Speaker 1Are we back in 2015 when everyone's making million dollar commission checks? If you're really, really good today, firstly, there's more demand for you than ever before because AI companies just do not hire fast enough. And these things are happening, which I think make it a better job than the job that was available five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Roadmaps sometimes like blow my mind. Get charts of the best. When you try to get too detailed over the course of a year or two year roadmaps. You can't. How are you predicting the future, buddy? Welcome
Speaker 2top line listeners. Today, we have a special treat for you. That's right. Today, it's just me and Asad Zaman here. Sam's on his way down to Mexico. He's coming down for Pavilion Gold. And Asad, we get to take away the show. We're talking about marketing under attack. We're talking about A16Z's $15 billion fund. That's insane. They raised $15 billion, Asad. Yeah, $15 billion. Is it the golden age of sales once again?
Speaker 1Look at that.
Speaker 2Is that what's happening?
Speaker 1I think so. This is like, this is one of those like old school jam episodes where we're just going to jam.
Speaker 2But we're going to still, guess what, Asad? We're going to still, gentlemen, start your engines.
Speaker 1Oh, Sam, that's good. Oh, yeah. So I have a thesis. This is the thesis. So a lot of people, when you listen to them, they're talking about all these sales roles that are going away, right? Like Lemkin, I think, has very correctly spoken about a number of sales roles today that exist that will most likely not exist in the future.
Speaker 2He has 4,622 agents running at his company right now. He has a lot. Sastr is only agents.
Speaker 1That's it. You know, he said it, by the way. He's like, it's me. And another person and just agents now. And so he also said something really sweet. He's like, you know, it's cool and it's efficient. It's all, it's kind of lonely as well.
Speaker 2It sounds miserable. It sounds absolutely miserable.
Speaker 1It sounds pretty cool. I think on, I think it has less ups and downs, meaning that the worst days feel less worse. Your best days feel less good. But I think on average, it's probably not a bad feeling. Yeah. Fair enough. So I think he's talking a lot about these sales roles that are going away. And I think he's right. About a lot of them. Like if you're an inbound SDR, like you can imagine that gets done by some sort of advanced one mindy type of thing. And you can see a lot of outbound emailing outbound gets done by these AISDRs plus somebody like a Brandon on your team. Right. So, okay, fine. There are a bunch of roles that are going away.
Speaker 2Have you checked out one mind, by the way? Have you just like gone to the site and talked to the
Speaker 1avatar? Like I would not use it. Like these are all things I would use in my organization. Like I think, but I was talking to Kyle, cause I find myself like naturally skeptical of some of these things because they're just not ready yet. And so I was talking to him and he's like, listen, there's a self-serve side to these businesses in SAS that in the past, there was no interaction with any sort of human of any sort. And could one mind play a role there? Um, where it's like your cheapest ticket item and your most transactional high churn customer, can you give them the one mind type of thing?
Speaker 2They're going to go away anyway. Just, you know, you might as well.
Speaker 1It's going to get better, right? It's not that today it's, it's going to get better. What I find weird is when companies are like mainstream implementing it today, it's like, dude, that's really weird. Like it's not ready. Like it's cool, but it's not ready.
Speaker 2Also, I can't imagine your costs. Can you imagine just some, like someone in some foreign country, just hacking your site and basically making, just driving up all of your data costs?
Speaker 1Yeah. I hadn't thought of that. Oh, your API costs.
Speaker 2Oh, it could go haywire. Yeah. Yeah. Just, just two weeks ago. Oh my God.
Speaker 1Imagine like captivate IQ is like, we're going to go off at photopod and they just.
Speaker 2But we had, we had a competitor just create thousands of works, free workspaces. Uh, just, just a month ago we were under attack. Yeah. What was under the attack, under attack, almost had to get the FBI
Speaker 1involved like a thousand plus accounts within quote apart to make you busy on those accounts.
Speaker 2Yeah. At least they were like in, in Austin's words, at least they were really sweet named accounts. They were like, cheesy potatoes, 365. I was like, okay. It was great. Okay. Wait. So how does this all add up to the golden age of sales? Like what are we, what are we talking about?
Speaker 1Everybody is talking about what's going away. And so if you listen to them, it feels like the dark ages of sales, right? Cause there's going to be less jobs, less ways to make money, less entry points into the sales career path, et cetera, et cetera. And I think some of that is true and we'll just go on to the other side, things that I'm noticing when it comes to actual sales, like mid-market enterprise, like human to human sales, right? Companies need salespeople, but less of them. So what example we give is a company that's doing 150 million in ARR with about 35 salespeople and those 35 salespeople or have larger quarters than before and are achieving at a very high rate. I think 80% of them are crushing targets. Some of them are just like doing insane numbers. And so over there, one of the things I'm noticing is that the territories are going down at a smaller rate than they're going down, than they used to go down before. So if you're a salesperson, what's one of the most annoying things that used to happen? One of the most annoying things that used to happen is you had a good year and now the company comes and says, we're slashing your territory. Are you shuffling the deck? Yeah. We're shuffling the deck. You get a territory that's like one fourth, the size of what it used to be before and a bigger number. Can I tell a quick story about this?
Speaker 2Because everyone loves story time. So my first job out of school, Meltwater had a thousand salespeople, 600 in the US, something ridiculous. And they didn't believe in territories. What they believed in was creating their own CRM. CRM had so many bugs. And one of the bugs was that you could like hack your way to taking accounts from other people. So it would at, cause it was a Swedish company. I was actually a Norwegian company at whatever time zone Sweden is in at midnight. If you hadn't put a future task two weeks in the future on all of your accounts, by the way, you had thousands of accounts, then it dropped from your name and you could pick it up. So every day people would like literally set their atomic clock to go into the CRM and just like search for Walmart, BASF, all of these like baller companies to try to take them from each other. And that was just the wild, wild west. That was our territory management. Isn't that great?
