Why Sales Execution Wins in an AI-First World with Brian McCarthy, President of Global Revenue and Field Operations at Cursor

Technology right now in this space is easily swappable. What's not is solving business problems. What's not very easily swappable is engaging in building champions and trusted business relationships that go parallel. Welcome to the Revenue Builders Podcast, a weekly show featuring "Be To Be Sales Leaders" and "Executives." Hosted by five-time CEO 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. Enjoy today's episode. Revenue Builders, welcome back. Today we are reuniting with a guest who defines what it means to build an execution machine. When we last sat down with Brian McCarthy in episode 71, we talked about the ultimate hallmark of a leader. That a job well done means the job is done. Brian didn't just talk about it, he lived it. He helped lead Rubrik through an era defining run, pivoting from a forgotten backup company into a cybersecurity titan that scaled from $118 million to $1.5 billion in ARR in just five years. He built the machinery, recruited his own successor, and true to his word, he stepped away to find the next great track to lay. And folks, that new track has led him to the absolute epicenter of the AI economy. Brian is now the president of Global Revenue at Cursor, an AI native coding platform that is quite literally melting traditional growth models. We're talking about a company that went from 400,000 in sales led revenue to nearly 300 million in a single year. They are exiting this quarter at a total ARR of 3 billion. But this isn't just a story about viral growth. It's a masterclass in avoiding what Johnny McMahon likes to call the PLG trap. If you want to know how value selling survives and thrives in a world of autonomous AI agents and the AI factory, you need to hear this. He's the man who reminds us that in a world of swappable technology, you as the salesperson are the most. Let's get after it. Brian, it's amazing to reflect back on episode 71 with revenue builders that we had with you. You were talking about the leader, a job well done is the job is done, and it doesn't require you anymore. I know that it's a perfect segue into your moving from one opportunity to another. Would you just kind of reflect on that for us a little bit? Yeah. I mean, first of all, Rubrik's an incredible company. Life changing for me and McCarthy family, and life changing for a lot of folks that were part of that run. A lot of my best friends in the world are over there. You both know John and Kathy, would it's like when you go build something special and have tremendous economic outcome for a lot of people? It's deep. It goes deep. From a hundred million, 118 million, an ARR to one and a half billion in five years, a company that was kind of forgotten to be like, "Ah, those backup guys are, yeah, that's old." They missed their window to recreating the space, pivoting, decipher, building an execution machine, and re-accelerating growth, which I don't know it had ever happened before. Like, year before, they grew at 6%. Then they went on to grow at a 80% cagga in the last two years where the highest publicly traded company in growth in the public markets. That's actual and SaaS for SaaS companies, with growing revenue over 48% both the eight quarters we were public. It was a lot of fun building it. But a key pivot point for me was when I went and recruited Jesse Green over to Rubric and just phenomenal grew up under both of you, by the way. At Mongo and became a really phenomenal leader there, like Houndus Kraft. It's really interesting. When I was recruiting for this role, it wasn't because we had something massively broken. In fact, to give Austin Stephanie a lot of credit, he was executing an incredible job. It was more about like, him being ready to move on into a CRO role, as well, which he's done a good job at DBT. It was more about like, what did we need to kind of replace myself and build that muscle into the company as we were going public? Jesse was somebody that was used to call on a big number in a public company. I only target it one guy. It's the only person I recruited for it was Jesse Green. The first call was to sell before you buy. It's just to kind of get him excited. He took the call and just he's like, "Hey, I just figured awesome opportunity to connect with you. I thought you were just going to talk shop." I was seeing those a lot of guys went from Mongo to work for you over Rubric's. Yeah, exactly. We ended up hitting it off and he came on board. One of the things that was important for Jesse was to go from growing up in one discipline and you've probably all heard me say this before, like, "I'm not a playbook guy." The reason I say that is because I think first principle thinking is primarily the way you build companies and the thing that's beautiful around what we've built with force management and it's actually first principle thinking. It's just like, "What is the problem that we're trying to solve?" How do we use tools and common language and a framework to address and close those gaps to help us deliver more value for our customers? He wanted to kind of expand that and he really wanted to get exposed, I know, into some of the things that he hadn't had a chance, things like co-planning, productivity model, understanding how to build the plan from the bottom up, interacting with product in a different way where you start reinforcing product