The Real Sale Starts After Signature | Proving Value in AI and Consumption Models with Seong Park

Do we have a champion? Like I'm asking the teams, who's our champion? Well, it's this person, who's our ED? Oh, it's this person in procurement. Are you sure? It's that person in procurement, like, why? Well, it's because we're negotiating the contract with them. So yeah, you're smarting, but again, just the basics around, hey, what is the pain? What is the business problem that they're solving and have we captured meaningful evidence that we are solving that pain for them? Welcome to the Revenue Builders Podcast, a weekly show featuring B2D's sales leaders and executives hosted by five time CRO, John McMahon, and force management co-founder John Kaplan, the show takes guests in the barrel, behind the scenes with the people who've been there, done that, and seen the results. Revenue Builders covers best practices for scaling and growing your business while sharing the pitfalls to avoid. Today, we sit down with Sung Park, Senior Vice President of Customer Support and Services at Cursor. Cursor, as you know, is a rocket ship founded by four MIT students just four years ago. The company closed a $2.3 billion series D and recently surpassed a billion dollars in annualized recurring revenue, more than one million developers use the platform every day. Sung comes to Cursor after an extensive career leading customer teams, including leadership roles at Palo Alto, Chronosphere, Layswork, and MongoDB. In this episode, Sung brings a perspective shaped by his pre-sales, customer success, and enterprise go-to-market roles. The team talks value realization, how to make customer success the revenue engine in a consumption-based SaaS environment and why today's most successful CS teams are made up of strategic consultants, not account managers. The one truth in this conversation, the fundamentals of paying champions, outcomes, and evidence still matter, even as the speed of execution changes. Let's get started. - So, Sung, maybe you give us a little overview of like, how you started and how you ended up where you are today as a senior vice president of customer support and services for Cursor. - One of the hottest companies on the planet right now. - Red hot. - Red hot. - Congrats. Well, first of all, John and John, thank you for having me. This is like super, it's an honor, right? Just because I think John, like you and I, go back probably about 20 years if I'm like doing the math correctly. I'll share a funny story about that in a second, but like my background is pre-sales. So I was born into kind of the go-to-market piece really around B2B enterprise sales where there was no cloud, there was no open source, there was no SaaS. So you had to talk to someone in order to actually buy some software. - Right. - And I happen to, yeah. So, and for me, pre-sales ended up being kind of a really great introduction to go to market because it forced people to really understand that there are business problems that are solved by technology. And I think, you know, the thing that drew me most was in pre-sales, you get to marry the two. So, you know, step, I don't know, forward a few years and then, you know, I landed into MongoDB with, you know, one of the best CROs arguably that I've worked with also Carlos Del Torre, right? So like obviously you both know, right? - Great guy. - And yeah, it was my first foray into really open source, SaaS, building out things that again were not necessarily very clear at the time. And there were definitely quarters and, you know, periods of time were just, just essentially we're like, hey, I'm actually gonna make it. But it was very eye-opening because I think in pre-sales, you learn how to build some of the interpersonal skills, you build great discovery, you build all the things that are going to be paramount for you to really understand the customer's pain and then figure out what are the best ways for me to position this solution or this thing that I have that can potentially solve that pain and do it in a meaningful enough way that says, "Sung, I've seen enough, I've heard enough, I'm confident you can solve this pain for me, let's go do this." Fast forward now to consumption businesses, I think it really forces companies to really re-earn kind of the revenue through usage and value realization. It's kind of this referendum on hate, like what have you done for me lately, right? And like are you actually delivering some type of meaningful quantifiable business value? And I think in kind of the B2B enterprise like SaaS, even up through SaaS, you could hide not having value for years, right? - Well, at least 11 months out of the 12. And with perpetually, you could definitely hide for years. - Exactly. - And CS at that time was really break-fix. People essentially waited until something broke at the customer and then they tried to fix it. It was not reactive, it was totally reactive. With subscriptions, your point, at least started to get to be somewhat proactive 'cause you had to fix the guys issue and make sure that they realized value, at least by nine or 10 months into the B2. - 100%. And I think the telemetry, the data, everything that's available now in a consumption-based business, it just exposes the truth. Like, are we really getting value out of this thing that we're now paying a lot of money for? And I'm here at Cursor and it's like bonkers, the velocity and scale in which that even exposes how much more relevant you have to be and how much more you have to be very precise about showcasing business value. I know Brian McCarthy was on before. - Yes. - You talked about the moat that he's building, which is really sales, right? And the sales team on the go-to-market team here. And I think for us, it really comes down to, well, hey, anyone can kind of show the telemetry and deliver like a capability and a feature set and a platform. But I think it really exposes, especially in the enterprise market, how much more you have to build and re-earn. And like, I'll just say earn the customer's business every day in a consumption-based model. - Right, because it's like a light switch, right? If they don't like what you have to offer and I'm realizing value, they don't have to wait. They can turn the light switch off and turn somebody else's light switch on and try them to see if they're gonna give them value. - Right. - You may be gone. You're gone right away. - And the reality of the world we're in right now is, you're guaranteed that that customer environment, you know, I knew they were gonna come in and turn on the light at eight o'clock in the morning and then it's gonna, they're gonna kind of dim the light at 10 or whatever. Now, new opportunities, AI has created people that are doing things faster than they've ever done before. That light switch can be going on and off or going on and staying on. And I think, and I'd love for your perspective on this, you need now more than ever to have great telemetry, great insights, great onto what customers are doing. 