Speaker 1That is crazy.
Speaker 2That's madness. It's so efficient.
Speaker 1So think about this now. So territories are larger for longer. They are reducing, but at a lower rate.
Speaker 2They're efficient because you actually know the accounts that you're going after. So that the, And because of the
Speaker 1fact, so why are they reducing territories at a lower rate? They're doing it because they believe they need less salespeople because those salespeople can cover more than they could cover before. So they are doing larger quotas, but they're also making bigger commission checks as a result. So those salespeople, if you're in the right company, you're making more money. And the rate at which your ability to earn well above your OTE by having a great year, that rate would reduce based on quotas on territories going down while quotas went up. That's actually, that pressure is less today than it was before. And so that's really interesting. And if you just think about it from a quality of life perspective, you were salesperson, I hated doing the administrative side of sales. Like absolutely. I hate the administrative side of my job today. And so salespeople do not enjoy spending so much of their time updating a CRM and sending notes. You don't have to do it anymore.
Speaker 2It's all automated.
Speaker 1You don't have to do this stuff anymore. They're barely doing any of this. And so they're spending the time doing the thing that energizes them, which is spending time with clients and pitching and taking, sending proposals and working through negotiations. Like the stuff that is fun and interesting and exciting and not having to do the mundane stuff. And so if you're a salesperson who's really, really good today, firstly, there's more demand for you than ever before, because AI companies just do not hire fast enough for their sales teams. So I think if you was to say out of all of these last few decades, which one is the golden era of sales for salespeople, it seems today.
Speaker 2Well, as I think about this and we talk through this, let me propose something for you. I believe this is true for the mid-market, but not for enterprise and probably not for SMB sellers. And here's why. If you were in enterprise six, seven, eight years ago, you were basically the quarter, you were an AE, you were the quarterback. You had solutions, you had maybe two SDRs. You had all of these people, manpower at your disposal to be able to pull from. Well, what's changed today? A lot of those roles have actually gone away. But at a mid-market company, a company where that wasn't really affordable to have a million dollars of headcount for a million and a half dollars book of business, you now have those tools at your disposal. Whereas at the enterprise, now that those have gone away, your job's gotten a little bit harder because you have to figure that out.
Speaker 1I don't think they've gone away at the enterprise, by the way. I think they've actually gotten more leeway. You think they have? headcount's still there so basically break it down into like what are the things that they want they want that pipeline given to them right you can't keep up with demand today like these companies can't keep up with demand the market's hard
Speaker 2well it depends on what depends on the type of company i'm talking
Speaker 1about an ai company you're very specific i know you said that like they ain't no golden era working for like a mid-market sass company like that's just that shit's not right right now you know like so that was like if you're a rep at outreach it's it's the dark ages for you today right like it ain't the good times but at gong you know why i'm starting to hear from people that gong has got some momentum going again now i don't know i'm skeptical i'm a little skeptical but i'm open-minded i love when this topic comes up by
Speaker 2the way we talked about sales loft outreach and gong and who's going to be the winner and go to market tech and for years i've said none of them you're going to be the winner and go to market tech and for years i've said none of them so i'm still i'm still yeah i think none of them
Speaker 1for sure yeah yeah none of them like no one they're not winning go to market tech for sure like that's not the thing i don't even know what's there to win and go to market tech we can talk about that like it doesn't seem like a great prize right now but um i think gong is starting to show some signs of acceleration people are saying um but they've been past 200 million in revenue for a long time and they have yet to announce something like 500 million so they're not growing like at a super fast rate because it's been eight years when they've been in between these two levels um putting them to the side for now i think there's the sas era companies that are trying to rediscover product market fit and find a future not talking about those companies i'm talking about those reps that have transitioned to ai um at a real ai company today those people i think it's a golden era for them because a pipeline is is robust they have forward deployed engineers that are doing so much more heavy lifting than what previous companies have been doing and they're not doing so much more heavy lifting like these ftes are like doing twice of what a solutions architect sales engineer did before so you have that support too and then you have all this ai does that does all your admin nonsense and so you really are having a good time like you're doing the fun stuff yeah but you're not
Speaker 2you're not sitting back and kicking up your feet you're doing the fun stuff because you're earning incentives you're earning dollars to do
Speaker 1it you have to imagine that they enjoy the job like you know i know you're doing the fun stuff but you're not doing the fun stuff because you're no no enterprise i don't think you make it to being an enterprise or strategic rep at a good company and being like i hate being a salesperson like i think you
Speaker 2enjoy the job i i think there's there's levels of that if you travel eventually that probably gets a little old especially if you have a family but at the end of the day you love sales you join you join sales like there's
Speaker 1parts of it you don't enjoy but there are things in it that you are like this is my this is my craft i love being a salesperson and now i get to do a lot of the things that i love more and a lot less of the things that i never loved yeah
Speaker 2yeah well all of this to say is that it is the golden era for sales i fully agree with you but what it's not the golden era of is marketing and sam has this
Speaker 1thing on marketing i'm i think this would be a fun one to talk about and then sam you can listen to this and come and debate us later so sam's take is that marketing is under attack i'm paraphrasing and i'm adding my own like thing to it so sam can come and clarify but he's not here so we're gonna make up his words
Speaker 2and we're really good at it
Speaker 1on sam's behalf this clip will be the clip we put out in the world let's just give a really grumpy
Speaker 2spin on everything that we
Speaker 1say and
Speaker 2there we go so okay
Speaker 1so what is the argument that people that think marketing is under attack are making the argument that they're making is that marketing is being is is being people are not being allowed to invest into brand um which is an important area to invest into today instead of investing into the brand which is an important area to invest into today instead of investing into the brand which is an important area to invest into today instead of CEOs and investors are pushing marketers on really focusing in on things that can drive pipeline today and tomorrow, and usually driven by initiatives that would be bucketed under performance marketing demand generation. And so marketers are pushing back and saying, man, you're not letting us make these investments into brand that are going to help us hit our pipeline numbers into the future. And every time we come up with a brand initiative, an idea, that idea gets shot down, you want to look at everything with a lens of attribution, and what is driving short term pipeline. And this is a the marketers have a creative muscle, so they feel stifled creatively. And they also believe that they're not being allowed to do the thing that is going to help them keep their job into the future. Because if you don't make these bets today, it's going to be hard to be able to drive the sort of pipeline you need a year from now, two years from now, unless we make these bets today. And so you're going to be able to drive the sort of pipeline you need a year from now, two years you're making it so that you're going to have to fire me a few years from now, because what you need, I won't be able to give you because we need to make those bets today. And so you're screwing me over. And so screw you. So that's kind of the feeling.
