Sales Mafias & What Made MongoDB Great w/ Graham Moreno, VP Worldwide GTM @ Parallel

of I can sacrifice some amount of upside on earnings to be around really good people who I'm excited to be with every day. Like a trade-off worth making in most cases because we spent so much time together, I would happily make 20, 30% less on a good year if I was 100% happier with the humans. - Just wrapped up a great conversation with Graham Marano, VP of Go-To-Market at parallel web systems. And in the conversation we talk about the different GTM off the years over the last 20 years. - Do you look back at like Monville and FD, which I think probably have generated the largest number of sales leaders in the last 10 years? Almost entirely came out of BMC Blade Logic. That crew came from PTC by and large and like a lot of the PTC guys were at Xerox in the 90s, which is a wild thing to say, but like Xerox had an amazing sales training program. - How the AI-Native seller differs from the enterprise seller generally more technical by nature has been using some of these AI tools and are great at it, comfortable talking to founders. - Some of his learnings at Mongo, Grafana and really what made the Mongo culture so great that it's bred so many BPs of sales in Xerox. People came in as sellers, had more success than they'd ever had in their career, felt more control of their cycles and more control of how they ran their business than they'd ever felt they had in their career. Then they become an RD. They put a really heavy emphasis on training and enabling people because it worked for them. I really enjoyed this one, Graham's been many time requested guests on the podcast and I hope you do too. (upbeat music) - Welcome to the Crew podcast, formerly known as the Vibescaling podcast, where we have conversations with the top go-to-market leaders at AI Natives and SaaS companies, talking everything from zero to one, how to choose companies, the swings and misses they've taken in their sales careers. I'm Chris Boleschris, co-founder of Crew, a go-to-market recruiting, media and investing firm, working with Seed through Series D, AI Natives and SaaS startups. If you're interested in the intersection of go-to-market, AI and startups, this is the podcast for you. Hope you enjoy it. Shout out to a repeat sponsor of the pod, Centralize. If you work complex enterprise deals, the hard part is an effort, it's visibility. Who we met on this account, who's gone quiet, who on my team can open a door that we haven't knocked on yet? Centralize answers all three of these. It builds a live stakeholder map for every deal, pulling data from Salesforce, email, calls and your team's network, and then tells you where to go next. Go-to-market teams at Langchained, Decagon, Webflow, and Cognition run on it. Try it now on a live deal at usecentralize.com. Big thanks to our sponsor, Dust. AI has made individual GTM work faster, but it hasn't made GTM teams more coordinated. Too much work still happens in silos. One person, one agent, or one threat at a time, Dust gives teams of humans and agents, a shared workspace to move complex GTM work forward using the right model for the right job. Think use cases like account command centers, RFP deal rooms, and cross-functional launches. Instead of keeping AI work trapped in threads, Dust makes agents part of how your team coordinates, makes decisions, and drives work. That's multiplayer AI, and that's Dust. Quick one, huge thanks to our sponsor, Sales Graph. If you're running an enterprise sales team, deals don't slip because of effort. They slip because you couldn't see the technical gap in time. A champion goes quiet, or procurement shows up late to the deal. That context lives in slack, calls, and your reps heads, and doesn't transfer to new hires. Sales Graph pulls this data from GONG, Salesforce, and Slack, and produces assets that help move deals forward. Gap analyses, business cases, pre-call briefs, built by the founders who live this problem at Mittlify, try it now at salesgraph.com. It definitely overquested guests on the podcast. High top five, I think you're like, who is on there, like Kyle Norton yourself. There's like a few that people keep saying. I'm like, I got to wait till Graham's in New York and SF. Heck of a run that you've had at some of the companies that I've written about in the GTM office, a whole section of that. Totally. But Mongo, Grafana, Windsurf, cognition, and now heading up sales app arrow, but you'll do a better job of explaining your background. How'd you even get into sales and tell us more about quite a legendary run you've had? I don't know, I've actually ever told this story 'cause it's so embarrassing. But basically, I got into sales by accident. I was trying to start a company coming out of college and I love my parents very much, but I did not want to move back home. And it was like two weeks out. And one of my buddies was like, hey, there's a company called Oracle handing out jobs. So I went and talked to the Oracle Recruiter and ended up in their classup program. And I actually thought I hated sales. I did 15 months more or less and fine experience. It's just not the right place for me and then I had a friend who was very accomplished. He's done a lot in his career sense, but was also at like 22, the VP or an SVP at a public training company because the company he had founded that got and bought. So extremely accomplished. And he was founding a company and was like, hey, do you want to like do this with me? And so I was in a patient zero at this company that he was founding and it was a really good experience. And they probably got the itch for early stage and for building. So we went from like zero to 30 people in a year and raised a bunch of money. And then it fell apart and that tends to happen. And from there I got plugged in with Carlos Delatore and Carlos is amazing. I'm like, I think this will be a theme, but Carlos could have been selling hot dogs and I would have wanted to go work for him. And I think that is where I stumbled into the enablement philosophy that I have now and the focus on pipeline generation and the focus on like excellence, both in terms of process and people and the way that you develop and then ultimately the culture that you build and Mongo was great in a lot of ways. Like most of the time when they tell my story, I started Mongo because I don't think it's super relevant before that. And then Grafana, you know, similar thing, right? It had been at dinner with one of the folks on the founding team, like months, two or three months before they started Grafana, like five years later. I reached out on LinkedIn and we got drinks and met Raj and met Tom Wilkie and ended up at Grafana very, very early and then had a great five year run there and you know, amazing experience, lots of amazing people and then ended up at Windsorf because Carlos had seed invested in them and him and another guy who have opened very important in my career, asked me if basically if I would just talk to Varun and like be helpful as he figured out B2B sales coming from autonomous vehicles. And so started talking to Varun and like thought I would be talking to him once or twice a month and it became once or twice a day 'cause Varun is persistent and smart and was very fun to talk to and like eventually it just felt obvious to go there. And so went back very early stage again and then everyone kind of knows the Windsor story but I was really proud of the team that we built and really proud of the like culture of enablement and making people better and some of the things that I think I picked out at Mongo that I'm still like very passionate about