Speaker 1My mom said, why on earth would you leave Meta? It's doing so well. I just, you know, IPO'd a couple of years, a few years ago. Like, what are you nuts? And this company is named after a donkey or a farm animal? Like, what is that? Ended up being the best career decision I could have made in terms of learning and growth.
Speaker 2Just wrapped up a great episode with Rich Liu, formerly the CRO at Navon, as well as VP of Enterprise Sales at MuleSoft. In the conversation, we go through some of the learnings from the MuleSoft years.
Speaker 1And it wasn't until I went to MuleSoft that hiring actually became religion for me. And what do I mean by that? One of the things Greg taught is everything goes back to the people. And I know it's such a cliche thing to say.
Speaker 2His awesome run at Navon, formerly TripActions, selling travel and expense software during a pandemic where it almost feel like they were one of the hottest companies pre-COVID, revenue going close to zero, and then taking them through an IPO after.
Speaker 1What is the product we build? What do we solve? Help people understand, you actually have a really unique opportunity right now because we've agreed travel's coming back. Whether it's in a month or three months or six months, now's the time to evaluate it, right? It's like between F1 seasons instead of between two races. Like this is the time to test the new aero or the new chassis.
Speaker 2What is somebody in your shoes that have been through a couple of IPOs focusing on in this AI native era?
Speaker 1Yeah, number one.
Speaker 2Welcome to the Crew podcast where we have conversations with the top go-to-market leaders at AI natives and SaaS startups. I'm Chris Belestris, co-founder, and I'm the founder of Crew, a go-to-market recruiting, media, and investing firm helping seed through Series D AI natives grow. Now, on to the episode. Shout out to a sponsor of the Crew podcast, MetaView. Hiring is the highest leverage thing any leader does. As they say, the team you build is the company you build. That's why over 7,000 companies from startups to the Fortune 500 hire on MetaView. MetaView gives hiring teams AI agents that do the recruiting work for them. Finding candidates, reviewing every application, capturing every interview, all in one shared workspace, so teams make faster, better hiring decisions. Don't let your competitors out-hire you. MetaView customers close roles 30% faster. Check them out today at metaview.ai. Big thanks to our sponsor, Attention. Sellers were hired to sell, not to fill in the CRM. Attention records and understands every sales call, then automatically updates your CRM, sends follow-ups, and scores reps against frameworks like Medic, Bant, or your own custom methodology. Next best actions, are proactively generated from there. You get a clean pipeline, coaching on every call, and forecasting you can actually trust without asking reps for more admin. Turn your call recordings into a GTM operating layer with Attention. Try them today at attention.com. Well, Rich Liu, dude, this has been a long time coming, man. I heard you on 20VC a couple years back, and we met in 2018 when you were building out the. It was TripAction. That's right, Navon TripAction's original landing team in New York. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're like, looking for an office, and I was. This is how great of an AE I was. I was pitching on behalf of my client at Salesforce. I told you, you guys should look at Notel. Notel, that's right. And not WeWork. And they were my biggest client. I mean, I'm just, dude, I'm just selling on behalf of my. When they say trusted advisor, this is what they mean. I mean, I got to kick things off with like, you're an engineer at Yale. Three IPOs you're a part of, and like just some legendary runs at MuleSoft and Navon. Tell us the story. How do you even go from engineer at Yale to like, I want to go sling some software?
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah. It wasn't overnight. I'll tell you that. But, you know, growing up, I just always just loved math, physics, science. You know, I'd far prefer that than writing or reading in English class. And so that naturally tilted me towards being a, you know, a STEM major. But through school and working in labs, working at different research jobs, I realized I love the problem-solving element of it. I didn't always love the being stuck in a room or on a computer or in a lab, on a machine element of it. I think I was. I was too social for that. And the other side of me was dreaming that someday I might be some kind of a CEO or business executive. I didn't even know what that meant other than I had a vision of that. And so that led me, especially after 9-11, where there weren't a lot of jobs to take a sales job in a boiler room, basically. Totally legal boiler room, but selling investment management, making cold calls by the dozen to convince rich people to let us manage their money. And sure enough, I thought I was going to do it for a year or two, see if I liked it. Ended up being a lot more fascinating and interesting, right? The idea of figuring out what is this person, what are they thinking about, what matters to them, and can what we do actually help them at an individual sale level to a sales manager or sales leader? Ooh, I have this target. I have a patch. Like, how do I go solve this problem with the resources I have to thinking more big? Like, this is our business goal. This is what the market looks like. These are what the competitors look like. How should we go after this thing and what are the problems to solve along the way? I think that sequential problem solving for a customer, for a patch, for a team, for a region, for a department, for a company, that's just fascinating. And it sort of levels to scaling businesses, growing companies, and I've never actually really considered myself by identity a salesperson, but just somebody who's there trying to help companies grow and reach their potential and help people with something that's better.
