Marty Kausas

Marty Kausas is co-founder and chief executive of Pylon, a customer support platform for B2B companies that handles support across Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, chat, and phone. He founded it in November 2022 with Robert Eng and Advith Chelikani.

Learning to Code at Purdue

Kausas started making games and websites in high school and grew more serious about programming after joining his school's robotics team. He studied computer science at Purdue University, where he joined Purdue Hackers, a club that spent weekends building games and applications, he told EO.

Working on Payments at Airbnb

During college he interned at Qualcomm in San Diego, California, at Yelp, and at Airbnb, where he worked on back-end payments infrastructure. He has said big-company work taught him mostly what not to do in a startup, and he left Airbnb because he was more excited by founders building their own companies.

Spending a Year on a Failed Health App

After Airbnb he spent a year on an app to help people with Parkinson's disease understand their condition. He later called it a bad idea, and he walked away from the idea, from health technology, and from that co-founder. With Eng and Chelikani he then spent months changing ideas every few weeks, a stretch the team calls "pivot hell."

Starting With a Slack-to-Zendesk Integration

The team noticed B2B companies supporting customers in shared Slack and Teams channels rather than by email. Pylon's first product was a Slack-to-Zendesk integration, it signed its first customer, Hightouch, within weeks, and it joined Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch, according to the company's blog. About a year in, the founders widened the plan into a full support platform for B2B teams, and Pylon reached $120,000 in annual recurring revenue within three months of the idea.