and what product needs to be built and how to prioritize product and product release. Really driving the company build. When I pulled him in to run the Americas, I was actually running a lot of functions, post sales, pre sales, customer success, like the finance, I mean the partners and alliances and so I was able to kind of bring Jesse along for the ride where he wasn't just running the Americas. He was integral in building comp plans, tweaking comp plans, interacting with finance, how to shape the business and ratios and how we're going to shape comp as a percentage of revenue and product build and all that and that was really great. So once I felt like, "Man, this is a machinery that can operate and I felt good that I could step away and the business was going to go on and continue to beat and raise without me as I still have plenty of shares over there." It gave me an opportunity to say, "Alright, this is time to go do what I love to do better than anything," which is lay new tracks versus keeping trains on time. Not that I'm not good that operating keep trains on time, but it doesn't feed my lifeblood as much as like going and building and shaping and laying the foundation and framework and putting trains going places that they never were going before. And so that's what led to the transition, we jump into this AI economy epicenter of the AI economy and code generation. So, yeah, everybody what you're doing now. Yeah, so unique opportunity actually and it's funny John that you opened up with the timing thing because we have a lot of mutual friends who can talk with Matt Murphy about this. I remember Matt Murphy reached out to me who was on our board at ATD and then also is on the board at Anthropic and he reached out to me early for the Anthropic Ciro gig. And I remember saying, "Hey, can't do it." And it wasn't like not interested, not a good company. It was precise what you said, John. It was like Rubric wasn't in a position I could leave. We had just gone public. We were two quarters going public when he first reached out and I couldn't do that to the business or it wasn't right. And so the timing was off. I also actually spoke with Brad and the team over at OpenAI at the same time and just seemed to say, I was like, guys, there's not timing is bad. So once I got to a period of time in which there's eight quarters, public markets, it's running on a rhythm. We're beating, we're raising, having an incredible leader that's comfortable in space. It gave me an opportunity to do what I was most interested in doing, which is to kind of explore this AI economy. And then within the AI economy, it's like, what's the epicenter of it? Where is all the attention and money? And it really is this AI code assistance and code generation. And I found in cursor, maybe the most unique situation possible in a company that had so much product demand from a PLG motion, incredible awareness within the engineering community, but relatively unknown. Like I'd never heard of a company that got to a billion in ARR in a year and relatively with almost no go-to-market motion. And everything was bottoms up. And I thought to myself, man, what would happen if we could build a go-to-market machine that married bottoms up and a top-down value selling? And could we go on as the sales execution and go to market machine, become the moat, in the difference? And so it just became something that was too incredible of an opportunity that was a company that had scale from a revenue perspective, but didn't yet have any of the pieces in place from marketing to demand, to field, in fact, every employee that they had was only in two offices. There was no remote event. So it was so early that I felt like this was a unique opportunity to put my fingerprints all over something to go build and shape a business that already had a tremendous demand engine through PLG. So, yeah, you had an opportunity. - Was there any enterprise sales reps when you went in, or is it just all PLG motion at that time? - There is. There was. And the team under Tomer, first like sales leader on the board, they started, last year with an enterprise, what they would call enterprise sales lead revenue, and they have self-led revenue, two different components. And because the self-led revenue was so dramatic, which is the PLG, the enterprise lead motion was not able even to keep up with capacity, and they started the year with four people in GoToMarket. - And enterprise. - In the enterprise, and the whole company had 38 people. - That's why I asked. - Last January. They had four people in GoToMarket. They finished the year that year, they went from $400,000 in sales lead to almost 300 million in sales lead. And they went from less than half a billion in PLG, to 1.8 billion. And they went from 30 some employees to 200 some employees, and went from four GoToMarket people to like 80 GoToMarket people. But that's how the year ended, and I started that February. - And there also be another armwear, it's PLG sourced and enterprise, you know, led or closed. - Yes, so what was really interesting, John is that the enterprise team, which I would say is like has pretty good talent density. Smart, understand the engineer can engage in a feature function conversation on the ground in a bottom's up motion, high slow, high technical IQ, and maybe has really good PG skills, and maybe actually has really good value selling skills, but they weren't able to use them and deploy them, because they