Speaker 1Ghazi Massoud is the CRO at Replit, where they've grown revenue from $2 to over $150 million in less than a year, and now they're tracking to a billion-dollar run rate by the end of 2026, all in the service of one mission.
Speaker 2We're democratizing software creation, and the next billion software creators are people who sit outside of the engineering and development organizations.
Speaker 1In today's conversation, Ghazi draws on his experience as a vibe coder, but also as a multi-decade revenue leader as we talk about the best ways to think about build versus buy.
Speaker 2The big question is, hey, are we building our own CRM? No, we're not. But then everything we're doing on top of that, they're all built on Replit apps.
Speaker 1Plus, we talk about the challenges and solutions around talent selection, change management, and how to structure a team when you're growing at a truly insane pace.
Speaker 2There's a lot of firsts happening in this business because the business has grown so fast, so quickly. Welcome to the Revenue Leadership Podcast.
Speaker 1A quick PSA, there's a change coming to the Revenue Leadership Podcast. I've moved my show to a new YouTube account, so if you enjoy the show, I recommend you go subscribe so you don't miss any upcoming episodes and a bunch of other content that will be on there. And you can find the new channel at youtube.com slash at Kyle-Norton. The channel name is Kyle Norton, the Revenue Leadership Podcast, and that's where we're going to be posting all the future episodes, clips, and a bunch of new stuff as well. And if you're wondering, the audio podcast will still be in all of the same places that it's always been, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Snips, and so on. So if you listen in audio-only form, no need to do anything. But if you watch on YouTube, now you know where to find future episodes. And while I'm at it, I would love if everybody could support the show by liking, subscribing, reviewing, leaving a comment on whatever platform they listen on. It helps new viewers find the podcast. It's really helpful for us, and I always forget to or even like it a little bit. Do us a solid and go review it, comment, share it with a friend, and that would be most appreciated. And now let's get back to the show. Today's guest is Ghazi Massoud, who is the CRO at Replit. And Ghazi has spent the last decade building enterprise sales motions on top of PLG companies through hyper growth at Auth0. He was the CRO at Retool, and now at Replit, where revenue has gone from, $2 million to over $150 million in less than a year. And Replit's now tracking to a billion dollar run rate by the end of 2026, which is truly insane. And Ghazi and the team are hiring 200 plus people over the next 12 months and rebuilding GTM from scratch in this AI era. We're going to dig into what it's like to build an AI native revenue org. Replit, for those of you who don't know, is a vibe coding and agentic building platform where you can basically build anything. It was actually built in the early 2000s, and it was built in the early 2000s. So you could build anything. And we're going to talk about what that means and what architecture looks like and why some of that answer involves scrapping the traditional CSM and how the org chart looks like. So I'm really excited about this one. This is going to be a ton of fun. And thanks for joining. Yeah, amazing. What did I miss in your background that's worth noting? And maybe just give people like the snapshot of what Replit is.
Speaker 2The background is pretty spot on. I've been at this for a long time. I've been a go-to-market operator for going on three decades now. The first part of my career was big companies. I did my standard via Microsoft Oracle. And then after Oracle, I've been in venture-backed startups, which some of the ones that you actually talked about. So I've been at this go-to-market game, and I've seen different iterations of the on-prem to cloud boom, the.com boom, the financial meltdown. So I've seen a lot of different iterations. And I've seen a lot of this. And being front and center in AI revolutionizing the entire landscape is super, super exciting. And Replit is just a fantastic place to be. And for me personally, I think from a career standpoint, it is a perfect natural evolution of my career as an operator, of being in this AI world of where I've been. For a lot of people, what they don't know is the very first company that I went to after Oracle, the big corporate America. The company that I left was a company called K2 Software, which was in the low-code, no-code space. This is when low-code first came out. And the art of the promise was empower knowledge workers to go build. So I've seen the evolution of low-code, no-code to now what is AI. So it's just a perfect trajectory for me personally, and super excited to be here. Replit is low-code, no-code on super steroids. That's right. That's right. Yeah.
Speaker 1You can just explain the business for folks.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. The last company I was at, Retool, one of the reasons I left is we could not pivot to AI fast enough, right? And yes. So with AI coming onto the scene, the relevancy of low-code, no-code is no longer relevant, right? You can't really. Low-code, no-code is. I actually did a podcast on this a few months ago, where I actually basically went on and said, low-code, no-code is dead. Low-code, no-code is dead. And if you haven't pivoted to AI, you no longer have a business, right? So yeah. So Replit, our mission is we're democratizing software creation. And we have 6 billion software creators are people who sit outside of the engineering and development organizations. And we want to empower anyone to go build, irrespective of their technical background. In the previous world, if you had an idea, you would have to go take your idea to the development and engineering teams to go build. We want to remove that bottleneck. And we want to empower the average person sitting in the business organizations to go build and create software. So that's kind of
Speaker 1what we're all about. 24 months ago, the mission was the same. And people would have sort of rolled their eyes at that and being like, yeah, okay, you can vibe code cool throwaway software. And what is the real enterprise fit for something like that? And now you fast forward 24 months, and a lot of the experiences I engage with day-to-day now are things that we've internally built. Which. Which is sort of a crazy experience. People don't send a dashboard or a spreadsheet anymore. Any spreadsheet is now an interactive web app. And it's just like, well, why wouldn't I put this into an experience people can engage with that's more visual? It takes two seconds. And that's the
Speaker 2default already. I am the perfect use case for that. So in previous worlds as a CRO, you've got a big support team. You've got a big enablement team. You've got a big support team. You've got I'm vibe coding my own decks. I'm literally vibe coding because I have ideas in my head. And I can literally put my ideas on like, hey, I want a 10-slide deck. I want to go tell this story. This is kind of what I wanted to do. I literally do it from my phone when I'm sitting in my bed when I know I have to go give something. And then literally, I've got a 95% ready stuff that I just take the last 5% and I kind of just make it my own. It's been working for me for a long time. It's been working just great for me. In fact, I used it when I did our first annual kickoff at the beginning of this year. We have a small team. I don't have the enablement resources or the people on the team that I had at my previous companies. So I had to just go do it. And I just did it and very, very satisfied with the results. And it's something I use all the time. So all my decks right now and my presentation decks are built in Revlet. Are built in Revlet. I do that right now. I don't even use Google Slides. I can export to Google Slides and PowerPoint, but the actual building is in Revlet.