Speaker 2Sam, did Austin nail it? He nailed it.
Speaker 1I think I think I just have like, this
Speaker 2isn't a new thought, though, a brand has always been under attack. By I'd say venture, I remember for quota path, where we have invested very, very heavily in brand up front. And when we raised our series B, we had an investor come to me and said, Look, man, like you, you're putting way too many dollars be around where they didn't
Speaker 1ask you any questions. They're like, do any due diligence.
Speaker 2They're like the best companies in the world have have the best brands, but they didn't start with brand. That's what he said to me. And I was like, that's so backwards to just so huge,
Speaker 1considering the amount of diligence that was happening in that market.
Speaker 2Yeah. So you were like, well, wait a second, you're trusting, you're giving millions and millions of dollars to the CEO. And I get there's a lot of CEOs that come from a sales background that CROs, they don't understand brand, they're not creatives. They're coin operated in a one zero binary world that exists very structured, very Excel. That's most most CEOs, because those are the CEOs that are able to work backwards and think really big at scale, not the ones that are like, this is super ambiguous. I don't know what to do. Why would I do this? Why would I do a creative with a cute little commercial with a pig that's dancing? I don't know why I would do that. Gusto did that and they nailed it. But if I think about what really How much pipeline does that pig drive? How much pig? Yes. If I think about what really makes companies tick and the heart and soul of it, brand and positioning are always at the bottom of that stack.
Speaker 1What do you think of as brand? Like when you hear brand, like what's your definition of it? Like, what do you think?
Speaker 2Well, let me ask you. Okay. Notion. What do you think of with Notion?
Speaker 1I think of Notion as very artistically led.
Speaker 2Yes. Like very black and white, like fat marker sketches, like design forward in a way that's not in your face.
Speaker 1There's a certain type of founder that is like, I think the Steve Jobs lineage of Brian Chastity and Yeah, there's a certain type of founder that is like, I think the Steve Jobs lineage of Brian Chastity and the Notion team, like I think they're design first type of founders. And you can see that there's an elegance, there's a beauty to what they build.
Speaker 2Right. So if you're if you're put two of those tools, Asana, when I say Asana, what do you think of?
Speaker 1I see messy, annoying, just like organization management tool. Yeah, project management tool. By the way, let me go off on this thing. I think they are there's so much time wasted in our ecosystem, putting together project breakdowns, to do list, at least 20 to 30% of our time in these organizations is wasted doing this nonsense is putting an Asana thing together of like, we need to do this thing project. Now we're going to spend days figuring out what are all these
Speaker 2little tasks and I'm going to give you how many tickets and story points and hours and then I want
Speaker 1to give a due date to it. And there's a critical path to it. And no one ever follows it. And it's never up to date and never goes exactly like that. It never does, then they they do that, then they have to update their own to do list. And that to do list is to the point where sometimes you hear people will go and do an item do a task that wasn't on the to do list, then they'll go write it on the to do list and cross it out just to like, give themselves a dopamine hit and say, what are we doing? Like, why? Why? Why do you need all of this stuff?
Speaker 2The middle of this episode needs to be awesome. It takes takes aim at project management,
Speaker 1softwares, roadmaps, sometimes like blow my mind, get charts are sometimes the thing that screws the organization over because I think the roadmap should be very big picture long term and super detailed at a three month increment. When you try to get too detailed over the course of a year or two year roadmap can't. Like, what do you know? Like you, you basically tied yourself into this outcome that you've decided today is going to play out. But the world is evolving. Customer needs are changing. You're getting all these signals. But now we have a road.
Speaker 2I'm going to come back to this because I have some thoughts. I love this this topic, by the way. But if you had a sauna notion, just one to one, which one of the two are you going to try out first notion? Brand, brand, brand, brand. So when you asked me the question, AJ, what does brand means to you? It's the first is you're like, Oh, this is sexy. This is something I really want to try out. Guess what? Notion sucks. I said it. I said it. Notion sucks. I hate it. We switched from a sauna.
Speaker 1It does not suck more than a sauna.
Speaker 2I like Asana. Oh, my God, AJ. Why do you like Asana? Because it's simple. It's straightforward. It does the thing I need it to do.
Speaker 1There's nothing simple about it.
Speaker 2I don't understand why Notion had to reinvent the grammar game in terms of how text is formatted. I just want three bullet points, for God's sake. That's bad. Why can't I just make this paragraph bulleted? I can't highlight it. Why is it coming up over here? I deleted Notion, by the way. It's a ridiculous UI.