'Cause what they're doing today is vastly different to what they were doing. I used to say a year ago, I can say now a month ago, a week ago. Is that fair? - Oh, completely. And I think, yeah, go on John, you're gonna-- - But I was just gonna ask, how do you, you're responsible for this value realization or I like to call it value creation, value capture, but I like your value realization. What does that do to a realization world, which is backed by consumption? And then obviously everybody's talking about outcomes. I'd love to hear what the reality is right now. - Yeah, and by the way, it just has a nod to force management and commanded the message and value framework. We make promises in the sales stages around some pain that we've identified jointly with a customer that we can meaningfully solve for in a way that results in positive business outcomes. If we do that really well, then that value realization ends up being just kind of execution, right? After land. And what I mean by that is easy words to say, but it's really, really hard to make sure that you're tracking whatever those business outcomes are because oftentimes, especially I think in a fast moving environment, you kind of root on sometimes surface level metrics. Hey, we've saved your developer hundreds of hours of time, so now they're more productive. Well, then so what? Like what did that actually mean to the business? So you have to, again, do great discovery and make sure that you are being inquisitive and curious and making sure you can draw that attribution to the PBO or to the positive business outcome. I think the other thing too, then, is how do you meaningfully balance what you're trying to find from a discovery perspective, but also showcase, hey, here are all the things that we can add maybe additional value to you, right? And I think that's the trick is like constantly doing this like give and take around discovery to make sure that, hey, let's uncover more pain, but also let's uncover where we can find some really well validated, quantified metrics in hard dollars, right? That we can actually capture as evidence of value. And this is the ultimate measure right now, some feels like the ultimate measure. And this has not been easy to do is whether or not the end user says, if you unplug it, I'm dead. Yeah. And that, Today is a new metric for me. If you unplug cursor or whoever, if they don't identify, you know, a lot of times we used to like to be a cursor, I think, is going to be like to be in the background a little bit. You don't even know where they are and we're doing, right? And now, what pressure does that put on your organization when the metric is CFO saying, if I turn it off and nobody screams, then I know I've made a good decision. What kind of challenges does that create for you right now? It's a huge challenge because the space is so new and nascent. A lot of, you know, our competitors are going to be doing AI generated code, period. That's kind of the tip of the spear in terms of a software development lifecycle or product development lifecycle. So if you're only focused there, then switching costs is very low. You can use something else versus cursor. I'm not going to mention competitors, but I think everyone knows what they are. So the trick is to make sure that we, again, seek to understand what a customer's workflows are. How do they actually go from idea, from design all the way through this development lifecycle and produce something at the end of it that is going to be production code, a production app that, again, ties to some revenue stream or some line of business that, again, you can equate and quantify in terms of dollars, right? So the magic's there. You want to make sure you're fully embedded in that lifecycle. I'll work flows, but you're also attaching to the lighthouse projects or the key initiatives that are going to be paramount to that company's like revenue stream or to their competitive vote themselves, right? I mean, if you do all those things, then great, you've become almost embedded and sticky. And there's an operational dependence on us for their core revenue. And I think that's the trick is like stay away from the high level, the harbor tour. Hey, everyone can do this like AI generated code stuff, but go really deep and embed yourself in terms of understanding the customer's workflow, how they actually create software and get plugged in that way. >> You said that really well. >> Yeah, you make it sound easy too, but at the end of the day for people that are listening to continue to sell like that, you have to constantly go through, I'm going back to what you said previously, you have to constantly go through that discovery process. You have to build trust. You have to gain credibility so that you can influence the customer. If you haven't built trust and gain credibility, you're not going to be able to influence the customer to embed you in any of their other processes. >> 1,000%. And John, you kind of started off the question, like what is CS look like today? Customer success is very much, I think it got a bad rap. I mean, even when I started in CS and by the way, fun fact, my first like real CS job was coming out of MongoDB, technically joining a company called Thoughtsbot where Brian McCarthy and JP Bowlin and a bunch of other great sales leaders were there. That's kind of my first shot at doing this full end-to-end. I had this dream that hey, we can go from selling stages these promises and deliver on those promises. So I had a bit of a bad rap where it was always like, "Ah, you're an account manager. You might do some commercials. You push some like paper around for the renewal." And you really don't have credibility or depth in kind of the product or the space. And you have to call in people from product or from free sales or from services in order to like answer a simple question that the customer just has to like, "Hey, just show me, am I doing this right?" Or I just want to know how I can leverage your thing to solve this problem. And I think the CS professional of today is part like consultant. It's almost like a McKinsey consultant, right? To go like really understand the nuance of the business. They have to have technical depth and breadth. So I would also argue having some credibility on the technology and the space. Super important because anytime there's something new and nascent, customers are so hungry for, hey, give me a little bit of prescription. How should I do this thing? And oh, by the way, John, how's my competitor doing this thing? Right. And I think you have to also have that just in time ability to answer those questions. And I'll say again, just like seeking to understand just having that natural curiosity and that inquisitiveness makes you super powerful because enterprise customers also operate in silos. And there's this very well understood dynamic that I've learned that large companies actually don't talk to each other. So you end up being this information broker. It's like, oh, well, hey, this business unit's doing it this way. And here's the gains and things that are happening there. And then this other one's like, well, how's someone so doing this? And it allows you to kind of be this information broker that gives you also access to information that again, helps you fill out kind of that big picture story about understanding, again, how your customer makes money and how you can materially impact that. So I think the CS professional, I'll say, because it comes in many different acronyms and flavors. We call them AI deployment managers here. Some companies call them technical account managers, customer success managers, customer success architects. It's really kind of evolved to the point where you have to be almost like a therapist to a customer like really seek to understand their problem in pain. You have to be an expert in the field or in the space. And again, drive a lot of prescription and drive or at least have a point of view. And then you also have to be very consultative in terms of, again, taking the business pain and then taking a technology solution and kind of marrying the two together to have this like beautiful outcome. That's again, measured in some type of business outcome dollars right at the end of the day. Don't you also have to have it also sounds like you have to have a little bit of sales person inside of you. Oh, you have to be an expert. You have to be like you said, a little bit of a consultant. But you also have to branch out to these other departments. You have to be a little bit of a sales person too. So I want to say that