Speaker 1From a CRO tooling, stuff that you build and use yourself or automations or apps or workflows, what are the principles to do that really well? Feedback I hear so much is like, yeah, I can try and it gets 90% there, but it's not really quite good enough. And I end up editing it a whole bunch. And for me, I've just sort of organically learned how to do this on my own. And I don't have a great answer for the principles of like, okay, this is how to think about the context engineering or what you should be doing with the specific prompts and the chains. But how do you think about advice for CROs who are like not super technical in terms of how they could be building the most powerful automations and workflows for themselves?
Speaker 2And let me put it in two buckets, right? So one would be a CRO that basically needs the tools to effectively do their job. You need a view of your business. You need a view of pipeline. You need a view of deals. You need a view of customer health. You kind of need the entire gamut from start to finish. So from that standpoint, I can tell you like what we're doing here and how I've kind of morphed into that. So the big behemoth question is, hey, are we building our own CRM? No, we're not. We had HubSpot. I'm moving from HubSpot to Salesforce. And that wasn't even a question internally in my business or for me. Like whether I was going to go vibe code my own CRM. Just on that note, I do have plenty of customers that are vibe coding their own CRM, and we can talk about that here in a minute. But for us, the decision was to not go build our own CRM. So we use Salesforce, and we just migrated from HubSpot to Salesforce, and that's still going on right now. So Salesforce is our system of record. But then everything we're doing on top of that, for me to be an effective CRO and get visibility into my business, they're all built on Replit apps. There are a variety of different iterations. We have something that we call a revenue co-pilot. which is my all-in-one dashboard that gives me everything from top of funnel, the conversion rates, all the way down to deals, sales stages, close one, everything. I pull gone calls into that. I can click on any customer logo, look on what it is. It's basically what I live with every single day when I wake up in the morning and what I look at and listen to. I don't even touch Salesforce. I just kind of go into that. Then for our teams that actually work with customers, we created basically an application that we have all these funny names for them internally. We call it Reply Book, but it's basically our version of Gainsight and basically a customer health dashboard that basically gives all of our customer advocates and our field engineers complete visibility around every single customer. You know, their utilization, their customer health score, when's the last time they, you know, what the engagement process looked like, are they healthy or not healthy? So basically you can think of that. And then. You know, then we have other things like we use our, we basically built our own CPQ and quote the cash. Wow. Okay. All order forms that we sent out to our customers. It's a Replite app that we go do that. We're building our own version of forecasting. So think of Clary. We're basically, again, on top of Salesforce, we're basically building our own version of that. And then our BDR team uses a bunch of research and script writing. And then we have a bunch of research and script writing applications that they actually go do. We use Nooks, by the way, but we use specifically for the dialer, but all of the other stuff we kind of just do on our own. So again, there's a, we can have an entire conversation on the AIGTM stack that we have. And in fact, there's a session at Saster that I'm doing where I'm actually showcasing dog food, some of the stuff we've built and we're going to do it anyway. So I'm going to be, I have a session, I think, in the middle of the week to go do that, where I specifically talk about the AIGTM stack. And then, so then the other bucket is, as a CRO, like things you do kind of every single day. And like, what do you, you know, like, what do you use? And that's where, you know, so again, I don't want to sell RapLate, but the one thing is we sit in the browser, right? We sit in the browser, so it's just up in the day of the thing. So what, the way I use it is if I have ideas or I need stuff done, I just go prompt it in RapLate and just build it versus going to like my enablement person. Hey, go, I need this, I need this. I just go prompt it because it's faster for me. It's quicker for me and it gets me what I need. Yeah. My own terms in my own way, kind of right away, right? I don't have to sit there and wait. I don't have to go explain it to anybody that I want. I just go explain it. I explain it to RapLate agent. That's actually what we call our product. And the agent knows my style. It knows my personality and it actually creates what I'm asking.
Speaker 1And so for the personal side, like you mentioned agent knows your personality and style. Is that because you specifically created a context file about your likes and dislikes and business context or what's, what's the scaffolding behind being able to quickly spin up one time or like personal apps? What, what makes that go well or not?
Speaker 2Well, I think it learns and iterates on your previous engagements and what you've done and what you've asked it to do. And I think it just gets better and it gets smarter in real life context kind of actually behind it. So, yeah, I mean like this, this notion of like a one shot prompt, I think has gotten a lot better than it word was probably like 12 to 18 months ago. And again, the more specific you can be, the better results you're going to get. And I've personally noticed that improvement as well.
Speaker 1How much other contexts do you have in there too? I think there's a lot of different ways to help your personal apps do the right things. Like for me, I've got, you know, a context file that's local and in GitHub so that my open clock can get at it. But it has like all the stuff about our business objectives and how we operate. And it's, it's built like a, an understanding of how I decision make and problem solve. Cause I fed it a whole bunch of content and like prompt it to be like, Hey, analyze this stuff. Come up. Come up with like a, a deep understanding of my approach so you can be the most effective AI chief of staff. And have you had to proactively do that? Or is it just about, Hey, use the tools and.
Speaker 2No, I haven't, I haven't gotten to that level of sophistication. I wish I had that. I haven't gotten to that level of sophistication. It's me just being specific with agent on what I actually need and the agent kind of going back to my previous context of the interaction and learning from it and just
Speaker 1getting smarter. That's a specific. Like feature of the replet ecosystem is this like recursive learning then it's built in.
