Speaker 1do we have a champion? Like I'm asking the teams, who's our champion? Well, it's this person. Who's our EB? 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 smirking, 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
Speaker 2pain for them? Welcome to the revenue builders podcast, a weekly show featuring B2B sales leaders and executives hosted by five times 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 1 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, Lacework, 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 pain, champions, outcomes, and evidence still matter. The speed of execution changes. Let's get started.
Speaker 3So Sung, maybe you'd 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.
Speaker 4One of the hottest companies on the planet right now.
Speaker 3Red hot.
Speaker 4Red hot. Congrats.
Speaker 1Well, 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. And I happened, 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 can, 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 de la Torre, right. So like, obviously you both know him. 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 where just existentially were like, Hey, are we actually going to 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 some of the interpersonal skills, you build some of the 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 some 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 business, 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, Hey, 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, the B2B enterprise, like SaaS, even up through SaaS, like you could hide not having value for years. Right.
Speaker 3At least, you know, you know, 11 months out of the 12.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 3And with perpetual, you could definitely hide for years.
Speaker 1Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3And 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, it was not reactive. It was totally reactive with subscription to your point, at least started to get to be somewhat proactive because you had to fix the guy's issue and make sure that they realized value at least by, you know, nine or 10 months into the deal.
Speaker 1A hundred percent. 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, you know, I'm here at Cursor and it's like bonkers, the velocity and scale in which that even exposes the value of the business. It 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, you know, he 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, like anyone can kind of show the telemetry and, you know, 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
Speaker 3based model. Right. Because it's like a light switch, right? If they don't like what you have to offer and they're not 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 going to give them value.
Speaker 4Right.
Speaker 3If they're going to be gone, you're gone right away.
Speaker 4And the reality of the world we're in right now is you're guaranteed that that customer environment, you know, I knew they were going to come in and turn on the light at eight o'clock in the morning. And then it's going to, they're going to 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. So, 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. Because 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
Speaker 1ago, a week ago. Is that fair? Oh, completely. And I think, yeah, go on, John, you were going to...
Speaker 4But I was just going to 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
Speaker 1reality is right now. Yeah. And by the way, just as a nod to force management and command of the message and value framework, right? We make promises in the sales stages around some pain that we've made to the customer that we can meaningfully solve for in a way that results in positive business outcomes, right? 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, you know, 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, 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.
Speaker 4And isn't the ultimate measure right now, Sung? 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 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 we're there and we're doing it 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?
Speaker 1It'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 competitor. 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, you know, workflows. But you're also. Attaching to, you know, the lighthouse projects or the key initiatives that are going to be paramount to that company's like revenue stream or to their competitive moat themselves. Right. I mean, if you do all those things, then great. You've become almost embedded and sticky. And there's an operational like dependence. Right. On us. For their core revenue. Right. And I think that's the trick is like stay away from the high level, you know, 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.
Speaker 3You said that really well, 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. 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.
Speaker 1Thousand percent. And John, you kind of started off the question, like, what is CS look like today?
Speaker 4Yeah.
Speaker 1Customer 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 ThoughtSpot, where Brian McCarthy and JP Bolin and a bunch of other people. The great sales leaders were there. That's kind of my first shot at doing this full end to end. I had this dream, right, 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, you're an account manager, you might do some commercials, you push, you know, 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 pre-sales or from, you know, 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 in the space, super important. Because anytime there's something new. When nascent customers are so hungry for it, give me a little bit of prescription. How should I do this thing? And oh, by the way, John, like how's my competitor doing this thing? Right. And I think you have to also have that, uh, 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, um, makes you super powerful because enterprise customers also operate in silos and there's this very well understood dynamic that I've learned that, you know, large companies actually don't talk to each other. Right. So you end up being kind of this information broker. It's like, oh, well, Hey, this business unit's doing it this way. And here's kind of the gains and things that are happening there. And then this other one's like, well, how's, you know, so-and-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 materialize. And then you can also, you know, build a business model that's really, really impactful. So I think, you know, the, the CS professional I'll say, cause like comes in many different, you know, acronyms and flavors, you know, we call them AI deployment managers here. Some companies call them technical account managers, customer success managers, customer success architects. Um, 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 and pain. You have to be an expert in the field. Right. Or in the space. You have to have 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 a kit, uh, again, taking the business pain and then taking, uh, 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.