everyone's a profile because it's too slow so much in the life. Yeah, I'm on the profile because when you think about what we're talking about here, we have this, we come to the conversation with this, there's some type of pre sales work. And then there's some type of hand off for post sales. And I think that's like horse buggy whips, right? Like that doesn't exist now. No customer, no customer's digging that. Nobody buys that way now. You can't set up to do that. So are we looking for a super human, where Johnny's question on the profile? Are we looking for, do we need two people, two organizations? Is it too much to expect that we have a technical athlete? And then somebody that's good and discovered for you or what have you? What are your thoughts on that? Where's this going? Yeah. I mean, if you think about that, so many ways to talk about this, John, there's definitely a-- is it a single unicorn person that does everything? Arguably no. I mean, these are typically-- again, talking about enterprise customers, like complex. You have to sell high. You have to sell wide. It takes a team and account team to do this. I've always thought about this, at being in flowing of functional roles throughout the customer journey and throughout the sales process. Because in reality, land and expand was kind of used in SaaS. Like, oh, yeah, you land, and then you kind of expand with additional skews, like things that you can sell and upsell. You drive a lot of NRR with a customer, et cetera. But what's our goal as a business? You want to acquire a customer and keep them, right? And I think in now the AI kind of era, especially in the AI space, the lands happen very easily. Like, JP Bowen and I were actually talking about this a few weeks ago. There's a concept of an AI champion. Someone who has on their back this responsibility to go and like, hey, we've got to figure out an AI strategy for my team, for my business, for my company. So guess what? I'm going to go look at all the different tools and offerings that are out there, cursor being one of them. So what's our job? I mean, we can easily get the land. Like, hey, we're going to go look at cursor and we're going to like make it available to our developers. But guess what? The selling actually starts at that moment, the true selling. And what I mean by that is not to, again, take away or diminish what the sellers do here. Because there's obviously a lot that they're doing. But I'm just talking in the context of the customer journey. The selling starts to minute they sign the contract. Because guess what? There are other competitors that also have deals. And now it's a knife fight where we have to go and like, do the land grab. But also, again, embed ourselves in those workflows, build champions, carry champions, make sure that we're finding out pains in the business and attaching to those pains and meaningful ways. It's a lot of work, right? So to kind of go back to the profile of person, you absolutely need someone who can sell. But it's not a single person. I think the AE plays a huge role throughout kind of that customer journey. We call them field engineers, but the pre-sales team also has, I think, a huge role. But like for customer success, we're talking about how do we drive awareness? How do we drive kind of the enablement and the education of what cursor can actually do for them? And then more importantly, apply that to our understanding of what their workflows are, what their environment looks like, how their devs work. So that's the work, right? And I think that that then means back to the profile, you have to have someone who's again going to be kind of part pre-sales, part AE, also someone who's going to be kind of the expert that can drive kind of that long term or the long tail of that experience for the customer. What about that AI champion you're talking about, is it relates to, I'm just going to play the other side of it, I'm a CFO, I don't want an AI champion going out there and sign up 15 different AI companies because I got security issues, it's going to get sticked. into workflow so it sounds like it's going to, by the very nature of things, customers are going to try to push you into pilots. Oh, it's so. Okay, so now even more, it sounds like to me that our ability to really qualify, not just getting them to sign up because it can stay in an AI lab for a while because I would think that you guys got to get it sticky, you got to get it into something that impacts the business. It's got to be a critical workflow, blah, blah, blah, all the stuff you just said. But tell me about the challenges of that as it relates to the go-to-market experience, even pre-sales and post-sales. The former way of selling rewarded certainty. Yes. Right? Yeah. If you think about where we are in kind of the AI era, we're actually more rewarded on curiosity, on experimentation, workflow discovery. How do we manage all these things in a way that again, it's going to be kind of unique to each customer. That's what I mean by the real sale starts after the signature. Then you get exposure to all the inner workings of a customer. It's our responsibility to understand those things and help them drive the experimentation, help them drive their own curiosity to figure out what is the shape of our engineering team look like. There's our workflow kind of materially changed, right? Because instead of spending the majority of their time doing coding, guess what? That gets compressed because you've got tools that almost remove all that like work that developers have been doing, but it gets pushed out into other areas of that development life cycle. It's change management, right? For decades, we've been talking about change management with digital transformation, application modernization. This is yet another flavor of it, but it happens at such a velocity and scale that I think it's kind of a free for all right now because if you think about customers trying to figure out their own strategies on how to be more AI native, you have on one extreme, right? We have a customer who's got tens of thousands of engineers. There's a mandate to go and basically uses many tokens, unlimited tokens to go and build, right? So, we have customers who are doing this thing called like token maxing where it's like, hey, no budget, just go, right? And so, you know, finance steps in and says, hey, John, what are you guys doing over there? And then you've got other customers who just kind of dip in their toes into water and looking around the room and seeing like, hey, what does that company do? And then should I just kind of follow suit? So, it's a wide spectrum of again, customers that just again are looking for help in guidance. And I think that's the moat that we build is how do we drive this like partnership that again, we experiment together. We drive this again, this very almost like a joint discovery session. And then all the guys, your Sherpas. Exactly. And then we come out of this thing with like hopefully something great that like moves the needle forward for that customer in terms of them shortening times for design to production for whatever app, right, that they're building. And I think that's the magic, right, because we have the ability to like have a front row seat to it, but also an ability to like materially impact and change almost fundamentally how a customer and a company does business. Going back to value realization, it used to be that when you sold to an account, because you sold to that account first, you could lock that account down substantially and keep the competition out. But to your earlier point, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing in a lot of these bigger accounts. And they could have your competition in that account. And if you can't realize value for them pretty quickly, chances are, you