Speaker 1I have no to-do list. I have no project plan. I don't have a very coordinated calendar. I have realized all of that stuff takes so much of your bandwidth and your energy. I have a simple Google Doc where I write three or four things that I need to get done at any given point, and that's it. Everything else is work that is happening. Look at that list. It's my to-do list. I just do it every day. That's a nice, simple to-do list. Because I think, do you have a strategy for your company? There's a company strategy that you have that you are executing against. And so things are happening. Work is happening. It's being presented. Next things are coming up. You are in momentum. And so I trust the momentum there. Things will come to me when I need to do something, and then I'll do them, and I'll move on from it. And once in a while, I need to put something on a list to remember it tomorrow. I'd get something tonight, and I'm like, okay, shit, I'll just put this here, and I'll come to it tomorrow. It's literally a Google Doc with three or four items in it. It's not like these crazy, robust things. And I've found that everything's gone better since I started doing this. Yeah. Okay, put this to the side for a second. So coming back to brand, I think another way to think about brand is brand is what people say about you when you are not there, right? That's the byproduct of branding is a reputation that you develop, like awareness across more and a good reputation with them is the byproduct.
Speaker 2But can you have a good brand and a bad reputation? No. No? No.
Speaker 1Like that's why you know one. If somebody tells me, like, one of the good brands in a go-to-market is gone, I'm like, it can't be. Like, if everyone's complaining about the product versus price, like, how is that a good brand?
Speaker 2Like, how? If you're out there and you're listening, and you can think of an example that flies in the face of what Asad just said, please, please let us know, dear listener.
Speaker 1It's impossible. Like, it's counterintuitive. How can you have a good brand, bad reputation?
Speaker 2Well, you can have a good brand and the product and not a great product, and therefore your reputation. Your reputation doesn't work as well. Because brand and product are decoupled. I think over time, both
Speaker 1will be in the same place. Like, maybe, like, your product just started becoming really bad, and your brand was good because your product was good, but your product started becoming bad. And so now it has to catch up with you. Like, I think that can happen. But at some point, these two things will converge. How people feel about your brand and your product will converge at the same time. Your reputation and your brand are the same. And so I think if it is those things. If that's the byproduct of brand, I think people should, they're probably right in feeling what they're feeling as a marketing community, that they are questioned more when it comes to brand investments. I think that is a fair sentiment. And so I was thinking, what is helpful to them? Not just saying, hey, I hear you. What might be helpful to them is to steelman this and provide the other side's perspective so that you know what the other side's perspective is. And what might be helpful to them is to steelman this and provide the other side's perspective so that you know what the other side's perspective is. brand investments are probably not going to be toast yeah it's not happening like if outreach today somebody at outreach internally is like yo we have this branding campaign we want to do i think that person gets killed so uh so
Speaker 2do we go back to your tirade on project management software do we move on to a16z's yeah let's talk
Speaker 1about project management software you
Speaker 2have it right you this is this is so funny uh that you say this because i was on a call with um two other management team members who will not be named because we had this big change management last quarter we moved from asana to notion and yeah it was and to me i was like i just need to ask you why what was the need because the it wasn't me driven just for the record all of us you know because product had started using notion years ago and we wanted to consolidate it was a cost piece of that but the thought process was oh we're going to record our management team meetings and then basically we're going to record our management team meetings and then basically based on our updates use that to help inform and like automate some part of our updates that was the thought process because notion ai yay which at the end of the day i still just use chat gpt and copy and paste into notion anyway and don't use notion ai so i'm on this call and we're talking and i'm like it was it's two uh two two colleagues that again will go nameless but they're on the like i don't like notion and they both said we don't like notion either and so now you have half of the management now you
Speaker 1might have to go back to the other one i don't i'm not gonna do that i'm
Speaker 2gonna be a team player and that's what they said too we're all gonna be team players in this but the reality is is that with notion not only is formatting text just strange to me but it's always so many more clicks like i don't have everything on one screen i with asana i had a side panel and i could see everyone's updates really cleanly how many
Speaker 1projects went exactly how they were mapped out in asana ever oh they
Speaker 2never do well they shouldn't i
Speaker 1think that's the point why are we doing the thing that never happened like you know then at least okay maybe my complaint should be different maybe asana is fine you know maybe asana is fine click up is fine etc yeah i obviously love gaurav and so maybe maybe these are great things but maybe how we're going to do it is we're going to do it in asana and we're going to do it in asana and we're going to do it in asana and we're going to do it in asana and we're going to do it in asana and we're use them as neurotic where we try to like get so granular with breaking something down and then trying to get so specific about the minute task within it assigning it to people assigning timelines to it and trying to be so precise with things that it's hard to be precise with and so then what ends up happening is you have this track record of your your your assumption of how something would go has never played out that way but we never question why are we doing this then like maybe we need to think about breaking this down differently and no one ever stops it just becomes more and more in companies like as you get bigger and bigger more projects go into this and never happen the way that we think they're going to happen and then there
Speaker 2was this whole period where we were like oh we've got to use miro or mural for all of our project management and collaboration because we're in
Speaker 1different places insanity like wow why why
Speaker 2i don't you're i mean we're bringing up good points i dear listener you all are we're in for a treat this is what happens with sam we talk about topics that are like they're actually clearly curious to what pavilion uses so like this would fit in right we'll ask i think they
Speaker 1on flick up i think they do click yeah
Speaker 2click up and then you have monday.com
Speaker 1if somebody in my company asked us to implement a project uh plan i would stop talking to that person for like a week project management software
Speaker 2is like payroll software there's a million of them we didn't talk about it's not
Speaker 1going to make you better like in in most of the cases most of the implementations of these softwares i don't think that software helps the company do anything better faster more efficiently um i don't think those softwares have any impact on enterprise value creation within these organizations instead i think they tire people out because managing them is exhausting and
