FOUNDER
Who is Sid Rajaram?

Sid is a Bay Area native, born and raised in California. He only briefly left the state his freshman year at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, before boomeranging back to transfer into UC Berkeley.

The entrepreneurial thread shows up early.

At UIUC, Sid wasn’t thinking about “startups” so much as solving his own annoyances. One of the biggest: the dining halls closed early, and late-night options were either too far, too cold, or too expensive (Uber Eats / DoorDash on a student budget).

So he built his own solution.

He launched a scrappy delivery service called 57 Delivery XYZ, named after the main campus café “57 North.” Students could place orders through a barebones website and have food brought straight to their dorm door.

At first, his “courier network” was just him, sprinting from café to dorm rooms with black bean burgers and fries.

The launch was classic early-founder psychology: he dropped the link in the dorm chat on Halloween 2019, watched three hours of silence, and started to spiral—until someone finally tried it. When that first order landed and the customer confirmed in the group chat that it was “legit,” usage took off. Flyers with QR codes went up all over the dorms, RAs pulled them down, he put more up. A small, cult-like following emerged.

That experience planted a core idea: make something for yourself that solves a real problem; if others share the pain, they’ll follow.

Then COVID hit.

Sid came back to California, finished classes remotely, and realized it made no sense to pay out-of-state tuition for Zoom. He enrolled in community college, navigated the maze of transfer requirements, and eventually made it into UC Berkeley to study computer science.

The transfer journey itself became his next project.

The process was so confusing that he decided to codify what he’d learned. He built Bunch of Advice, a free website that distilled the transfer playbook for tens of thousands of California community college students who wanted to follow a similar path. No monetization—just a problem he wished someone had solved for him.

After Berkeley, Sid joined MinIO, a leading open-source object storage company with a top-tier technical team. He sharpened his engineering skills while absorbing what it looks like when a highly technical product finds real market pull.

COMPANY
From DiscloDocs to Clodo

The first version of what would become Clodo had nothing to do with B2B SaaS prospecting.

Sid and his now co-founder, Rithvik Chuppala, launched DiscloDocs, a tool to help real estate agents review disclosures more efficiently. The product was born from his mom’s workflow, but they quickly pushed beyond a single user.

Their go-to-market playbook was as manual and high-conviction as it gets:

  • Every weekend, Saturdays and Sundays, 1–4pm

  • Drive around the Bay Area

  • Spot an “Open House” sign

  • Walk in with a laptop and pitch the agent on the spot

Half the time, they were told to get lost. The other half, agents were intrigued enough to try it. Over time, that hustle got DiscloDocs into every major brokerage in the Bay Area.

The traction created a new problem: the side project started to cut into their day jobs and sleep. They wanted to go full-time.

They applied to Y Combinator—late.

Applications had technically closed in mid-May; they submitted in mid-June without realizing. YC still bit. Within days they were interviewing with partners Jared Friedman and Eric Levine and were accepted into the batch.

They entered YC as DiscloDocs. Halfway through, they pivoted.

The turning point wasn’t a brainstorm; it was internal tooling.

To sell into brokerages, they needed to know who to talk to: who actually had budget, time, and mandate to adopt new software. They built an internal tool to automatically identify the right decision makers inside target organizations.

On a hunch, they shared that internal tool with salespeople they knew from prior roles.The response was dramatically different.

The emotional intensity—how excited those reps were compared to real estate agents using DiscloDocs—was night and day. That was the market signal. They decided to go all-in on sales prospecting.

They also needed a new name.

They took the middle five letters of “DiscloDocs”—Clodo—grabbed the clodo.ai domain, and started building what they wished they’d always had as founders doing outbound.

Problem & Solution

Sid describes sales in one sentence:

“Sales fundamentally is about really just one thing. It’s about saying the right thing to the right people at the right time.”

Everything else—bad leads, bloated lists, random filters—is a distraction.

Traditional tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Apollo are built around rigid filters: industry, title, headcount, location. They’re decent for broad targeting, but they break down when you need to find very specific buyers:

  • Decision makers responsible for VR/AR lens manufacturing in Wisconsin who are hiring right now

  • Founders of Series B AI infrastructure companies expanding to Europe in the next 6–12 months

  • Finance leaders at mid-market SaaS companies evaluating usage-based pricing tools

Today, there’s no clean way to express that in filters. You either over-include or miss the best prospects entirely.

Clodo’s core bet: you shouldn’t have to fight the tool to describe your ideal buyer.

You should be able to prompt it.

What Clodo does:

  • Lets you describe your ICP in natural language (like you’d talk to ChatGPT)

  • Returns the specific people and accounts that match those criteria

  • Surfaces signals like hiring, role, and context so you know why they’re a fit

  • Gives teams a way to prioritize outbound toward the highest-intent, best-fit prospects

A Japanese client offers a concrete example: they manufacture world‑class precision molding equipment used to make lenses for VR glasses. Their ICP is ultra-niche: decision makers at companies manufacturing VR/AR lenses. That’s not a standard filter in any database.