and then you know, cognition handled that acquisition incredibly, I think that's been like pretty widely reported and it's very much true and then you know we went through the transition and got the team settled and got the itch to go build early again and now here we are at parallel and I think I have said probably on a podcast that I was not going to operate again after Windsor and so like for me to jump back in took like a great product, unbelievable fountain team like Travers and Paraga so great. And then Liam Okie who you know being there kind of made that the right decision here we are. - Yeah, what a great, there's so many things I want to jump into with that. So with parallel we'll start with that but then go back to just like the Mongo days. - Yeah. - I sold my last, I started vibes going early 2025 before then I was at Metro and that's how Travers and I met there was a small startup that came in bound to Metro and called Parallel and I talked to Travers and they bought Metro from me and we had a really good relationship there and when I started vibes going he was like, hey looks like you're doing this recruiting thing and we were like, you know they were still figuring out their emotion just last year a little bit of like what to sell for and then when I hear they hired both of you guys, right there's a couple of signals it's like Graham can go anywhere and he's choosing Parallel and then same with Liam, right Liam, you can say what you know he's got insight from all these different portfolio companies of like hey how they might be doing or he's definitely a student in the game just generally knowing a lot of these companies. - Liam is one of the most like the greatest minds we go to modern, go to market totally especially. - Yeah and it's encyclopedic both because he's just smart and because he's been exposed to so many different looks. - Totally. - So it's like fun, very fun going to jam with him. - Yeah, we're aligned he was like our second or third guest and he's become a good friend and a fellow Jersey guy now. So, but Mongo like we hear all the time of like this Mongo Mafia. What about Mongo made it so great and like tell us more about the things that you specifically learned and maybe some things that you took away as I wish I would have done differently. - Yeah, I mean I think Mongo was amazing because I think for a lot of us it taught us some things that we absolutely want to do and want to repeat. And then there were definitely things that I think like a lot of the crew that has left Mongo and gone on to do other things has evolved and has probably not unintentional that we've done some of those things. And so I think like talent bar was really high the level of talent density. When I think back to the six to 12 month period where I got hired, you had like Graham Siemens, Matt McClure. and Marcello Gallo, Jesse Karein, Tim O'Brien, me, Liam, James Underwood, it's just like an insane procession of people who found out to be really impressive. And I think that that group was largely attracted to Mago because of the culture of enablement, because of the reputation they had for building teams and then we did a good job of promoting from within, basically everyone that I just named started as an IC for the most part, there might have been one or, I think Marcello started this in RD. But like starting as an IC, heavy development emphasis, huge push on enablement and like a very good, like good sense of cultural uniformity. It did a pretty good job of making sure that everyone kind of had the same enablement experience, the same set of expectations. And so you had this group of people that was different personality-wise, but fundamentally pretty like minded. And I think it created in the same way that if anyone's ever done like theater or sports or something repetitive and intense, it creates the sense of camaraderie and community that has persisted through the next 10 years. I mean, like when the Windsor situation happened, every meaningful conversation that we had came from Mago intro. And so like just a tactical example of how that community has stayed very tight, very good at supporting each other. You said two things there, you evolved in their enablement. We'll get into the enablement piece second. The first, what do you mean by it evolved maybe in a good way? What were some things that maybe worked at the time then that were forced to change? Yeah, I think the way that we drove accountability was pretty Byzantine. Very intense. In a lot of cases, pretty old school. And I think too, and like you'll see this with John McMahon or Carl Salatore are like unbelievable generationally good sales leaders and also unbelievable at developing people. Like John's obviously famous for it, but I think if you look at Carlos, there's like not another person operating today who has more CROs or very senior sales leaders at one point reported to him. And the thing that makes that possible is their styles are very authentic to them, like both in terms of how they complement people and elevate people and in terms of how they apply correction. And I think we got into a situation at Mago where there's a lot of people that were imitating them. And that doesn't necessarily work if it's not authentic to you. I think you have to find the thing that works for you. And so like Carlos from John, like giving a correction, whether it's in a QBR or call or in a strategy meeting, like works because it's very true to who they are. And then I think when you get a bunch of other people that are larping as someone else, it can be tougher for that to land. And so I think at times, the culture of accountability was like productive in the sense that it made people a lot better. But I think there are more inspiring ways to to encourage change into like drive behavior. And I think we've seen that if my aunt McLaren is great at it, Graham Seaman, just great at it. Marcello Gallo is great at it. But I think a lot of us made the decision to want to have the same level of accountability, break or ability to coach people because that's super important, like dedicating yourself to making people better. I think it's a responsibility of a good leader. But I think like how we chose to go about that was probably informed by both what we saw that was really good at Mago, which I would say is like a Carlos or a John. And then some situations where people were maybe not necessarily being authentic. And as a result, it landed a little bit differently. Yeah, super interesting. The enablement piece, almost like enablement is infrastructure. Tell us a little bit more, why is it that so many people came out of that and have been so great at sales? Because if I'm an AE, everybody tells me I'm going to coach you, I'm going to, but what about like the Mago seller is different than than others? I think just like for four AE's who are looking at a role, someone says I'm going to coach you, like the two things that you should look at is who else has worked for that person. Like what have they gone on to do if they've been doing it for a while? And if not, then where do they come from? Because like you get people that are completely different than either of those things. But I think for the most part, those are two really good indicators. And the way that Mago did it, like Graham Narei, who's now the CEO at OSA, like started the enablement program for Carlos and then Jeremy Powers and Nicole Retinger came in and like all three of them were really brilliant. Nicole and Jeremy in particular at enablement. And it was a huge emphasis. Like David Acharya, Carlos Delatorio down, bought in to enablement is going to be our big