Speaker 2yeah if you get behind then you feel you just like procrastinate you get behind you always
Speaker 1overwhelmed you always feel stressed at the losing out aspect of this you never are able to project a plan this correctly and so then that person looks highly incompetent because you're like hey you had 20 of these things and none of them played out the way you wanted them to play out but the reality is across our entire ecosystem none of them play out the way we want them to play out that's the part of building things it's a little bit tricky and we probably need to be less granular in trying to map it out and actually just start doing the bloody work like you're spending so many hours on this just do the work like the work will move forward a bit faster and you're not going to be able to do the work that you want to do you'll be more on time if you start the work than if you do this thing right how much time do you think in your organization or in an organization that does like 20 million in revenue how many hours do you think go into these project management softwares oh sometimes
Speaker 2they have a full head count that manages the project management software i've seen that before oh my god yeah so an insane amount okay that's a job that we should move on to project management software i'm not going to
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Speaker 2a wee little sam i was a wee little kid 15 years ago i didn't know anything how was community well first off i thought uh pnl started this stood for parts and labor and so there we go there's that so the pavilion community helping you understand that i would say it's the most fundamental change if there was three things community would be one of those three things that have impacted my career and what changed the trajectory uh across across everything it's everything rank
Speaker 1yourself like would you give yourself an a plus an a a b plus etc in pnl fluency i feel like i'm not an a yet like i i would be honest and transparent i should take i've done that course i should take it again um i would say i'm like somewhere in the b b plus range um where do you reach yourself on that i would be
Speaker 2uh for sure um and i would say that this is the area that's actually what i told my management team last week is there's an area for us to up level it is across pnl and in finance fluency and uh and i'm not even kidding about this i was like hey uh carrie can you please please please reach out to pavilion about getting this scheduled for january now that's cool yeah true story that's great
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Speaker 2that episode of succession where uh kieran colkin has to go to like management trainee class
Speaker 1i mean like he
Speaker 2has to sit there i was teaching
Speaker 1we're sitting there you should do one in person if you did in person agent i will commentate that first oh i
Speaker 4think it's a good idea all right maybe i will well to that point folks if you want to accelerate your career sharpen your operating edge and get paid what you're worth pavilions where you grow next join pavilion.com thanks for listening
Speaker 2um i actually have i i want to kind of call an audible here because i i was thinking about a conversation i had yesterday i know we haven't done uh a audience question but i have a situation where i'd like to get your take acid and it's a friend uh of mine who started a company two years ago and he sent me a long text yesterday he said aj after three years of doing this thing and a i am like i've got 12 months of runway but i'm just done and i want to know i want your advice on what what to do and some more details on it i really really strong go-to-market operator was very successful multiple companies and um when he left his previous company he was like didn't know actually what he's gonna do he's gonna consult but he's like i'm catching the founder bug i'm gonna go start a company he started a company it was an ai space pivoted a couple times, but it was in one of the ai go to market and and basically it's a it's a tool that can be repeated by any number of organizations could go build the thing that he built and so he's a few hundred thousand dollars left he raised from uh friends and family and the the big challenge is his co-founder and cto left uh six months ago and so he's trying to to think through a couple different options like what are some type companies soft landing etc so i'm talking to him like you know what partners you talk to who do you work really well and integrate with and it wasn't a lot there uh to do it so i'm kind of curious asid you're seven months of runway you kind of hit this point this inflection point what do you do to move on like move on that easy you have so much emotional baggage caught up in
Speaker 1this company give it up like that this is where i think people get caught up in things that are like they make this up in their heads like an example of this is i have a friend who is spending too much time thinking about returning capital like i want to make my if he keeps
Speaker 2thinking about it's going to be gone so
Speaker 1he's
Speaker 2like
Speaker 1i need to return capital to everybody that invested in my pre-seed in my seed round i think it was just pre-seed or something like that like a million dollars they've raised and they raised from a bunch of investors and some angels and so really taking the pressure of like i need to make them whole um very very seriously and in a way it's very commendable but the the other side of it is who is investing in your company their entire life savings like no one's crazy enough to be like here's a venture investment let me give you my life savings and venture capitalists obviously have a tolerance for losses along the way and so that person has created this artificial situation for themselves where they have to find some sort of a soft landing where the probability of this soft landing to me is like closer to non-existent than existent and so they're trying to find this very hard to land soft landing and instead i think what this person should do is close it down return the money your person probably should do the same thing whatever is left return it to the people and if there were like one or two angels that you want to make whole from your own pocket over time do it if you have to but don't worry don't worry about vc money in that instance like they understand they made a bet on something that has a high probability of not working out and it didn't and now go and find your next step in the market without the baggage of this thing because markets aren't going to stay the way they are forever right now you're in the early stage of a platform shift it's significant you can find a good job you can start a new company there's so many things you can do don't waste the year doing it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things to anyone and so but you find a lot of people and they think it's because of integrity and this and that it's like i don't think you've gone through the intellectual rigor of thinking it through like it won't matter what you're trying to do doesn't matter just i don't think that's
Speaker 2it actually though i here's why i would say i see it as if i'm in that position and i built something i've spent three years building something it's almost part of my resume and i'm not going to be able to do it again i'm not going to be able to do it again it's almost part of my resume and i'm not going to be able to do it again i'm not going to be able to do it again and i feel like if i'm looking to get a job as a cro which as we've said many times austin won't hire me i'm gonna get one so like let's say quota path blows up and i built this really cool tool i want to find a company where i can maybe potentially run that as a standalone by itself and get you're in go-to-market tech where are you gonna