Speaker 2You were just so, before your time, we had on Raph Parker, who was the founding business hire at Segment. Love it. And he was a lawyer at NYU, one of the top law schools. And then he's like, I'm just going to go into sales. I don't like being in law. And he even said it then, this is in the mid to early 2010s, was like, it wasn't common for somebody from like a really elite school to be like, oh, I want to go into sales. So that's why I think it's like such an interesting story of like, you then going to Fisher, right? Was that where you were? Fisher Investments, yes. You had a great run at Fisher. And then how do you then say, okay, I want to get out of, of financial services selling and then into, you had a great run at Facebook or Meta. Tell us about the transition from that. Fisher, to this day,
Speaker 1I have a lot of appreciation for Ken and the company of learning how to build basically a direct-to-consumer massive sales marketing operations machine to sell money management direct-to-consumer instead of through a brokerage house. I learned a ton around a lot of parts of the business, but not to actually apply it to tech. And I was looking over the aisle. My wife, Suzanne, at the time was working at, at Google early. And I was thinking, man, that industry is way cooler. They're moving faster. It seems more open, a lot less structured. But, you know, Google's already too, too big. Let me try this other company. And, and sure enough, my angle wasn't getting them to hire me to go run sales teams. It basically said, hey, we could hire a hundred of you out of Google or Microsoft or Yahoo or some other ad sales company. But we like that you seem to have this knack for helping, you know, a totally different type of company figure out ways to optimize an inside sales machine or redesign a leaf flow machine for your field sales org. You know, why don't you come in here and we have this project we're doing to try to segment and tier our ads business. This is 2010, so pretty early stage. But why don't you come in here? Maybe you can help us, you know, work on that project and then we'll see what you can do after that. And I said, great. As Sheryl Sandberg likes to say, it's not about seeing what seat you have on the bus. It's about being on the right bus. Getting on the ship. And so that was really the first way in. It was just, figuring out, have me do something and then, you know, parlaying that into running sales, account management teams across a number of the verticals. But that was basically it, like trying to break into sales. It wasn't until MuleSoft later that was, okay, let me actually think about what my role is and how I could, what I could see and what I can learn about scaling a, you know, SaaS AI software type of company, right?
Speaker 2Yeah, you said it. It was like micro yeses. Some people just jump right into software sales. Yours was like, okay, I need to say, I need to go from an engineer to say yes to sales, broadly. Then I'm going to say yes to sales broadly in something, financial services into ad sales. It's different than software selling. How then do you go from like, all right, I'm at Meta for a few years and had a great year on there into MuleSoft. Like, and that's where we'll start getting into like, love the people I've met from MuleSoft. The talent density there is probably the most underrated there. on that show not too long ago. Exactly, Darren, right? How did you then go from Meta to Mule? What was the entry point there?
Speaker 1first of all, my mom said, why on earth would you leave? Uh, Meta, it's doing so well. Just, you know, I peed out a couple of years, a few years ago. Like, what is that? The name wasn't the best, but, um, you know, for me, I, I think being at Meta when it was like, I don't know, 1,500, 2,000 people when I joined and seeing it scale to 15, 20,000 people over a few years, that was just sort of mind blowing in terms of the different types of scale and how many different companies you see within that, um, within that range. I really felt like, wow, I, I wanted to be there earlier when the hardest problems were still being figured out and I wasn't going to be able to rewind that company nor did I want to rewind that company, but how do I go figure that out at an earlier stage? And I also was seeing, wait a second, you know, ad sales is sort of different once I was inside of understanding ad sales is not what most of tech go-to-market is, which is SaaS, software, infrastructure, right? Um, and so I wanted to see what, what go-to-market was like in what I call the actual part of tech, not sort of this adjacent, you know, build a network of eyeballs and then throw ads on top and sell those ads. And I knew that the stage mattered to me to be there earlier and, uh, the go-to-market mattered to me and so I was trying to optimize for how do I go learn true tech go-to-market at a company at the stage that's not series A but like definitely pre-IPO growth growing and how do I learn from people who actually knew how to do it? And so, you know, working with folks like Greg Schott, or Simon Parmet, who was the president. and being able to say, hey, I don't, if you want to hire me to run inside sales right now, I have field sales and the largest customers, the company. Yeah, I'll go back to run inside if I get to sit on your leadership team and actually be in the room when we're trying to steer and guide this company. And that was really the trade-off I was making, trying to figure out, you know, what do I get by doing that? And how can I grow by doing that? And what kind of skills and experiences can I get? And again, the seat was less important and the whole, hey, I used to have Microsoft and Google and Obama for America as our larger customers. And, you know, now I have inside sales BDRs, again, ended up being the best career decision I could have made in terms of learning and growth. Forget standing on a balcony at the stock exchange. It was actually the growing and learning part that really helped me and made it all worthwhile.
Speaker 2What was the entry point though? Was it just like, hey, they were on all the lists and they were looked at as the hot company minus like, what about it? Did you, because Meta is a really good one. Like you had a lot of leverage, I would think in your background, even though you said, might need to take a step back. Was Mule like one of the high, this is before, I hate to like age you, but it was before my time. So I don't know what the vibe was.