Speaker 3But don't you also have to have, it also sounds like you have to have a little bit of salesperson 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. You have to branch out to these other departments. You have to be a little bit of a salesperson too.
Speaker 4So I want to say everyone's profile because it's, it's, it's changed so much in the last, I'm on the profile because when I, 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 handoff for post sales. And I think that's like horse buggy whips, right? Like that, that doesn't exist now. No customer, no customers digging that nobody buys that way. Now you can't set up to do that. So are we looking for a super human we're on 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, uh, you know, somebody that's good in discovery or what have you, what are your thoughts on that? Where's this going?
Speaker 1Yeah. 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, like 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. Ebbing and flowing of functional roles throughout the customer journey and throughout the sales like process, because in reality land and expand was kind of used in SAS, like, oh yeah, you land and then you kind of expand with additional. So skews, like things that you can sell and upsell, right. You drive a lot of NRR with a customer, et cetera, but like, 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 Bolin and I were actually talking about this a few weeks ago. Like 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. Cause there's. Obviously a lot that they're doing, but I'm just talking in the context of the customer journey, the selling starts the 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, curate champions, make sure that we're finding out. Pains in the business and attaching to those pains in 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. Uh, 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, you know, kind of the enablement and the education of, um, 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 like, 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, you know, experience for the customer.
Speaker 4What about that AI champion you're talking about as it, as 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 signing up 15. 15 different AI companies because I got security issues. It's going to get 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. Always. 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, the stuff you just said. Tell me about the challenges of that as it relates to, you know, the go-to-market experience, even, you know, pre-sales and post-sales. Yeah. The former way of selling
Speaker 1rewarded 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... How do we like manage all these things in a way that, again, it's going to be kind of unique to each customer. And then, and that's what I mean by the real sale starts after the signature, right? Because then you get exposure to all the inner workings of a customer. So it's kind of like our responsibility to, again, understand those things and help them drive the experimentation, help them drive their own kind of curiosity to figure out, hey, what does the shape of our engineering team look like? What does our workflow kind of materially change, 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 lifecycle. 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 it, if you're thinking 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 use as many tokens, unlimited tokens to go and build, right? And then you have customers who are doing this thing called like token maxing where it's like, hey, no budget, just go, right? And so finance steps in and says, hey, John, what are you guys doing over there? And then you've got other customers who are just kind of dipping 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 and 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
Speaker 4discovery session. You guys are guides. You're Sherpas. Exactly. And then we
Speaker 1come 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
Speaker 3it 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 a nice one. Go back to the profile, though. Where are you finding these people? Where are you finding these people? Where are you finding these people? Where are you finding them? Because these people didn't exist before. So where are you finding them? You find them like tech guys that have like a sales, some sales characteristics inside them. You're probably certainly not finding sales guys that are technical experts at this, right?