were actually drowning in opportunity. Like from being super clear, they literally were drowning in opportunity. I don't mean that, is in that they're not capable. What I mean is that their sales motion was, your customer is spending X on a credit card. Go talk to them and convert them over to a committed spend over a 12 to 36 month period. And so virtually all of that $300 million sales led, all of it was driven from a conversion of a PLG. - But doesn't that also speak to the, if you're drowning in those types of deals, doesn't it also speak to the fact that you have to make sure you're chasing the right deals to optimize? - Totally, but for maximum revenue, even though these revenues are off the job, how do I know what is my benchmark to know that I'm chasing the right deals to maximize it even more? So the cash noise becomes compared to what? - Yeah, we're doing good. - Great, compared to what? - Yeah, and I don't think that was able to happen. And so the challenge, the big challenge, and I spoke at their scope, or our scope, I think it was like day one, February 7th or something, seven days in the year, I said, our first, second and third biggest problem at Curse or biggest challenge is capacity. And capacity solves a lot of things because it lets you do your best work, your career work. If you have 40, 50 opportunities at any given time, you can't actually do your best work. And by the way, your customer and prospect aren't getting what they deserve as the best possible buying experience. And so our problem ended up being, and I would say this, and I told the entire company this, I said, failure will be soon at the pinnacle of success. And our failure will be because we were too successful in PLG and couldn't get out into executing great, like doing the great sales execution go-to-market motion and giving our buyers an incredible experience because we were inundated just from demand and couldn't keep up with it. So much so that I would tell you, we made a plan to go from 100 go-to-market people to 866 this year. And since I've been here, we've gone from 100 to 300 in seven weeks. Let that sink in for a second. Like I hired Europe, APJ, I've resegmented the entire business. And the reason, I will never forget the first day, I was talking with somebody who told me they can't get out of bed for a deal that's under a million bucks. Because if you just do the math, think about this for a second. They 40 sellers were gonna do two 300 million. Forget about the PLG that will exit three billion this quarter in total ARR. But just in the sales led, I think we did two 70 or whatever last year, we'll surpass that in Q1, we'll do three plus 320 plus of new ARR in sales led. And that started with 40 people. So just do the math, that's like $12 million for Q1, a person. So to your point, they didn't have the choice, it was like there was deals that just weren't even getting to it. It was like, hey, I can't get to it. I'd love to get to it. I have no chance to get to that. And so our biggest problem was cutting up territories. You know, average enterprise seller was having 30 existing accounts with customers. And so we weren't looking for, there was no PG motion. Why would you PG? If, like, I remember Dan Foujir told me one time when he went to the data dog, he said, Brian, sometimes it doesn't have to be that hard. You know, when they're jumping into the boat. And if they are jumping into the boat in that manner, the challenge of it is to really win this space, we have to go win where we're not. And we're just winning over the champions that are already champions that love us. And there's a whole world of people that are winning where we're not. And that's what it strikes me as like, it's a game of risk. You know, which countries do I have to have? Totally. To win the long game, you know, versus strategically just winning cities in all the countries. But eventually, my competitors start owning the countries and I'll be run out of the cities. Yeah, it's an interesting thing because, you know, the AI space is like this. So first of all, not the AI space. Let me be very specific about this. AI space, a massive space. It does a lot of things. or were you? is very in particular to the SDLC. It's a software development life cycle. It is about helping companies deliver and ship software or applications, whether that's tech companies or big banks or whatever, build applications faster and deliver them higher quality, faster and with lower with less cost. So improve the productivity of an engineer to be able to do more with less. And that space is not a binary space. So if you think about it, what's required to in this space, you need to, it started off, the space started off with what we would call engineering assistance. Originally it was TAB. So it was like, think about auto complete on your phone, right? Your texting and a word comes up and it's just auto completes. It was that for engineers. It essentially is, hey, you're in there writing code and it knows what you're going to write and it completes the code. So that's, that was the start of code generation. It was like, and the companies that did that best were the ones that had deepest understanding of the code base. And most engineers using it. And because the engineers use it, they had the best ability to anticipate what they were going to write and complete the code. That's why cursor like blasted onto the environment. We had three million engineers using it. We