Speaker 1If you got in as an anthropic 18 months or two years ago, you might make 20 to $50 million on that exit if it stays at a 1.5 or $2 trillion valuation. Just wrapped up a stellar live crew podcast recording from our GTM paddle event in SF two weeks ago. In this, we riff on the sales posts that blew up on Twitter these last couple of weeks. If a company is hiring a hunter AE and won't pay above market for it, it's a huge red flag. Whoever takes that job is signing up to be underpaid. In the modern AI era, salespeople with the highest ceiling are former bankers, consultants, lawyers. 60 hours a week feels easy to them. We need more of them in GTM. We also talk about what the best candidates do in interviews in order to stand out.
Speaker 2Today, I got a text from a candidate. He's like, I treat every one of my recruiting processes like a sales process. And I was like, of course. Naturally, you're going to respond quickly. You're going to bring energy and enthusiasm.
Speaker 1We also had sales leaders on from MetaView and Blacksmith talking about what the market looks like. right now in their respective fields.
Speaker 3The vibes are insane right now. It's just such a hot market for sales talent. Right now, the business
Speaker 4is absolutely taking off. A lot of this is led by the rise of AI coding.
Speaker 1We had the crew team answer one of the biggest questions we get asked. How do you know if a startup is worth joining?
Speaker 2How much revenue have you closed over the last two quarters? And what's the revenue mix of that revenue? If it's one $9 million deal and a few 50Kers run.
Speaker 1All this and more in today's podcast. Welcome to the crew podcast, where we have conversations with the top go to market leaders at AI natives and SaaS startups. I'm Chris Balestris, co-founder of crew, a go to market recruiting media and investing firm helping seed through series D AI natives grow. Now on the episode. Showtime, baby. We're in Embarcadero. I think it's the Embarcadero and in San Francisco, we're right in front of the ferry building. We're at Park Paddle. It's Paddle, not Padel. We said this in the first one. So it's Park Paddle. Still up for debate. It's not up for debate. It's what the cool kids are telling me I have to say. If you're a newbie, it's not up for debate. Yeah, I want to give a shout out to one Park Paddle for hosting us, our great crew for being here. And then our awesome sponsors for throwing this a little bit of background to we threw this event in New York in late August. It's now October 28th on Wednesday. And we have about I'd say there's about 100 people here, all privately held companies of enterprise AEs, sales leaders, a little bit more of a senior crowd at some of the best companies in the world, both SAS and AI native. And also shout out to our sponsors. So for this fireworks, listen, labs, serval, greptile, Metaview, blacksmith, nooks, and centralized, helping to put this on. And we have a DJ, we have food, drink. We got three courts. They're pretty packed right now. People playing. We got three instructors, instructor on each. And dude, we're just going to be doing a this week in GTM riffing of just all my shit posting on Twitter that I've been doing the last few weeks. But Kurt, what what's the vibe like? Give us like the play by play right now.
Speaker 2Things are looking good. Yeah, every court is lit up. We got the we got the lights. We got the food. People are excited for the live pod. You know, I'm sensing good things.
Speaker 1Yeah, me too. So we're gonna be getting into a little bit. Let's just jump right into it. Let's do it. Different takes that we're seeing. I mean, you probably have seen the this week in GTM from a few weeks back how I just talked about how if you're not on Twitter yet, you have to be all of what we're gonna be talking about are pretty much the tweets that ripped on Twitter. And if they rip on Twitter, that's when I post them on LinkedIn. I sanitize a little bit. So it's a little bit of a mullet party, our formal in the front party in the back. But we're gonna we're gonna choose the party side on this one and just go off the tweets. It usually gets a little bit spicy. So let's start it off. All right. So first, did you see the 20 VC episode? Max Freeman. Max Freeman's coming on the pod. He's SVP at Ramp. You probably have seen this viral post. I'll show it on the screen of like, he was like the founding BDR at Ramp. Totally. And just like crushed it. Six years he's been there. He's now the SVP. They don't have a CRO. I think he's essentially the CRO. I think they are. What Max said in the episode was they initially hired a bunch of bankers at Ramp to the founding GTM team. I'm a former consultant. Used to work at Harvey with a bunch of lawyers. I think we're probably a little bit biased of saying I'm a former professional services people make some of the best salespeople. It's the, they're already used to grinding. So I'll pull up my tweet here. So what does it say? I posted this and this one kind of ripped. In the modern AI era, salespeople with the highest ceiling are former bankers, consultants, lawyers, no question. The hardest part is getting them to say yes to sales as a career, which more and more people are doing. There's a look into breaking the AI and away from the boring professional services job. Once that yes happens, it's magic. And they have top 1% attention to detail, polish, business acumen, and executive presence. And then yes, post-inspired by the legendary Max Freeman, SVP of sales at Ramp. I find this to be true. It's just, we don't have enough of them that say yes to it, but they are attention to details at 10 out of 10. They know how to grind. They know how to work because they work 100 hour weeks at a job they don't like. So if they come to AI native selling and they're working only, and they're working only 60 hours, that's where the magic happens. Kurt, what do you, what did you see at Harvey hiring former lawyers? And what do you think about the stake?
Speaker 2Number one, uh, I remember interviewing with Max at Ramp and he was a man. I got a great, uh, great impression, great vibes. Like I was just shocked that he was already, I think the VP of sales at sub 30. And I was like, wow, like that, that's about as impressive a progression as you get from going at one company to be SDR all the way up to VP of sales in like a handful of years. Um, number two, yeah, professional services, background folks on the whole, as long as they have that next level gear, next level, um, motor, let's call it. Yeah. They can be some of the best salespeople period. Like I was just chatting with a guy at persona. Uh, he's a four years consult. Then he went to snowflake. Then he went to persona. I think he's going to do okay. Yeah. Um, and then number three at Harvey. Yeah. I remember the, like the top of the leaderboard. It was like, I was really curious. There was at first a little bit of a, I don't want to call it a divide, but we were trying to figure out like, is it going to be the ex lawyers or is it going to be the enterprise AEs who are going to be the biggest, baddest salespeople at the company or the biggest, baddest, uh, go-to-market folks. And it ended up being half and half and maybe the top five, like, I think from the first four managers that were hired, uh, from there were all AEs and then one in the management, I think two were lawyers and two were enterprise AEs that, you know, had worked at stripe and, or had worked with me in previous roles.
Speaker 1Yeah, definitely. Uh, I know when we were talking to, uh, Pat at LaGora, he was one of our former lawyers to be on the sales team, a lot of that post-sale, but like some of them then say, Hey, I actually want to start doing some of the, the, the closing of it.
Speaker 2So just one thing there. Yeah. I will say, you know, uh, I want to emphasize the motor piece because I've also chatted with professional services, folks, consultants, or folks long time in that, you know, the more services side that aren't hunters. Yeah. Aren't necessarily killers. And so they don't always have the same, Hey, you gotta go break into that new logo. No matter what type mentality. So there's a little bit of balance, but yeah, max isn't max. Isn't off base.
Speaker 1Yeah. A hundred percent. Well, what a good segue into the next tweet. So you'll see on the screen, uh, this one ripped on a few different channels of, you know, hiring the hunter AE and really how you should be compensated more for this career. I know you have some takes on this. So if you look, I won't read this whole post cuz it's quite long, but the beginning of it is if a company is hiring a hunter AE and won't pay above market for it, it's a huge red flag. They're offloading the hard work onto you without paying you accordingly. Pretty much all of our clients for the most part are hiring us because they need to hire reps to fulfill existing demand. And guess what? They're still paying top of market. This is why, you know, I've said this before. A lot of people are probably a little bit pissed at the anthropic. I use, cuz they're like, wait a second, you were getting a shit ton of inbound and you're making, and you're gonna be the richest people in tech. This doesn't make any sense. So, um, what's your take on this? And like, I mean, you head up our go to market practice now. So what are you seeing and like, do you agree with
Speaker 2this take? I mean, number one, like if you have the opportunity, it's kind of like that quote, we're probably gonna talk about later. Like if you have the opportunity to get on a rocket ship, join the rocket ship, we'll get to that. We'll get to that. Gonna hate that. But like, if you have the opportunity to go to an earlier growth stage, AI native, and you have intellectual interest there, go there because I guarantee 80 plus percent of them have a ton of inbound. They have the demand in place. They have the demand gen. They have the communities or distribution. They're starting to get that in a good place. If they're one of the top two or three category leaders. So please go there. Yeah. You do not need to be in hard mode. Number two, I couldn't agree more. Like, it's just like, I've been in roles where, you know, the OT is close to double a previous OT and I'm probably not even gonna hit it. Yeah. And it's because it's a hundred percent outbound. There might not even be a category created let alone, uh, demand. So I think you're, you're definitely onto something with the getting like two X, the OT, you just don't get
Speaker 1points for playing hard mode, you know? And I get it. If you like need the job and you need to eventually accept it. But I think like this one gets a lot of people pissed because what you might be gaslit from a hiring manager is by somebody saying like, oh, well maybe they're just not ready for a startup. And it's like, no, no, no. There's plenty of startups where it's a selling and it's a building role, but they actually set you up for success with a tailwind. And we'll get into this next point in just a second is just like, The best AEs will still do outbound in order to like two to three X their number. But you want that initial base. Otherwise, I mean, I had Bhartia Shahali, VP of sales of Granola on. He's like, dude, I will never not go to a PLG company because if I'm going to do some outbound, I still want there to be some brand recognition there. And it's not necessarily the AE's job. Yeah, that's what the VP of sales is going to say at a company that has no pipeline. It's going to say like, yeah, like it's your job to hit your number. It's like, well, I'll say this to AE's. It's your job to make sure you're diligencing a company accordingly that they have enough inbound and tailwind for you to actually go after.