Speaker 1roll well that's fair like let's be honest like go-to-market tech is is screwed right now like what's working zoom in for trades are twice the revenue hub spots down 60 hub spots down 60 70 like it's struggle city over there salesforce is like big and massive but not really growing at any significant rate and they they don't seem to their ai stuff doesn't seem to be doing all that well either um what's there like what is there like clay is exciting but clay is a i'd
Speaker 2say quota path can i get can i offer you quota path it's a company that's very exciting there's a
Speaker 1lot of excitement in small companies and go-to-market but like where where do you have this type of large scale
Speaker 2winner million dollar revenue companies and you mean in the 100 million arr company like the bigger go-to-market tech companies i
Speaker 1think the 100 million to a billion range is what tells you the state of this market right and there's not a lot going on there well they're and they're
Speaker 2not acquiring i mean yes salesforce acquired qualified for 1.2 billion and that was a great great win but you don't have many of those you're just not seeing them
Speaker 1and so these smaller like seed round companies that are looking for soft landing in go-to-market it is very different to if you were let's say a devops solution of something like that the market that you would look for that soft landing in is larger it's more robust it's doing well you have more optionality over here your optionality is very limited right now and so your ability to find that soft landing i think is close to non-existent because like does clay want to buy you like easy to figure out right like hey would clay want to buy us because if clay doesn't want to buy you does hubspot want to buy us you have there you go like there's actually there's an interesting
Speaker 2situation where a co-founder of a company left the company and is now running a part of clay it's not announced yet so i can't say who it is but uh is like one of the vp of sales at clay he was the ceo at a go-to-market tech company yeah uh and he just turned over the reins to his co-founder and he left to become the vp of sales at clay so i mean it talks said well it's been a while since we've had a top line hotline and yet here
Speaker 1we are and here we are here we are okay let's talk about the indreason round so 15 billion dollars what's the framing so indreason from day one initially they were laughed at this always made a bet into the world becoming larger than it is today and so when they raised their first few funds um a lot of the traditional vcs used to laugh at them that the size of funds you guys are raising the it's not going to be possible to provide venture returns against those funds because there's just not that many big winners out there and indreason would say no outcome sizes are getting bigger the market's getting bigger we believe you can provide venture returns and people really beat them up about this they're like these guys are capital aggregators all they care about is management fees um and this is not really venture anymore etc etc well indreason just raised 15 billion 15 billion is i think if you look at the last 12 months close to 15 20 percent of all the venture raised um so it's a lot like they they obviously have raised a big chunk of the total venture out there they've raised it across a number of funds but obviously a raise of this sort is a bet into the future being much larger than it is today that's the only way this works right but in doing so they also did something interesting they they released their results from previous years and those results are bloody good ha those results how good are they amazing like very very good like those are tier one vc returns
Speaker 2i mean the question i have in digging into them um were some of those results outsized from one or
Speaker 1two investments all of the funds will be outsized from a few investments but if you're talking about a few investments and you're talking about a few investment options um it's not like you can just say i'm going to do this i'm going to do this i'm going to do that i'm going to do that i'm going to do that i'm going to do that i'm going to do that i'm going to do that i'm going to do that i'm going to do that i'm going to do that i'm going to do that i'm going to do that i'm going to do that i'm going to do that i'm going to do that i'm going to do that i'm going to do that i'm going to do that um they do their largest holding by the way is data breaks yeah they own like a very big chunk of data breaks so they are concentrated into uh winners that can return tons and tons of capital for them but i think when you look at the returns that they have provided over since 2009 which are just amazing returns like their lps must be so happy and every bet that they've made around the world getting bigger has played out correctly and then you look at this raise and see that they are betting into the world becoming obviously orders of magnitude larger than it is today you have to give it to them that they've called it right so far and so well who's to say that they're wrong this time like they have a good track record against this and i think the logic is there like this this is a platform shift on the order of magnitude of computing rather than things like cloud and mobile um this is like when we got computers and then what happened from there and so they believe lots of really big winners are going to come out of this lots of enterprise value will be created um general thoughts and sentiments when you see something of this size
Speaker 2and scale i mean my primary shareholder in quota pack is insight partners and they're a 90 billion dollar 90 billion and they have had their track record i obviously can't compare them to andreessen but what i can say is that very
Speaker 1comparable by the way insight is different in the sense that a lot of insights business is pe well it's east coast
Speaker 2versus west coast and there's pe piece of it
Speaker 1their returns are great and every quarter inside has like a multi-billion dollar ad say exactly
Speaker 2right that's what really that's where i i take that tend to to see because i i stay up to date with insights news and every single quarter they have three to five exits like clockwork that are always really positive returns why something when
Speaker 1the market was hard for one billion yeah everybody is like this is going to be a bad purchase and they sell it for five seller for ten there's like they've done so many of these they bought vim for five billion beam just was worth 20 something billion now that they had the exit a few weeks ago which means all the way back to
Speaker 2the recorded future last year it was a year and a half ago to mastercard they go all the way back to sales loft to uh insiders is on under
Speaker 1appreciated how good they are generating returns they're
Speaker 2very very strong and there's a um a great great uh podcast with patrick o'shaughnessy that uh talks to their founder uh whoring uh that you can all go with he never does them so it's worth it yeah this is like the first
Speaker 1one he's ever done the reason is like i think if you are a founder or if you're an operator how do you read this i think if you go to market this should go back and tie to like the thing that we're talking about a bit earlier which is that for a lot of go to market i think we are entering the golden era this is the market is going to transform um you know a lot of the things it's weird when you
Speaker 2say this i try to square this and i'm just going to ask you because one hand we talked about the golden era of sales on the other hand we talked about how abysmal gtm tech is yes how do we square those two things isn't that is wild yeah the market could never be hotter for sales and never worse for go to market tech how does that happen such