Speaker 2Yeah, it's a bit, I mean, we're an agent for right now, which is our last day or that was our last launch that we actually did. And agent four had a bunch of unique things that the market doesn't have, where you can actually run multiple parallel tasks at the exact same time and go do that. Are you going to have collaboration? Um, there's a lot of different things on it. We came up with a canvas, a very robust mobile app thing. So, but yeah, it's basically the agent side. It was just, just getting smarter. And I think with agent five, I think it'll get even better.
Speaker 1Yeah. Sometimes I wonder if I've like overcooked with, with my setup, like having open claw and it's in this like digital ocean droplet and, and like the whole configuration. Cause I, I now look at the tools that. Claude offers and like replets always been so such a, like a, a great building platform. I'm like, should I have just adopted one of these tools more holistically? And so that's sort of the advice. I give to people is like, actually my approach is probably, is it probably overbuilt because I wanted it early. Like I wanted to get my hands on this stuff as soon as I can. And I find it really interesting. It's a great learning experience to try to, to try to figure it out, but it feels like I could get most of what I've been able to build, which is taking a bunch of effort, just like in a tool like replet. Yeah. Try it out.
Speaker 2I mean, I tell people, just try it out and then, you know, see what it can actually go do for you. The advice I would give to people.
Speaker 1Is that if you're going into these new, new tools, just make sure you bring as much of your previous contexts with you. And there's prompts that you can run in your, in, in Gemini or chat, chat, or Claude, just be like, give me everything that you know about me, download everything into a Markdown file about how I think my preferences that are those. So you can at least start this new experience with a, with a, with a baseline. I want to just zoom out and ask. About this experience as a CRO, because, you know, there's only a small handful of people in the world that have been in a company growing at this type of speed. Like companies have never grown at this rate ever before in history. And now there's a handful of, of sort of anthropics opening eyes replets that are, that are growing at like 50 X year over year, like 10 X year over year at, at like multi hundred million dollar run rates, which is just mind boggling. Like, what is it? Like, just as a CRO trying to do your job day to day with those, with those like dizzying numbers and trying to hire 200 reps at a time, like what, what, like, what is it like?
Speaker 2It's pretty nuts. You know, context switching of talking to a customer on a deal and then being in an interview and then looking for executives to kind of, I mean, it's your context switching so much every single day, every single hour, right? If you look at my calendar, it's like a hodgepodge of, you know, so I just given that we're building a team. I had this process in place right when I started is I do all first screen of candidates right now, just because I don't, I don't have a leadership bench, right? Like I, like my org had retooled was 300 people. I don't, I'm not at 300 people right now where I've got like first line, second line. So I did all first interview screens just with every single candidate. And basically if they kind of pass my interview screen, then I would actually get them off to the panel and the team from a day to day perspective and a hyper growth company like this. So as a CRO, you know, you're wearing multiple hats and I'm like rolling up the sleeves and I'm at the ground level. So I'm not a chair CRO that's looking at spreadsheets and, you know, doing orders. I'm actually doing the work, right? I'm actually doing the work and I'm actually just getting my hands dirty and it's actually like super, super fun. We're building, right? So we're building up, we're bringing on our first BPS sales here in a few weeks here in the U.S. You know, I'm opening up our London presence for the very first time and I'm bringing on a head of a EU GTM, right? So we're, we're building up. We're building it and it's going to get better. But right now in this hyper growth scale, I have to be involved and I have to kind of have the pulse on the business to kind of get it to a point where I feel good about it. So yeah, it's been, you know, we're basically building a B2B GTM company within this massive company and it's, it's phenomenal. You know, like everything we're doing for the very first time, you know, rolling up territories, very first time, rolling up comp plans, very first time, rolling up forecasting cadence, very first time. I rolling out, you know, the post sales motion free. So there's a lot of firsts happening in this business because the business has grown so fast, so quickly. There hasn't been kind of this classic GTM playbook or structure that we all come from as revenue leap. And I'm kind of incorporating that in this AI first world and in, in this AI fourth way here at Replit.
Speaker 1And what do you bring over that is, you know, like similar to the previous playbook and what's the next step? It's totally different now.
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, similar to the previous playbook is, boy, we need salespeople. We're not going to go automate salespeople. I think what's different is the profile of the salespeople I'm bringing on board in my previous 30-year career is different. Previous 30 years is like, hey, go get the top 1% seller that has blasted quota, comes from Oracle, Salesforce, has that pedigree, just get them in because they're just a killer, right? I'm not optimizing for that right now. I'm optimizing for more people who are passionate about AI, that are passionate around our mission, and that really, really believe in what we're doing. And I've taken a chance on a bunch of people that are here right now that come from non-traditional backgrounds that have never sold before, but have expressed a very deep understanding of who we are and what we do. I'm not saying technical, but they're really passionate about it. And they're in sales roles for the very first time in their career. And they're doing exceptionally well. They're doing exceptionally well. And I feel I can train them on the sales elements and part of it. So that's the different part of it. We invest in technical resources because even though Replit is easy to go out and show, we're not one of those companies where if you're a rep on a deal, you don't need to bring an SE with you to do a demo of the product, right? We expect the AE to take the conversation almost to 100%, oftentimes to like 80, 90% completely on their own. And then once the customer starts digging into data residency, security, deployment configurations that may be out of the depth of a classic AE, we would bring in our field engineering organization. So I still have a tech technical organization, but unlike previous SaaS companies I've been at, you've been at where AE will get on a discovery call and they will have their SE when they want a discovery call. Even if the SE said nothing, right? Or the AE said nothing, that's not a model that we're building here. We expect the AEs to actually be product experts and actually take the conversation pretty far because the product is just so easy to show.