Speaker 2So that actually is something just to jump in. Like, yes, one, we probably all should get together and figure out how we can coach up reps and make sure we always know this too, how to do the best due diligence. Cause yeah, I mean, let's be honest. I'd imagine a lot of VPs and sales and CROs. It's tough answering that question. If a rep asked you directly, like what percentage of the leads are inbound?
Speaker 1A hundred percent. I think that the reason is because they've taken their bet on that. And also the VP doesn't have to do outbound. So maybe they're choosing an op, not caring about the outbound piece, but the best sales leaders also will say it would be easy mode for me to recruit. Imagine what we think about when we get from companies like Blacksmith now, which shout out to Blacksmith. Yes. It's like, you're gonna do any outbound for quite a bit. Like it's very compelling for an AE. Now the best AEs will say, I'm also going to do outbound to like 400, you know, 400% their number. The next piece I want to talk about is, is actually it's the same exact topic, but a little bit different is this tweet I have up here or this LinkedIn post, my take, AE, should be doing their own outbound. So this is like, might sound a little contradictory, but eventually the inbound dries up. What is that healthy balance? What I have seen to a year of you, whether it's Liam Mulcahy, Graham Marano, boss, Mongo mafia of what was instilled to them. This is from the John McMahon lineage, the Carlos Del Tori of PG Tuesdays, PG Wednesdays. And that is, what is that? One of five days. If I'm doing my math right home, let me get my MBA brain cooking. That is 20% of the week. One of five is okay. That is like the day that, you know, I'm doing my MBA brain cooking. Okay. That is like the day that, I don't schedule meetings and they, you know, do that to, in order to like blow out their number. I think that is super fair. And that is 20%. Listen, that's going to ebb and flow. If that becomes 30 or 40%, that's also probably a little bit fair. But if it starts getting like, this is the number that I've heard a lot of sales leaders say, if it's higher than 50%, you have a kind of a problem. You should stop hiring AEs. Companies you've worked at, Kurt, you worked at like, you know, the outreach to the world and some of these other like SaaS darlings. Have you been in a hundred percent? Outbound role before? Have you been at one where it was like, they preach it from the top that it was this 20%? I'm like, what have you heard this from certain sales leaders?
Speaker 2So I'd say number one, you want to go to a place where the name will mean something. Once you get, especially to that series B, C, you know, of course, seed series A, like you're just breaking in series B. Sure. But once you're a series C or D, you want to make sure that name means something. So at least it's easier mode when you're prospecting. Like when I was in outreach in 2020, 2021, then it meant something. So it had a higher conversion rate when I did reach out via email, via LinkedIn, via cold call. Same with Harvey, 2024, 2025. The name already means something. Yeah. So really make sure you're doing due diligence on at least the things I think we covered in the last live event, you know, tier one investors, are there hyper growth rates? Is there a fair amount of inbound? Those types of things. So that it's not only inbound leads now because you're early and it's a bigger TAM and there's bigger territories, but also the future will be easier even when there isn't as much inbound, if you will. Yeah. I have been at companies where it's like a hundred percent outbound. It's, I've definitely been at companies where it's a hundred percent qualified outbound. So honestly, what sometimes is worse is when you're at a company where you're getting a fair number of inbound, so much so that your time is being spent. You can't really carve out much time for your own outbound prospecting, but it's all on qualified opportunities. Yeah. Because either the company doesn't have product market fit or it's just not a great market. Yeah. So I've been in a couple of those scenarios
Speaker 1and that's, that's maybe even darker. It's just like, you know, it's like, I'm a Jets fan. It's like watching the Jets quarterback play football and then growing up watching Tom Brady, but they're both NFL quarterbacks. They're both in the NFL. You know, like it's, it's just a different sport. And it's like, it doesn't feel fair that how much of a gap that ends up really being. Okay. Let me pull a sales leader. Let's do it. All right. We pulled in one of our steam sales leaders that is, has been on the crew podcast before. MetaView is a sponsor. We got Mark Goldberger, VP of sales, at MetaView, one of our awesome clients and helping to put on this event. Mark, how are the vibes like in the field right now?
Speaker 3Oh, the vibes are insane right now. So it's really cool in this event too, because I'm looking at all these stickers with people's names and their companies and like half the companies that are here, probably more than half are actually MetaView customers, which is pretty awesome. Yeah. And honestly, like it is just such a hot market for sales talent. And when you're in the, in the recruiting spaces, we are with our Gentic recruiting platform. Everybody is looking to, to us, to help them grow. And frankly, we use our platform ourselves. So we've grown from, from nine to 52 this year, grown about 150 next year. So like just crazy,
Speaker 1crazy growth. That is crazy. So where you guys play is you help with the sourcing piece of it. So like it'll help companies source a little bit faster, but this is replace Ashby as well. Is there a coaching component? Like just tell people in like a 30 second clip, like what even is MetaView and where you guys sit in the stack of recruiting?
Speaker 3Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, we sit really kind of throughout the stack. So we're not an applicant tracking, so not really at that, at that layer, but really the power of the application is everything from sourcing to going through your inbound applications, things like an AI screening agent. So you can screen thousands of candidates in a day if you need to, you don't have to worry about recruiting capacity. So it can do various workflows like that. And then we have an autonomous recruiting agent that helped me frankly recruit eight of my last 10 hires. So fully autonomously sourcing, sequencing where I'm getting a thousand calls 39% response rate on cold outbound, which is insane. And then actually scheduling fully autonomous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's totally wild.
Speaker 1And for the record, we know what you do. We'd be a bad recruiting partner for you if we didn't know what your business did. More so to just orient the crowd a little bit of like what MetaView is because, yeah, I'm running on the Embarkadero this morning and I see the Fillmore ads and everything and it makes sense of why you named it that, right? A Fillmore of the roles that you might have open. So it's been great to see like the growth. It's been awesome working with you guys. The question, so the format of this and we'll just have you on for this one question because I think it'd be great to opine on this is talent density of teams. So Paraform, and we'll put this up on the screen. Paraform came out with this talent density index of companies that were probably a little bit later stage where you guys sit right now. 50 companies. And I put on this the companies that we have seen. I would add MetaView to this, but MetaView is not on the initial Paraform list because they constrained it to this. We do kind of compete with them. So I was going to say.
Speaker 3Maybe you're right. Maybe you're not on that list. That's all right. That's all right.
Speaker 1I should have known that actually. So, well, this makes sense. They're like the human version of Fillmore. One opine on just some of the talent dense GTM mafias that we see in SaaS and AI era. Obviously the ones that they name are AI era. But the ones that I want to call out from that list that I've seen on the GTM side, Anthropic, OpenAI, Modal, Decagon, Fireworks, LangChain, TogetherAI, Cognition, Harvey, Perplexity, Rogo, Mistral, Sierra, Clay, Parallel, Base10, Cursor, Factory, and 11 Labs. And I guess I would ask you, like out of the AI natives and not naming MetaView, what are two or three of like, do you think the strongest sales teams that are out there that you've come across?
Speaker 3It's a great question. So one, it's pretty cool to see a lot of our customers on that list. So kudos to them. You know that I come from a background that's much more of the sales led. The PLG side is not as much of my thing. I like hard mode versus easy mode. Yeah, you play hard mode. You know, I like to play hard mode because, you know, it's not always 2021. And, you know, when 2022 comes around, you need the sellers who know how to sell in hard mode. And so, you know, I look at that list and I think about people like Degnan, who obviously just went over to Cognition. That was spicy. You know, there's that sales led type of approach, I think is what is tried and true in good times and in hard times. Because those skills those fundamentals are really what help power you. So like the companies that are doing that, I think ultimately are going to have more staying power.
