zendesk come across your radar?

Matt Price: I’m sorry, Alejandro, it broke up. Can you repeat that question?

Alejandro Cremades: Yeah — how did Zendesk come across your radar? How did you connect, and how did it crystallize into you joining the team and finding yourself in the U.S.?

Matt Price: A lot of this was just network. I was based in the UK. A previous colleague of mine had just joined Zendesk and they were looking to expand. So I got a call asking, “Hey, do you want to join this company?”

Matt Price: I think it was about 50 people at the time — less than a few million in ARR. I wasn’t sure about it. I looked at it and thought, “This is pretty interesting, but I don’t really know who this company is.”

Matt Price: So I started to follow them on Twitter and listen to what people were saying. This was the advent of SaaS, and it really piqued my curiosity. Selling on-premise software had been the norm, and the opportunity to actually understand how customers were using the technology was mind-blowing.

Matt Price: That combination became a no-brainer. Looking back, it was a great decision to do it.

Alejandro Cremades: Quite the ride — because with Zendesk, you were there for over 12 years. One thing that really stands out is that after working at tech companies and for other folks, all of a sudden — 18 months ago — you decided to take ownership of your own destiny and build your own thing. Enter the venture world. That’s quite unbelievable. How did that shift happen for you?

Matt Price: Yeah — and it wasn’t necessarily planned. I’ve been through many shifts in technology — from basic PCs to client-server, to web, internet, and SaaS. So when LLMs came out, I knew this was going to reinvent the whole stack and the domain I was in.

Matt Price: Based on my background, I thought that would probably mean joining a Series B-stage company and helping it scale.

Matt Price: But I was approached by a couple of co-founders, Amanda and Andy, saying, “Hey, we’ve got this idea.” And it was such a good idea — so well-backed and well thought-through — that it was a no-brainer to join the opportunity.

Matt Price: Also, in terms of assessing the opportunity versus risk, it was something I hadn’t seen before. And so that was the opportunity.

Alejandro Cremades: General Catalyst was also in the picture and helpful during the initial phase. How did the relationship with General Catalyst come about?

Matt Price: General Catalyst has a fund creation program where they back business ideas that they don’t necessarily see companies for at the time. One of the philosophies in the organization was the idea of AI disrupting traditional industries and building companies around that.

Matt Price: The idea for Crescendo was that the BPO industry — a half-trillion-dollar market — was ripe for disruption. But current approaches to disrupting customer service were very siloed — here’s a bot, here’s another tool. We wanted to step back and ask: what does it really take to transform the industry?

Matt Price: Could we assemble a group of founders with a solution that truly disrupts it? Customer service is an industry with a lot of unfulfilled promises. Could we be the company that delivers on value in the AI era? That’s how we were created.

Alejandro Cremades: So for the people listening, what ended up being the business model of Crescendo? How do you make money?

Matt Price: We provide customer service to companies — full-service, using both AI and humans.

Matt Price: Our unique approach lets us deploy advanced solutions — technology and people — within weeks.

Matt Price: As a result, customer care quality goes significantly up, and the cost to deliver it goes down. We’ve been going just over a year, and we already have dozens of customers seeing significant results.

Matt Price: It’s really about stepping back and rethinking how we approach this. How do we create a combined solution that actually delivers on its promises?

Alejandro Cremades: What was the moment where you felt like you turned the corner and hit product-market fit?

Matt Price: It happened really early. We were fortunate to team up with co-founders who had already spent two years developing 80–90% of what we needed. That was serendipity. They joined us as part of the journey.

Matt Price: We spent the first three months looking for pilot customers. Our vision was to only charge for outcomes. A lot of people talk about outcome-based pricing, but it’s usually limited to a small component — like a self-service bot.

Matt Price: We wanted to apply it to the whole thing. If we can’t answer a question, or the customer’s not satisfied, then they don’t pay.

Matt Price: That created alignment between the consumer, the business, and the supplier — end-to-end alignment of motivations.

Matt Price: The lights came on when we deployed the first few customers. With tech and humans working together, the results were clear.

Matt Price: We saw that this wasn’t just a one-level transformation — it was a complete rethinking of customer experience.

Matt Price: We brought cost economics down enough that clients who used to focus on deflection — hiding phone numbers, minimizing contact — could now afford to open up channels and talk to customers.

Matt Price: Engagement increased 5–10x. Customer service, once a back-end function, is now back in the boardroom.

Matt Price: We recently interviewed Ken Chenault, former chairman of American Express. He said Amex was all about customer service, and they could do that because they were a premium brand. But if he were running Amex now, he’d be worried about companies like Crescendo bringing that level of service to everyone.

Matt Price: That was our “lights on” moment. I’m sure other founders listening have had similar moments where the thing you started out building suddenly expands into so much more.

Alejandro Cremades: And what about building the team? What was your thought process, and how did you get the right people aligned to push this forward?