Speaker 1And are you taking these non-traditional folks into AE roles like straight? Okay. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2I mean, I did a podcast on this with Chris at Vive Scaling. He asked me about this. Just a couple of anecdotes for folks that haven't or didn't listen to that. So when I got here, our number one seller in the company, and the person was already here, came from the military, was in the US Marine Corps, never sold a day in his life. Absolutely killed it. And now he has a much more passion for the side. So he's actually changed into a technical role, but he was initially doing sales. And then one of our top commercial sellers for our downmarket business, who's still here in that role, was a school teacher. Never sold. Doing exceptionally well. In fact, I just did a pipeline review this morning. He has one of the largest pipelines and forecastable deals for the quarter. So yeah, a lot of these non-traditional folks are in sales roles for the very first time. And again, I want to make sure people, that's not our entire org, by the way. There's a balance, right? I do have people who come from enterprise sales, who've done enterprise sales before that have been in the top 10% of sales people. We definitely have those as well, but we're balancing it out. We're not just optimizing for one or the other.
Speaker 1And so mission centricity and sort of a pull to the product is a part of it. What else did you see in those people that, and what else are you looking for that's most important for you?
Speaker 2The biggest thing I'm seeing, and now just being in the trenches and listening on calls with them and being in meetings with them, the way they explain the art of the possible, that the customer really bought into our vision around what the art of the possible could be. And it's like this light bulb moment is like they've elevated to trusted advisor Lee. They are not viewed as a sales person in front of the customer's eyes. They're advocate, they're like their AI advocate, they're like their AI trainer. You know what I mean? That's the status these folks have elevated up to. And that's kind of what I look for is, can someone, when I do these 15 minute screens, the question I ask is, hey, how would you explain Replit in like the first 15 seconds to someone who doesn't really know who we are, what we go do? How would you establish that level of trust and kind of explain kind of our mission? And usually you can kind of tell the people that are, you know, are the product people that are just passionate about it because they've, you know, prior to coming to interview with me, they've built like a bunch of apps for their, you know, kids, little league team to their hobby apps, to personal website. So they know the flexibility of the platform and the ones that are just rattle that off like that. And you immediately know, oh my God, putting them in front of a customer, that's going to be like amazing. What's the shape of the team today?
Speaker 1So you've got this like insane PLG business that's going exponential. And so how big is the sales org today? Where are you guys focused? Like what is the structure?
Speaker 2Yeah, we're building it like, so GTM all up. We're hovering right around 60-ish right now of all up. So we've added a lot of people since I've been here. And we have a lot more to go do. But yeah, the makeup, just to write it down for you, we're very, very high level. So when I first got here, I'm in a PLG business, 90% of our pipeline was all inbound. It was all inbound people basically hitting our website, wanting a demo. And so we had inbound SDRs that will actually go do that. But I'm actually building a intentional outbound SDR team. So we actually opened up an office in Salt Lake City and we're basically building a, outbound motion and an outbound BDR organization to supplement the inbound. And then eventually I want to automate inbound. So inbound will be like fully automated probably by the end of Q2, where we actually won't have humans triaging inbound. Inbound will be a full, fully an agent that gets it, you know, books the meeting, et cetera. And then we'll just have like an outbound motion. We'll still have to get inbound pipeline, but inbound pipeline will not be managed by a front end. And then on the field side, we basically have, we segment our business between commercial and enterprise. And commercial for us is less than 2000 employees. Enterprise is greater than 2000 employees. And we basically have account executives for each one of those segments. And then I don't have, and I'm not building customer success here. I have a role internally that we call account managers, which is a pretty common term that many revenue leaders, but they go to market. And introduce themselves as Replit customer advocates. So we have a role that we call Replit customer advocates that basically come online when the AE closes the deal to help with the customer on to onboard the customer, and then continuously plant seeds to go out and retain and drive future use cases of Replit within that account. And then the last role we have is what we call our field engineering organization. And we think of them as like a forward deployed engineering team, if you will, that spans both pre and post sales. The bulk of their time post sales, but they're also available as pre-sales technical resources. So that's the makeup of our GTM team. And then I've got RevOps and enablement as well, given how many people we have to go hire. We take enablement very seriously here. We don't just hire and throw people at the phones or give them their books. They all come to foster city, which is where we're based in California. They do the company onboarding. And then the woman, Yo-Yo, who runs my enablement team, she's got like a robust GTM onboarding program, depending on your roles. If you're a BDR, you go through a BDR track. If you're a AE, you go through your AE track. If you're a customer advocate, you go through your customer advocate track. If you're a field engineer, you go through your field engineering track. So we do spend a good amount of time. Of making sure all the people we hire are properly enabled and set up for success.
Speaker 1The ARR per employee must be just bonkers. It says only 461 employees on LinkedIn, which is usually off by some of them. It is bonkers.
Speaker 2I mean, the one thing that it's hard, right? Because we had to put quotas for the very first time. Nobody was on quotas up until January of this year. When I first got here, everybody was on full OTEs. So we changed that, put everybody on quotas, and it was kind of hard. To put a line in the sand as to what quotas to go use. So that's why I did half your plans, because I knew things would be moving so fast. And clearly with, you know, we're sitting here on May 1st with Q1 behind us, everyone is smashing their quota in the TLDR. And my team knows this, I can talk about it, is, you know, in the second half, we are going to raise quotas up and get them normalized to what it is right now. Just know that we actually have some baseline and some data against it. -
Speaker 1Yeah. - It's a law of startup physics, quotas only go up. - Yeah. It's like gravity. And if quotas start going down, then that's when you got to work.
Speaker 2That's right. That's right. I mean, I still want to create a winning culture, right? I still want the winning culture. I want people making a ton of money. So we're still going to build it with that mindset. But we have to be judicious to our board and finance and the rest of the team and do the right thing and take what I said.