Speaker 1Yeah, completely agree with that. I think that, yeah, it's the MongoDB lineage a little bit. And when we interviewed you on there, I appreciate that, right? Because like, you know, like right now you guys are benefiting from a demand rich environment that's part your demand gen team, part a lot of people being in market, part the work for talent's insane. Yeah. So a lot of people are using your product, but then eventually that's going to dry up and you need to be able to control your own debt with the ability to do outbound. And it's, yeah, so. That's exactly right. Totally, yeah. What about you, Kurt? Any like AI natives that come to mind that should be on this list? I worked in legal AI,
Speaker 2so I got to give a shout out to the other big dog, Legora. Yeah. I think they're incredible. I've got a great team. Great team. And a lot of good people over there. Yeah. Pat's one of the coolest, best CROs out there today. Like he's the type of guy that's sharp and on it and you want to, you know, he could talk to a lawyer and hold his own, but also, you want to run through a wall for the guy. So I feel like that's a team for sure. And then Listen Labs, who just got acquired, we got to give a shout out.
Speaker 1Yeah. We do have to give a shout out, but we'll give something else in sort of this customer focus group data, synthetic data space. I'm very excited to ramp up a little bit with Aru, which does not compete right now. There's really three players in this space that overlap in an event diagram perspective. So Listen Labs, Aru, and Simile. And where Aru plays is more of the synthetic data. So if Listen Labs is the tech to like, use less humans and order for companies and like focus groups to talk and there's just less humans in that process uh aru automates the focus group side of it and like gives you millions of data points where all these different variations and everything so that you can have a lot of confidence when you do go to market with a new product or a new uh country or whatever that new thing might be uh and i think that's like a really it marketing teams right now are buying the listen labs of the world the similes and the arus a ton and another team that gives me listen labs vibes very cerebral very like we want former kids we actually like don't care if they have a lot of sales background we want them to be uh almost performer lawyers bankers consultants that have said yes to sales so i think that there's been another one um yeah yeah i mean i
Speaker 3love people with uncommon backgrounds in sales i think it's hard to build an entire team of of people like that you have to have just extraordinary conviction but i think where you can find great talent uh that can think outside of the box uh that you've built you will often find that asymmetric upside you can find those people who can 10x performance uh and so you absolutely should be open uh to folks who don't have that that traditional background and i'm not just saying that because i used to work in the wine industry uh mark this is great man
Speaker 1thanks for coming on yeah yeah you get out there to sling some more meta view to the ones that aren't customers yet and uh recruit some aes thanks as always great to see you man appreciate the partnership cool all right now moving on to the next sort of uh thing here is uh all right i thought this was pretty interesting this tweet here so this guy vine i i and gar yep uh and i'll read it off here so the tweet says i spent the week at harvard meeting undergrads and nba students shout out to the nba program hbs a few takeaways the highest status job is now joining a company like mercor under the days where everyone wants to go to mckinsey goldman sachs or google the undergrads are significantly more impressive than the nba's this was always true by the way but anyways i don't want to but seemingly more impressive than the nba's this was always true oh he says it's always true in my view but that gap has widened significantly wait what was the one that he said at the start he said the undergrads are significantly more impressive than the nba's i prematurely jumped in and said wasn't this always true and then he says this has always been true in my view but the gap has widened significantly probably because less people are beat and they're not as dumb as i am they're not going to business school so and then everyone is obsessively thinking about how ai will impact their careers many are questioning the value of higher ed entirely and actively considering dropping out so this all makes sense i saw this been seeing this the last three years we see this with like i talked to my friends who are in banking and consulting and it's like a big proportion of my friends and my wife's a lawyer like in new york now my wife likes what she does probably a masochist right of just like the pain of 100 hour weeks which she genuinely loves being a gator a lot of my friends are banking and consulting though i get texts from them weekly be like dude i feel so out of the game if i'm not at one of these ai companies um when you hear a quote like that or like a tweet like this what comes to
Speaker 2your brain you know status is one thing like are you actually changing behavior at these legacy institutions is another like i'm wondering like sure maybe uh maybe that's where they think it's the sexiest area to go into like kind of thing about becoming content creators but what i'm really curious about is are they actually then pursuing it yeah or are they falling back to the old tropes of i'm gonna go into banking and consulting yeah that's where i'm i'm wondering but i will say it's probably getting more applications than ever yeah i think that's a
Speaker 1safe bet totally i think that uh i think it's tough so who's the advice that you're gonna get you're gonna get advice if you're right now at harvard you're gonna get advice from your parents and you're gonna get advice from the career center first it's only until you branch out to alumni that have graduated in the last 10 years that you're gonna have the ai native sort of conversation of oh i want to join one of these companies if you are having condos with peers 1 to 10 of or maybe 1 of 20 peers are making a ton of money as a content creator actually you know this world pretty well i do um you're married to somebody that uh does this partially for a living so i you know i bet she would be pretty pro of like hey if you're interested in something and you're down to grind and boast about it every day go do it right and that's what i think i have a ton of appreciation for for gen z is this sort of just go for it a little bit and just because like somebody else is telling you that banking is prestigious but if you think it's boring like there was a quote by sam altman he's like oh yeah it's at uh stanford everybody was telling me to go into banking and i did it for you and i had so much dread because i knew i wasn't gonna be good i wasn't gonna like it and he just goes and starts loop or whatever his startup was and uh you know the rest is hey i always find it just so fascinating people that have a lot of money and they're like oh my god i'm gonna go into banking and i'm gonna like the cojones a little bit right to just be like i don't want to do this for my career and i don't know i just think it's fascinating i'm happy that it's moving in this direction a little
Speaker 2bit something i have seen that's been wise so first of all i just think you know there's so many interesting you know media sources social media there's so much more about ai there obviously than banking or consulting so obviously that's playing a massive uh role in undergrads being more interested turning their heads um but the other thing that i've been seeing from some of the people that i've been talking to i've been talking to a lot of the people that i've been talking to i've been talking to a lot of the people that i've been talking to uh they go to the colleges and they educate the college students about their products i'm seeing a lot of really smart sharp cerebral ai natives go do classes in tandem with harvard business school uh they're doing case studies with these programs uh they're going what you know it's not just the old quintessential hey i'm at pwc and i'm at the campus student fair not just the old quintessential it's they're coming into the classroom and even having the god i don't want to give away too much ex-professional services that are now working at these ai natives go teach their old classmates yeah about it and it's really it's a shrewd way to get it in from the ground up it's kind of like scouting for nba players at like 12 yeah or 14 like get in front of them
Speaker 1earlier totally uh they have these ambassador programs almost that are like yeah and they're uh so people are getting more and more used to uh yeah you know like you know like you know like you know like you know using these tools so that they can help when they're in these companies procure them and then it starts this like groundswell or plg or bottoms up motion so i think it's super sharp yep um i am seeing this more and more in colleges especially like perplexity anthropic open ai we're doing no free ads and there was and there was uh there was like a status to it too like even though like a million a thousand people were ambassadors of a perplexity uh it still is like cool i'm like oh i'm in like part of the ambassador program a little bit so totally um on the state note i'll pull this tweet here this is like the new m dash of ai is adding a so i'll pull my tweet and i got this from my friends who are also in finance or consulting ai is adding a ton more work for professional services so law consulting finance etc um not less so let me explain i have some friends who are in these fields in new york and they recently got access to a company-wide license to plod uh and partners are doing their typical look over the final deck this is where like you know fit uh liquidity and fin meme culture is like uh you know a police fix sort of thing yep and they uh what they're doing now is they're still sending the police fixes but then they are sending like a 47 point verbose document from plod and it's like hey did we do we check on this yeah it's
Speaker 2like the mark twain line like if you had enough time i would have just written one page or what would it say if uh if i had more time i
Speaker 1would have written less exactly kind of like a skull sculptor right you can take the block of wood where you have more wood but i had more time i would have made it into the david right a hundred
Speaker 2percent yeah and like uh i remember at one of the ai natives that i worked with i worked for a lot of x stripe leaders yeah and i remember like it was beyond impressive how i honestly almost like consultative and it can almost like an ex consultant type background they just know the right amount of words to write yeah like the emails that were sent internally the slack messages it was never you know this ai slop for too long it was always just the right number of words to communicate the message