Speaker 1Yeah. 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 market, right? Where they're working in the domain and learning. Obviously, they're coming from a very credible space. And obviously, they're coming from a very credible space. And obviously, they're 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, we're putting a lot of investment and time into this transformation team that JP is running, which is going to, again, change fundamentally sales process and methodology or qualification frameworks, but also how we differentiate, how we message and 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, oh, CS is bad because we pay well here too, by the way. And, you know, then there's this like, oh, the real challenge is 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 Lampre is coming over to run 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 Jai, 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 consultants 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 little plug out there
Speaker 4for 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 have had one foot in technical capabilities. And whether I have those technical capabilities or not, it's about the customer's technical capabilities. And whether I have those technical capabilities or not, it's about the customer's responsibility. And it's the customer, excuse me, it's the company cursor's responsibility to educate me on the technical problems and challenges and to give me dialogue so I can have one foot in this technical world. And 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 with some good post salespeople and we do a deal. Now, with consumption and outcome-based pricing, now it's going to be, not only do I have to attach it 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 business, you're not going to be able to do that. And I think that's solutions or currently using their own. That's where I'd spend some time. Company owes you the knowledge about the technical. If 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 McKinsey person. I'm not, I didn't come from a technical, but if you really analyze it, 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 hired JP Boland, that's exactly what he's probably looking to do. Is that correct? Okay. He kind of knows what he's doing. Yeah. He
Speaker 3knows what he's doing. Well done. So let's go talk about consumption now a little bit from the perspective. So for years they've demanded, like, I need a consumption model because I only want to pay when I use 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, I even heard, you know, one company say that they, they're the token usage that they're using is three X 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, and the usage and outcome of,
Speaker 1of the product? Yeah. A thousand percent. I think the consumption model makes a lot of sense, but it's also, I think I realized John it's in disguise, this like operational dependency that's like needed again, because and what I mean by that is I think there's an element of consumption model makes sense. I think there's an element of consumption model makes sense. I think there's can go use as much as I need. business is honest but also us very honest like hey is this all this money that we're spending is it like realized and 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 because 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 um 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 because at the root of it is you want to come up with some value driver right hey we want to get to market faster we want to reduce our risk we want to drive some competitive advantage right all the things that again john to your point like the more things change 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 that we're doing this right we're doing this right we're them, how we can materially impact, how they can compress, you know, product time from idea design to delivery, right? That's kind of what it is in its 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
Speaker 3chunks to go execute. No, I think that's really important, giving them the big picture of what's the business outcome. Okay, so maybe it costs you 3x 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 earlier, 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 3x on tokens, you know, you're not going anywhere.
Speaker 4I think what you guys are talking about is exactly the vulnerability that sales teams are going to have. 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 never, 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 framework with you guys like once a year, we'd change it. You know, twice, two times a year at MongoDB. Today, that technical framework for you at Cursor is probably changing weekly, you know, and 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. And 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 SaaS, 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?
Speaker 1You'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, again, 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 in that way. 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 in that way. 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 in that way. 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 in that way. And spending all these, spending your budget on these things, what do you have to show for it? 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. 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 thin because we were a little slow to the game in terms of getting the go-to-market teams built out. And it's a lot of work because guess what? It's moving fast. I mean, our teams are kind of spread thin because we were a little slow to the game in terms of getting the go-to-market teams built out. And it's a lot of work because guess what? It's moving fast. I mean, our teams are kind of spread thin because we were a little slow to the game in terms of getting the go-to-market teams built out. And it's a lot of work because guess what? It's moving fast. I mean, our teams are kind of spread thin because we were a little slow to the game in terms of getting the go-to-market teams built out.
Speaker 4And it's a lot of work because guess what? It's moving fast. I mean, our teams are kind of spread thin because we were a little slow to the game in terms of getting the go-to-market teams built out. And it's a lot of work because guess what? It's moving fast. I mean, our teams are kind of spread thin because we were a little slow to the game in terms of getting the go-to-market teams built out.
Speaker 1And it's a lot of work because guess what? It's moving fast. I mean, our teams are kind of spread thin because we were a little slow to the game in terms of getting the go-to-market teams built out. And it's a lot of work because guess what? It's moving fast. I mean, our teams are kind of spread thin because we were a little slow to the game in terms of getting the go-to-market teams built out. And it's a lot of work because guess what? It's moving fast. I mean, our teams are kind of spread thin because we were a little slow to the game in terms of getting the go-to-market teams built out. And it's a lot of work because guess what? It's moving fast. I mean, our teams are kind of spread thin because we were a little slow to the game in terms of getting the go-to-market teams built out. And it's a lot of work because guess what? It's moving fast. I mean, our teams are kind of spread thin because we were a little slow to the game in terms of getting the go-to-market teams built out. And it's a lot of work because guess what? It's moving fast. I mean, our teams are kind of spread thin because we were a little slow to the game in terms of getting the go-to-market teams built out.