Speaker 1as this i think that itself tells you how human go to market i love it it kind of does right like the technology is is fine and helpful at the margin it's worse than project
Speaker 2management software apparently it probably
Speaker 1is true like some of this go-to-market tech out there is like really it's really really bad and if you think about what it brings it down to is that sales and the rest of marketing is you've got this like human to human aspect to it and that's what it's all about so we're in the golden era and sales people and go to market professionals driving five six trillion dollars worth of spend and purchasing in the economy and the tools that are enabling them specifically are barely getting to a billion that's a red herring if you're a
Speaker 2founder out there and you're like i'm gonna go build something to solve the sales problem that i've had don't do it stay away this is
Speaker 1the thing your technology won't make a bad sales person good your technology will not make a company with no product market fit good and companies with good sales people and good product market fit can kill it without your technology because they have for ages and ages and ages you're hitting something that's and where the where the unlock has come right now by the way like all of these productivity unlocks that we're finding in sales right now they aren't like some of it is just very generic tools being used to do simple things that used to take a lot of time and maybe you could use case that into some sort of a go-to-market test thing sure maybe it becomes an ai crm or it becomes a a module that hubspot or salesforce sells but we've found that the massive unlock has come from simple things being done for these people give them more time to do what they're really good at but if you can't make a bad sales person good or if you can't make a company with no product market fit fly then you can't re you you're not really helping the pain become less painful and the good ones can be good without you that's the challenge i think in
Speaker 2gold market tech yeah i agree with you 100 in the sense that if i think about just even quota path where a lot of our challenges are in our rep the rev ops leaders or even finance that are leading and implementing quota path the reps get upset not at quota path but at their own comp plan and that kind of manifests up to the admin where it just can get frustrated it's like well quarter pass on doing the thing it's supposed to be doing it's like well no your sales team isn't doing the thing it's supposed to be doing and and that's why it's really
Speaker 1changing but like i the sales rep is going to feel crappy if they can't hit their quota their quota is mainly dependent on them having a good product to sell and being good themselves at selling it right and so the thing that shows them how much they're earning and all of this stuff it's great when i'm winning and i'll i'll be frustrated at it when i'm not winning but it can't make me win or not make me win right the beauty of what you're doing is you have used go to market as a wedge to go into incentives more broadly so what you get to do is you get to teach the econ economy more broadly speaking that hey one thing we have found in go to market is that with these humans the really good ones if you give them a good product and then you take an incentive plan and you use it to direct their attention by telling them listen i'll pay you more to do this thing then it directs their attention in a specific direction it's a really good way to orient your sales team orient people and so let's use incentives broadly in our company to for a change attention from here to there and see the benefits that we've had of doing so in sales more broadly i think that's a beautiful story but that means you becoming the big winner that you will become is breaking out of go to market and maybe that's the lesson for a lot of go to market tech founders is can you break out of grow to market can that be the jumping off point like
Speaker 2the wedge is so important we thought about this day one this was 2018. look commission tracking isn't the end all be all does my team wake up in the morning like so jazzed about commission tracking absolutely not we get we get jazzed up about solving really big problems and the problem you have is exactly what you said is most companies aren't aligning their incentives correctly so if you're gonna have commission tracking because that's a mission critical thing you're doing payroll with it yeah fine get in and do it do it well but you have to broaden the use case above and beyond that if you want to differentiate and do exactly what you said which is extend on the category above and beyond go to market tech now the challenge is although this is a great thought exercise has there ever really been a company to do that successfully salesforce i would offer up is probably one area but well
Speaker 1i would say salesforce is like the company that we have to now question like how like how much can we learn from that company because yeah listen super impressive world-changing organization all of that 40 billion in revenue better than us all that stuff give it to them but at the same point in the grand scheme of things like they their their growth rate's not really good right now and i think growth rate crm is under
Speaker 2attack i mean marketing is under attack but
Speaker 1crm really to keep adding new value to for the market that you're selling into is like if you need to increase the amount of value that you're providing so that you can increase the amount of revenue you can generate over time so your growth rate indicates that especially in a company of that scale and so one would argue that salesforce over the last couple of years has had a really tough time finding ways to maintain a healthy value exchange which is now indicated in their growth rate and so whatever they're doing internally some of it is obviously not working because they they haven't gotten these things right i don't know of many organizations i don't know of many ceos that believe right now that you can use incentives broadly in the organization the way that you can in sales but i think that's the fun opportunity is to say listen we've proven that this works we've proven that if you take somebody really really good right like a really good salesperson and you give them a really good thing to take to market and then you tell them okay i need to help you allocate your number one resource which is your time and your energy and i'm going to help you figure out how to allocate it not by your frontline manager telling you what to do but instead your comp plan telling you what your comp is and then you tell them okay i need to help you out and i'm telling you what your comp against that tells you how to spend your time and so i'm going to use that to tell you where to spend your time and it works really well an example of how it works is imagine you had a sales rep who had an existing book of business and new business as well that they had to drive if the new business commission rate was 15 and the existing business commission rate was two percent the rep knows to spend more time on new business than existing businesses so it's really important that you take that into account and i think that's a really important thing to keep in mind as you're thinking about how you're going to move forward with your business and i think that's a really important thing to keep in mind as you're thinking about how you're going to move forward with your business and i think that's a really important thing to keep in mind as you're thinking about how you're going to move forward with your business and i think that's a really important thing to keep in mind as you're thinking about how you're going to move forward with your business and i think that's a really important thing to keep in mind as you're thinking about how you're going to move forward with your business and i think that's a really important thing to keep in mind as you're thinking about how you're going to move forward with your business and i think that's a really important thing to keep in mind as you're thinking about how is eng because in eng i think it's hard to measure type of job it really well