Speaker 1It was not actually. So, so like a little bit about the, the, the history of the company, like Ross Mason started as like an open source connectivity thing. It was like a project and it had grown to, you know, at the time it had spent probably about 10 years getting to be a $800 million. Right. You know, not quite unicorn. It was not a like, sure bet it's going to be an IPO or sure bet we'll 10X the valuation from there type of thing. So it was really a company that was in the process of finding its voice and becoming the company that it became. And a lot of people don't know it because it's infrastructure, not in the application layer. It's large enterprise focused based on the nature of what it does. So it's not sort of a tool that you and I touch all day long by virtue of working, um, working in an enterprise company. Right. And so it was, it was pretty unique and niche, but it was an interesting company because it was a company that was just starting to find its gear. And what was particularly interesting in that was, you know, we'd spent that long time sort of open source, then becoming sort of a tactical solution that we sold to enterprises. So like a developer connecting Salesforce to Workday at a large enterprise could write custom code to connect those things, or they could maybe buy something, a platform from MuleSoft or five other vendors. And we were just starting to flip into that. into the MuleSoft that it became, which was taking a step back and going, wait a second, why are we doing this? The sale we're in feels like a knife fight. And it's a knife fight. We got to fight to go win every dollar in and yeah, they'll expand, but it's not an easy expand. And there's a lot of friction in the whole motion and credit to folks like Simon Parment, Matt Kilgus, Mahal Ma, our head of marketing at the time, Greg Schott, Ross Mason, like the folks that were saying, wait a second, we got to rethink this thing. It takes a lot of courage, right? Because what ended up coming out of that was thinking, all right, well, what's going on in the market? You know, at the time, it's shift to mobile, it's shift to cloud, it's digitalization of the enterprise, right? All these big things are going on. And yet the CIOs, these large companies are still sitting on these COBOL databases that my mom built for them in the 80s, or, you know, have the stack that's on prem and some of this stuff in the cloud. And meanwhile, their customers, their internal teams are saying, hey, build me this online ordering kiosk for McDonald's or this State Farm app that all our customers can use, or this point of sale iPad thing that my doctors can use if I'm Sutter Health, and those IT teams can't go any faster. They can't build stuff faster. Our point of inflection was sort of recognizing, wait a second, there are these trends happening. It's leading to this massive problem for these IT and technology orgs. They really can't solve it better, no matter what they're trying. Oh, well, instead of we have the solution to just connect things better for you. Maybe what we're actually doing is bringing a whole different way to approach and solve this problem, right? If you start to connect these things with our platform, whether it's on prem or in cloud, you overlay an API on top. So every time you need to go back and use that thing again, whether it's the database, the service, the COBOL database my mom built for me in the 80s, you just pull that thing off the shelf, like it's like a Lego piece or a spigot, you just turn it on. And so if you think about your architecture that way, you start to go faster and faster and faster. And that was the unlock. Right? Because instead of selling to developers working on a project here and there, we can now talk to Jane Moran at Unilever, the CIO, because we were solving a problem that she had, not some developer, we could start selling larger ASPs on the land, we had deals that we would sold that were tactical that would actually expand, because every time you do this project, oh, you're one step closer to creating this application network we talked about. And it required a whole different type of sale, because we were now positioning it differently, it was less tactical, it was more of a top down evangelical sale. A different type of distribution strategy where we could now actually build a true exec outreach and engagement model, you know, let us engage SIs or GSIs better, because now we had something where they could really apply some good thought leadership muscle. And, you know, that was a juicy story for them to bring to the table. Yeah. And allowed us to really hire and grow different type of seller. Because now instead of trying to sell something technical, you're actually selling this transformation thing. And, you know, it's a different. Different type of sales motion, and all the things that come out of that, right, demand gen enablement, you know, your, your, your SDR motion, all those things sort of flowed out of that. And that was actually the unlock of, you know, taking 10 years to get to 800 million valuation, and then another three years to go 810 exit from there. With that pivot.
Speaker 2Yeah. So thanks for walking through all that. I got exposure to MuleSoft, because I was at Salesforce as a core account executive when the acquisition happened after the IPO. So you guys IPO'd, and then you got acquired by Salesforce.
Speaker 1Weird story, because, by the way, Salesforce was one of our strategic investors. And Mark would always say, Oh, you guys were too expensive. I should just take just taking you guys out like rounds ago. And so we thought, okay, that ship's not that ship's sailing. And then sure enough, you know, a year after the IPO, they came knocking, and it was like a maybe like a 30 day course. Like, screw, we're just putting so much cash. This is nothing. It's a rounding error. But anyway, so you were at Salesforce at the time.
Speaker 2I think it was $7 million acquisition, something like that. So, and then. Which was big back then.
Speaker 1It was their biggest acquisition at the time. It was just 10x in, you
Speaker 2know, if we have to adjust the numbers for inflation and just like the AI native inflation, I guess. But I just remember being so impressed with the account executives that I would work alongside with. The way I knew MuleSoft was it's technical. I don't really understand what it does. And it was large land. So that got me thinking as a core rep, okay, how can I sell a little bit more on MuleSoft? But what was it about the way you guys hired that? Like, I got coffee with Karina and Kareem. Same thing. They said that the bar that was set at MuleSoft is so high, I can't unsee it. And it caused me to only want to work around people like that or hire people like that. What do they mean by that? And like, how did you guys think through interviewing salespeople there that was maybe at such a high tier than like what I see with other?