Speaker 1properly all makes sense all makes sense uh and this is why we put this in our core values now as a as a firm is that i think you're just going to get judged on how can you say the most amount with the least amount of words and i'm trying to get better at that really hard to do when you have a podcast and we're kind of just talking for a half you know an hour here um but yeah i would say uh completely agree the new m dash is just like a shit ton of words that are on yeah the uh you know what you're sending in slack and i in on a document but moving on to this next piece so this next piece gets me absolutely fired up gets me going uh if you look at the screen right here you'll see a tweet from alex craw check crawl crawl weck crawl weck uh so alex just got back into gtm leadership and um the strategic accounts they got he didn't put mega accounts you see that from like some of the new titles people are putting head of mega accounts oh my god oh i did see that yeah he put strategic which which is like a strategic smb mega account it's like enterprise i guess we're like these deals are getting so big that people have to do on top of people wanting to change their name in sales but um he says he look look at this tweet it's a year ago i left leadership i left leadership jobs to go back to carrying a bag a lot of people thought i was crazy this dude took a job at spacex i mean i totally get hey you want to always tell your story to sell it a little bit more hard mode and you want to tell it so that you know nobody ever wants to be like i had a easy. And like, here's all my inbound. And guess what? I have generational wealth. like nobody ever wants that story doesn't serve anybody doesn't serve anyone right so uh with alex i didn't post it i was like who in their right mind was telling alex crowek he was crazy for taking a job at xai and then i did curse her as well aka the best companies of all time a year ago and then all right so there's this other post on here it's like two sides of the same like same same kind so this cliche never gets made sense to me at all when offered a seat on a rocket ship don't ask what seat just take it that's like saying like if you get offered a 50 million dollars in the lottery you know don't spend it all it's like yeah no shit it's like no shit you know no it's just like nobody gets offered this is not relatable advice nobody gets offered nobody wins the lottery so all right what do you think about this is this just like people with revisited history just like telling their story or i just thought this was pretty funny i think it's
Speaker 2hilarious like i i mean it just it does for some reason make me think of this conversation i had with alex crowek and alex crowek and alex crowek and alex crowek and i had this week i spoke with a sales leader at snowflake i think prior to snowflake he was at canon for like uh several years another big big company and he looked me in the eye and he's like i'm the zero to one guy what yeah come on man you've been at a big publicly traded company that ipo'd years before you even got there zero to one you're the zero to one guy ah man like i was it was really hard to just be like yes no i totally hear where you come from zero to one guy i found her founder mode
Speaker 1right this goes back to like nobody ever wants to think of themselves as not a builder totally nobody ever says that i'm not technical no one ever says that i'm not a builder no one ever says they don't care about growth like you know if somebody ever says i'm it's a startup within a startup to me ever again yeah i'm gonna run through that i'm not gonna make it i'm gonna go dive into the water it's uh look i remember when i had some friends that left salesforce and they went to aws they're like well yeah amazon's big but aws is kind of like the startup business and they're like well yeah amazon's big but aws is kind of like the startup in the startup i was like bro you guys have a monopoly it's or at least at the bit of it's a three that a triopoly between azure and and you know gcp totally so i think this is just like people are always going to say like they're going to oversell their technical ability they're going to oversell their building right because you don't ever want to be viewed as something that's not none of those right even though but your actions dictate that so the guy at snowflake seems like he was a great guy not a builder great guy not a zero to one guy not the zero to one zero to one guy he's
Speaker 2the one trillion to two trillion
Speaker 1guy but listen come on that's like that's that's a coin operated rep that's a coin operated rep yeah um all right moving on to this next one this is where i got a little bit spicy on twitter so if you see this this meme went viral of taylor swift uh she was pointing at her massive rock on her ring on her finger uh that was saying my husband and i went i was like this is like i gotta jump into this um the wives of anthropic aes you can even just call it abs aes any of these sort of companies that are gonna get in generational wealth uh by joining the wives of anthropic aes taunting significant others who married sales reps who joined absolute dog sales orgs with a 29 quota attainment on rep view and i don't know i just thought like this is the type of shit that i have these demons in my brain a little bit of of it and like uh i thought this was kind of funny it's like how do you loop in what did i call timothy chamelet oh god yeah you uh you gave me shit on this i'm trying to get better with my sort of uh emotional pop culture with some of these celebs and dating and all this but uh i thought this was really funny and then the other one that i posted about was uh and i'll put this on the screen this one kind of ripped you got a one it got 63 000 impressions on on twitter can't wait for all the anthropic aes to make an absolute bag from the ipo join vc funds and advise founders on how they scale in anthropics go to market motion lol first off let's give a shout out to timothy chamelet shout out to anthropic going public in a couple weeks and a lot of these aes just making a ton of money and uh what's your thoughts on this of just like some of these topics if you have any god well
Speaker 2number one so happy for them like oh what a beautiful i mean it's a beautiful it's a beautiful moment for the tech industry so that's going to be awesome number two then it might lead to the nightmare of what you called truly there's going to be more vcs uh more advisory shops more uh i'm the i'm the founder i'm the zero to one guy than ever before that's that's going to be tough
Speaker 1100 but good for them i think they're like part of the reason why so many people are getting upset is because we were on parallel paths with a lot of these people as enterprise aes and tech sales and i feel like uh it went from everybody like oh have you got if you chose the right company versus not you made like three or five x more and still like a good payout but if you got it as an anthropic at 18 months or two years ago you might make 20 to 50 million dollars on that exit if it stays at a 1.5 or 2 trillion dollar valuation so i think that's like a part of the reason why people are just people are just a little bit like pissed maybe yeah a little bit like how do you think what's the market you talk to enterprise aes a lot and i don't know what's like am i right about that sentiment
Speaker 2a hundred percent yeah everyone would have taken the opportunity yeah if you interviewed there and were given the opportunity it had a hundred percent acceptance rate yeah like that is s tier full stop totally um number two the number of reps that didn't get that opportunity that then said well i mean they don't even really get commission yeah you know and then yeah you
Speaker 1don't need a baby commission what are you gonna like the the stock is absolutely ripping yeah
Speaker 2and i'm just like hey i hear you let's i can be in
Speaker 1there and commiserate with you like sure i love playing hard mode with no upside how about you so it's just like no listen good for them it's truly truly some of the sharpest uh aes i've ever worked with work in anthropic and it is a privilege to be an order taker and they earned a lot most people that i know went there like are really sharp and earned the opportunity to go there and this is true for a lot of the labs companies that you know you get in post product market fit but with equity upside so um yeah i'm a little bit jealous but i'm also happy for a lot of those people because it's like this is what's going to draw smarter people into tech sales is it goes back to like how do we get some of those professional services one you call the role gtm this is what we're trying to find out what we're trying to find out what we're trying to find out but two is you pay them an absolute bag so they can join vc funds and they can advise on gtm strategy like this is exactly like there's just steps in the right direction and i am i'm here for it man we're gonna keep pumping out the gtm brand of all this stuff um with that said i'm gonna go grab uh our third amigo matt roberts we'll talk about some ai native the ai nativity recruiting all right y'all quick break if you're getting value from this do me a favor and hit the follow button on youtube spotify and apple it helps way more than you think now back to the episode all right first off shout out to matt roberts matt roberts heads up our bd practice i went a little white you went some red i had some white earlier which is totally fine all right let's pivot to like what are the best candidates and what are the best recruiters do that we have heard so i think what's really interesting is like as we try to be the best recruiting firm that we could possibly be so like i do a lot of our recruiting but like media you head up parts of sales leadership you're doing a lot of our bd and smb ae stuff uh we get to hear hear from a lot of candidates and we might lose them sometimes of like what are the best recruiting firms doing i think it's been really interesting to hear some of the negative feedback that we're hearing from other firms what are some of these like tidbits that matt you've been hearing uh and that we maybe don't do sort of thing
Speaker 5yeah best practices i think to me when when i look at it from a recruiting standpoint of what good recruiters and good recruiting companies and and practices do is in my head it's you're trying to get the person you're working with the candidate you're trying to get them the best offer they can get at the best company that they can get that they're most excited about to me that's like that's what you should be doing as a recruiter and that is does not always mean that that company is a company that you're connecting them with and that you're going to get financially rewarded at and so there have been multiple times and i again i don't want to toot our own horn but so i'll just say like best practices are you have somebody that you're working with they get an offer from one of your companies and it's a great company and it's a great offer but they got an offer that's at a better company and it's a better offer and you have nothing to do with it your responsibility should to should be saying go take that offer yeah unless they want to take the other offer is there complete their decision too which we understand so much of the um subjectivity of this and how much of the human variable goes into it but i think the sleazy like car used car salesman vibe of like recruiters is that they're always going to push you in the direction that gets them paid but i hope and i think that the reality is that there are people out there doing a really good job of not doing that and still just like servicing the candidate to get the best offer at the best company and it might not be the one that they set you up with yeah and like i i know we strive to do that and i think we do a really good job at it i know there's other people that are doing it but i want candidates and i want people who are looking for roles to sometimes come with that mindset so that if there's more like to have as their weighing options they they hopefully believe that they are trying to lead them down the right path not down the path that makes the recruiter get paid yeah