Speaker 1Momentum is a powerful tool for turning sales and customer conversations into go-to-market intelligence. Using GenAI, it extracts, analyzes, and automates customer intelligence across your GTM org. The best part, it's not a new platform for your team to adopt. It integrates seamlessly with your existing stack, or it can straight up replace your conversational intelligence tool. At Owner, we ripped out Gong and went all in on Momentum. It writes back to our sales force directly, captures forecast and churn risk, autofills CRM fields, shares product signals, and tracks sentiment. Companies like Cursor, Zscaler, Ramp. And Eleven Labs use it every day. Check it out with a free trial at Momentum.io. When you grow at that rate, what's the first thing that breaks? What are the things that are just like can't keep up and you feel like you're duct taping together? The RevOps stuff.
Speaker 2We are doing so much change management, right? Territories, comp plans, quotas, systems, hygiene. The way we structured deals. We also went from seat-based pricing to usage-based pricing. So there's so much there right now. And with new people coming in, the legacy folks and ownership of accounts, that is right now our biggest thing we need to streamline and get better at. It's working, but that is where I need to be spending our time and where the team is kind of spending their time just to kind of make sure that process. And right now it's the migration from Hotspot to Salesforce, which as you can imagine, when you move from a system like that to Salesforce, it's rocky with the duplication of deals, the account ownership, the lead routing, all of that stuff. So that's the biggest thing that we're spending time on. We have no issues on deal velocity, closing deals. I don't have a close plan issue. I don't have an issue of like, oh my God, this deal has been saved. It's sitting stagnant for two months. What the hell are you doing? I don't have that issue that many revenue leaders have had in the past. I don't have to deal with that. I need to go deal with making sure I hire fast enough, making sure I enable these people to be good at their jobs, and making sure that the actual foundation and the systems are kind of working in the right way to make sure that we're not missing a beat there.
Speaker 1I have the same opinion. Like, we're not going to go vibe code Salesforce. If you're being choiceful about buy versus build, it seems like those core systems of record that manage governance and ecosystem and security, those are things that are best bought. And I think the announcements that Salesforce has made around this headless architecture, or I don't know if they're calling it headless or Salesforce 360, whatever they're saying, it seems like the direction you guys are going in as well. So, like, what do you think is the role of CRM in this whole thing?
Speaker 2I mean, you still need a place to house your customer information, right? So, that doesn't change, whether you use Salesforce or some of the other tools out there. That's kind of up to every organization. So, I think you still need that. But then making it your own, interacting with it in a way that's kind of useful for you and your business in a day-to-day, that's where. I think it's changed from how it used to be, right? Where you would just go get a tool for whatever you needed on top of that. Like, there were even, like, RevOps tools that were there that would deal with annual planning and forecasting. I tried some of them out and never ended up using them. You know, then you have, like, forecasting tools, customer health tools. So, I think that's the world that's evolving right now, is you need the systems of record, for sure, depending on whatever it is for your business, but then making it your own, and the flexibility to extend that, and the extensibility of it, that's where, like, a solution like ours can really help kind of play that game. Because we're fast, we're quick, we're pennies on the dollar in what you would actually do. Like, you know, I think our RepliBook example that I mentioned to you, and, again, tune into SASTAR, where I'll probably be giving a demo of that. I think it took our. Our field engineer is the one who built that. Yeah. I think it took him. Less than a day. Less than a day to probably put that together. And we continue iterating and doing that, you know, modifying it as we continue growing. So, I think that's where it is right now. But, you know, the other, just on this topic, I do have several customer examples, right? Specifically, SMB customers. I've seen SMB customers, like smaller startups and, like, small organizations. Pretty cool stuff. I've seen them actually have VibeCode CRM applications. I've seen them VibeCode, like, another HCM-type solution. They've actually done employee onboarding, VibeCoded. So, I've seen that as well. And, you know, UpMarket, obviously, I haven't seen that. Like, GPMC is not going to go get rid of their ERP and their Salesforce instance. But I've seen the extensibility even happening UpMarket.
Speaker 1What is that mental model for you about, like, what are the things, you know, for a company of meaningfulness, like, 50, 100, multiple hundred millions in ARR? What should people think about not building themselves? And, like, what is the decision?
Speaker 2Yeah. I mean, if you're a big enterprise organization like that, you're not building your own CRM. You know, you're not building your own ERP. You're not building.
Speaker 1And so, like, why, though? Is it because, like, it's, it is it, is it because the governance or security? Is it? Like, the stability?
Speaker 2Like, what would be the, what would be? I would say, I would say in an organization that's as large as that, you have so many touch points with billing, finance, accounting, true ups, delinquencies. You know, the whole integration to your back office, the front office is pretty dialed in. And if, you know, like, it's just, it's just really, really tight. And to go do that in a vibe. Coded fashion and connect all the, could you do it? Yes. Would you want to go invest the time in doing that? And, you know, basically get, getting rid of your plumbing and getting a vibe coding solution to reinstitute a whole new plumbing. I think that is a huge uplift for any organization, any enterprise organization. Right. That has been around for decades and decades to go do that.
Speaker 1So, like, integrations and, and sort of, like, the centrality of the tool. I think that's a good heuristic. Like, governance and security, I would think, is another good heuristic. Like, if part of that platform's value is security, stability, governance, like, buy versus build is probably smart. Any other, like, key heuristics? Because what I'm, what I'm trying to, I get asked this question so much, and I'm trying to think of the model. And actually, I might, I'm planning to talk about this at Sastr as well. And I'll, I'll drop my, like, Sastr link in the show notes because I'm going to come see yours and everybody should come see your, uh, your demo too. It's, like, at what point down the stack, like, should we vibe code sales loft? Like, it's a, it's something that we've talked about a whole bunch. You know, I don't think we would vibe code a calling tool. Like, you could vibe code your own thing and just API into Twilio. But, like, what's sort of the point? If that goes down, it, like, your whole team is offline. And so the, like, I'm trying to come up with the heuristic of, like, how far down the stack and, like, what is the trade-off question? Like, if that goes down, it, like, your whole team is offline. There's more of this than that of, like, where you stop building. Like, we're going to, we're building our LMS. Like, we've rebuilt a learning management system. We've, we've built, like, a recognition and a contest system. And it's because they're not that connected. They're not that, that central and important. Stability, if it goes down for a couple hours, like, you're not totally losing your mind if your contest tool. But any other heuristics that you think are helpful?