Matt Price: Yeah, you know, there’s kind of a meme that goes around — that in order to actually build a startup, you need to have a bunch of 20-somethings who really have the raw power and enthusiasm to drive it, and then maybe bring in senior operators. I mean, what we’ve learned is that…

Matt Price: That fire and, I mentioned, passion can exist in many people from many different dimensions. And if they’re curious about the opportunity and passionate about the opportunity, it can be incredibly powerful. So, you know, my engineering team are the guys that built Genesis Cloud — amazing experience in that area. We have a COO who has built many, many different operations. So, being able to bring this team together is incredibly powerful for us. You know, we have the experience combined with the fire.

Matt Price: And that’s exhibited in things like version one of our software — it is amazingly scalable, has failover built-in, and has a lot of things that no other AI platform has.

Matt Price: It’s because the guys that have built it have already built something like it and seen it operate at scale to, you know, millions and millions of users.

Matt Price: So that’s one of the core dynamics, but then you have to think about — and this is my role as a CEO — how do you optimize the talent you have and make sure it’s aligned and bought into the same place? This is not a command-and-control environment necessarily when you’ve got highly experienced talent.

Matt Price: This is about bringing people together and aligning them, and having them play really well as a team. You know, Andy — who’s my chairman, Andy Lee — he started Alorica and built it over 20 years into one of the largest and most successful contact center companies.

Matt Price: And he obviously loves the project, but he hadn’t gone through it before. But, you know, he said this is a bit like a basketball team or coach. You have highly skilled individuals who work in different environments. So part of the interesting aspect here is: how do you align and bring that team together to win the playoffs?

Matt Price: And it’s maybe a different approach from how you would necessarily organically grow something from scratch.

Alejandro Cremades: And then also, on the investment side of things, since we’re talking about people — you guys have raised over $50 million. So how has the journey of raising money and going through those motions been?

Matt Price: Yeah, I’m just fortunate to have amazing investors and partners, really, in General Catalyst. And so, you know, we agreed in advance that there would be certain milestones for future investment. And if we hit those milestones, then they would help to facilitate further investment rounds.

Matt Price: So rather than going out and doing big raises, we made a move — we set it up as milestone-based investments that were pre-agreed. And obviously, at that time, we brought in other investors as well. So it really allowed us as a team to focus on operating and meeting what we would call our value creation milestones,

Matt Price: which was, first, product-market fit — like you say, early product-market fit — and being able to prove that we can execute our first acquisition. And each of those triggered those milestones. So, I feel incredibly lucky to have actually started something with that degree of partnership.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, obviously, having these supportive investors and that clear understanding on the transactional side of things, I think that has also helped you guys in thinking through execution from a very unique perspective — which comes to building growth inorganically via M&A, via acquiring other companies.

Alejandro Cremades: This is quite unique. So walk us through this. What is the thought process? How do you guys go about it? And why is M&A the path that you have chosen for inorganic growth?

Matt Price: Yeah, I mean, the basic thesis of this is that the BPO market — the labor market for people — is highly commoditized at the moment. It’s very much a race to the bottom on just really providing labor. It’s not really business process outsourcing — it’s really, “Who can provide me with offshore labor at the lowest cost?”

Matt Price: And it’s an arbitrage. And there are many, many businesses in this arena. Our philosophy is that, actually, by partnering with organizations who are very skilled at operating this — I mean, it’s amazing. Me coming from a tech background, I’m constantly impressed by the operational rigor of these companies.

Matt Price: But by bringing that, what we can do is combine the technology viewpoint, outcome-based model, and bring in this — we can take something that has this level of value and make it a lot higher value. You know, and that’s — I mean, I’m not an investor, but obviously this is a model that’s been around for a while, which is a roll-up model. If you take an asset and roll it up, and combine it, and create more value from it.

Matt Price: What’s unique about this is that if you approach it very much from a growth aspect, then the dynamics change. We still look at the same investment metrics — how we acquire and the ROI of that. You know, my co-founders and investors are much better on those economics. But where I come at it from is the operator perspective: How does this help me accelerate the growth of the overall vision?

Matt Price: And it’s really interesting because if you just look at it as a pure customer acquisition cost, or a customer acquisition approach for a new business or an early business like ours — we made our first acquisition and along with it came 200 very happy customers who were purchasing labor services from the organization.

Matt Price: Very quickly, they were excited about the new proposition and new proposal. And as I say, now we have dozens of them on the new platform — costs are lower, CSATs are higher, and they can expand. So that would have taken us a lot longer

Matt Price: to execute if we were doing it organically. We still do it organically, but we now have this other approach of acquiring BPOs, bringing on their book of business, upgrading the customers, and obviously creating… that creates significantly more value both for them and for us as part of the roll-up. So it’s been exciting to see how the side benefits of this really help accelerate the business. I’m sure it doesn’t work in every market, but we’re lucky — or actually, it’s forethought — from the origination that this is a great way to acquire distribution for our new offering.