Speaker 4That sounds like if I'm going to go there, I got to be talking a little bit more about like what would fit for you. I got to be comfortable. with being uncomfortable. I got to probably be comfortable with grabbing a bucket of water. You know, we used to say at the force management in the early days, when we used to bind our frameworks, you remember, you'd get them, the force manager would be binding. The term was on the wall, we had everybody binds. Like if we had to put 100 of these things together, everybody would bind. But that's a certain mentality that, you know, you got to be ready to do that. You got to be comfortable with ambiguity and high growth. What else would you say for people that want to
Speaker 1reach 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 we're doing. And I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. 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 gonna, you know, 6x 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 scope role, knowing that in six months, nine months, 12 months, I can actually step into this. 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 should permeate every role here, right? Because you have to seek to understand. Yeah. And it's something-
Speaker 4I'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 specific advice.
Speaker 3I've seen it so many times where, you know, people call me, hey, can you help me? I'm looking at a couple of 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 title's 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 grow with the company, you're going to have a great time. And I tell them, look, go to the opportunity, you're going to have a great time. You're going to be surrounded by great people. And next thing you know, you look back two years from now, and you're in a much bigger title, in a great opportunity. If you take the title, you got a big title, opportunity's 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're going to 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 at Cursor, it's a giant opportunity.
Speaker 4On the phone, while we're recording, bro, while we're recording, SpaceX and Cursor are doing a deal. And we didn't, 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, you know, an option to purchase. And so 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 to reach out? What's the best way if I'm interested in Cursor? What's the best way right now? Because stuff's flying.
Speaker 1Yeah, I mean, well, for me, like, if you want to explore a possible role here, just send me a message on LinkedIn, my LinkedIn is kind of exploded already. But like, I am coming through it. That's the obvious one, you know, whatever the plug here is, for some part, we'll get it. We'll put your LinkedIn in the show. We'll get it. Perfect. Yeah. And then beyond that, like, 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 the last thing I'll say is, you know, as far as a cursor and kind of the market, and you kind of mentioned SpaceX, I'm 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.
Speaker 3That's a technical term?
Speaker 1That's a technical term, John.
Speaker 3Okay, gotcha. I'm going to put that, I'm going to put bonkers in the technical section of the
Speaker 4Man, I feel technical because people call me bonkers all the time, Johnny.
Speaker 1Johnny Mac, do you remember, just one quick thing for you. Yeah. Do you remember, this was at Blade 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 were called application engineers, but I was working with, you know, Damon and like Devakkar 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, song, 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 new, new 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 a good demo or not? And I was like, I always wanted to ask you like what the context of that was. It could have been a candidate that
Speaker 3you just wanted to maybe. If it was nefarious, it was him. We were going to find out if you were good soon enough anyway. So yeah, I'll find out right now. Yeah. But I distinctly remember that
Speaker 1because I was about to have 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, um, 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, because you
Speaker 3know, you can always get better and you want people that always realize I can always learn more. I can always increase my skillset. The minute that, you know, I've seen people that think that they can do 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 cursor, are 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 company's changed. The market's changed. Products change. Messaging's changed. 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?