Speaker 2I think you have to have a discussion as a organization and as a group to actually look at the feasibility. Right? And just have some common sense behind it. The way I think about it is just have some common sense of, like, stuff, you know, that you're going to go do. Like, we're not going to go build an outbound dialer. Like, I'm not going to go build a dialer. Right? Like, there's other things that are, like, more important for me to go do. Could I? Sure. I probably could. Like, but am I going to go do that? I'm not going to go do that. Right? So, yeah, I think every organization is different. I would just say just sit down and have an open discussion.
Speaker 1I think the cost-benefit is the other thing. Like, what is the incremental benefit above the quality of the tool today that you unlock by doing it yourself? And, like, that might be a determining factor as well. Like, you know, vibe-coding your own dialer. Like, how much better are you going to make a dialer? Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Really? So, that might be the other thing. Yeah. Okay. It's interesting. It is interesting that a company like Replit is, like, replatforming to Salesforce. I think it says a lot, and it sort of confirms my prior awareness. little bit and and you guys are ahead on this like headless architecture of saying yeah all right you're actually not going to live in the tool that much but it is this like hub and connection point where everything like builds off well yeah
Speaker 2and like it was the salesforce actually we had a call with salesforce just uh this past week where they showed us kind of their stack and we kind of showed them our stack of how we're extending salesforce just from a visibility standpoint um we even we just came up with a slack connector as well with replet so now within slack you can actually spin off a workflow to build an app all within slack you know directly with the slack so again the so we're all about the extensibility right how can we use a technology like replet to go extend and kind of just make things your own and and do it in a way that serves you we kind of show up every single day right i i live in slack right so if i can make things your own and do it in a way that serves you we kind of show up every single day right i i live in slack right so if i can i can make things your own and and do it in a way that serves you we kind of show up every single day right i i live in slack right so if i can go spin off a workflow in slack versus going to replet specifically right that saves me time right that saves me right so it's again use cases are kind of all over the
Speaker 1place hiring at this pace is extraordinarily difficult and it's hard to keep keep a bar so how are you thinking about and especially like if you want to hire 200 people at some point you're not going to be able to do the screens and and so like how are you thinking about handing off the playbook to somebody else who's going to be new to the business like yeah new vps new gms i i at least have a bunch of people that have been with me three years now as we're we're probably gonna hire like 100 people in sales this year but you know there's so much there's so much more institutional knowledge it's a little different going from like tiny org to what you're trying to do so how are you thinking about the hiring system first and then i'd love to unpack the profile
Speaker 2yeah i mean so the system in itself we we actually have a fairly tight hiring process that i actually designed and i kind of created just to kind of optimize for speed and making sure we're also sacrificing on quality and the people we're actually bringing in so our hiring process is like very simple right now like as i mentioned i do the first screens and i was doing 30 minute screens i actually changed from that to 15 minute screens so i do i do 15 minute screens because i've got a good read on people and i can usually tell in the first 15 minutes whether they're worth a another conversation or not so i do 15 minute screens with everybody and i i'll talk a bit about how i'm going to change that and then usually if they pass the 15-minute screen they get invited to a mock panel and our mock panel is we give them a prompt um a very very specific prompt depending on their role and then we usually have three people in the panel usually be like a rep a customer advocate or a field engineer we kind of change it up all the time and the candidate will present to the panel against their prompt and coming out of that we make a higher no higher decision i eventually am going to get out of doing the first screen so i'm like really excited to have my head of sales starting here in a couple of weeks and they'll kind of carry that torch and my head of europe who's going to start it will carry that torch internationally as well i'll still be there to help close candidates and do whatever it is that i need to go do to bring people out there but i don't think it will change the process in itself because it's pretty quick and dirty right now our biggest thing is making sure we go back to the first principles of like some of the characteristics that we actually want in the people that are coming here and that's really what the prompt really helps us validate is you know outside of their customer facing skills you know i talked about their knowledge of the ai ecosystem their knowledge on reflect their knowledge on the art of the possible you know how they can go articulate that obviously if they're technical we actually give them a technical exercise to go do so we just make sure we're good there and the other thing i'm also given how fast i have to go higher i make this call right in the beginning is we want an 80 bar so we're we are not striving for a hundred percent or like if they don't meet this hundred percent bar we're not if it's 80 and we think somebody can kind of meet that eighty percent bar and we know that with the right level of enablement we can kind of get them that last twenty percent we're actually optimizing and pulling the trigger on that person just because we have to go higher super fast because if i take like a fine-tooth laser focus of like oh my god they must go me i i just never can hire as fast as i need to go higher right now so that's kind of what we're doing and then i'm spending like i mentioned a lot of time and enabled it because i think that's going to be a huge differentiator for us um as
Speaker 1well and so that last 20 is either like the product knowledge the sales craft and you feel like you can just like you can fill those gaps with your
Speaker 2system exactly yeah it's like someone may be lacking on they they may be in the prompt they were really really good at the art of the possible in the product but maybe they didn't do as well on discovery in that prompt right and i think i can teach them how to dig and dip deeper and go do discovery you know in a much more diligent way or yes the sales aspect or whatever it ends up being right we want people that can actually show up get in front of a customer and we know that we can actually trust them to go out and explain our value proposition what's
Speaker 1most important for you in that profile so the the mission centricity you want to see that they understand the ecosystem the tools what are the like the raw traits because it sounds like you're making like traits based decisions and then teaching a lot of the craft and and specific knowledge you