Speaker 1Yeah. First of all, I love hearing that you're talking to Kareem and Karina. Yeah, yeah. Both of them. Yeah, they're coming on. Karina out of Stanford, I think. Yeah, yeah. She's a BDR and a great example of that herself. But I think it starts upstream of that. And one of the things that Greg Schott still looked to him as my role model for this is, you know, coming out of Facebook or Meta, my attitude was like, yeah, we got great people. I know what talent looks like, you know. Meta was like an anthropic today, like, you know, 10 years ago. And it's like, oh, we get all the best. We can look for our, we know how to vet it. And I know it's such a cliched thing to say, but in practice, most people don't actually act like that. And when Karina or Kareem makes the comment of, you know, the bar is, when the bar is here, you just can't unsee it once you've seen it. Yeah. I think there's something true to that. But the why is whether it's trying to make this pivot or this transition in terms of the go-to-market we're running, whether it's building the best product, whether it's whatever the case is, like, you have to understand that. We need the best people to do it. And the best people, as you heard from, you know, whether it's Kareem or Karina, they know what great people look like. They also know what an A-minus looks like relative to an A. And the best people are looking for other amazing people to be around them, because that is a sign of who they, the company they keep, and it's who's going to push them, and it's who they're going to push. It basically signals, like, this is the kind of team I'm playing for. And part of, like, setting that is actually being really specific around. And, okay, for every individual role, because, again, this is where it can get confusing in practice, right? Hey, I'm building a company that's in fill-in-the-blank space. Okay, just get all the people who are top performers at the incumbent version of that space or a peer version of that company and go from there. But in reality, it's a combination of what stage you're in, what you're building, what type of go-to-market you're running to understand, all right, based on those factors, like, what kind of sale am I in, what kind of stage am I in, and therefore, what does a person need to do to really thrive and grow? And that's a combination of skills or experiences and traits, right, of, hey, if someone's in a late-stage sale, they don't have to be super creative and help me shape the sale and the story. But if we're a Series A or B company, yeah, I need every sales rep to be able to be super creative and help me shape the sale in a world where we don't have a fully dialed-in, step-by-step, read-off-the-script playbook. hey, there's a senior stakeholders, there's technical stakeholders, there's business stakeholders, and I need to go, Simon Permatt used to call it sort of linear execution, where you're trying to figure out how to go execute a very complex order of processes that you're putting together and drive. A great sort of evangelical seller is like going to come in and teach me why the world is actually flat and I need to go do these other things. They might not be great at that, but that is a skill set that we needed at the time to run the MuleSoft sale. So when you identify the combination of those traits and the qualities that you need, the traits and the skills, then you have to design a process that is highly, highly repeatable and getting between the interviews, between the exercise, between the back channels. And then you can then scale that to every single role so that, for example, on the team that I ran, we had, I don't know, a couple hundred people in six offices or seven offices. I needed to be sure that the process that was running in Singapore versus Sydney versus London versus New York were going to lead to the same results. And so it was really important to design what we called hiring 2.0, which was very rigorous process of these are the questions we would literally ask. And this is what a good answer to look like. This is what a bad answer to look like. This is what data points of success look like in a role and leading that previously. These are how you vet for qualities like grit or passion for sales or. Coachability. And this is what good look like and bad look like. And then making sure that the bar is held pretty consistently. Our CEO, Greg, famously would review every single person's hiring packet through, I don't know, a thousand plus employees. And these are not like one or two page briefs. It was every single interview set of notes, every single reference notes, all the artifacts from the exercise that we ran and challenge folks on it if it didn't feel like that person was anything short of exceptional. Yeah. And so I was proudly the first. Exec or department head who was off of that Greg panopticon eye and able to do that myself. And that only happened when he had the conviction that I fully appreciated what the bar was, how to go vet it, how to process that would find it consistently across my org and that I was held to it like religion. And I think that happens downstream of every, you know, executive to department head or to manager to the floor. And when you hold that. That's when great things happen. Right. And, but you gotta do it early because the temptation is, oh, we're in a hyperscale stage right now. We just got to put some bodies on floor. I got a quota to hit. I got capacity. I got to build. Right. Let me fill a seat. I'll come back to it later, but I've been at enough high growth companies to know that that is messy. You don't get back to it later because you're always trying to solve some other problem. But the pain is real because when you're building a foundation, like we're sitting here in SF, I'm building a foundation in a skyscraper in downtown SF. If I say, Hey, I'm going to do, you know, 10 pilings down to the bedrock or not go down to the bedrock all the way, instead of the 30 or the 60, everything I build on top of that is going to be shaky. Totally. Right. So it's one of those things you can't go back to it. You can't sort of change my bar later and decide a year or six months from now, oh, we're going to be an A player. We're going to be a special forces. We're going to be like seal team six. You don't just change that downstream if you don't start with that. Right. And everything you build has to build from that. So unless you end up with a situation where the market gives you that, like maybe, I don't know, Navon and a pandemic, a travel company that gets the industry cut out from under them. And you have a, like a crazy black Swan event. Most companies, like I wouldn't wish that on anyone, but you've got to start right. If you actually want the chance to grow geometrically where every single hire can help ramp or be a people leader and grow great teams of exceptional humans underneath them. That kind of geometric growth only happens when you have really high quality bar to start. So you cannot, cannot trade on that.
Speaker 2A little bit of context in the mule soft sale. The reason why I have so much respect for it is it was big deals, not a lot of inbound. It was like you need to change the way that a CIO and a CTO thought about their stack. So you were hiring people that it's very different than like how you would hire a anthropic right now, which is like a PLG, more and more of a technical, maybe not right now, but like in the last year, uh, PLG, like technical. Yeah. So you're hiring people that are like, oh, I'm going to hire a professional. I'm going to hire a professional.
Speaker 1maybe didn't take off the way you like and are trying to go make that pivot. There's a flavor of that everywhere. And it's trying to make sure you can actually solve for that, right?