differentiator. And like we are going to build a process and a playbook and we're going to train it with a level of intensity and rigor that, you know, we had an executive that used to say we want to a sales team so well enabled that could switch products with the competition and get the same result. And I don't know if that was true, but we believed that it was. And I think there is like a swagger and a confidence that comes with that, especially when you're winning consistently. That's infectious and that made people want to be there. I mean, people excited to be a part of it. But I think it also meant that at every level, people bought into enablement as like a critical function that drove our success because people came in as sellers had more success than they'd ever had in their career, felt more control of their cycles and more control of how they ran their business than they'd ever felt they had in their career than they become an RD. And because at that point, they're drinking drinking the cool it as it were. And so you begin to create this flywheel of like people who at different levels have seen success based on our approach to enablement that then made them bought in. And I thank you. And then it attracts people that want to get enabled. If you just want to be left alone and sell, you weren't coming among though. But I think the other thing is that it attracted younger people. It attracted people that were earlier in their careers that were eager for that level of input and intensity. And I think it's part of why we saw so many really, really talented sales leaders come up there. Because at a certain point to it, it becomes a self-selecting group of people. If there is a place that has a reputation for very intense enablement that's super effective but pretty prescriptive, you're choosing to go there at a certain point. And so I think that that was great though. And I actually think one of the big tragedies of the PLG era is that we've kind of moved away from companies emphasizing enablement and emphasizing making people better. And I think that that is an advantage for us. Like it was a huge advantage for us at Windsor. And it is an advantage for us at parallel because we still very much have that. But I think like for the market at large, I think we're seeing fewer great young sales leaders get developed. And I think it is because most companies don't want to focus on that. Let's go to this hub's concept. Well, one of the components of what you want to look at is where they come from. Yeah. I wrote the article on go to market mafia is almost starting from mango and onward because I started my career in 2014. If you were in the prime of your career or maybe you saw some mango, where were the last 10 or 20 years before then where were those mafia's in the 90's and 2000's that enabled the John McMahon's and the Carlos's of the world. Yeah. I mean, like you. It's funny, right? Because you look back at like mango and apti, which I think probably have generated the largest number of sales leaders in the last 10 years, almost entirely came out of BMC blade logic. That crew came from PTC by and large. And like a lot of the PTC guys were at Xerox in the 90's, which is a wild thing to say, but like Xerox had an amazing sales training program. And then you had other companies that were really famous for great go-to market execution oracle had a sales team that was really respected for a long time. Salesforce was like the original. And I think you've seen like some of this is industry specific. My whole career has been infrastructure. So like easy for me to talk about PTC blade logic, mango apti. But like if you go into the application layer, a lot of amazing leaders started the sales force. And so I think it just depends a little bit on like the industry that people are coming from. But I would say you can track for the most part whether it is applications or like financial services. I mean, people talk about like the stripe group and there's been some really amazing people. I think for that specific type of sale that came out of there. But in my world, yeah, PTC blade logic and then long go apti. And then you can kind of see like, I'd guess 10 to 20 companies currently. I have CROs that came out of one of those two companies. There tends to be a, I guess a concept like maybe misconception or just a thought around, hey, you're either an infrastructure seller and you're a little bit like lower energy. You're just not as salesy or you're an app seller top down. Usually it's bottoms up in for a top down app. And you have to be a little bit more assertive because you have to like outbound your way in versus like the PLG thing. But what's interesting about mango and your guys lineage is that you guys are technical, have business acumen that can also kind of ask the uncomfortable questions. It seems to be unique for the mango sale. I guess how did that wedge kind of exist? Because I outside of that, you know, think about stripe. It's an API plads an API or you have orgs like naman. It's an app. I would say those sellers are night and day different. How did, how do you think it came about that like mango sales culture even existed largely as a reflection on like Carlos and on Dave got it. Who decided that we were going to be good at both? Because you really, I mean, you can't have any credibility talking to like anyone making decisions on databases if you can't speak the language. And so they broke it down to its atomic parts and came up with the Nexus architecture. texture and value drivers, and all this isn't made it very easy for us to remember it. But at the same time, if you're hoping to be like any kind of mission critical, then you're going to end up talking to someone who is thinking less about speeds and feeds and more about the ultimate business outcome to this thing that you're buying opens up and like a mango attended to be accelerate revenue or make it easier to make changes and respond to demands in the market, and like that is something that is inherently very business focused. So you want someone that can have that conversation, but you're never going to sell, especially an open source product effectively, if you have a guy who can't have a technical conversation with developers because at that point, like why have that rep just send the SC? Yeah. And so I think they made a choice that we were going to be good at all of it and hired people that could have both types of conversations. And again, that gets back to like the talent bar and the kind of person that you're looking for, which ultimately created this like very intense community. We'll go back to like the mafia's piece into the second, but the second component what you were saying at Mongo was this sort of enablement is like, Hey, we made it as part of an infrastructure. It was a focus here. What specifically though? Is it like, Hey, we talk command of the message. We talk medic and we were very, very stringent on entering exit of certain stages. Like what specifically did you learn? No, like the irony is that it's a sales process, right? So you come in and like you set the expectation, Hey, and the first six weeks, you're going to do a bunch of like e-learning, uh, mind tickle was the tool we used a bunch of e-learning. You're going to go through this stuff. Take it seriously. Like where there's quizzes for like looking at it, you're going to go to boot camp. There's a quiz when you get in. There's competition. It's like an opportunity for you and people are watching. Like people are paying attention. Like David Acharya comes in, Carlos comes in, uh, you know, Jesse Green, Jay Pippole and like all these people who