Shit In

Shit Out

B2B sales has a dirty little secret: most of it is garbage. Mountains of bad data. Endless spray-and-pray emails. SDR armies burning out on work that barely moves the needle.

Michael Heiberg, CEO of Ocean.io, has one answer to all of it: fix the data. “Shit in, shit out,” he says. “If your foundation is broken, your automation is just chaos at scale.”

On a recent episode of Tech Ascent, Michael pulled back the curtain on how Ocean is quietly rewriting the rules of B2B growth - and why being early, patient, and uncompromising on quality finally paid off.

Michael founded Ocean.io in 2017 after years in enterprise sales. He knew what every rep wanted after closing a big deal: “Find me ten more just like it.”

In B2C, Facebook and Google had mastered this with lookalikes. But in B2B? Nothing. So Ocean set out to build it.

For years, it was lonely work. Early algorithms were clunky. Few prospects even understood what “vectoring” meant. “When we told people we were vectoring landing pages, they just stared at us blankly,” Michael laughs. “We were way ahead of the market.”

Patience was the price of being first. And then came 2022.

Everything shifted when the market finally caught up. Natural language processing went mainstream. Suddenly, prospects no longer needed convincing.

“The old way was armies of SDRs throwing mud at the wall. Lookalikes changed everything. You could finally define an ICP based on how companies actually operate - not just size or geography.”

Ocean went from oddball to frontrunner overnight.

AI isn’t magic. It’s only as good as the data you feed it.

“We’re the only platform built on a fully normalized database. That means data element A is always data element A. Everyone else is building with Lego blocks that don’t fit together.”

That’s why first-generation AI SDR tools fell flat. They automated garbage. And the result? Garbage, faster.

Michael sees three waves:

• First gen: spray-and-pray with a shiny AI label.
• Second gen: tools that add real value in specific parts of the funnel.
• Third gen (coming fast): orchestrated automation across the whole funnel, with humans guiding strategy instead of chasing cold calls.

Ocean’s role: be the engine that powers the second and third generations with data that doesn’t fall apart.

Every quarter, Ocean rolls out new capabilities:

• Vectoring of companies, LinkedIn profiles, and job descriptions
• Clustering of closed deals to uncover a true ICP
• AI-powered lead scoring tied to ICP insights
• People Lookalikes that cut straight to the decision-makers

As Michael puts it: “Traditional CRM lead scoring is dumb. We’re building lead scoring that actually knows who your ICP is and how to treat inbound leads differently.”

Michael’s biggest regret? Waiting too long to return to the U.S. market.

“That’s the stupidest mistake we made. Development can sit in Europe, but the market was here. The moment I landed in San Francisco, everyone knew what vectoring was. In Copenhagen, nobody even used the word.”

Lesson learned: be where the early adopters are.

Inspired by OpenAI, Ocean made a bold move: no gated demos, no sales hoops. You can test the Ocean API instantly on their site.

“There’s no barrier. You see the difference in seconds. Transparency is how we build trust.”

Ocean’s mission is simple: enable real AI automation in B2B and supply chain - not with generic LLMs, but with models trained for the jobs that actually matter.

“We want to be the dominant player in this space. Let others build applications on top. We power the automation.”

B2B automation doesn’t fail because the AI is weak. It fails because the data is crap. Ocean.io is fixing that.

No mud-slinging. No Lego blocks that don’t fit. Just precision, context, and a little bit of patience.

Because as Michael Heiberg will tell you: “Shit in, shit out.”