Speaker 2know like in the 15 minutes i get with candidates what i want to be convinced of is their communication style and skills how are they how are they in communicating with me um i do ask about kind of their aspirations of why sales if they haven't been in sales and what you know why they want to do this role and then i take the back half of the conversation and i talk about i go basically hey if you look at the ai world that we're living in stack rank yourself around your knowledge of ai between azure 10 kind of everything that's going on with the ai world from inference to llms to app creation like where would you stack rank yourself from from your knowledge and then what's your awareness of kind of where replica kind of fits into that ecosystem um how they respond to that and then based on that that kind of gives me either confidence or not confidence that you know this person can actually be effective in the world that we're actually interviewing them what's the most important for you and thing in that 15 minutes look for communication style because if they can't communicate well with me how are they going to communicate well with the customer you know the people that are either nervous or you know kind of struggling with that you can kind of weed that out
Speaker 1pretty quickly yeah interesting so what something i built a few weekends ago was the uh like a deep dive into what you know what you know what you're trying to do and so i pulled in all of the scorecards from ashby all of the meeting meeting recordings from metaview all of the in-roll performance from our bi tool and had using claude had claude do this big analysis of like what are the common traits how are like who's good at identifying talent and who's not what are the things like where are we most off because when i was using claude i had claude do this big analysis of like what are the common traits how are like who's good at identifying talent and who's not what are the things like where are we most off because when i i'm trying to build as an output which i have it as an output i'm still like iterating on my level of confidence is a co-pilot tool that can take in every single interview afterwards and give us give a synthesis on on their uh likelihood of success if nothing else is a it's been a really interesting gut check so i'm the finalist i'm i'm the bar raiser interview i'm the last 30 minute interview in in uh all of the market-facing roles and so um i'll do the interview then i'll then i'll just go to the my terminal tab and be like hey run it on xyz person it yanks in all of the information it gives me this uh output and creates a notion page and it's really interesting to see like the the distillation of all of the interviews because i don't read the other interview notes i don't watch any of the other calls but i get this distillation as a second as a second guess and so far i've done like maybe five bar raisers and uh it's been aligned with all of the recommendations but like as i add more and more data to it i'm i'm and my confidence level grows like i want to see if that score the ai score is going to beat or improve on the human scores the interesting thing is like i was churning and turning and turning on it and i was like i don't know like i just was a little i was second guessing the analysis and then i then i put in um that andre carpathy auto uh auto research github repo i'm like hey like do the because i have the outputs output metrics i have all the input data on the interviews and i have the output uh data on uh performance in role performance so i was like oh that's a good auto research opportunity and then it ran for i don't know like 45 minutes and it was way better after then yeah i'd love to see that.
Speaker 2i'd love to see that i love to see
Speaker 1that that's that's pretty cool that i think is like one of the really interesting last frontiers i've i've met some uh founders that are building in this category but it was always like a little thin and a little like ai slop feeling yeah you can't get confidence without like a massively deep understanding of of like the enroll performance and this scoring and uh so we i ended up building and i think it's i mean i think it's usable data now but i i needed to i need to see how these scores translate to enroll performance over a couple years yeah that's awesome you don't need to do the 15 minutes you can just take the whole output and and have your brain in it like layered over the whole interview process and maybe maybe other than like helping close candidates like you don't need to be in it yeah that'd be pretty cool that'd be pretty cool you've
Speaker 2been in this business now
Speaker 1when did you start a replit
Speaker 2i started officially in december but i was actually with the business early on and like last summer um doing some stuff kind of behind the scenes what
Speaker 1have been the biggest surprises and what do you find yourself changing your mind on as as you're in this like fully agentic business that where you can build anything and do
Speaker 2anything surprises was i i knew the gtm the b2b gtm org was small but i was surprised to see the lack of a lot of common infrastructure that was that you know that i thought was already here that wasn't here um so that was surprising um that's fine i mean it's you know we just build and we grow um so that was definitely surprising the other aspect of it is you know given how many you know given how many users replit actually has i was surprised that from a headcount perspective how concentrated we were in the u.s and didn't really have dedicated headcount globally across the the the company right um we do but not to the level that i would have thought you know like everything else around the product that i kind of knew coming in um there's this cult following right there's this going of replit where i mean i mean i cannot tell you the amount of times i'm in an airport with like either a replica jacket or replica people random people just go oh my god i love replit i'm like you know like you know there's not a lot of brands where you get that where people see it out there so that's like super you know you're just impressive um around like how far we've gone and how far we've kind of built
Speaker 1the community so there's so much conversation like oh like you know sales sales roles are going to get automated or bdr is dead you know like you know like you know like you know like you know yada yada you know you've talked about automating inbound but growing your outbound function how do you think the shape of go-to-market teams are going to change like and how are you thinking about building yours different
Speaker 2so i so there's certain roles i do think will change and by the way i've tried like i tried the automated sdr yeah last company and you know it didn't really work for us and i've talked to a lot of other peers where it doesn't really work so i don't think the automation of bdr is going to change and i don't think it's going to change and i don't think it's completely is going to go away anytime soon um i think inbound is a different thing because in the thing about the inbound motion the inbound motion is taking somebody who's interested in seeing a product and getting them to go talk to somebody who can show them the product right that workflow i do think can be um automated in a right way if you actually ask the right upfront questions in a forum and with an agent so anyways that that's the model we're working towards so like quotas and how we comp i think there's going to be like different flavors and i think there's going to be different flavors of kind of tweaking that model in in the old world in the new world and then i'm also dabbling with this experiment which is going to be coming online here very soon is i'm going to give for the very first time our customers to actually go buy replet enterprise in a self-service fashion so so today if you go to our website you can sign up for our free tier our core plan and what we have is our color pro plan um and that's what the majority of our usage is right now you know there's these hobbyists students average person who actually wants replet they just go sign up for one of our b2c self-service plants yeah but i'm going to have um we're going to run another experiment initially but we're actually going to have a flavor basically not a flavor basically our enterprise