Speaker 1i think you bring up some really good points there and then kurt i'm actually what want your opinion after this there's like three pillars of this i had people who we lost uh they got an offer at i'm not gonna name names of our companies but like we work with great companies but we don't work with anthropic and cursing when they were coming up and they got offers there i told them to just take it yeah and i think they would have taken it anyway i don't think i was the one who like gave advice and name any of these top five companies that have been generational and those i think we have to do that even there's this middle area though that sometimes um this is where we us being x operators they'll come to us because they're like hey you guys have been aes before and it's like which one should we choose and it's like hey permission to like challenge you a little bit and i love those sort of conversations i i want to have the best roles so we never have to have those conversations yeah but it happens right we don't recruit for every you know company i think modal is a tremendous company with justin dignelli and we work with one of the other inference players and fireworks that's going to be like a pros and cons sort of conversation that you're you don't have a bad decision to make if you're about to join one of the inference players right now so how do you have that you have to like understand what they really want what they're looking for um when they want to enter that sort of organization uh and then there's times when they're about to make a really bad decision yeah and that is when you have to be like hey man can you really like let me go off for a couple minutes and you have to like i think when you want to do that you ask for permission a little bit yeah yeah what i have been hearing from some recruiting firms is they are super super super pushy about it and that will never be us but i kind of get it right like we're paid on this is where like we don't want to be the coin operated recruiting firm we want to be truly like the trusted advisor consultate look at me using the buzzwords right but it's like that's truly what we want to be because we might lose somebody but guess what that person knows 10 other amazing aes 10 other amazing bdrs and we want the referral and we want to throw events like this we don't want people to like hate us and if that means it's like a short-term you know it's like the you lose the short-term gratification for the long-term gain a little bit and we definitely want to do that and like you guys are freaking perfect for that you know i mean but curry yeah thoughts on this i think you guys have
Speaker 2covered most of the good bases in terms of recruiter best practices i think matt kind of alluded to like the mindset which i think is most important for how the recruiter needs to think like you're trying to do best by them and get them the best possible opportunity possible period yeah too many p's a lot of alliteration but you got my point um i think the way i view it is like i think it might have been you matt that brought up how you view a lot of these uh sales people as like the athletes i always view kind of like the recruiter almost like you have to act like a sports agent like you've got to figure out what are the best teams for that athlete to go to and how can you get them into that potential door kind of like how sometimes you're going to have a holdout or sometimes you're going to uh not want your player to get drafted to a certain team it's like hey we're ex-operators we've made a lot of mistakes we've done a lot of things good too we can like dramatically change the uh trajectory of your career if you trust us to be your sports agent and let us say like hey trust me you're gonna want to go to fireworks even if it's an ai native role versus an enterprise ae at another company trust us yeah whereas if you you know maybe work with another recruiter it's just going to be coin operated they're just going to try and get you in the door somewhere get that placement fee and move on it's like no we're in this for the long haul so whether it's us or another mentor that can act like a recruiter do that and you'll be in a great place that's
Speaker 5that's what i was going to say because i know you you talk a lot about mentors and i feel like you know not every recruiter is a mentor and not every recruiter needs your mentor but i think really good recruiters are a mentor and and it's sometimes it's really hard to not feel like you're coming from a place that makes the candidate feel like yeah you're point operated and you're trying to do it but you truly are trying to give them advice because you're not going to be able to do it if you're not going to be able to do it if you're also have some knowledge that maybe you can't share about internal things that are happening at a company here or there and so you're trying to move them in a spot that again lands them at a really good opportunity where hopefully they can go and grow a fabulous career make a lot of money and then set themselves up for a really good spot and it's like it's always kind of battling with like you said ask permission yeah where it's just like i don't want to say that you're making a bad choice because i also don't want to lose the credit that like i've built with you and but like i want you to think about this a little bit more because in your head you're like based on my experience based on what i know i think that might not be the right choice and and it's just like it's a it's a fine line to like get people to understand again that not everyone is out there just to service themselves but they're actually looking out for you from a mentor standpoint the way that like a mentor might tell them don't take that offer take this offer yeah but it's hard when you're financially involved in it but again yeah best recruiters are i think are mentors in a way
Speaker 1yeah you definitely see us more with what you do i would say early stage like when we get more of the very fair yeah the enterprise am sometimes we get you know like they they want to run their race and they want to tap to us when they need to yeah but some of the younger especially we see this with like we have some not companies we work with but companies are like hey here's an offer you got to end of the day to accept it they're like strong arming some of these young bdrs yeah and i'm like this is like dumb yeah
Speaker 2um one other thing here yeah the other thing is that i think it's kind of is you can only help people if they're open to being helped yeah yep so one thing that kills me and i'm sure i've done this and i'm sure we've all done this and it just kills me is don't ask the questions don't ask like for example us or your mentor if you're not actually open to hearing what we're saying yeah so like i remember speaking to an ae once and he was about to he was asking me about this company that i had a lot of inside scoop into and he was asking some pretty good questions you know about inbound about uh the market about the product market fit but i could tell he's already made up his decision he was going to pursue that company that wasn't a good fit yeah fortunately this ae didn't get the opportunity uh bullet dodged uh but just make sure you're really open-minded if you're going to ask the questions and ask the questions because your career is more of your life than your personal time 100 yeah and
Speaker 5we talk about all the time where the company is more important than the title the comp or being good at sales
Speaker 1actually yeah so yeah that's like uh i think the thing i want to pivot to is we we talk about like what we see other recruiting firms may be doing poorly that we're like hey we want to not do that yeah what do you think are some of the things that the best candidates do and then the the candidates that don't perform well uh what comes to mind for these so like i'll start off candidates i had two candidates this month that didn't it was the first call the hiring manager didn't have their cameras on
Speaker 5that's crazy to me
Speaker 1dude and they have apologized after and they were both like hey sorry i was so deep in this other process that i ended up accepting and i wasn't i was dogging it a little bit i'm like all right you called it out um because they went to a company that we work with so i guess they want me to like i thought i was gonna like do anything um but so that would be one i would say an area that uh candidates what they do well being concise yeah concise brevity so i consistently hear the flip side of this of like candidates who who are like you know who are going to do a lot of the work and they're going to do a lot of the work and they're going to do a lot of the work and they're going to do a lot of the work and they're going to do a lot of the work and they're going to do a lot of the work and they're going to do a lot of the work and they're going to do a lot of the work and they're going to do a lot of the work and they're going to do a lot of the work and they're going to do a lot of the work and they're going to do a lot of the work and they're going to do a lot of the work and they're going to do a lot of the work and they're going to do a lot of the work
Speaker 5together again i know we've talked about we did a podcast on like these things that people are doing, but it's like, if I'm saying, Hey, let's connect and talk about this conversation. And you're sending me an invite for next Thursday and you're doing it tomorrow. I immediately like Chris way more than you. And then the communication piece is just like at every step, whether it's before the meeting, it's after the meeting, you know, like we've seen this a lot. We tell people, Hey, send a thank you note. Like, Hey, thanks for your time. Kurt really excited by ABC that we chatted about really excited about the next steps here and there. The hiring managers that send us Kurt was great but he didn't send a thank you note or a follow-up ding like those things are huge and the momentum in sales and momentum and recruiting processes are hand in hand and then the communication I'm just like you how you do something is how you do everything totally if I'm looking at you as a sales rep and you're not good at communicating and following up and stuff you're probably not going to be that great yeah
Speaker 1yeah yeah momentum and calms everything what about you what are some things that stand out best candidates do not so great candidates do that
Speaker 2they shouldn't be doing so just today i got a text from a candidate and he said it and it was like such an obvious aha and yet i haven't heard many people say it he's like kurt i treat every one of my recruiting processes like a sales process yeah and i was like of course yeah that's it like what a simple effective way of putting it um it's so true so naturally if you're in a sales process you're going to respond quickly you're going to book calls maybe on the call or first chance yeah you're going to bring energy and enthusiasm oh my god when i get uh like a ping from a hiring manager a cro founder being like yeah low energy didn't seem that engaged felt like they were multitasking yeah oh god what are you doing i checked in with the guy and he's like i wasn't multitasking i'm like then what does that mean about you i'm even more scared yeah um oh the other piece is yeah like look the part you know like lean in be be present don't don't have a hat on yeah um you know be professional have good lighting yeah by the way hey i'm leaning with the vest you know one for two isn't um but i remember my first sales leader he said perception is reality like at the very least control the controllables yes and bring energy Be, be precise, be engaged, be enthusiastic, be in a button up shirt and don't have a hat on, and you got eight tenths of the thing done.