Alejandro Cremades: So obviously, when it comes to the transactional side, the people side, there’s always vision — vision that people are ultimately betting on. So the question that comes to mind is: imagine, Matt, that you go to sleep tonight and you wake up in a world where the vision of Crescendo is fully realized.

Alejandro Cremades: What does that world look like?

Matt Price: If you think of it from a consumer perspective — I think of a world where I can, at any point in time on any channel, interact with a company and get help from them.

Matt Price: And it’s frictionless. It’s not frustration. I’m not wasting my time. Now, this is a vision that’s been thrown out by everybody who has sold any kind of CX tool or anything for the last 30 years — and it hasn’t worked.

Matt Price: What I wake up and see is that it works because of the way we’ve approached the problem in a very unique way — combining the AI with the humans.

Matt Price: And what that means in reality is — let’s say, we’re thinking about the different dynamics of what customer support is. We’re working with clients who provide reasonably sophisticated home devices, connected devices, direct-to-commerce businesses.

Matt Price: And you see the lights go on. At first, we say, “Okay, we can open up a voice channel for you,” because people like voice. A lot of people want to be talked through a solution, especially at that level.

Matt Price: And what they don’t want to do is go through

Matt Price: a bad bot experience that then routes them to the back of a queue. They get a call back later from somebody who is a level-one employee that takes them through everything again.

Matt Price: And then they have to push to get to that level-two person. But the experience where they get an immediate expert — the AI is very, very good. But the AI is not being stretched. The AI is being taught: stay within your lane.

Matt Price: And if you have any issues at all, don’t try to make anything up — flip it to a human. And this is how we get 99.8% accuracy on everything we do. But imagine now — when I unbox the product, or I load up the app, or I scan a QR code — I’m connected immediately with someone saying, “Hey, can I help guide you through this process?”

Matt Price: And you flip support from this break-fix perspective to a constant-assist notion — someone that’s there and smart enough to understand where you are. “Do you have all the pieces here? Can you take a photo of it?”

Matt Price: For me — I mean, yeah, obviously I love the business model, I love our offering — but what’s really exciting is we can sit back and say, “This is where it changed.”

Matt Price: This is when companies stopped looking at CX as a must-do back office cost, and for the first time, like American Express once did, began to invest. Everybody can now start to say, “Customer service is something I can really believe in and invest in.”

Matt Price: That’s the world. I’ll add one more thing: it’s very difficult for customer service leaders to drive transformation and change at the moment — at the level that’s going to happen — because they have to DIY everything themselves.

Matt Price: They have to buy the bot, evaluate it, plug it into their existing architecture. They have to hire the people, train the people, then do it again every three months because the AI’s changed.

Matt Price: If we look back in history, we can draw parallels to the rise of contract manufacturing, which spawned a host of new innovations in connected devices because people didn’t have to set up their own production lines to deliver the Nanit — an amazing baby monitor — or the Rachio, the smart sprinkler.

Matt Price: These visionaries could get their prototypes to market because of contract manufacturing. And we believe the same thing is going to happen with customer service now. Entrepreneurs and founders will be thinking, “What is my design for service? How do I want it to work?” Then they partner with Crescendo to fulfill that — rather than putting the pieces together themselves. That’s another vision for the future: Crescendo as the primary form of delivering customer support, rather than DIY.

Alejandro Cremades: I love it. So Matt, let’s talk about the past now, through the lens of reflection. If I brought you back in time 18 months ago — when you were thinking about giving notice at Zendesk and becoming an entrepreneur — and you had the chance to give your younger self one piece of advice before launching the business, what would that be and why, given what you know now?

Matt Price: I learned very quickly that one of the privileges of being a founder and CEO — rather than an operator on a function — is that you can be very transparent about what you don’t know and where you need help.

Matt Price: When you are in an operating function — let’s say, head of marketing in a large organization — you’re expected to be the genius of marketing within that organization. As a CEO, you have an environment or a fantasy where you can be very open because nobody expects you to have done everything before, especially within a new market.

Matt Price: So looking back, I would have done this quicker — I mean, I did it more as a reaction to the fact that we were going very quickly — but I would have surrounded myself with some amazing advisors I could trust in different functions. And it’s not a classic advisory mode, but I have amazing advisors who have

Matt Price: run M&A — many, many mergers and acquisitions — at a high level from a legal perspective. So I call them my phone-a-friends. I call them to help me make decisions, and they can provide quick feedback. So I would say: surround yourself with trusted experts you can call on.

Matt Price: I probably would have done that quicker and more proactively rather than reactively.

Alejandro Cremades: I hear you. Well, Matt, thank you so much for that. And thank you so much for being on the show. For those listening who would love to reach out and say hi — what’s the best way for them to do so?

Matt Price: They can email me: ma********@*******do.ai.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing — easy enough! Well, Matt, thank you so much for being on the show today. It’s been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Matt Price: Oh, it’s been an honor to be on this podcast. I really appreciate the opportunity, and thanks for letting me tell our story.

*****

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