Octolane Thinks the Tallest Building in San Francisco Is Built on Broken Software

One Chowdhury was 21 when he dropped out of Duke and moved to San Francisco. He had no job lined up, no investors waiting. But he had one insight which was that everyone hated using Salesforce. "If something sucks that badly and still has the tallest building in the city, there’s opportunity," he figured. That hunch just turned into a $2.6 million seed round for Octolane, the startup he co-founded with his best friend and fellow immigrant Md Abdul Halim Rafi. Their pitch? A CRM that updates itself, tells you exactly what to do next, and learns your style over time—what they call the world’s first “self-driving CRM.” Since launching earlier this year, Octolane has signed up 200 customers, with 5,000 more on the waitlist. Many are defecting from Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pi