Speaker 1Yeah. So those are some of the quick wins I'd say. A hundred percent. Um, I think that, you know, we did an article on this. We did a podcast on this, we'll drop it in the show notes of just like, what the seven things or i think we did 12 things that top interviewers are doing and i think you guys brought up some good ones here i i do want to pivot to you know i i have the hat now i was at cursor's office or grokbot's office uh i'm not wearing it right now because no free ads even though i'm saying their name right now but but i i took a
Speaker 5photo of the hat on the bed and i said i want one of these and then i pinged my one of my buddy's little brothers who works at cursor i said how do i get one of these and he said i'll get you in on the next shipment hell yeah yeah so either you're getting one or i did
Speaker 1breakfast we were trying to do like a live collab with uh with spacex or cursor team because i got a bunch of friends that are there and i mean us as a firm we've been using grokbot a shit ton awesome it's awesome it's awesome so i want to like get into a little bit of like what's your favorite use cases yeah uh this could be personal or professional uh for grokbot use cases so we're actually name one just name one the top one that
Speaker 5you've been like blown away well what i want to say before that because i laughed that you just said personal or professional i'm not going to say personal i'm not going to say professional went in my head i'm like i haven't done it personally yet okay i know that you have yeah and i also saw you my wife was so
Speaker 1impressed i like booked the whole italy trip through i remember when we were in new york
Speaker 5a few weeks ago and you and i was looking at your stuff because you're talking about it and i saw florence and there was one also that was like uh find multiple uh like uh food reservations where i don't need a cc down but are like 4.5 and above in this and i was like oh my god chris is becoming ai i'm a hack i don't have an ai pill your gt but i haven't done anything personally yet but i have also talked to people um in professional settings where i'm like oh grokbot's great we're doing this this and they've asked me what are you doing on your personal side and i was like i haven't yet and it kind of i will i will get to the spot where i'm doing some things i don't know exactly what yet business professional wise the amount of times that the manual efforts of follow-up that i was doing and things i didn't really know could have some good automation uh linkedin is awesome it's been actually really really helpful to be like you sent this person a calendar link and they never responded or you never responded like got your time thanks for whatever go bump them it's been four days and i'm like yeah those are ones that i was manually going in because also like condo scares the hell out of me i was going to rest in peace the condo partnership with crew you got me we want to use it but we keep getting banned that's my
Speaker 2livelihood so i couldn't well i wouldn't say that was no free advertising i think that's that is detrimental now no all right mitch mitchell went to
Speaker 1cognition so what does that tell you anyway that's whatever
Speaker 5it's scraping things like that is so cool and it's very very helpful and then the last one which i told you to about and like i don't know we still haven't seen it live i was trying to show you yesterday but it but it was down um oh it was down for a little bit it's not perfect but whole world stops the whole world stop is the the feedback that i had to go read slack and say like hey here's why people are getting dinged and like here are why people are getting moved to next rounds on specific clients this is like the feedback that we're getting comms are bad bad energy hey this person's energy is great the things that are important to each individual client each individual hiring manager takes that says cool kurt got a yes from that company boom takes all the good information takes all the negative hey these are no-goes sends kurt a message kurt before you go and talk with crew do this kind of stuff yeah and then you're like oh don't do this kind of stuff and it's and it's live it's living it's green so it's like updating it can be surround sound it can be like or like it's monitoring and like i wanted to do that i wanted to give people the good prep that is very personalized to each um company and in each hiring manager and each org and this allows me to automate it and it's pulling directly from the word of the mouth of the hiring manager and then the candidates like dude that's awesome thank you because i also send our like generic overarching here's the 12 things people are doing yeah i send kurt had of the like yeah brevity and you know no hats which debatable but it also can take in all these like really personalized things that people are like that's awesome usually i get just a generic thing but this has generic which is great advice and personalized to that specific yeah opportunity and it's like i don't have to do anything other than hit send yeah it's awesome
Speaker 2totally it's great from the slack channel yeah and any feedback that the hiring managers are giving there it totally i did see this one that was cool yeah yeah yeah
Speaker 5and any crew content with those people yeah like hey we did a podcast with artia so here you go yeah we did this with you know whatever company
Speaker 1throws it in it's sweet yeah um i love it i think it's great i think that like what i've been the most surprised about grokbot is that and i'm not doing this daily to send 100 messages but the ease of using it for linkedin i've been pretty shocked maybe this gets banned like next week somewhere like a lot of the resi apis and like some of the apis and all that but and the banking apis but i think that the ability to you know we as recruiters as people as former salespeople linkedin's like your freaking data hub right and it's how you communicate with a lot of prospects and people that like when you're not on text or email just yet and i think the use case is just we send our calendar a lot in linkedin and we just like never really track if they book time yeah i started running that and i had like 20 or 30 in the last two months and i just bumped it and then people was what was all it was kind of upsetting was four of them were like i just got a new job and i was like oh shit but then like three others were like oh shit sorry like just like lead slip you know how like i was like dude no problem at all
Speaker 5and that's the long-hanging fruit that's the like the good fit not on a calendar that we used to
Speaker 1call it i got us the team license a month ago and then i said i'm putting it i think you guys remember i was like i'm putting a mandatory team meeting on not our scheduled time i was like everybody if you ask questions in our group chat anymore and it could be grokbotified i'm gonna just do
Speaker 5at grok can i can i i want to give chris some flowers i like giving chris flowers because thanks man you're you're a badass i i truly mean that and i also at the end of this i want to hear after his professional one because i don't know if he does personal stuff i do want to hear your personal grokbot favorite thing they do but you did force us you're like let's do it yeah and i looked into a little bit when you first like this is cool like check it out i was like okay cool and i was like yeah but then when you forced the hand i was like okay cool and i was like yeah and i was like shit you're completely right this is really helpful and it's addicting and it's fun and now i am always thinking that's like not even working anymore he's just playing with riley as good yeah i'm just hanging out i'm dude i'm in the ball pit with them it's automated rock is just you hop on i'm not even on calls dude it's it's just an avatar i have an avatar and he's running but no it really has been uh so helpful and it saved hours of manual which is what ai should be doing is yeah automate the the manual and it's saved hours of manual which is what ai should be doing and effort that you need to do on things admin style stuff and it is sick so like shout out to you for like making us thank you and thank you it's sick appreciate
Speaker 1the kind words so the reason why i cracked the whip on that one was because i just had the light bulb moment that i had on november 30th 2022 when chat gbt came out and i was about to go into consulting and i was like this job's not gonna make it ngmi right and i was like this job's going away i also was a pretty shitty consultant so like my job in particular like average consultants were certainly going away so um what kurt what's been like one grok by use case that you've been like oh this is like this has given me a good
Speaker 2amount of leverage so two that jump out right away one is i have like this living breathing corpus of all of our roles indexed in real time so at all times i can just ask grok but like hey i'm chatting with chris molestris former ae or ae at metronome what are the five roles of our litany of roles and companies that are the best fit for him in this time bam yeah i don't know it's incredible the second one is prior to every uh candidate call 15 minutes before i'll have grok but tell me that what are the five roles at this current moment based on our current portfolio a role could have changed yesterday for example one of our companies uh profound now has a remote enterprise ae role yeah just went online so now uh if this ae was targeting remote they were in you know the middle of the country etc this that would have been one of the roles highlighted to me so i'm going in kind of with my briefing yeah going into that call the last one that's money is uh we have such a high volume of candidates uh conversations uh humble brag how many how many per day how many per week no we have a lot uh and at the end of the month there's no way i can go back and look at every single missed meeting or reschedule so i just have grok about run through all the calendar invites that were canceled or um pending and it'll provide me a list and be like hey these people are going to be like oh my god i'm going 15 people didn't book time with you uh here's a draft i
Speaker 5like that one here's a draft to send to
Speaker 2matt and chris wow i need this play i
Speaker 5don't i didn't know it's amazing i know dude why are you
Speaker 1sharing this on the daily syncs he's too busy too many candidate calls how many you said how many per day uh but i need to hear your personal uh grok like like your favorite personal i can get uh but no that sounds weird actually yeah that's very interesting i don't know like texting your wife nightly like this is linked up to you just like my wife's pissed at me i never answer yeah what's your favorite one that you think
Speaker 5is like uh usable by kurt and i
Speaker 1or kaylin like i would say there's two so one is uh i moved to a new town about a year ago in new jersey and i am planning a dinner for guys who i started golfing with recently and liked in town and uh i had it kind of like they gave me a few restaurant recommendations that they wanted to go to they're really hard to get so i was like rather than offload that to my wife, who usually is better at like the resi hacks, I had this thing like waiting waiting waiting and emailing and then like waiting for the day that it opens up so kind of was this resi bot waiting for 30 days before the reservation because we actually booked this over 30 days out because they're just like how schedules were in the fall and um and that was one i would say two would be we are getting a bunch of work done into the house because when we bought the house we knew we needed probably like 50 to 100 grand of work to do it was moving ready but then there was like we need to paint we need to do so we're getting the list now and there's a lot of the stuff that falls on the man a little bit right which i don't know shit about i'm not very handy at all but it's like it's being very helpful like hey find me the three best vendors and then reach out to them and then it kind of like automates when they do then send then they come to the house and they send me a quote then i say oh match these up and it's constantly being like a thought partner proactively to see hey that person gave you a quote but didn't put in the primer of the painting oh you got to ask for apples to apples and it's like okay thanks for like proactively actually telling me and here's the draft that you should send vendor to so it's helping me both i would say restaurant recommendations which is a common use case in rock pot but second is like apples to apples comparisons and then actually drafting up the email to vendor two of what vendor wanted already that's a kick-ass one yeah yeah that's a very cool one i will take that one so that's