know, the competition will find a way to get you out of there. Absolutely. Yeah. This is an option. Go back to the profile though. Where are you finding these people? Because these people didn't exist before. So we find them. We find them like tech guys that have like a sales, some sales characteristics inside them. You probably certainly not find the sales guys that are technical experts at this, right? Yeah. I mean, there is a fair bit of technical depth and expertise you need, right? So you find them. I mean, we've had success with a few product managers that have kind of made the shift to go to go to market. Right. Where they're working in the domain and learning. Obviously, they're coming from a very credible space and are open to learning and being coached up on account management and kind of the soft skills, you know, exception handling, competitive positioning. Obviously, you know, putting a lot of investment in time into this transformation team that JP's running, which is going to again change fundamentally sales process and methodology or qualification frameworks, but also how we differentiate, how we message in position. So I think that's going to come as a very good investment. Looking at pre sales people, right? Because again, that is a very easy evolution. They just have to kind of grok the change that hey, I'm no longer like core sales team. I'm like part of this like other customer success function. So they have to kind of remove any bias or any like type of preconceived notion that OCS is bad because we pay well here too, by the way. And you know, then there's this like, oh, the real challenge is like the minute the customer signs, how do we do this long tail of all this work that is actually not that dissimilar from what you're already doing today, right? So I guess by the time this airs, you know, I'll have, you know, one of the leaders here, which we both know Frank Lamprey is coming over to run. Okay. Great. You know, one of the functions. Yeah. Frank's amazing, right? He's probably one of the best pre sales leaders, but he's like, hey, this totally makes sense. I want to try this thing. But more importantly, I know he can do this thing because like it was an easy kind of evolution. I have another pre sales leader coming from, well, he was at MongoDB and was at Google, Tosin, J.E. But he's also someone that's going to help run kind of the technical solution architect team that sits in customer success. But guess what? You know, it's kind of like pre sales in disguise in some ways. So you know, find a lot of talent that way. Also customer success architects, professional delivery, again, consultants, management consultant, who again have this kind of AI native like mindset are also very, I think, good fits for the role. And I'm going to put a, I'm going to put a little plug out there for people that are listening to this and going, I'm not any of those. What the fudge. So let's just settle down for a second because the more that things change, the more they stay the same. And let me just give some spirit. I believe, and I think Brian even said this, that the greatest sellers on the planet have always been the one that I've had one foot in technical capabilities. And whether I have those technical capabilities or not, it's about the customer's technical capabilities. And it's the customer, excuse me, it's the company, cursors, responsibility to educate me on the technical problems and challenges. And to give me dialogues like can have one foot in this technical world. And I can, my job as a seller is to connect that technical world to business outcomes. And before people are like, yeah, yeah, I do that. But I could stay in IT and sell a technical solution with some good, you know, with some good post sales people and we do a deal now with consumption and, and, you know, outcome based pricing. Now it's going to be not only do I have to attach it to the positive, to the positive business outcomes, like you said. So I have to have my foot in the technical and the business world. But I also have to understand their specific workflow. And that is the skill if I'm talking to people out there. If you don't understand workflow and you don't understand how these people are using your solutions or currently using their own, that's where I spend some time. Company owes you the knowledge about the technical. They owe you the knowledge about how to connect it to a business outcome. Your job is to understand what that workflow looks like. And I just found a lot of, I'm giving sellers a lot of spirit because, you know, listen to this, they'll be like, well, I'm not a McKenzie person. I'm not, I didn't come from a technical, but if you really analyze it, it's, it's getting back to really good basis and also the companies out there. You don't want to be hunting for unicorns. You want to take the real savages and you want to make sure that they have the right arrows in their quiver. And I think, you know, by the fact that you hire JP Bowlin, that's exactly what he's probably looking to do. Is that correct? He kind of knows what he's doing. Yeah, he knows what he's doing. He knows what he's doing. Well done. So, let's go talk about consumption now a little bit, you know, from the customer's perspective. So for years, they've demanded like, I need a consumption model because I only want to pay when he used this software. And now they're using the hell out of it. And they're coming back saying, hey, I need some cost predictability because the bills are so high, you know, even heard, you know, one company say that they're, the token and the usage that they're using is 3x the cost of the developer themselves, right? So have you already seen that it's a struggle for some customers where they're trying to balance cost predictability and the usage and outcome of the product? Yeah, 1000%. I think the consumption model makes a lot of sense, but it's also, I think I've realized that, Sean, it's in disguise, it's like operational dependency that's like needed again because, and what I mean by that is, I think there's an element of a consumption model makes sense. I can go use as much as I need. It keeps Business is honest, but also us very honest. Like, hey, is this all this money that we're spending? Is it like realized in like some tangible value that's being delivered? So that's kind of the first thing. I think the second thing too is like, some companies seem to be okay, maybe spending a little bit more 'cause they're again trying to navigate and figure out what their strategy is. But I think as sellers, as like a go-to-market team, it gives us a real opportunity to again, drive some prescription around, hey, here's how you need to think about this. Here's how other companies are doing it. And it's an opportunity for us to again unpack, like, well, why are you trying to spend all this money? 