are running big parts of our organization and big parts of our business are going to come spend time. Michael Gordon, the CFO is going to come in. And so they did a good job of making it clear that it was something to be taken seriously and that it would like, it was a way that you could jump start your reputation at the company. If people were like, man, that person's really impressive. It was also like a potential landmine, if it wasn't handled with the appropriate level of care. Um, and I think again for the right kind of person, because that's not meant to be scary. It should be something that's exciting. Like if you're leaning into like, hey, if I take this really seriously, I can like start to build all the relationships forward to six weeks into being at a company like, that's cool. And if you're the kind of person that's like, oh my god, I'm going to mess up and like, don't be in sales. That sounds stressful. Um, and so then we would go through boot camp. And it was very relevant. Like they're explaining why, hey, we're going to spend a day on this and here is how this impacts you. If you're an SDR, if you're an AE, if you're an SC, um, and then six months in, you go to advanced sales training, then there's kick off and then like we did a good job breaking it out into role specific things because the reality is that like what an SC needs and an AE needs are not the same. What like a seller earlier in their career needs is probably different, like probably more of a tactical conversation. In addition, if you're a very senior seller, like once you get through boot camp advanced sales training, all the like, all the initial brainwashing, then it probably becomes a little bit more about like specifically within your role. What can we be giving you? That's actually going to help you continue to get better. And like that's the matters. I think a lot of people now talk about like money and they should. It matters and like equity upside. They should. It matters. But I also think people stayed leaned in because if you're like actively getting better, the right kind of person is really attracted to that. And I think we did a good job of that. And then at Windsor, like so much Danny, Danny McCabe, Nicole Retinger, did a brilliant job as we started to scale really fast, started to break out like we're going to go do leadership enablement. And like there's a difference too between are you a first time leader or have you been doing it for five years because like again, the kind of conversations that you want to be having are probably slightly different. Or you would deploy an engineer because then the training that you should be doing is a DE, especially like six, 12 months out, totally different than an enterprise rep, totally different than an I native rep. And I would say that like obviously I'm inclined to talk my book. But I think that like I think that the company is that invest in that like deserve a disproportionate level of inbound applicants, especially people that are younger in their career and want to get better. Because the other thing is if you look at like the crew out of Mongo or like most of the best hires I made at Grafana at Windsorf, it wasn't necessarily people with those backgrounds. Like everything that I've just said is important. A lot of those people didn't have it. It's because when someone comes in and you're hiring them, it's like is this person smart, driven to the give a shit? Are there someone that people like to work with? Do they make people around them better? It's like a hugely underrated one is like, is this person by force or personality someone that like makes everyone around them? No, it's not just work harder can be like is constantly helping people in a way that like creates the right atmosphere like that's the stuff that you look at. And if you have a strong enabling program, you can over index on those traits because you don't actually need someone who is the completed product. You can bring someone in, develop them and then like give them all of the hard skills that they need. If the soft skills that they come into the room with are really compelling and like outside of widening the aperture on who you can hire, I think those people also just tend to be better is the word in my head. It's probably not a great word, but like tend to be better because they had to earn it. They had to work for it. Like they appreciate what they've been able to accomplish at Mongo of a Grafana at Windsor of a parallel. Wherever that might be that they got exposed to this initially. And then like you carry that forward with them, which is why I say I think looking at where people came from, who they worked for and then like how many people have worked with them or kind of like come out from from their coaching tree because I think once you've experienced a good version of it, it's like hard not to want to do that for other people. 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. You said a lot that I was writing down because there's a few things that I want to get some more detail on. You are one of the rare leaders right now that have been like an AI rocket. You've been at two of them essentially, like an AI rocket ship and now doing it at parallel again. How are you thinking through team composition differently or how you're looking about scale on the team with parallel then during the Windsor of cognition years? Good question. I mean, I will say like that we are the most AI enabled company I've ever been at. What do you mean by that? So what are some of the things that come to mind that you're now starting to use that maybe didn't exist at Windsor for you guys didn't think to do? We, the cloud code work has completely changed how I operate which is wild, but like I have a weekly recap email that I send to the company that historically I would spend literally hours writing. And now I can I still probably spend an hour to two hours like editing it, but now I can have way more in the content of the email because it like because cloud will go out and will connect via API to our CRM and our note taker and all of this other stuff and can like write with some prompting a really good far more detailed email than I would go pull myself. And it's like that building documentation much easier talking the book, but like we've obviously plugged parallel into it. And like parallel has this CLI where we can go and get like deep research briefs on everyone that we're talking to like connect our calendar and just say, Hey, like an hour before email this to everyone at parallel on the invite. And like the level of research that we're getting thanks to parallel search plus cloud plus all the internal data from CRM's and past conversations. It's just like a much deeper, more intense level of prequel prep than I've ever done because like you write, you know, the paragraphs and slacks say, Hey, everyone here's what we're doing. Here's what we're covering. Here's the content that I put together and you send it out the day before or whatever. But I just think like the level of information that is very easily accessible and via via API and via just like a set of commands and rules that you create. So the stuff is just getting injected into your workflow is not like anything I've ever experienced. And like there's exactly zero people on earth who've ever been in a sales work who was good at updating Salesforce to be able to go and just message. Plod and be like, Hey, you know, here are my notes from these opportunities. Can you go update this and like push this to stage three and like tag this person as a potential champion and do all of this stuff programmatically like way now