Speaker 2a personal one i have a new york city apartment that's rented yeah yeah they're like so i don't
Speaker 1know if that's gonna be they're like uh well it's a year i'm jealous of that when you buy a house or whatever you want to call
Speaker 5it my list has only grown over the last year yeah yeah it's just like and you're on sacramento yeah you're not too far from here and you're just like ah i gotta also add that in so that's a great use case uh matt thanks
Speaker 1for joining us man we're gonna finish up with a couple other topics and uh go go uh work the room a little bit or
Speaker 5get out of the the grandma blanket
Speaker 1yeah grab
Speaker 5another glass of red wine and
Speaker 1show that san francisco does drink a little bit i'll i'll bridge that for you yeah yeah yeah first off john boyer vp of sales at blocksmith just raised a c a series c from sequoia and uh yeah why don't you give a quick little background for you you're going to be on the pod tomorrow which won't ship for another month but tell the crowd like who you are and yeah quick little overview yeah
Speaker 4hey everyone my name is john boyer i'm the vp of sales at blacksmiths uh for those of you that don't know blacksmiths we are a purpose-built ci infrastructure um right now the business is absolutely taking off a lot of this is led by uh the rise of ai coding um creating one of the biggest bottlenecks that developers are faced with which is really the uh the part of the software development development life cycle where you're validating code and um you're putting your builds and your tests together um we help developers accelerate that uh reduce obviously the the costs and uh accelerate the time to ship as
Speaker 1well yeah oh yeah love it yeah like i said came out of nowhere i know you started earlier this year i remember what because you and i were connected and uh you've been a fan of the crew pod which you're on now which you'll be on tomorrow uh but yeah when i like heard about your guys growth numbers it's why i wrote the article and i'll put it on the screen of like a wide join i write this from an ae lens and i was like holy shit like why does nobody know about this opportunity uh i know why more people probably can't join it because it's a very technical sale so you need those type of sellers but um what was it about like how did you even know because you join around like what 10 million error or maybe it's like uh or i don't know it was before that as well okay even before then so um almost about a year ago like what how did you have the growth rate that it was going to have now and everything like what were some of the initial signs how did you even find out about the
Speaker 4opportunity yeah there's probably uh two things so like shout out to heather torres uh from google ventures she she actually had introduced me to jp the first thing was just the quality of the people so the three founders they're all grads from the university of waterloo two of them worked in infrastructure with cockroach labs the other worked at fair and so they had really deep experience with this problem firsthand i think the second thing was um in speaking with my friends who were engineers many of them were obviously benefiting from leveraging ai coding tools but the one thing that slowed them down um was actually like everything that followed after writing code and so they saw all these benefits that writing code is obviously getting cheaper they're accelerating but the main problem was actually everything that came after that so they weren't actually realizing the roi and so i knew like both at the talent side we had great founders really amazing founding team but more importantly the problem was absolutely massive yeah i didn't say one quick thing yeah of
Speaker 2course that second thing that you just said i think the whole audience needs to keep that in mind when you're evaluating infrastructure opportunities ask the engineers yeah ask your engineering buddies and be like tell me if this really passed the sniff test are you actually using this are you hearing about this i think that's like so key for due diligence so i love that yeah 100 and
Speaker 1i didn't know how much of a hub waterloo was for engineer town i watched the blackberry movie yep and uh that was my first taste of it i didn't know how much of a hub waterloo was for engineer town i watched the blackberry movie and i think like i think chamath went there too he was talking about on the all-in pod of how like waterloo was this big hub uh so it's like a signal it's like yeah you can go to carney email and stanford or waterloo like if your engineers are coming out of those it's usually a pretty good signal yeah yeah the second ride
Speaker 4i've been a part of with waterloo grads so okay yeah um obviously there there there's been multiple experiences but my time at flip as well was uh quite a few waterloo grads so really great talent sweet well you guys are hiring aes hiring some sales leaders yeah we're hiring across the board so uh if you're an account executive uh solutions engineering we're we're looking for a lot of folks to work closely with our customers um we're starting to build out our post sales motion as well so um more of like a technical account management team and then uh beyond that looking for sales leaders as well yeah sweet and then new york where's the office in new york did you guys find a spot uh so we are just outside of creotown in new york um it's like i think it's like 30 and fifth but uh i'll get back to you on that address we just moved in last week and uh we're just here also in the bay at uh 575 market sweet hell yeah uh it's been great
Speaker 1working with you guys for those that have not heard of blacksmith check out this article i that's how much of a loser i am i geek out over this and our blog that goes out there's times when i'm like i have to write an article on this company why you should join and you guys were an easy yes to that so it's been great working with you we got somebody this week kurt yeah it's steven uh hopefully many more to come with that and uh excited to get the word out more when we have you on the pod it'll be a nice story tomorrow so uh but john thanks so much man likewise man and thanks for uh yeah coming out coming on and we'll wrap up in a little we'll see how you and i get some wine so cool john's great awesome working with that team they're just busy they're busy right now dude they're like they need like so for those that are looking technical aes let's get you placed there please reach out to kurt myself whoever um all right two last things is so what do you know about corgi oh my god what one
Speaker 2of the top three most huh names in tech today
Speaker 1yeah uh for reasons that are quite interesting so corgi i'm pretty sure just hires like attractive women and shit posts on linkedin on twitter not linkedin twitter um they also had the corgi cafe which was like the ftx of coffee shops apparently like i think it's shut down i don't like know what actually happened i don't even know if they were selling coffee but what what they're doing is they're like they're like i'm gonna hire a bunch of attractive women and put them on twitter and the one brooke leblanc had posted out this is pretty much like the six five blue eyes trust fund finance sort of thing in tech where she said i wrote out a list of what i'm looking for x work your magic and it was all stuff that was like it was all stuff that uh listen this exists but it's similar to like i'll go back to the the software developer that gets into sales there's like six five blue eyes trust fund finance sort of thing in tech where she said i wrote out a list of six of these in existence so you know non-negotiable 35 to 42 years old healthy masculine smart funny all this stuff so like follow that list i then played a little bit of joke on this i said here's my non-negotiables for a sales role yeah okay as an ae a former ae um plg healthy inbound uh but company still has the product that can command large enterprise deals out market ai native so like post 2022 and newer smart sales team so cerebral and non-salesy went to good schools grinders you know won't complain about late hours since we're hopefully winning and we have way too much inbound startup veterans and junkies addicted to the game i did a quote on that um at one of the companies that actually matters right now good brand appeal it's like 50 of those right now we work with a bunch of them they're growing from 100 or 0-100 mil in three years at the minimum i'd even say dude we just had a john from blacksmith he was just sitting here that's like zero to 100 in like two years like i feel like that needs to almost be two years yeah sales leadership i can learn from not sold they still quote clary clad ross uh yeah coffee's for closers uh they won't over hire sales at least in like a one or two year period and they love it when i say when sales makes a bag what did i miss here what is like your six fives blue six five blue eyes trust fund finance version of the the ideal sales role what did i miss you kind of nailed it caitlin what's coming to mind for you dude i'm drawing blank that's a pretty good list you had how's this how's this if you were to define what is the most uh important diligence question that you can ask if you can only ask one that would give you 80 20 of is this opportunity good or not what is that one question that you could you you would ask can I go with what i would answer on it so what i would answer on it is uh how much inbound where are you getting your deals now then again you can't ask how much inbound it's like the uh never ask a man his salary a woman her age or in a hiring manager how much inbound this is you can't directly ask the hiring manager like how much inbound but you can kind of back channel a little bit with aes I just Like market pull is so important to your success as an AE. I mean, the best reps, they might not, they don't directly ask the hiring manager this. So like, that would be my number one. What about you? Anything that comes to mind?
Speaker 2Yeah. Like the thing that's coming to mind is maybe it's a two-part question, but it's one. It's how much revenue have you closed over the last, call it two quarters. If I know it's 10 million and there was, you know, six, uh, seven figure deals and, or five or six, seven figure deals, and then a bunch of, uh, six figure deals. And then a few five figure deals. Okay. Fantastic. If it's one $9 million deal. Yeah. And a few 50 Kers run.
Speaker 6Yeah. Interesting. I'd actually, it's so hard to distill it down to one question. I'd say the non-obvious one is I want to know about like, what does NR look like? Um, I mean, Anthropic just came out with their S1. You saw that there. And our was 900%. Uh, so a dollar was worth $9 a year later. Um, and so it's like, you know, it's also, you could have a lot of PLG, right? A lot of inbound that. And if they say, yes, we have a lot of great, but what you might not know is this is a leaky bucket, right? Like how many, how much, how many, how many dollars are you holding onto your, over your, over your, how much is that growing? That just tells you, like, if they love that's, that's essentially an indirect metric of how much they love the product. Cause they're spending more on the product. You spend more on what you love. Right. So totally.