Speaker 2100%. 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. I think there's four components. So there's so much that you just said there that I want to jump into. The different risk vectors. We run a recruiting firm. So we talk about this all the time because it makes us look bad if we float a candidate that is too far off what they're looking for. We usually see this in like deal risk, technical risk, stage risk. And then I'll actually add a fourth one, which is just pipe gen risk. If they're coming from an inbound heavy and you're going to like that needs to align a little bit, or at least a story of how they have pipe gen before. Deal risk, you know, sizing. If you're doing 250k lands at MuleSoft, you don't want to hire someone who's only done 20. Technical, if you need someone to sell to developers or CIOs or CTOs, you don't want someone that's only been selling to salespeople. Stage, you don't want somebody who's only been in a public company coming to your series to start up. And then pipe gen. Yeah, it would be, um, I love somebody just put us in our chat. Quite the cold plunge. I'm going to start using, it would be quite the cold. That's actually a great analogy. It would be quite the cold plunge is the pipe jet. Yeah. You go from, uh, inbound heavy to like, no, dude, you're going to need to like really hit the phone sort of thing. So pipe gen as well. So I love like how you framed it as like in your story, can you align it with those different? Yeah. And it's important
Speaker 1to be intellectually honest with yourself as well, right? Like if I really want to work here, it's a pure outbound sale. I also need to know like, what does that look like? Am I not just about telling the story, but am I ready for that? Right. I think that's a great call out. I love that outbound cold plunge analogy.
Speaker 2Yeah. Shout out to Mike Dombrowski at extend for telling me that this week when we floated. I'm going to use that. Thanks, Mike. Yeah. Um, the BDR thing is interesting too. So we just brought on Matt Roberts at heads of our BDR practice. I actually see a trend that's happening with some of these, you know, college athletes at NESCAC and Ivy league schools. And even just like, you know, I'm a big 10 guy, you know, Wisconsin, like a rower from Wisconsin we're working with right now. And it's like, they don't want to go into bang here consulting, or there's less of those jobs, or they're just naturally attracted right now to AI, but they're not technical or they similar to you when you're coming out of Yale. I don't want to just be like coding all day. I'm a little bit more extroverted. I want to be in front of people close to the business. Yeah. Uh, they're all getting into BDR roles and they don't know if they want to go be a CRO, but they at least want that as their entry point. Yeah. Because everybody wants to get an AI right now.
Speaker 1I think that's a wonderful thing.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 1And when I think about MuleSoft, we didn't think about our BDR program as just a, we call it the AD program, account development. Yeah. You guys,
Speaker 2uh, you guys almost GTM-ified BDR. It's like, uh, what James White at Rogo.
Speaker 1Shout out to Steven Brody from Glean. Yeah. He's got a couple of good runs, actually, that guy. Well, it's like what James White's
Speaker 2doing at, uh, at Rogo. I'm like, dude, how do you get all these bankers to like, go be BDRs? He's like GTM. But you guys essentially- GTM engine. You guys did it at MuleSoft. You're like, no, no, not BDRs. We'll do ADRs.
Speaker 1The way I would think about it, yeah, the ADRs or ADEs and, you know, account development executives, the, um, the way I think about it, if you were thinking about an industry change, like we, we famously had like, you know, the Sammy Webster, the ex-ballerina, now, now Sammy Snowden, or a couple ex-teachers, Ryan Patrick O'Neill or Carl Schatz, Brett, um, Brett, who were like ex, like Fulbright scholars. Totally. Like, oh, we want to make the transition. Try it. It's not just, okay, now this is a career-changing program. Better come one, come all. But it's about figuring out, one, why do you want to do it, right? One of the things we vetted for in that department was like passion for sales. Like, do you actually know what it means to sell something and that it's not teaching kids in an interstate school, which is a godsend. My sister is a teacher and I love her, um, and, and the fact that she's able to do that for her whole career. But it's, there's a commercial element to it. And, um, it's about, you know, being able to push people forward. At times to think differently and be a little uncomfortable. It's about being proactive and getting your foot in the door when the door is not just opening for you. And I think we specifically looked for that in the people that we hired, but we also knew it was not about having every single person feed into SDR to AE to senior AE to regional sales director to RVP to AVP, whatever it was. It was about finding people who we thought would be superstars at this company. And so when I started at MuleSoft, we didn't have a great, um, track record of moving people from account development to the AE role. And there was a sort of a feeling of, Hey, the sales too hard. We can't get people there. Cause it's a large enterprise only sale. Super hard, man. I gotta give you guys credit. It's a hard sale. Right. Um, and so we said, wait for us to bridge that one, we have to hire people who have the aptitude to get there and get there sooner than, you know, 10 years, which might be the normal track eight years. And then we have to actually build skills for them to actually get there, but it's okay. If they don't get in there, if they end up in customer success, marketing, recruiting, GNA finance ops, like that would be a huge win for the company. And so we didn't seek out to build a program to solve for all the other departments in the company. But one of the really cool things was that because we took some chances with folks and said, Hey, you got to give it a good two, three years in this account development role. Notice I didn't say six or 12 months, said two or three years in this department to really contribute. And if you don't end up in sales, that's okay. But our expectation is you, you're going to crush in this role. And if you don't, you're not going to get the opportunities to go move to other parts of the company. And so we ended up solving for actually staffing and providing superstars across whether solutions and services, partners, a lot of these other orgs that weren't previously possible because we really shifted the bar of what great looked like in the function. And we're hiring people that we thought had the kind of breath to go make some of those leaps, right. And even the interest. And so I think whether or not you end up in a sales function, you know, if you're the rower at Wisconsin or whether you find a program that ends up giving you experience and you end up in marketing or adjacent function, because, you know, you figured out how to get your foot in the door and understand how a good sales or go to market org work, and then figure out ways to go learn and contribute in ways that were interesting to you that might not have been in pure sales. Like that's a great platform. If you're a BDR in your first few years out of school, I'm a massive fan of like, even if you're not sure you want to be in sales, you got to know, you got to crush it. So if you don't even know that enough to say, I can go crush this thing for two, three years. Okay. Maybe have some heart to heart conversations with yourself, your mentors, your, you know, your parents, but know that I think it's a great pathway just into building company.