no one has an excuse not to have their CRM updated, which is great, which I as a sales leader love. But reps also have a much lower lift on doing it. Yeah. It's just like way simpler. So that's been cool. Like I think that I can take no credit for that. This was done before I got it, but who's been really like fun to experience and even now there's certain people who I think are like tinkerers by nature. They'll come back and be like, Yeah, I set up this workflow. It's crazy, which is fun. It is fun. It's awesome right now. So I love that use case. Are you thinking about building out the team a little bit differently? So like I went and served like, Hey, I come in and even before my first rep, I hire an enablement person and then we build out that like, how do you think through when you get brought? Because you were brought in at Windsor pre early and similar to working human. Yeah. Yeah. about like the literal human build out of it's like a back of the napkin, hey, based on this revenue projection, this is the rep efficiency, anything that's changed or that you are now having more of a focus on as regards to who you're hiring in the time it went to hire them. - I'm like the safe harbor statement that this plan has not been approved by others, but I think, yeah, and I'll talk about like the structure that I'm envisioning and then I'll talk about like the who, 'cause I think they're both have some changes for sure. What hasn't changed? Higher enablement early, first. Like if you get a great enablement person and like Nicole Retinger at Windsor was amazing, Danny McCabe was on her team, Danny's now leading at parallel also amazing, like a great enablement person can change the trajectory of the company at a pretty fundamental level. So I still think that's an early hire at Windsor, if it was really clear that we had a strong partner motion like we hired Gardner Johnson who in my unbiased opinion is the best partner leader out there. And like he's, that was a huge bet for us because we knew it would take 18 to 24 months to get like meaningful throughput from that, from that effort, but we placed our bets. And I think like something that we will, that I hope we do differently at parallel is I think we went a little too wide on partners and like the partner or get cognition is ripping now. Like is so is doing such a good job. But I think we could have been more effective a quarter or so earlier if we had placed bigger bets and fewer places and like easy to say that now knowing how it all went. But I think that's like a takeaway for me. And then I got the data piece wrong at Windsor. Like that was a, that was 100% on me, but I think investing in that and again, like we've done a lot of the scaffolding prior to me coming here at parallel. But like the, the ability to use data to inform like how you engage with customers, how you talk to customers, what you build at a product level, how you scale the team is so important because you can kind of make it up to a hundred million or so. And then after that it all breaks if you don't have the data instrumented correctly. And so I think that like investing in that early and getting it right is something that a, a lot of the work was done prior to me getting to parallel, but I think that is just like a super critical piece that I've learned. And then like structuring the team, this is just such a product dependent question. Like at Windsor, yes, there was good product market fit. And like our emerging enterprise team, like Ben Tholan, Sebastian Cantazarist, did like an amazing job. And that was great because we got low velocity. You got like a pretty healthy level of NDR. If you get to the right companies and there's a lot of value there, but it was really apparent early that enterprise was where the plurality of the revenue was because we were selling at the time a seed based product. And it's like where are there most engineers? All right, we're going to go sell there. And so we built a very enterprise focus business just because of the pricing model. And because of where there was like really non-linear value. Because the other thing is that smaller engineering hours startups tend to be more on top of it. So there's not like a multi-year backlog that's killing people's careers. There is it like basically every large organization in the world. So it was just like a lot more obvious as a way to go and like generate a ton of value for our customers. I think at parallel, it's fun and like is different because the AI native segment like A I think will probably be our biggest segment for this. Well, definitely, almost definitely for this year bar and something ridiculous happening and probably next year. And like the point that that traverse and prerog make and they're right is that we're now entering an era where you can grow companies in a way that is not directly tied to headcount. There's like some relationship but it's not linear the way it used to be. And so you're gonna get a generation of companies and I think we're seeing some of them now with like a notion or a Harvey or a rogo who are gonna be unbelievably successful and grow like gangbusters without necessarily needing to have 5,000, 10,000 people and let's say they won't but they might not need to. And so I think the AI native buyer type looks different. The way they expect to buy is different. The way they evaluate is different. Like frankly, the kind of rep who I think does really well there is different than certainly like at Mongo or Grafano five, 10 years ago because now there is more anxiety. I would say around committing to contract lengths, not that folks don't like unit economics, impact on relationship, all of this stuff. I think can create value in that. But there is a group of companies that have grown up like monthly anthropic bills, monthly cursor bills who don't necessarily feel the need to commit to something and are kind of finding, curing attacks if it means that they have flexibility, especially given how fast the AI is moving. And like that's a different buyer type and it means that you then fundamentally have to change. Look how you think about presenting and generating value because the feedback loop is much shorter and I think in some ways that's a pity because the nice thing about having like a relationship that is contractually guaranteed is that you can focus on like broader strategy. And I think sometimes with not all, but in some cases with the I native segment, it's like a very quick feedback loop because there is this just like hey, we need to be getting constant value from this over and above anything else in the market and we're constantly looking at what else is out there and switching costs are lower than they've ever been. Partially because of how we build products, partially because of tooling. And so like that is different. I think the AI native space has been really fun because A, they're like very much at the cutting edge of where companies and organizations are using agents, which is like perfect for what we're doing. And so that's been great. And then I also think just like the type of seller that you're hiring for that role is generally more technical by nature. Generally has been using some of these AI tools that are like newer to someone like me who's spent a long time in enterprise and are great at it. So like all of the reps that we have in our Android segment are like breaking my brain on a weekly basis with some of the stuff that they can do just using AI in our own internal systems. And it's fun and I think that like that energy and that approach to driving success is like a breath of fresh air. And then I think in the enterprise, I don't