'Cause the root of it is, you wanna come up with some value driver, right? Hey, we wanna get to market faster. We wanna reduce our risk. We wanna drive some competitive advantage. All the things that, again, John, to your point, like the more things changed, the more they stay the same. Like, why are companies actually going through this pain of change and like spending all this money? And that's kind of my point. It's like, hey, the faster we can get them from this exploration experimentation thing to showing them how we can materially impact how they can compress product time from idea designed to delivery, right? That's kind of what it is, and it's simplest form. Now, to do that's really hard, like, that's the work. But I think if you think about and have the CS teams and the account teams, like, think through that, then it maybe becomes a little simpler, right? And kind of digestible chunks to go execute. - No, I think that's really important. Given on the big picture of what's the business outcome, okay, so maybe it cost you three X in tokens to get this product out the door, but you got the product out the door three months earlier. And because you're out three months early, you captured this much more of the market. And because of that market share, it equates to, you know, $100 million. And that's where you got to play. If you just lost in the fact that it cost them three X on tokens, you know, you're not going anywhere. - I think what you guys are talking about is exactly the vulnerability that sales teams are going to have on if you do not consciously play the long game with these customers and with these workflows, you're going to be at risk because, you know, my point is, if you start and you're talking to the customer about, hey, this is the problem that you can solve. And everybody gets excited about it. And think about how many of us were brought up on the promise. You said it, the certainty, the proof points of being able to do it somewhere else could get me enough to buy this product. But now the success of whether or not they keep the product or whether or not they consume the product has got to be in that full thought in the sales cycle. You can't just win on the technical requirements anymore because those technical requirements that became, think about it when people used to do frameworks on. We'd do a frame with you guys like once a year, we change it twice, two times a year at MongoDB today. That technical framework for you, a cursor is probably changing weekly, realistically. And so you have to understand that, you know, who's really consuming this? This is what I really love about AI today. The business is demanding. They don't understand AI. They don't understand like everything that it takes. They're here in 10 times faster, 10 times productivity, and that's what I want. I want innovation and I want speed. They're not considering security and all the things, and we know the problems that happen there. But what they, like as a seller, if you don't take the long game and connect it all the way down to the line of business that's going to say, if you shut that off, I'm going to scream. Like we could say that happened like in SAS, we could say, you know, but now I think it's mandated. You have to have those examples. Am I on the right page or no? You're totally on the right page. And if you look at even just the mechanics and like the heuristics of our business, you know, we have customers that can't just for context, you know, we had our first enterprise renewal in October of last year, just months ago, right? And then two quarters ago, we had about, you know, 20 or so ish enterprise renewals. This last quarter that ended just a few weeks ago, you know, we had over 200, right? So again, the velocity and scale of the business, obviously is now reflected in how much more we have to look at that long game. I think you're so spot on because it's kind of like, I mentioned experimentation, right? It's all experimentation right now. Let's go figure out how we can use these tools. That's the first wave we're in right now. The second wave is like when finance shows up and says, okay, now what are we doing? And I think we're right there right at that cusp or companies now, okay, you've spent the year kind of doing this token maxing and spending all these, you know, spending your budget on these things, what do you have to show for it? Like how does this meaningfully impact top line, bottom line? And how do we have some evidence of value that we arm our champions with? Period, right? That's kind of what we're doing. And it's a lot of work because guess what, it's moving fast. I mean, our teams are kind of spread then because we, we were a little slow to the game in terms of getting the go to market teams like built out, maybe arguably should have been a year ago. But I think that's kind of the fun part of this is like, we're operationalizing how we're going to market from our side from cursor, right? In terms of that long game, figuring out kind of the functional roles, but also making sure that we're building kind of the foundation, the playbooks, the repeatability, right? And kind of removing a little bit of this, like, everyone loves a hero. There's a little bit of hero culture that kind of naturally exists in this space, only because it's like so fast moving. And even the way we build products, for example, it's like a one person team because we're dog fooding our own stuff. Amazing, right? Versus like these groups of product managers and developers that take weeks and months to go build the thing. So like, I think the way we have to re, you know, reimagine, go to market, same thing. How do we operate in this kind of environment where the ground underneath us is changing so quickly, but also kind of counterbalance with what you just said a few minutes ago, John, which is like the more things changed, the more they stay the same. But we have a champion. Yeah, good one. Sorry, go ahead. Oh, what's he going to say? Like, I'm asking the teams, who's our champion? Well, it's this person. Who's our EB? Are you sure it's that person in procurement? Like, why? So yeah, you're smarting. But again, just the basics around, hey, what is the pain? One of the things I'm struggling with and current resourcing is thinking about this. As you said, there's much more, like for years, we were telling breps, don't do the POBs. There's enough evidence out there. And that's not really realistic now. And so you're saying we got to kind of land, we got to get them in the exploratory phase. What is that doing to your resources that have to support? Do you just let them go rogue and explore on their own or do you got to have resources to guide them through it? What's that doing to budgets? What's it doing to head count? What's it like? If we did that at Force Management, we had to have a bunch of new people there to guide people. That's a whole nother head count problem or challenge. How does that showing up for you? Yeah, I mean, right now we're in build out mode, John. So it's as high as fast as we can to build just a foundation right now because we have, I guess I can share some rough numbers. We have thousands of enterprise customers. And my team right now is about 35 people globally. Right? So it's kind of crazy. Yeah, and we're talking hundreds of millions and obviously renewable AR that we have to kind of focus on in the near term. So do the math. It's a lot at stake. You got to do the renewable AR. You got to do the, then you got to do the exploratory on the new stuff with 35 people. Right. So the problem statement is, yeah, there's no way we have enough human beings. So guess what? I mean, we have to leverage tooling. We have to leverage the things that are going to give us as much signal as proactive signal to say, hey, John, watch out. This customer, whatever signal we're looking for, maybe their competitor shows like an increase usage across their development teams or, hey, our usage has dropped off or, hey, we've lost engagement. Because guess what? Our champion just got pushed into another team or just left the company. All the factors that again, should be very proactive signals. And I call it early warning detection. How do we build those systems? Number one, and then number two, what actionable things can we do to react when we get those proactive signals? Right. That's kind of the work in order to like build consistency and scale. So we're trying to do that now. The other thing too is, you know, when you hire great people, they can kind of do many things and do the work of many people sometimes, especially in kind of like, you know, these like crunch times. So it's really important as a leader to like galvanize the team around, hey, here's the mission, here's the charter, here's