Speaker 2you have so many different variables equality versus velocity are the really challenging that's the problem yeah what do you
Speaker 1how do you measure quality we're going to crack it
Speaker 2austin i'm going to figure it out by
Speaker 1the but even if you didn't do engine you did everything else that's a big ass time right like
Speaker 2yeah so we'll get there uh going back to a16z and their 15 billion dollar fund awesome that they released their results awesome that they're doing well and that's just great like i know that there's a a pessimistic view on venture and software right now but when you see a fund like a16z put their money where their mouth is and do that it gives the rest of the world hope oh venture works it is the right business model all ships rise that's else it works like quit hitting on venture uh okay we're coming up on time i think we should do shout outs wins of the week i i'm gonna start if that's okay austin because um i like every person ever set a goal at the beginning of the year to read more of course dry january reading more um but i finally started uh project hail mary and i started andy weir and i started it so the martian is his other pretty well-known book and this this one's coming out with a movie starring ryan gosling and woohoo in march but um i started it two days ago and i'm halfway done and it's really really good it's a page turner for sure and all of you sci-fi fans if sam was on here he would roll his eyes
Speaker 1should i give you for all of the listeners who are wanting to read more books i'll give you a trick on figuring out whether you should continue reading a book or not because there's so many books out there in the world you can't read all of them when i was young for a couple of years i was living with my grandparents and my they had this library in their house um and that library became my bedroom and so it was beautiful like it was like books everywhere and then i had like it was this beautiful library and i got to like live in it and one of the things i learned in that library is living in that equinox and i lived that like it was impossible and so you have to have some way of deciding whether you continue reading a book or not and there is a way to do that the way is this it's a hundred pages minus your age that is how many pages you must read before you are allowed to decide whether you continue or not so what does that do if you're young if you're like 30 years old 25 whatever you by default have to read more pages because you don't know that much about the world you don't have you're not that far ahead so you need more time to make that call if you're 80 you don't have that much time left firstly and you have more knowledge and more insight and all of that so you just need to read 20 pages to decide whether or not i'm going to continue and that has helped me so much there are so many books i start now and i'm like no like you're not going to get my attention and it is it it actually makes reading more fun because the thing that screws us sometimes is you start reading a book that you're not loving and you think for some reason you have to finish it like the food on your table i must eat my vegetables i must finish this book and that is nonsense you must not throw it away i
Speaker 2can't wait until i'm 99 years old and i only have to read one page
Speaker 1well considering all the longevity stuff all of that stuff that's happening you might get to live to like 120. we'll see
Speaker 2uh austin you're already on your way there all
Speaker 1right would you invest if aj you got if you had to put a million dollars to increase the probability of you living to 130 by 30 percent would you spend the oh
Speaker 2yeah 100 100 i'd spend five million dollars to do
Speaker 1that yeah right i mean you spend a million dollars to go see the moon for
Speaker 220 minutes yes 100 yeah i love this game this should be quiz bro quo this is the great this is a great game no multiple choice this is really somebody said
Speaker 1no to that like sherry is like i don't care about the moon i said what do you mean you don't care about the moon like it was so cool like amazing i want to see the moon okay what's
Speaker 2your win of the week
Speaker 1what is my win or shout out i just feel like it was really interesting i it's a lesson learned last week maybe which is we took a couple of weeks off from sending the newsletter out um we sent twice a week we took a break at the end of december and so last thursday we sent it out for the first time and one of the things i was thinking of is that we probably will have to tolerate a lower open rate for a few weeks to build back warmth and the habit with the audience etc and so we sent this thing out and it's been weeks since we've sent anything and 70 000 people read it in less than 24
Speaker 2hours 50 open
Speaker 1rate about 49 open rate and that was just so shocking to me and we didn't post about it on social or anything of that so it just went to the audience and it was just wild it was like such an unexpected thing and so counter to what i my logic had made me become comfortable with and so it's just a healthy reminder that you can sometimes think things through and feel a lot of conviction around where you land up and be totally fucking
Speaker 2wrong that's okay my cto commented on it that that's how great the content is look at that cto's are reading are reading it uh yeah well you have a really great newsletter draft in your inbox asid i uh using it a little bit they'll already be out by the time you all listen to this but i uh i spent two and a half hours on the plane down to mexico working on this and really i'm not gonna lie i'm not gonna lie i'm not gonna lie i'm not gonna really thinking about the practical go-to-market lessons i learned last year and what did i really truly learn if i thought back and it was just a really great exercise to to do a retro uh for myself and i wrote down the themes and i worked through and i said what actually made this tick what worked and what didn't so if you're looking for practical go-to-market tips well i got a newsletter for you it's coming out this is exciting okay opening up right now he's like i gotta actually read this thing okay we we did it uh we did it without sam we can still survive acid we can do without our fearless copilot uh copilot captain we look forward to
Speaker 1having him back and telling us how we butchered his
Speaker 2things yes he loves marketing and he's all for brandon it's it's the heyday for for marketing is what he's going to tell us that's not true uh but another episode i think we're on episode one i actually don't know 140 i don't know either but now i think after 100 it's going to be 100 i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know
Speaker 1doesn't matter you
Speaker 2just stop counting and uh appreciate you austin thank you all for listening to results goodbye everyone bye okay and against all
Speaker 3odds you're still here look if you want more top line check out the top line newsletter at topline.beehive.com beehive is spelled weird it is b e e h i v.com topline.beehive.com or if you're a video person because video is great check us out on youtube topline dash media is what you want have a delightful day everybody
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