think that much has changed. I think that like you still need someone that deeply understands the tech to be effective selling, what you know whether it's parallel, cognition, whatever it might be, need someone that's able to talk to executives and have a business level conversation. You need people that are comfortable doing pipeline generation and owning their number. Like all of that, I think they're profile of a great enterprise seller in 2016 and 2026 is largely the same. I think AI native is a totally different world and we are definitely building a team that is more evenly weighted. And if anything probably waited towards the AI native by head count, relative to wind sort of cognition where we were like very much enterprise heavy just given the revenue split. What are those traits? You mentioned a couple, there may be tinkers and tooling there used to maybe a short sale cycle. Yeah, what are some of those other traits that make somebody better for the AI native seller? More technical by nature. I think especially with parallel or wind serve or cognition, comfortable talking to founders which is like a different profile than like a CTO CIO. Probably leans into the technical thing but also is like able to understand the product that we're selling to. It's like in a lot of cases, the lift on experiment with these is very low. And so if you're selling to notion or if you're selling to atio or something like that and you haven't gone and played around with the product, probably a miss, but I think really good at it. If reps just do that naturally and select more inclined to get hands on with the product they're trying to sell, because no one's gonna go and like try to use Sabers end product, right? But like someone absolutely will and should if you're gonna go sell to any of these agnative companies that whether they're B2B or B2C tend to have like a very easy loop in experimenting with them. I also think that you need to very, very quickly generate ROI in these scenarios where it's like, All right, we're gonna go on site, work on deployment, do like a lunch and learn or a technical feasibility workshop with the team and then like immediately identify how we can configure this and integrate it and go run it value. And again, I think if you're coming from like enterprise cycles where you're dealing with like a bank's security and then scheduling and then there's teams in Singapore and London and New York and whatever that might be, just a very different time scale. How would you advise a company to show that ROI if they're not PLG? I actually think not being PLG helps because it isn't the problem, problem. Like a potential challenge of PLG is that people accidentally limit themselves to their understanding of the product and that's like often not complete. Like I don't know that I've ever really talked to anyone just like to use a world that I spent a long time in. Anyone using Windsurf or Cursor who is using it to the fullest extent of its capabilities but I've met tons of people who think they are. And I think that is like an education gap because that's not really someone's job generally speaking to become an expert on that tool. It's their job to use that tool to generate and now come for their company. And so I think the benefit of having like a go-to market team who is really serious about, 'cause this is the thing, if you're serious about enablement internally then you kind of have to be externally. You can't spend a ton of time enabling your team your employees to go be successful and to develop and then turn around and not have that same approach. to customers. And so I think there is like a virtuous cycle there where we're really obsessed with driving customer ROI. And like for parallel, that looks like identifying what the gap is. And it might be, hey, we're using some other tool and the quality of results that we're getting back isn't very good. Or we want to develop a new feature, like just an outright new part of our tool. And we think that like the ability to pull web data in to along with internal data that we're using plus anything from a model is going to give us like a new surface that we can go attack that we haven't been able to necessarily build on before. And we're going to go do that. But being able to very quickly identify like what's the business outcome that you're driving? How are they measuring it? Is there a timeline? Is that timeline fixed? Is there like a, is there teeth to it? Or did we like set this timeline two months out because we think we can go sprint at it and build this new feature and launch it by that. But like being able to get aligned with all of that. And then being willing to get hands on. Like I think one of the other things that has happened since 2020 is there's a less inclination to get on site with people. That is something that like AI native enterprise, there's no change. Like if you get on site, you get way more done. And like I have, you know, in the last month, I have examples where in enterprise team went on site with a, with a company that we're working with. How to meeting left person. One of the people in the meetings had a thought called them was like, Hey, can you guys come back? And they spent like an extra hour with this company that doesn't happen on a Zoom call. And then similarly, like for one of our AI natives, you know, we were on site meeting with meeting with the founder kind of to the point of like you tend to be talking to a different kind of person meeting with the founder about something they were looking to do by pulling in web data to one of their experiences. And like the CEO just walks into the room and like, you know, set high and caught up with the team and like got to know them. And then when they left, they like walked around and met a couple of other people that were going to be involved in the project. But like in the course of a 45 minute on site and I met the CTO CEO got walked around the office meeting these other people and like that very much enhances our ability that I turn around and like deliver value and have conversations. And suddenly you're like texting people who've met you and who like, you know, got a coffee with you, got a beer with you, whatever. But I think it just like deeply enhances the ability for companies to to provide value to their end customers. If you make it a habit of getting in person with them, yeah, completely agree with that. I know you've been traveling a lot to it sounds like New York, SF and London. But what's your airline of choice, by the way? Do you have like a certain one that you try to I'm a Delta bro Delta guy. No, I Delta. Delta is by far the best of the U.S. airlines. Yep. So every year on the Wall Street Journal ranking and they're always number one in the edge. Now they just have to get starlink. Yeah. And they really because the Wi-Fi is still a little sus. Yeah. Yeah. Outside of that. But you know, one thing that I've always respected a lot about the Windsor story was it clearly like there was a number one big behemoth that you guys were going after. And listen, you don't want to join the seventh product in the market. Yes, that gives you adversity. But you probably don't have a tailwind in order to have success of a halo and real learnings and real earnings from that. Now if you're too much of the number one and it's easy mode and it's order taker, you don't really learn sales. It's like it doesn't force any adversity. Maybe trying to get the number two or three players is like kind of where the sweet spot would be then maybe eventually you want to cash out and like go be at the number one and use the skills that you've learned from selling