Speaker 2Totally agree. Uh, yeah, I'm sure Nick, Carl, a few of the MuleSoft guys in Anthropic now after they played hard mode at MuleSoft, they're like, dude, this is shooting fish in a barrel.
Speaker 1I don't know if any sale is always easy. But you're right. You're right. That's how everybody will always spit it.
Speaker 2But I do know
Speaker 1those guys are working their, their tails. They earned it.
Speaker 2Those are Nick's. Yeah. I worked with him briefly. It was, yeah, he's incredible. So you had a great run in Navon, which when I was talking to you, when I was slinging no tell as a Salesforce. I'm sorry, we didn't take a no tell
Speaker 1lease. I could have got my rev share, dude. It would have paid for poor as hell as I,
Speaker 2as I live in a New York city at a shoe box with a couple of months.
Speaker 1You don't even share square footages when, when you buy or rent a place out there for a reason. Right. Summer team one in a thousand.
Speaker 2Well, it's funny. There's like a, well, listen, actually it's way more expensive to live in here now than it is in New York. I shouldn't even say like it used to be like you go to San Francisco, you could save a little bit of money. Yeah. Now all the East East East East East East East space. Totally. Sacramento maybe. So in Navon, you had a great run there. You saw them public. Uh, they recently went public in the last year and you recently left. Would love to like talk about quickly the Navon years, but then also, uh, what you're doing now. You were at a travel software company during COVID I can't think of a worse nosedive of a business value prop than that. That is one where you go from the company that went from zero to 4 billion pre COVID, one of the hottest companies in tech being called trip actions. COVID happens revenue. I'm assuming flips to zero really fast. You guys rebranded Navon.
Speaker 1We were the first post revenue company, you know, usually talk about pre revenue revenue. It's like this now it's category called post revenue. Exactly. Yeah. Temporarily.
Speaker 2Right. So like, how did you guys get through that as like a sales, how did you like rally the troops, get people to not want to leave in droves? Like how did, how did you think through that?
Speaker 1Yeah, it's, um, I, I sometimes joke that it's not an experience I'd wish on anyone, but at the same time, uh, uh, my high school English teacher used to say pain builds character and there's a lot to learn when things get really hard and really hard, really fast. You know, I can't take all the credit for it because there's a ton of people that were basically like, all right, what do we do? How do we steer this thing? What do we do next? But if you think about what happened, right, we'd spent the last couple of years, you know, growing, I don't know, a five X followed by a four X in the years prior. And so everything was sort of geared towards growth, whether it was, you know, your marketing team, your, your, your hiring recruiting team, like all these things are geared towards growth. And we had a pretty good well dialed in, you know, what's the problem then we solve and for whom, and how do we bring it to the world type of motion. And all of a sudden that sort of dried up. And you sort of fall out of product market fit, you know, Hey, Chris, I'm here to sell you travel. And you're like, rich, it's a pandemic outside. I'm trying to get me killed. That doesn't go over so well. And so really it was trying to figure out like, first of all, one, at least from a conviction standpoint, do everything, do we think travel will ever come back? Because recall at the time there was a real discussion around that, Hey, we're going online forever. You can do all your deals on zoom. All those, those are real conversations that we were having around like the future of work and go to market and business. So the first bet was like, do we think it comes back? And our bet was yes. The numbers have proven that to be well true. Second was figuring out, all right, well, if it's coming back, but it's not back now, like what is the product we build? What do we solve? And so we doubled down on building out the expense side of the product because travel and expense T&E always sort of were just two sides of the same coin. And we always had that vision to go create that broader T&E unified platform, which by the way, is an amazing product, works great together. But in the meantime, we also knew, okay, well, we have this motion, this aura, the CS aura, the sales aura, the demand marketing aura, what do we need to do now? You know, we thought, all right, well, how do we think about this? Well, one, the dialogue became, well, do we think at some point you're going to travel again? Yes. Engaging customers with that. And then also engaging customers on, hey, when we think this comes back, do you think it might look a little different? Yeah, probably. You know, the pandemic taught us you probably need to know where your humans are at any given time. It's really valuable to understand what they're spending on, where they're spending on, what rules and regulations and safety guidelines apply. We might be having more of a hybrid workforce where people are remote or distributed. But they come together to do team offsites or to do these company events, effectively trading off some of the real estate budget to travel or T&E. Okay, if we think all those things are happening, let's one, build a product that supports it. And two, like help people understand, you actually have a really unique opportunity right now, because we've agreed travel's coming back, whether it's in a month or three months or six months, or, you know, whatever you unless you think it's 20 years from now, don't talk to us. But if you think it's over the next few months or a few quarters, you should probably talk to us because for all the time that you were telling us in 2019, oh, yeah, we're too busy right now. We can't change things right now. We don't want to break anything while people are on the road. Now's the time to evaluate. Now's the time to evaluate, right? It's like that between F1 seasons instead of between two races, like this is the time to test the new aero or the new chassis. If you're not thinking that now, you're actually being pretty irresponsible. Oh, by the way, your finance and HR teams might have less on their plate because you're sort of going through this retrenchment. So that's exactly why you should be working with us. It's