the why? Are you with me? And like, here's the thing that we're going after. And like, you know, I actually learned that from John. Like, that's what galvanizes teams to go. And like, kind of hustle through and, you know, have the grit to kind of endure some like pretty tough times and hopefully come out of it, right, in a better place. So we have to ramp hiring. So like anyone listening to this, like we are hiring, we are hiring the best people we can. And if you want to do the best work of your career, like talk to me. But we're also like, if I'm going to go there, I got to be talk a little bit more about like, what would fit for you? I got to be comfortable. would be an uncomfortable. I got to probably be comfortable with grabbing a buck water. You know, we used to say at the force management in the early days when we used to bind our frameworks. Remember you'd get them? The force management would be binding. The term was on the wall we had everybody binds. Like if we had we had to put a hundred of these things together, everybody was fine. But that's a certain mentality that you know, you got to be ready to do that. You got to be you got to be comfortable with ambiguity and high growth. What else would you say for people that want to reach out to you? Yeah. I mean, people who have high agency like the desire to go and not only do the best for themselves and have a high bar, but kind of do the best thing for your teammate, right? And for the person sitting next to you and standing next to you, like that's super important. But that agency comes as a function of, hey, if you see a problem, it's one of our values, like go do the thing to go fix the problem, right? Like you're empowered to do it. And again, that was before my time here, but like this is kind of root and kind of core to what cursor is. I think the other thing too is fully understanding that sometimes you are taking a slightly, you know, step down and maybe the roles you're used to in order to come here. But guess what? There's going to be so much more headroom, right? Like my team's going to, you know, six acts from the number I just told you, right? And like with that comes opportunity. So like people sometimes have to take a little bit of a, hey, slightly different scoped role, knowing that in six months, nine months, 12 months, hey, I can actually step into this like much bigger role, right? And have a much bigger impact because I think the people I'm also looking for want to make a difference, right? What else would I say? I think again, the intellectual curiosity that is huge and that permeate, that should permeate every role here, right? Because you have to see to understand. Yeah. And it's something. I've heard you Johnny say a million times to people. And I want to have you phrase it, but like don't worry about the titles. What do you know? You have a pretty, pretty specific position with opportunity. I've seen it so many times where, you know, people call me, hey, can you help me? I'm looking at a couple opportunities and then they tell me about the two opportunities. One has a bigger title and the opportunity is terrible. And the other one has a big opportunity and the titles like, you know, middle of the road. And I tell them, look, go to the opportunity because the opportunity, it's going to grow. And if you're good and you're performing, you're going to you're going to grow with the company. You're going to have a great time. You're going to be surrounded by great people. And next thing you know, what you look back to, you're some now, and you're in a much bigger title in a great opportunity. If you take the title, you got a big title, opportunity is going nowhere. You're not going to be around great people. And two years from now, you're going to look back and say, I made a big mistake and you go into the next one and you're going to go to the next big title with no opportunity. So don't confuse position with opportunity. And I curse it's a giant opportunity. While we're on the phone, while we're recording, bro, thumb, my we're recording SpaceX and cursor are doing a deal. And we did it. I'm not sure, you know, we Johnny and I sure didn't know about it. I'm sure Brian probably knew about it. But you know, a couple of days later, Johnny, it gets announced that there's going to be an option to purchase. And so it sounds like just an incredible environment there. So that's a little plug. If they want to, we got more to talk about. But if they want to reach out, how do they, how do they, what's the best way if I'm interested in cursor? What's the best way right now? Because stuff's flying. Yeah, I mean, well, for me, like if you want to explore a possible role here, just send me a message on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn's kind of exploded already. But like I am coming through it. That's the obvious one, you know, whatever the plug year is for Sun Park. We'll get it. We'll put you LinkedIn show. We'll get it. Perfect. Yeah. And then beyond that, like the, it's, we're almost building a who's who of go to market leaders here. It's like every week we've got, oh, wow, that person. And you know, I'm also interviewing quite a bit. So if you want to work with the best and brightest, also just take a look on LinkedIn and see who's here that you might know. Because we're all connected, you know, one or two people removed, right? The longer I do this, the world seems much smaller, right? You know, someone through at least one other person. So I would highly recommend, you know, show some PG skills, do a little research and go do some outreach to the person that you want to land the job with. Because it means a lot here. I think that the last thing I'll say is, you know, as far as cursor and kind of the market and you kind of mentioned SpaceX, not really supposed to talk about it, but you know, this is a front row seat, arguably the most, I don't know, the most interesting for sure, but like the biggest generational shift in like technology since probably the cloud, right? And that was a long time ago. Right? So like if you want a front row seat for that, then like come check it out because the things that you get to see, I've been here just a few months, it's just again, the technical term is bonkers. It just makes no sense. That's a technical term. That's a technical term, John. Okay. I'm going to put that. I'm going to put bonkers in the technical section of the day. Man, I feel technical because people call me bonkers all the time, John. Yeah. Exactly. So Johnny, do you remember, just one quick thing? Yeah. Do you remember this was that boy logic? I was actually thinking about this the other day. You had just joined. I had, you know, that was my first pre sales job, right? We're called application engineers, but I was working with, you know, Damon and like Devacher and those guys. Yeah. You had just joined and you like reached out to me and said, Hey, I've got this like candidate or someone like, it wasn't clear who it was. And you're like, Hey, son, I heard you give a good demo. Do you mind getting on this call and like doing this demo for me? But I was like, you know, a little nervous. I'll say it politically correct. I was like, what the hell? Like you, you guy here, new sales leader. I haven't even met him yet. He wants me to do a demo. And the demo was weird because like there was a third person on that was like off camera or whatever it was. And then it was just you talking a little bit, but me just going through the standard blade logic demo. And then at some point, I realized like, Hey, this feels like I'm just being tested. Like, Hey, can song actually do it a good demo or not. And I always wanted to ask you like what the context of that was. It could have been a candidate that you just wanted to maybe. If it was nefarious, it