With Clodo, they can just say:

“Find decision makers who make VR/AR lenses in Wisconsin and are hiring right now.”

Clodo parses the request, hunts across data sources, and returns the people who actually look like that description.

The impact is twofold:

  • Time: less time wasted on dead-end leads and generic lists

  • Revenue: more energy focused on prospects who are both qualified and actively in the market

Clodo did exactly this for Sid and Rithvik during YC—they used it to scale quickly for demo day. Now their customers are doing the same.

ICP

Clodo isn’t boxing itself into a single vertical.

They’re already working with:

  • Early-stage YC companies needing founder-led outbound

  • B2B SaaS teams with dedicated GTM leadership

  • Industrial / hardware / deep-tech companies with very specific buyer personas

Two primary ICPs have emerged:

  • Founders running founder-led sales

    • Early-stage teams with limited bandwidth

    • Need to find high-intent, high-fit prospects fast

    • Want to spend time in conversations, not CSVs

  • Heads of GTM / VPs of Sales

    • Leading outbound-heavy organizations

    • Care about list quality, account penetration, and rep efficiency

    • Want tools that make their teams sharper, not just busier

Clodo is priced intentionally for individual adoption as well:

  • $75/month

  • Free trial

  • Competitive with Apollo / Sales Nav

Right now, many signups are individual BDRs and SDRs who put their own card down because the value is obvious. From there, the team runs a land-and-expand motion into larger org contracts.

GTM

Clodo’s go-to-market motion is a mix of product-led growth and targeted outbound.

Key elements:

  • Self-serve onboarding:
    A fully self-serve version of the product is live. Reps and founders can sign up, run searches, and feel the difference without ever talking to a salesperson.

  • PLG as the entry point:
    Many users come in bottom-up—BDRs, SDRs, individual reps at industrial companies, YC founders.

  • Land-and-expand:
    When multiple reps from the same org start using Clodo, Sid’s team reaches out to leadership:

    • Understand their GTM model

    • Align on ICP and outbound strategy

    • Explore team-wide deployments

  • Clodo using Clodo:
    For outbound, they literally use their own tool:

    • Find companies actively hiring reps

    • Identify orgs ramping outbound programs

    • Pinpoint GTM leaders most likely to resonate with Clodo’s promise

They also plug into the YC community, where a growing number of founders are spinning up outbound for the first time and need leverage.

The Future of Clodo

Sid’s north star for Clodo is clear: “Become the Cursor for GTM”

Just as Cursor lets engineers build software at the speed of thought, Clodo aims to let GTM teams execute outbound at the speed of thought.

The roadmap, in Sid’s mind, breaks into stages:

  • Prompt → Prospects

    • Where they are today

    • Type natural language ICPs

    • Get precise targets back

  • Prompt → Full Campaign

Example Prompt for Clodo:

- Find all Series B founders who need D&O insurance

- Start an email campaign to finance leaders at usage-based SaaS companies

Clodo will:

  • Find the accounts and contacts

  • Generate targeted email sequences

  • Surface LinkedIn profiles and connect links

  • Orchestrate multi-step campaigns

End-state: GTM at the speed of thought

  • GTM leaders and founders focus on strategy and messaging

  • The “plumbing”—research, list building, routing—is handled by an underlying engine

They’re already seeing individual reps and YC founders adopt Clodo this way, with the long-term goal of becoming the default prospecting layer for modern sales orgs.

Why Sid Stands Out

Spending time with Sid, a few constants show up:

  • He builds for himself first.
    Late-night food delivery for his dorm. A transfer guide born from his own confusion. A disclosure tool for his mom. A prospecting engine originally built to sell his own product.

  • He pairs technical depth with go-to-market scrappiness.
    MinIO-level engineering meets “barnstorming open houses” every weekend with a laptop.

  • He chases sharp learning curves, not comfort.
    Transferring schools mid-pandemic, going from internal tools to YC-backed pivot, rebuilding the product mid‑batch.

  • He thinks in clear GTM systems.
    Founder-led vs. scaled sales. Real estate vs. universal prospecting. Internal tooling vs. external product. Always asking: where is the real pull?

  • He’s not trying to replace salespeople.
    Clodo doesn’t exist to automate humans away. It exists to make sure they’re talking to the right humans—buyers who actually care—so reps can spend more time selling and less time sifting.

If you’re building a GTM motion—whether as a solo founder sending cold emails at midnight or as a VP of Sales running a multi-rep outbound team—and your current tools feel blunt, Clodo is one of the sharpest prospecting layers you can add.

And if you’re early in your own founder journey, Sid’s path is a compelling blueprint: start with your own problems, build the smallest thing that fixes them, and watch closely for where the emotional pull is strongest.

TL;DR

Bay Area–born UC Berkeley CS grad and lifelong “build for yourself” founder, Sid went from hacking late‑night dorm delivery and transfer guides to co-founding Clodo, an AI prospecting engine that helps GTM teams find their exact next buyers with a simple natural-language prompt.

Keep Reading