Michael Heiberg is the founder and CEO of Ocean.io, a Copenhagen-based go-to-market data platform. He began experimenting with lookalike targeting around 2018–2019 — inspired by the B2C 'lookalike audience' concept — and, after keyword approaches proved too imprecise, moved onto the leading edge of natural-language processing and vector databases to match companies by contextual meaning rather than keywords or titles. The technology only became robust in late 2022 / early 2023, when Ocean took off on the back of a self-serve, product-led motion that lets prospects experience the 'wow' directly on the landing page. Today Ocean vectorizes 65 million companies and 230 million LinkedIn profiles and exposes its logic through an API used inside 40+ other applications. Michael is an outspoken advocate of micro-targeting over mass outreach and of keeping a human in the loop as go-to-market moves into second-generation agentic automation.
“Why don't we put our technology on the landing page, just bring it up there for people to test it out themselves? We didn't have to explain anything. We had the wow moment within three to five seconds because they had never seen anything like that before.”
“We talk about moments to wow. How long does it take for someone logging onto Ocean before they get it? We went from more than two minutes down to 30 seconds.”
“By the way, I haven't used any credits yet — for all the Clay users out there. I haven't used a single credit yet, because I'm refining my search.”
“If you put a mic in front of anyone, they'll know exactly who they sell to. And now it's basically just dump them into Ocean and you have the lookalikes.”
“Why do you want to enrich something that is not on target? You don't want to do that. You don't want to spend credits on that.”
“It doesn't tie you into a title. It ties you into a contextual understanding of what that individual does for this company. That's the big difference, huge difference.”
“First generation was, let me put it in popular terms, basically an LLM wrapper around an analog database.”
“What automation and AI really does well is micro-targeting. Overlay all this information with third-party data and intent, and then you have a perfect audience for who will actually convert — not in the 0.1%, but actually in the 5 to 10%.”