the number two or three. What would you tell somebody listening that's maybe selling the number two or three player in a competitive but large market in order for them to help win it to win the market. What did you guys do in order to like you guys? I mean, I think yeah, and I have a high degree of confidence that they would agree with this. Like cursor was is like the greatest PLG story ever. Right. So I have never seen a product become a personality trait for people faster. And it's a great product. Like it really high value to people. They did a great job building a brand. And I think we knew early on like A, we did them the people because like who you have in the room really matters. Like if you have a bunch of people that are great at selling to insurance companies and banks, like don't try to sell to people who are like swiping on their credit cards. That's like not the motion that you have. And I also think that momentum compounds especially in AI. Like they're I have never never in the history of technology has there been more criticality to act with the tone of urgency. And you see that with like the revenue of open AI of anthropic. I mean, what SpaceX is doing is super interesting. Well, like the numbers that are starting to come out there like really impressive cursor. Everyone knows the story but like unbelievable. And I don't think we had any delusions that we were going to go catch them in PLG. But I am really proud of like what the team that we put together can do in the enterprise. And I was extremely confident that we could win that. And so I think we in the Fortune 500, it like it wasn't all that close. Like I think we knew that we could operate there because in the Fortune 500 and any large organization, it's not just two people like the stickers and like used it on the weekends. It's does a password security review. Is the organization staffed and capable of handling change management? Yeah. Are there partner relationships that we can lean on where we have like existing relationships with people that we trust who can come in and do trainings? Is there an ongoing culture of enablement and updates because we're shipping every two to three weeks. It is not in the workflow of any bank to go and do reeducation on this every two to three weeks. So like what is the cadence? Is it once a quarter? What does that look like? And so I think there's a lot of operational maturity that goes into being able to effectively service large organizations. And that is like it's an intentional choice to develop and it's an intentional choice to prioritize. And we did like there. And so I think that was a big piece of it. It's like figure out where in the market. The number one is exceptional. And unless you're really, really confident you can win that fist fight. Don't fight it. That we were never going to win PLG. It cursed you to do a better job with that than any company in history. But we knew early on that we could win enterprise. Yeah. And so I think like knowing, hey, this is their core carbon and see they've done an amazing job. But like ours is ability to build systems, build processes higher the right people to go and provide a really high quality of service to the Lord as organizations in the world. Was like the niche that we picked. And I think one that we executed really well on and I think like the fun thing about being a parallel is and like this is where it's such a blessing to have Liam. Now we want to do both. We want the AI natives, the companies that like buy and large lean heavily into cursor to go and like use parallel and to figure out what that motion looks like. And maybe this is like a big structural difference to come back to one of your earlier questions. One of the things that Prague and Traverse talk about is like where we have to make trade-offs just in general, we will of course. But there's no reason with how much throughput you can get per person with AI that you can't be great at both. So now it's like, all right, how do we go create? This like amazing flywheel of like a combination of PLG and amazing customer success and like creating just a culture of obsession around delivering outcomes to our a native customers. And go do the thing that I that I am probably the best at in terms of like Liam is going to go build or focus on AI native. And like I think he has just a huge amount of context coming from Clatter and just like with his brain on how to work with these companies and what they care about and how they're thinking. And like I am going to spend a lot of time on both, but I think by and large, I can enterprise figuring out the right way to provide, you know, the level of service that we did it when surfed to customers that are now looking at not just searched, but like how do you pull internet data or web data into product experiences both internally and externally and like that's a fun problem. That's like something that if we get right unlocks like a huge amount of new workflows for companies that don't currently think that can have access to them. And there's also just like a huge education component with that that changes how we sell or how we have to hire because someone that's like inclined to educate and really good at that isn't necessarily the same as the person who's going to go sell snowflake, which like everyone knows and no one needs education off. Yeah. With great book, by the way, I want to get Christine in on here. The way he tells the story early days of snowflake was that nobody knew it. And then it eventually flips to everybody knows it and it becomes a little bit more, you know, easy mode, but still a great or they've built in the last thing I want to hit on, you know, we were on our recruiting firm here and it's the hiring and also what you would advise people listening right now of how to choose what like listen, if you've been a mom over five years and then you went to Grafana, obviously there's a component of company selection that is super important that a lot of I know I've gotten wrong and it took me longer to look, if you had a 80 20, what are the things somebody should look out for in order to maximize their chance of success of hitting the home round off? What would you tell them? Within reason, don't worry about tech go for people. I'd like Carlos could have been again selling hot dogs. I don't want to work for him. Like anyone has been in a room with Raj Dutt knows that he's like one of the smartest, most compelling people ever and same thing. Like Grafana, I wanted to be around Matt and Tom and Raj and like just be around people that I knew categorically were smarter than me and like was very attracted to that. that. I could not have told you in 2018 that Grafano was going to go from mostly selling dashboards to being like a deeply complex back end system for observability, but I knew that I wanted to go be around those people. You know, at that podium at the time, ultimately windsurfing, not cognition, Varune is like one of the most compelling, impressive people you'll ever come across. And like similar thing, he could have been like, "Hey, man, we're gonna go sell snow cones." And I would have been like, "Awesome. Let's do it." And that's like why I think I'm so excited to be at parallel because Travers, that guy saw like where we are with agents now, like three or four years ago, just like an unbelievable level of industry foresight. Parag, like a lot of people know that story, but it's like just like an unbelievably charismatic, compelling person. And he's a good person. Like him, Travers, the entire team, like one of the things outside of just talent that I was really attracted to is that everyone at