Speaker 4I'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, cursor's the company for you. If you get motivated by, 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 don't have to deal 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 sun, 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 530. Yeah, it is. Oh, dark 30 is 530. Don't make me come over there. Listen. So it's, it's not that you can't do it. Please listen. It's, will it give you energy now? Cause there's a lot of people that are listening to this going, I can do this. I did it with song back in the day. We can do this. And song you're, you know, you look young as heck, but you've been doing this a while and you're still a sunrise guy. And, uh, so just being honest with yourself, 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. I hear 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 wrong call Kaplan. If you want to get in,
Speaker 3you call son or call somebody around son. Yeah. Oh yeah. Hey son. So typically you've been, you've been in quarterly business reviews and forecast sessions, mainly forecast sessions. And basically, to go to market side of things and now even a couple years ago you wouldn't find a lot of client success or customer support people in forecast sessions but i gotta ask i'm certain that you're finding yourself in these forecast sessions these days well it's it's worse than
Speaker 1that um mccarthy's asked me to basically call a renewals a churn number i have to forecast a
Speaker 3number to him john so it's not even attending so i agree i agree with him i'd have you do the
Speaker 1same thing yeah and it's uh i mean think about it almost as a parallel forecast in a way because he doesn't want me to care about expansion or any the 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
Speaker 3okay 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 probably eventually get there we're just trying
Speaker 1to get our heads wrapped around hey we got yeah i'm certain that's coming so you better get how much is coming yeah because the nature of our business is sometimes the renewals are going to be 2x 4x 5x 10x what the original land was right because they're consuming way more um and like we've changed pricing models and kind of its simplest terms but yeah back to the uh the future and the roles that we play again if we've 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 that's a good point and i think that's a good point and i think that's a good point and 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 um 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 a you know call him a little b yes i'm a sales leader or a rep for calling something it's like well 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
Speaker 3about one or two other things so johnny touched on this a little bit on the handoff right because you got about real the customer has to realize value so when you're handing off from the sale 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 uh
Speaker 1easy 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 that 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 pbos right like what does 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 here are the things that you're potentially you know making the progress that you're making the progress that you're promise of delivering on um 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 in theory hey you made some promises and go help achieve these business outcomes and 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 you know get this renewal or get more business right and i do think that um you know that whole end-to-end like handoff i hate the word because it's a transition right because are we really handing 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 eb relationships uh making sure that we you know provide because the 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
Speaker 4like here's the danger right son it could be a bot let's think about it it's all about the customer experience seriously if i could i don't care who does it if i could get somebody i hate a handoff 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 where 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
Speaker 1when 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 um even more important we do it because again the market's fast changing competitive uh threat is massive right switching cost is generally very low and i do think that there's an opportunity for us to again be the moat 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 yeah it's like never kind of been far from the truth yeah 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 um do the 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 um the delta i'll say in terms of you know being you know just any old seller and being you know elite you know being any old se or cs you know professional and being elite hey before we let some go
Speaker 4johnny can can we take a second and just because we we tap we touched on a little bit and it's okay if it's not appropriate for 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 in the uh forest like we went from subscription to consumption and now we're hearing outcome based pricing so i'm hearing this boom boom boom boom boom boom and it's getting louder and louder and louder 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
Speaker 1where 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 you know a fintech company versus you know a health care company versus you know a government like dod right like they're going to have very wildly different outcomes and measures i think because their 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 you know consumption based pricing is kind of going to be here for a bit only because it does again it's the 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 right 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 um at least for now um you know it's funny we had a company um customer and he was espousing he wanted it'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 are 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 Cursor to kind of normalize that. Now, they're probably much smarter people than me figuring that thing out. It's just my current view of the situation. But it's still
Speaker 4drums in for right now. It's the drums in the forest. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, for sure. Johnny,
Speaker 3any other point on that? Well, I wrote down three things when and song picked up pick two of them, people in process, and I wrote product life cycles, because if you're 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 be that could take a year and a half, right?
Speaker 4Mm hmm.
Speaker 3But I think what really is going to happen if it's going to be outcomes, it's 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 Yeah, but it's tough. It's really tough. It changes from product to product that changes from company to company changes from process to process. And by the way, that'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.
Speaker 5Oh, wow. Looking good, too, brother. Thank you.
Speaker 4Looks young as hell, Johnny.
Speaker 5He looks young as hell. He's got a fresh haircut. Looks like he's in good shape. I'm prepared for himself. Thinning out a little bit. I mean, I have four kids. I don't know about that. I'll take that. So, Kaplan, definitely take it. Don't you?
Speaker 4That's unkind. There's no reason for you to come over to my side of the room with that comment.
Speaker 3All right. Sorry about that. Not a lot. Thank you, Song Park. Thank you. Thank you, John Kaplan. Thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of the Revenue Builders Podcast.
Speaker 2Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe, rate, and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out ForceManagement.com for more information. you
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