Speaker 1And a benchmark that like snowflake was the darling here. Uh, for a while and they were at like 200% NRR. Yeah. 200% was known as like the generational companies. Totally. Anthropic was at 900, it's not even like we went, we doubled. We 4.5 X. We didn't two X we 4.5
Speaker 6X the last benchmark. Yeah. Pretty insane. Think about this. They have a, I think I, I may be fudging the numbers here. I can't remember. I think they said they have a thousand million dollar customers that million dollars to be worth 9 million. If that, if those rates hold true for that segment, this is unheard.
Speaker 1Of what are their reps doing differently that I wasn't doing at Metro. I'm just kidding. I know it's like, you know, listen, no comment. Great, great, great reps that are there. Um, truly. And, uh, I mean, they just built an amazing and so many people said they were
Speaker 2crazy for going there though.
Speaker 1Like, yeah. Can you believe it? Nobody said anthropic, but I will say people, oh, wait, I actually, this is a good point. Kurt people said that I was crazy for joining them at 18 billion. Now, one, I didn't get chosen to go to the dance. So just to be clear, but second is, uh, a lot of. If people were like 18 billion, you're going to make no money. Well, jokes on you. Jokes also on me. Cause I didn't, I didn't get the, the role, but like also like that's, we don't know what the limit is in this a little.
Speaker 6Yeah. Yeah. I think it's just like, uh, right now in this era, the last couple of years, there's so many firsts, right? Like how historically do you ever see companies going from zero to a hundred million in two years? Like now, like these are all just like firsts could be a side effect of a bubble. Yeah. Right. You see the stuff in a bubble, even like sometimes like you. Saw companies go to a billion dollar versions of like zero in revenue during the.com boom bust. Right. So many of them, you slap.com and anything, and all of a sudden you're a billion dollar company. So we just, yeah. But the point is, I think there's a little more sustainable. We all agree. The AI, uh, the use case around AI are really real. It's going to boost productivity and GDP over the long haul. The question is, are we getting over our skis a little bit, right. Yeah. In terms of evaluation.
Speaker 2So. Well, just to be fair, just to help the lead push back, maybe I'm just deeply biased. I think my diligence question was the best. Yeah. Like, I feel like if you have, maybe it's like, yeah, no, yeah. I think like, if you look at the last year of a company, how much revenue have you actually closed and then what is that deal mix or that, um, that is a great question to deals. I like, I wish I'd asked that in past roles so much.
Speaker 6So I think we all agree. I feel like all of the questions we ask are all the questions you should be asking. Yeah. Nobody's asking that question. Yeah. I would say no one's asking that.
Speaker 2Spoken from some internal. We should, people should be asking that question.
Speaker 6Yeah, totally. And we asked this all the time when we were working with companies. Right. Like it's part of our diligence framework so we can make sure that the people we work with, like our only have a high probability of working for a winner.
Speaker 1Yeah. Yeah, totally. Um, all right. Moving on to the last tweet before we wrap things up is, uh, Isaac, Isaiah Crossman posted about this and he said, I would say the single piece of sales advice that has made me more money than any other is simply never leave a sales interaction without the next meeting booked on the calendar. And I think this sounds good. I think eventually you get a champion and a deal where you always can maybe have a meeting with them. I feel like there's nuance in this post and then I, you'll see my screenshot on this. I posted there's nuance here. Yes. Great. AEs ask for the next meeting while they're still on the call. I totally agree. But if you book time live and the prospect says, let me get back to you once I align calendars with a few others and you push again, like you are the reason why AEs get a reputation for being salesy. So I think that obviously there's some common sense with a lot of this stuff, but I would say, um, there's just a lot of people that are not. There's just nuance with a lot of this stuff. I guess what's your guys take of like, you know, asking for the meeting on the meeting and like, what do you see? Like the best AEs have ever done that separate them from a good to a great AE.
Speaker 6I agree with you on the take of, I guess, Isaiah's tweet, which is like, I just feel like it's so formulaic and scripty to go back. So let's get the next meet on the counter. I've been on, I've shouted so many AEs calls where they do it. It feels so unnatural. Yeah. Um, it's like, let's pull up the counter. It's like most times if you're having a really productive meeting, you're running like against the, uh, close to the metal. Yeah. Timing. Yep. Um, and so like, and then sometimes they have to huddle up with a bunch of other people. You know, I'll tell you, I've seen so many reps close massive deals where they didn't set the next step on the counter and they've closed six and seven figure deals, high six figure and some seven figure deals. Right. Uh, later on, like many, many meetings later.
Speaker 1I mean, one of them too, is just, I think the best AEs ask the uncomfortable questions that are tearing on friction in a discovery call. Is this worth your time or not? I actually don't think I was that great at that as an AE, and I think if you have an heavy business, you don't have to, you can let this slip a little bit. I really wasn't at those type of companies. So I would say it's the ones that can really get out. Like, why are they just window shopping? Yep. Or do they actually have a need where they're going to buy this or like actually evaluate your product? That's probably one that comes to mind. Anything come to mind for you, Kurt, of like top AEs and what they're doing differently.
Speaker 6I'd also say, by the way, if you have good EQ and you can read the room, you can under, you can feel out the vibes of like how serious they are. Yeah. Uh, it's the unspoken, it's the unspoken. It's the unspoken body language, how they ask questions, are they engaged throughout the conversation? Do they know what they're talking about? Are you, you know, if you know enough about your product and your category and they're reciprocating that energy, you can, and obviously the, you know, the classic, like, are they the right people in the org, et cetera, et cetera. You can usually feel out if it's going to actually, you can vibe check if it's actually going somewhere. Definitely. I mean, you tell me, Kurt, you've been a top eight, a bunch of companies. What do you think? So I think you have the
Speaker 2good fortune and some AEs have the good fortune of that high EQ. But I think the thing that we got to drill into AEs heads are. Former selves included is qualify, qualify, qualify. Yeah. The best orgs that I've been at qualify so hard, ask the tough questions. They are direct. Um, they have the EQ, but they also ask it to make sure they don't miss anything. The worst sales orgs that I've been at, we didn't qualify a ton and we were just like, oh, inbound leads. Oh my God. Amazing. Totally. It was like my day. Like, let's talk to them and we take it too far. We waste a ton of resources. Clothes lost. Yeah. Um, we spoke to the Nooks VP of enterprise sales. Shout out to Nooks. Sponsor this event. And he said something this week that I really liked. He's like, I look for three vectors when I'm interviewing EQ, IQ, AQ. What's AQ? Uh, obviously emotional intelligence, intelligence, intelligence, and then action quotient. And he's like, I always want that bias for action. So I think that kind of tips things over the edge. So like where, of course you're at the end of that call, you're going to encourage a next step, but also you're going to have the EQ and IQ to read the room. Totally. To not push, you know, if it, otherwise you will come across salesy. Which is ironically an, an anathema, anathema when in the past, I don't even know what that word means. It was read a book, Chris, uh, when in the past, that's what
Speaker 1you would have been playbooked to death with. Yup. Yup. Yup. Uh, all good stuff. I mean, we've been on this mic now for 90 minutes, so we're going to wrap up. Uh, last thing is favorite sales company, a company that we work with right now. Uh, I'll actually, can I name two? I'm going to name two.
Speaker 6Favorite company. Favorite company. That's whatever. That's whatever
Speaker 1clients that we work with. You're trying to pick a favorite. I'm going to go infra and I'm going to go. Yeah, I know. Who's your favorite? Uh, infra I'm going to go in one infra and one app layer. Infra blacksmith. I, I think that company is just, uh, that's why I wrote the article on them. And I think they're doing great. We just had John on second is Aru. I know I mentioned them earlier. Uh, I was big fans of the listen labs team. They don't compete with an Aru, but it's like in the sort of focus group sort of world of things. Uh, they've been a great team. Shout out to TRP. Who's an awesome sales leader who out of our clients so far, have you been like this company's I like the vibe of them. They're also doing really well. What comes to mind? Either of you.
Speaker 6Um, I'll give you one and I'll think about the infra cause I'm going to say also blacksmith seems like a great company. I'm very bullish on them. Um, I'm going to fight for the little guys since I'm a early hard mode, early state startup guy, uh, centralized is a company that I'm just, I've loved working with them, great founders investor. I'm pumping my own book. I'm an investor disclosure, but, um. Um, the C the, the, everyone who we placed there has loved working there. The founders just super down to earth guys, great people set like cracked engineers and, uh, they're building sales tech, so it's like easy to understand for the average person who can go to market. Um, and you know, just everybody we placed there, uh, stayed there and have been very happy.
Speaker 1You can just get it in the inference layer. Now it's like the, the. A hundred percent. Yeah. All right. This was the SF rendition of the paddle event. Going to try to do these quarterly shout out to. Fireworks listen, lab servo, reptile, Metaview, blacksmith, nooks, and centralized for sponsoring this. And. And till next time, we'll see you next week. Thanks for hanging with us. If you like this one, follow the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube, and we'll see you next week. Cheers.
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