parallel is really kind. And so like that is cool. It's amazing to be around someone that's had that much success and to be around Travers who was like writing long form blogs about the way that agents were going to change the internet before I think I knew what agents were. And then like you add someone like Liam to that who I think again, it's like one of the greatest minds and go to market currently. And has this amazing amount of context around AI Native, which like I built it at Grafana a little bit and at Windsor, but like I wouldn't say is my biggest strength. And so to be able to go somewhere that like I'm just like incredibly excited about three separate people for to like different reasons that are all overlapping in a really good way. But in none of the stories that I talk about the tech at all, I think it's because like generally speaking, when I've gotten really fired up about being around people, the tech has worked out because if you have great people around you who give a shit and care about customers and care about each other, then like generally you'll problem solve effect. Yeah, it's interesting. I in the beginning this year I wrote a blog post that was like choose the tech not the people because I've been very unfortunate. My current this is also me not asking the right questions of I would join places for leaders and they would either get moved to another division. Yeah. And then or they would leave. Like, so I just that's probably be picking bad versus but like what I did invest in and I had this with the past company was just overall talent density. They went off to go do great things. And even though that company may not have been a home run, it's that network that you build. And I think there's a component of what you're saying there that's still, you know, range true with a lot of like company selection stuff. But total and I make like generally speaking, if you're surrounding yourself with really good people, then like success comes. And there's I'm sure there's kind of examples to that. But I also think that like for me, we're in a pretty fortunate position to be anywhere in tech. And so if I can sacrifice some amount of like upside on earnings to be around really good people who I'm excited to be with every day. And again, there's like orders of magnitude to that. But I think that's like a trade off worth making in most cases because we spent so much time together that like I would happily make 20, 30% less on a good year if I was 100% happier with the humans. Right. Makes sense. The last couple of questions I wanted to ask you were, I know you have a high bar for this is like, what are the good market teams in the AI natives that you've come across that you have now worked up that you would say I like what they're building and I really respect their motion. I'm going to answer this like most like there's a little bit of talking like talking my book here's and there's a lot of people that I really care about. But like I think I think Decagon has a good product and it's brought in a lot of great leaders. Like Nika Rivas went over there. Just like a bunch of folks have gone to Decagon that I really, really respect. I mean, Wiz is kind of cheating, but like Mike Ernest and Dali are both great. Mike is incredible. Whatever. I'm excited to see wherever he goes next. I think I mean, I would have said, and I still like Brian McCarthy is amazing. And like what he built a rubric was super impressive. The rate that he's built at cursor has been insane. Like he's only been here for six weeks. He's hired like 500 people or something like that. I mean, hard, hard not to like respect and admire that. And then like for some of the smaller orders like like brain trust, I think Brian Cox is great. He'll be in here in half hour. Yeah, Brian is wonderful and like has done a really good job with with what he's been building. But like I think in the next three to five years a lot of people that are at cognition will go off and like lead teams. And I would say like that's one to watch. I think Marcello Gallo at Sigma is like an unbelievable leader. And if you look at the talent entity, he's created where he's gone like move works had great people. And like a lot of them have gone on to either be really good companies and be leaders or really good companies or kind of in like the process of moving there now like Carlos, the editorial harness. Same thing. There's a lot of folks at harness who are going to go and like lead orgs. I would say in short order whenever that journey ends. Um. And so I think there's like a few places that I wouldn't necessarily say people should like rush to at this stage and the evolution of those companies. Right. Just because you're watching watch where they just burst to. Yeah. Cause like to your point, I think there's a sweet spot. Yeah, there's a sweet spot. Like for some of these, they're probably in the last year or two before they go public or sell or whatever. And so like if you're looking to have a three to five year run with someone like that's probably not the moment to jump on. Um. But like I would say that those are, or ours are really respect. I don't know anything about Sierra's go to market team, to be honest, but I really like Brett Taylor. I think that's like a good company and a good product. It's clear a lot of investors do too. Yeah. That is for sure. Yeah. Oh, I'm actually like factory. Yeah. Andy codner. Yeah. I love Andy. Yeah. He's like a great human being, a great seller, a good leader. Shout out to them. We play some of their sales team. Um, but yeah, they all some team. Yeah. Another one that I would have said too, that I like very much respect. Yeah. I mean, they're founders. Look, what's on the man? Like they're founder teams great. Like again, like cognition, companies doing great, uh, very biased, but I love the sales team over there. Factory was almost what wind surf was. So cursor, right? Yeah. So like, yeah. So that's why I always respected them too. Of like kind of coming in as this like number two, but also big enough market. But then now they're starting to rip a little bit. So I know I said don't talk less of that work. Yeah. I was a Kim Henry Gerst, Ben J, just from Sandy shop. Yeah. Yeah. I was in the hand like the whole group over there who's leading Austin Mead, like I just fucking great people super talented. Yeah. I mean, it was validated, uh, para forking out the talent, I see index. And it was actually, I thought it was pretty aligned to like where I'm not saying like whether it was numbers based or there's some sort of algorithm, but based on what my network has said, it was pretty well aligned. I was curious if you had some sounds like you have some differing thoughts maybe with it. I just don't know how they got right. It's just so much. I have different thoughts. I think for the most part, I agree. It was accurate. It was a lot of those companies that you'd said parallel to 22 was like a bullshit, but that'll share. Well, we'll see. You're all about high slope. So next year you guys will be top five. And then that that no one will have a higher growth rate on that list. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, it was so great to have you on excited to throw the event tonight. And, uh, I know our audience is going to really love hearing this and getting a master class on all things GTM. Yeah. This was fun. Um, excited to see you guys continue to grow parallel. And, you know, like I said, thanks for coming on. Yeah. Thank you. That's cool. Great. Thanks for hanging with us. If you liked this one, follow the show on Spotify, Apple podcast and YouTube. And we'll see you next week. Cheers.