like classic sales where for every reason there is not to engage, there's an even better one. Yeah. Why you should engage and why you should engage now. And our job is to help you find that. And so figuring out, okay, how do we rebuild demand, the messaging, the brand, the content, the demand, and also thinking like, which parts of the market do we bet on more, right? Segments, regions, countries that would travel more or less as we came out of this. And we actually made a wrong bet first where we thought, oh, large enterprises probably have more, you know, money in the bank or less living by dollar to dollar. Maybe they'll go travel first. We should go bet up market. Yeah. What we found in the first few months was that it was actually the opposite where it was the SMBs, this commercial and then market companies who were already going, wow, hey, I'm traveling because I need to go close those deals or I need to go see the vendors or inspect my supply chain or go this industry event to go drum up demand. Like if I don't do that, I don't have a business. And so interestingly enough, it was actually the smaller, more nimble companies that started traveling faster. And more because they needed to, you know, it's sort of also validated the fact that, you know, there's a reason why we go fly from New York to SF to see each other face to face because there's real value there. So we quickly had to pivot and adapt to that as we were coming out and adapting. But, you know, if there's any learning, it's when the going gets tough, you can either choose to go home or take your Legos and don't play anymore. But at that point, like, yeah, we were sort of in it and we needed to figure out how to go get to the other side of it. So fortunately, we were able to get to the other side of it. And so fortunately, the company's thrived since then. And yeah, and it's, you know, only emerged stronger, right?
Speaker 2100%. What a great story that in the moment is tough. But like you said, it builds character and you come out of it, you come out of it with a story that I'm sure you guys are proud to tell of like, you know, when I think through, like when I was in interview stories, I can't think of a better one than like a Navani saying, oh, yeah, we literally went or even yourself, right? Went from zero and then how we had to rebuild this. So I appreciate you telling that. And you've recently left Navon. Yes. So what are you up to now? So like, what are you going to like go join a VC fund or like you're advising some of these clients? Like, what is somebody in your shoes that have been through a couple of IPOs focusing on in this AI native era?
Speaker 1Yeah. Number one, there's there's obviously personal reasons that I'm not, you know, back at it, just running, running it back as an operator. I think right now, though, is just such an interesting time that I know it's oversaid, but all the ways that you share this, like right and left where all the numbers are weird right now. You know, you have the billion dollar revenue company or half billion dollar revenue company with a really immature go to market that's trying to build out like, what should they think about? Or, you know, three years ago in 20 VC, I think I said, like the PLG or the product led sales motion is dead. It's very much like that didn't age well, because now there's actually a huge, huge influx of that. And I think it speaks to this new technology wave that we're seeing. So like, how do you make that transition? It's been a blast to spend some time, you know, working on obviously it's around and re, you know, reinvesting at home, because I'm famously not been great at that over the years as an operator. But being able to sort of see right now, whether it's advising or consulting some of these, you know, AI native companies are like, first of all, what are the scaling up challenges you're seeing, which some of those are some of them are the ones we've seen before, some of them are new, some of them are flavors of the ones we've seen before. And, and being able to use the combination of experiences and like, data points that I can reapply or that we can reapply as a go to market or go to market practitioners, but also we're wait a second, it's a little different. So I can't just be a hammer hitting for a nail, I need to think about this a little differently, we need to think about this a little differently, if we want to be successful. As an example, you know, the idea of like, okay, let's go build out a, I want to scale, I don't know, skill thing as fast as possible. What do I do? Like, what was that the iconic study that came out? Oh, yeah, week around, hey, the benchmark now is just way higher than we talked about how somebody's
Speaker 2companies have warped the market of people's like perception of winning? Yeah. It's like, if you're not an anthropic growth numbers or a cursor, you think you're doing something wrong. And it's like crazy. But yeah,
Speaker 1well, I think it's interesting, because whether it was like, anthropic or open AI now, or even like, you know, I don't know, a Google or meta 10 years ago, whereas it'd be easy to see those numbers. And when I said a meta went from 1000 to 20,000 people over a few years, and yeah, the revenue shot up like that as well, it'd be easy to say, Oh, we got to do that. But not every company has a site with billions of eyeballs on it, that could just start slapping on ads and go. And also not every company has a, in this example, the built something that is truly valuable, but yet that that creates that kind of demand that can grow through a PLG like or like usage expansion, like mode, like if you're still a large top down sale, enterprise sales company, you know, you can't chase that kind of growth just by slapping more bodies and capacity into it through a bottoms up build. So it's thinking about, you know, what is the reasonable target to chase? And if I'm going to chase higher growth, which I absolutely think we should, what are the shortcuts to do it from the kind of sale that I'm in, or that the product that I'm trying to build, or that the market dynamics I'm, I'm in and need to create. And I think that's one of the, you know, things that actually hasn't changed. If you think about what is the problem we need to actually solve, right? It's not okay, now I need to all of a sudden change this top down to a PLG motion. Like if we tried that at MuleSoft, I don't think that would have been a great strategy for the