was it. We were going to find out if you were good. This is soon enough anyway. So yeah, it's all find out right now. Yeah. But I distinctly remember that because, you know, it's about to have my my first kid and my wife had stopped working. And I was like, man, I can't screw this up no matter what. And I think it was just kind of that thing that I'm also looking for. People who like not operate out of a position of fear. It's because they have so much that they need to do and are capable of doing. And sometimes you have to operate from a position of a little bit of uncertainty, have a little bit of a chip on your shoulder, right? And like, want to do the best work that you can. And like, I'm looking for that. I know it's hard to kind of like this. Because you know, you can always get better. And you want people that always realize I can always learn more. I can always increase my skills at the minute that, you know, I've seen people that think that they know everything. They don't need to be coached anymore. I already got all the skills. That's the time for them to go because companies, especially like a curse or moving so fast, somebody that you see at this stage, you're going to see people two years from now. You're going to go, that guy's a dinosaur. Like he has not changed the companies change the markets change products change the messaging change customers have changed. And this guy hasn't changed. He looked good at this in 2026 and in 2028. He looks like a dinosaur. You guys, you know what I'm calling this right now? I'm calling it sunrise in my own company. I'm calling it sunrise versus sunset. If you are somebody that gets motivated by the sunrise, cursors the company for you. If you get motivated by it. And I'm not there's no judgments. It's like if you're on the tail end of your career and you're looking for a place to land and you got, you know, you want to get back and you want to, okay, I call that sunset and there's nothing wrong with it. But when you try to put a sunset person in a sunrise place, bad things happen. Does it make sense? It's not. And by the way, for you all listening out there, do your pre-qualification for yourself that says, if this is a, am I being honest with myself? Am I willing to go and like, when I say sunrise, I mean like, oh, dark 30, like 530 in the morning and getting motivated, swinging my legs off the, it's not whether this is important for me. It's not whether or not you don't think, oh, dark 30's not 530. Yeah, yeah, it is. Oh, dark 3530. Don't make me come over there. All right. Listen. So it's, it's not that you can't do it. Please listen. It's will it give you energy now? Because there's a lot of people are listening to it's going, I can do this. I did it with song back in the day. We can do this and song your, you know, you look young as heck, but you've been doing this a while and you're still a sunrise guy. And so just being honest with yourself and saying, is this type of thing going to give me energy or is it going to take the energy away from me? And it's, it's, there's no judgment right here. A lot of people, now I'm going to get phone calls. Can you get me in the cursor? Can you call song? Can you? That's the first question I'm probably going to ask them. That's the one. You'll call Kaplan. If you want to get in, you call song or call somebody around song. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Hey, son. Yeah. Typically you've been, you've been in quarterly business reviews and forecast sessions, mainly forecast sessions because you've been basically on to go to market side of things. And now, even a couple of years ago, you wouldn't find a lot of client success or customer support people in forecast sessions. But I got to ask, I'm certain that you're finding yourself in these forecast sessions these days. Well, it's worse than that. McCarthy's asked me to basically call a renewals a turn number. I have to forecast a number to John. So it's not even a ten-year session. I agree with it. I'd have to do the same thing. Yeah. And it's, I mean, think about it almost as a Arale forecast in a way, because he doesn't want me to care about expansion or any other stuff like of the renewable available to renew dollars. How much of that can we count on, right? Because we have to protect the base. Okay. So he's doing the renewal and he's looking at the churn, but he's not asking you to forecast for the current quarter of upside business in the, in the, from the existing customer. Well, so probably eventually get there. We're just trying to get our heads wrapped around. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just coming. So you better be. Yeah. I want you to come in. Yeah. Because the nature of our business is sometimes the renewals are going to be 2X, 4X, 5X, 10X with the original land was, right? Because they're consuming way more. And like we've changed pricing models and kind of its simplest terms. But yeah, back to the forecasting and kind of the QBRs, I think because of our nature and the roles that we play. Again, if we, if we're doing our jobs right, we're going to have so many data points and so many ways to qualify in and out expansion opportunities, right? Because customers aren't going to buy unless they're happy and already getting some type of value period. And remember what I said, consumption pricing is almost like a referendum on, hey, are we getting value out of this thing that we're paying for? And if we're not, you know, bye bye, we'll go do something else. So I think it really forces, you know, us to stay on top of the value game number one. And number two, I think there's also this ability for us to provide all the data points that kind of either support or refute whether or not something should be called, right? Like Carlos, love this. I mean, about him because he would always come to me, he's like, Hey, some, you know, tell me like, tell me the truth, like, is this a real opportunity or not? And he would always use me as kind of the foil for, hey, you know, calling a little BS, I see a leader or a red for calling something. Like, what about these things that we know? And I think that's the way that I've operated always. And it's the way that we should continue to operate, especially in CS, because again, we're going to have access to information that should really help from a qualification perspective. Hey, I want to talk about one or two other things. So Johnny touched on his a little bit on the hand off, right? Because you got to that real, the customer has to realize value. So when you're handing off from the sales person, how do you ensure that your CS people are getting all the relevant information that they need to make sure that the customer realizes the value that they intended to realize? Yeah, it's easy to say these words, really hard to execute, but we have to have in, in post sales and CS a really firm understanding of why they bought and what outcomes, but well, the EB wants, right? And then also what wins does the champion get out of this? Even if you just root on those like three things, BBOs, right? Like what is the EB care about and what does the champion actually want in terms of the win? 99% of the work is almost done, right? But it's really hard to go and capture those things because oftentimes, unless you're getting pulled into the POC or the pilot or the validation event to really understand hey, these are the requirements and hear the things that you're potentially, you know, making the promise of delivering on. It just always gets lost in the shuffle. And I think even after you land, you may not have access to the information to kind of even get a status on, hey, did those PBOs actually happen or did those outcomes meaningfully happen? So that's why I say it's really hard to do. It's easy and theory. Hey, you made some