version available as a self-service option and what i think that's going to drive and my hypothesis behind that is i think there's a segment of the b2b enterprise segment that is small enough that can really just go self-help themselves without talking to somebody else for sure yeah right and basically get the get the features of that they actually go want and you know small acv small deals so the idea would be is like all the small acvs like say sub 20k 25k those are all just self-service then i've got my sales team kind of working on the higher construct of deals and what that will probably do is that will change the makeup of my commercial team maybe i have less commercial sellers and i have more enterprise sellers as an example i don't know so that that's one experiment that we're kind of going to be running with and it's going to be coming online here very very soon the other way is like the way we're building our rev ops team is totally different you know like the old world where you know you scale rev ops with the number of sales people you have we're not thinking about it that way we're going to be opening up a role that is the classic role that everyone loves to hear about which is aigtf engineer we're going to have one too um that sits within the rev ops team that kind of helps with everything around automation and what we want to go build and then you know using a lot of the stuff we're already doing like you know our own cpq like you know deal desk analysis of things like that to just run a leaner team yeah in a way that we can go support it so that's definitely on the
Speaker 1horizon so what sits under rev ops today like because there's rev ops there's gtm engineering there's like applied ai which you could say is different there's data there's biz ops like those are all functions that overlap so much now in so many ways so how are you thinking about that architecture
Speaker 2so in our world um it's very simple so within rev ops we have systems we have a deal desk and then we have kind of what we are calling like a generalist ops role right where we're where it's that role would serve sales post sales partners right and then we are thinking about this layer of like an ai engineer and that's kind of it data doesn't sit in our world the data actually sits in the product team right now and then we have a biz ops function that is kind of like a biz ops gtm liaison that sits in finance and so when it
Speaker 1comes to like lead scoring so figuring out what leads to route to what people is that in the data team or is that in systems it's in it's a
Speaker 2hybrid right now so that's what we're actually working on right now like lead scoring the whole pql intelligence so i think that'll touch multiple people right that'll touch data it'll touch marketing and it'll touch systems as well as our bdr team right so it'll touch a bunch of different people
Speaker 1there and that type of initiative is run out of the data team that's under product no like the whole
Speaker 2lead routing thing we in gtm in collaboration with marketing would kind of run that initiative out
Speaker 1it's it's funny how much these how much overlap there is between these roles oh yeah how fuzzy it gets because totally especially now that the technical barriers are so low you know you don't really need it to call in a technical person from some other team to build something so like who owns that yeah today is is a big question do you see the core role of a sales rep changing like do you think that ai will fundamentally change how things are bought like there's a big question around like will agents just buy from agents
Speaker 2i don't think so no i don't think so i again like the whole customers doing their own research making their own decisions and carrying something on their own like kind of the self-service motion yeah that is here to stay for sure right and they'll definitely be vehicles right and they'll definitely be vehicles for that to happen i i do think that but i think you know the consultative conversation the relationship building all of the things it takes like on classic enterprise to negotiate complex deals with complex regular customers you know in fin serve and cpg and health that's not going to be automated with an agent the salesperson's job is changing right like the amount of research and information gap i mean that's all automated so i think they can now spend their time in front of customers where they should be versus doing the back office crap you know the teams we've managed in our previous lives like salesforce hygiene and people spending more than half their week updating salesforce and i think those days are those days are good for them i think they're going to be those days are gone right those days are gone like you can utilize a lot of automation to get and do all of that for you if you do it properly it already
Speaker 1seems crazy that we did it like it's it's funny how much things change in such a short amount of time like it like it seems insane now to think about how much time people spent building a lead list to call and updating their next steps and moving stuff around and stuff like that so i think that's a big part of it and i think that's a big part of it and i think that's a big part of it and i think that's a big part of it and i think around in a in a dashboard it's uh it's a really crazy concept okay i want to uh hop into the quick fire Before we wrap, so what do you think separates a good CRO from a
Speaker 2truly great one? Customer-first mindset, right? Customer-facing, lead by example. Don't ask people to go do something you're not going to go do yourself. As a CRO, you're not just running sales. You're managing the entire lifecycle from start all the way to finish of how people get at the door and how they kind of hear about your company from the very first gate and then how they kind of get value out of your product. So looking at that entire landscape and just having a viewpoint on it and being front and center, I think that's what makes the difference.
Speaker 1Yeah. What's the most common advice you give to newer leaders? First-time CRO, first-time VP of sales, big mandate. What's the advice you give to those folks?
Speaker 2So the ability to scale down irrespective of your title and irrespective of your remit is extremely important, especially when I hire leaders. Like the two leaders that I hired, that was a very direct conversation with them. It's, yes, you're going to have a big team and you're going to have layers of management eventually as well. But when you first come in, you got to get your hands dirty. You got to get your hands dirty and you got to get in the weeds and you need to kind of understand how things are kind of operating there. So that's the piece of advice I give all the leaders coming into my business right now. Going out and doing deals, getting in the trenches with the reps, that is like table stakes. And we ruled out a lot of candidates in this search that were very credible executives, right? Very credible, seasoned executives, but I questioned whether they could scale down. I think that it's way
Speaker 1more important in this AI world where things are changing so fast. Like you can't rely on working a couple of deals when you were a manager 18 months ago to apply today just because everything's different.
Speaker 2Everything's different. Right. Yeah. Everything is totally different. It's the way we price, the way customers buy, how they evaluate. I mean, it's totally different. What's the hardest lesson you've had to learn in your career? God, hardest lesson. The hardest lesson, I mean, I had one company where it was my one and only, from a career perspective, the wrong decision was vetting the company, vetting the founder, vetting the CEO. And I was like, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. And I was like, I'm going to do it. And I was like, I'm going to do it.
PodcastTranscript AI