company. But it's about figuring out, you know, what are the ways that I can actually build faster growth for myself, whether it's wait a second, there is a big shift happening in my flavor of vertical AI, that should be able to adopt faster than past enterprise software companies. How do I get out there quickly partnerships? How do I get out there more quickly events or other strategies? And I think that's a really important part of the process. That it might not otherwise approach until I'm later in my maturity, for example, right? And to be really bold around that, because what I'm bringing is such a different flavor of what this legacy or this vertical slice of AI or SaaS has seen up until now. Yeah. But that's just one of the challenges, right? There's plenty of other interesting things going with AI, whether it's around, all right, well, you know, I mentioned the example of we're trying to hire or grow quickly. What kind of sale are we in? Are we in a bring a new product, show it to them or go, or has the sale evolved to being much more mature, just more quickly than we're normally used to seeing it where we're not in the early adopters, we're actually in the early majority or mainstream of the adoption curve now. And therefore, how do I want to play in that market? Right? Yeah. That's another one we see a lot, or even as a practitioner around go to market. And I talked about this, I think in the Arvin fireside a few months ago of, well, can I think about it differently of I need XYZ number of marketers or ops people or BDRs to AEs versus the flip side of that spectrum is I don't want to hire anybody and I can hire, you know, I need to force leanness by hiring only one marketer or only one, you know, CS person and figuring out, you know, where do we want to be on the spectrum and, and what are the bets that we want to take with AI to actually go enable those things to happen? Right. Those are some interesting sort of trade offs that I think are much more prevalent now than the classic, these are the ratios. This is a ratio of comp to, you know, what they need to produce in quotas. I think a lot of those we can and should challenge right now. Yeah. But not blindly. You need to figure out like what's reasonable and do we actually have a path to make that, you know, those numbers a reality.
Speaker 2It's so much, so much FOMO. There's so much opportunity cost that people are calculating in their heads. And then there's also the VCs who are like, oh, like they're pressuring you to, you know, whether they do it soft or a hard pressure, like trying to grow a little bit faster. The Wales mafias, Like, when you were interviewing at Navon and MuleSoft, you're like, man, these two or three orgs, I am so impressed. You thought that in the interview and then it validated by them being really good reps. Do any, like, orgs come to mind?
Speaker 1Oh, gosh. I think going back to what we talked about earlier, there's a lot of this is, like, the right tool for the job or the right sort of sales motion for the job, right? Like, you talked about MongoDB and my successor at MuleSoft, Carlos Del Toro, was from MongoDB. A ton of respect for him and what he's built and for the motion there. I've seen some really strong salespeople come out of that org. But if I'm running a, you know, run and gun, land grab early, like, show the product, price it, see who wants to buy, go to the next one, that might not be utilizing the right sort of skill set for the job. Or if I'm a, you know, Palantir, looking at the Palantir sales force that I love, by the way, and I don't have a, like, deep forward deployed model, I'm trying to sell something that's a little more in the box and, like, so in the box, like, I might be underutilizing someone I bring out of that model. So it really does depend on, like, what type of model I'm running. And again, you know, I use some examples of companies that are known for being great at running different models, like that Palantir model, forward deployed engineer model, like, go find high-level people with budgets who have problems they want to solve, figure out how to solve them, and then help see if we can solve them, and then put together a team to help them solving it using our tech. It's a great model if that's the kind of product and software or AI you're building. You know, for, like, a more classic top-down value sale, sales process-driven, like, AppD, Mongo, Navon, right, of what folks like Carlos or folks like, you know, Grant McGrail, the current CRO, built, is awesome. You know, for the velocity type of sale, I think there are some really cool, you know, whether it's the HubSpots or, like, Box Inside Sales, there was an era where Box Inside Sales was just killer with Leslie Yan, Laurie Jimenez, Lauren McGuire, and some of the leaders that have also come through Segment or Navon. Right. Just some really good folks who sort of know, like, hey, I'm not running a true running gun. I just don't need to land a value sale, but I need to do it at some kind of scale with quality people. Like, those are some of the teams that I've loved.
Speaker 2Totally. I appreciate the call-out on, like, yeah, form-fitting. It's like, a salesperson might be good in one environment and not good in the other. It doesn't mean that they're bad at sales. Oh, totally. It's just you need to form this into, like, the right culture, the right. It goes back to how you guys hired MuleSoft. It's like, what are the traits that we need to have and how are we testing for them and making sure that it aligns with that.
Speaker 1And again, you know, I don't need to say MuleSoft, but I think that's a sale in a sales motion where, you know, it wasn't a true sort of the command of the message, force management sale in some ways, but we sort of built our own flavor of that. But the discipline, the linear execution, and vetting for overall caliber and, like, adaptability while being a good human. Yeah. That's a little bit of what I think we solved for there. We're there, right? Yeah. And I'm still a fan of today.
Speaker 2Totally. Rich, this was great, man. It was great to finally have you on. Really appreciate your time and thanks for coming on the Crew Podcast. Oh, my gosh. I had a blast. Thanks for having me. Of course. Of course. Thanks for hanging with us. If you liked this one, follow the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube, and we'll see you next week. Cheers.
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