promises and go help achieve these business outcomes. And then we're going to capture evidence of whether we've achieved them in some time window and time frame, give it to our champion, show the EB and validate that hey, we have delivered value, but also we've earned the right to go and get this renewal or get more business, right? And I do think that, you know, that whole end to end like hand off, I hate the word because it's a transition, right? Because are we really handed off and does the AE and the, you know, pre sales or the field engineer here at Cursor, like do they stop engaging with the customer? Absolutely not. We're still engaging to, you know, cultivate and curate the champion relationships, the B relationships, making sure that we, you know, provide because a customer doesn't care who the role and what your title is. They're engaging with a company, right? And it's like one company. Do you know what I mean versus like, here's the danger, right, son? It could be a bot. Let's think about the customer experience. Seriously, if I could, I don't care who does it. If I could get somebody, I hate a hand off. So that's number one. Every conversation around user experience or customer experience is going to encapsulate what we talked about in the beginning has to be where we land in the end. And if there's two different organizations using two different languages, doing things differently, that experience is going to lead to a high probability of that not being the same thing what I signed up for is not what I got. So again, song, you know, I'm going with this. The more things change, the more they stay the same. But that need for common language that maybe we could get away with is, hey, we sold it this way. And this was the promise or the certainty. Now has to be in the actual, you know, you got to deliver all the way through the execution and the proof, right? And only when you have that, you know, that proof point, that case study, yeah, right? Then you know, you've achieved it, right? And again, like, it's the work, right? Because I don't think we're all consistently operating that way here yet. We will. But I think it's even more important we do it because again, the market's fast changing, competitive threat is massive, right? Switching costs is generally very low. And I do think that there's an opportunity for us to again, be the mo in terms of how we engage, how we sell. And it comes back to the basics all the time. Like I've been doing this and it almost feels like it's come full circle, right? It's like all the stuff I learned at Blade Logic. It's like never kind of been far from the truth, right? It's always pain. There's someone who cares about that pain. And there's someone who's going to meaningfully spend some money to go solve that pain. And there's someone who's going to sell on your behalf when you're not in the room and has a win and has influence. Like all those things, it's like the same. You know, 20 years later. And I think that's the thing. It's, yeah, I mean, I'm not trying to do the sell on that, but like that's fundamentally what it is. And I think the new sellers of today, the new go-to-market professionals, they could do a lot to just go back a little bit and kind of understand the basics and where we came from and apply that because you'd be surprised how little I think capture there is in terms of some of those like key foundational concepts. And I think that can go a long way in terms of shortening some of the delta, I'll say in terms of being just any old seller and being elite, being any old SE or CS, professional and being elite. Hey, before we let song go, Johnny, can we take a second and just, because we touch on a little bit, and it's okay if it's not appropriate for this conversation, but I'd like to know, can you educate us a little bit song on the, we're starting to hear some drums in the forest, like we went from subscription to consumption and now we're here in outcome based pricing. Some hearing this. Can you just kind of, for the audience, can you just kind of tell us where you think that is? What does it mean and where you think it is? Wow. Really early to tell. I mean, I think customers love the idea. Why am I, especially let's say in our space, why am I paying for all these tokens when I'm just paying for the thing that's going to deliver some outcome? Why don't I just pay for the outcome? Unfortunately, I think outcomes for customers are going to be wildly different, right? So it's going to be hard to kind of have a normalized, hey, here's an outcome for a FinTech company versus a healthcare company versus a government like DOD, right? They're going to have very wildly different outcomes and measures. I think because they're maturity, where they sit in the maturity curve is also going to be very different because it's largely dependent on the people they have the process, what tools they're using, how well they do the change management and kind of transform. That's also going to be a huge factor and I do think that consumption based pricing is kind of going to be here for a bit only because it does again, it's the shining the light, right? It does expose whether or not you're delivering value. I think most companies are still going to default to that or customers are going to default to that. But I don't know, outcome based sounds like a great thing in theory. I think it's just going to be a very hard thing to execute, especially in our space. At least for now, you know, it's funny. We had a customer advisory board dinner I'll sit next to a crypto company customer and he was espousing. He wanted it. He's like, "Hey, you guys are doing your pricing." all wrong, you should do outcome-based pricing. I was like, "Well, how would you measure that?" And then we had other customers who were like, "Yeah, it sounds great in theory, but really hard to do because guess what? Your outcomes are going to cost very different than mine." And it'd be really hard for someone like Kerser to kind of normalize that. Now, there are probably much smarter people than me figuring that thing out. It's just my current view of the situation. But it still drums in for right now. It's the drums in the forest. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'm sure. Do you have any other point on that? Well, I wrote down three things when a song picked up up two of them, people in process, and I wrote product life cycles because if you were a gaming company, you got to get a new game out in like six months. That's one thing. I'm building an airplane. That's a whole 'nother thing. You want outcome to be based upon me doing a new wing design. That could take a year and a half, right? But I think what really is going to happen if it's going to be outcomes, is going to be like micro outcomes based upon your product and these little micro outcomes that you have to pay for. I think it's yet to, but it's tough. It's really tough. It changes some product to product that changes from company to company, changes from process to process. And the-- By the way, it's my great people. Do I really want to count on your people to make the outcome happen quickly so I can get paid? I don't know. Song Park. Master's last. It's the last. Oh wow. I'm platter. Looking good too, brother. Looking good. Thank you. Looking young as hell, Johnny. There was. He looks young as hell. He's got a fresh haircut. Looks like he's in good shape. Yeah, but-- He's in good shape. Sitting out a little bit. I mean, I don't know about that. I'll take that. So count really. Don't you get that some kind. There's no reason for you to come over to my side of the room with that comment. All right, sorry about that. Thank you, Song Park. Thank you. John Kaplan. Thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of the Revenue Builders Podcasts. [MUSIC]