were the best at anticipating code completion, but like it wasn't a comparison. And so we, it exploded and you didn't need sales to do that. It was just get engineers using it itself, sir. And they did that, Brian, at the AI level at the task level, right? That's that sort of there. They're basically the reason why there's very little competition, I think, right now is because it was done at the task level. The AI was built right there. Yeah, totally. So essentially, you know, as people were building and building code in what was referred to as an IDE, which is the, you know, individual development environment. Right? And so their environment is in there. They're in their writing code. And they're going out getting code like searching for code in the code base, bringing that back and then auto completing that. And that was happening in cursor. And would change which pivot it from that. That was, I would say, you know, these life spans in technology in our world used to last five years, six years, get disrupted. Something comes along. Now it gets disrupted in a year or months or weeks. And so this was the most innovative thing in the world. Every engineer in the world wanted it. It was, it was like nutty. And then it went and got disrupted in months. And so then what happens is clawed comes out. And the next frontier is, all right, do you even, you know, you don't need to go ahead and complete the, you know, engineering test because you don't even need to be a linguist anymore. The agent can build the code on its own. So, um, and so that pivot took place. And now you see companies like cursor that are just leapfrogging in that space and what they're doing is they're creating, instead of an IDE, an AD, an agent development environment where agents are building code on its own. And so this then is the current model that we're in. And this becomes like a little bit of a competitive market currently. But the way the market is competitive is this. Those agents are going against the model. And that model is what they're, there is fine tune to be able to generate the code. So it goes in through the model pulls it out. So if you think about models like opus and anthropics model, clawed going against opus to go build the application or generate the code for the application. Cursor came out with its version composer. And this is probably more than everybody's super interesting, but it's just, it's really interesting how quick the place moves. And so compared, you know, in cursor, it has its own agent build and its own model that comes. And what happens is every, which has 3 million users. Yeah, exactly. And so every few weeks models jump each other. Opus 4, 6 was the best model in the world. And then open AI came out with the best model in the world. Then by the way, cursor just came out composer 2.0. And that proved to be the best like objectively measured on performance ability to generate the code, completeness of code and quality of code, amount of code kept. It was inarguing really better. So every time the models keep jumping, then you have Devon from Windsor for, you know, the cognition folks, you have deep seek and, you know, the open source models, you have Google and you have Microsoft models. So all these things are being built. And what cursor did that's very different. Here's where I'm saying this space is like super wild is cursor is agnostic to what model you use. Yes. So if you're clawed and you're a clawed user, you're going to consume an anthropic model when they reduce the model, you're only locked into that model. However, you can use clawed and you can use the anthropic models in the cursor harness. You could use codex in the cursor harness. You can use codec against their model in there. You can use our model. You can use our agent build. You can go directly against Trump. It doesn't matter. You can switch based upon capability and price. Exactly. So what we we provide essentially a very differentiated solution. And this is where we're almost like more like frenemies right now with a lot of the competition. More anthropic is consumed through cursor than anywhere else in the world. In fact, when open AI announced, I think they said like you have five exabytes were already consumed. It's like a week or two weeks ago, their new model 40% of that was consumed through cursor 40% of all their model usage. So what that means is that cursor is giving the engineer the unique ability to be able to pick the right model for the right use case because not everything might need an opus six and there's a cost train a cost tradeoff between speed quality and and the dollars it takes to go build that an agent build. And so cursor is giving people the ability to automate that process to auto select the right model for the right job. And in that way, we see this space slightly different. This is where I was getting to John around the competitive thing. We look at anthropic and an open AI is going to be our best partners in the world. Long time that's why I talk about call and Brad regularly engage with these guys. You know, and I look at them as the hyperscalers. And we're the snowflake data bricks of the world. And that we're building the vertical expertise for SDLC. And they are building models and agents to solve maybe the largest time in the history of time, human work, which is a $50 trillion or 10. They're trying to build models for poets and actors and voiceover and nurses and lawyers and everything else. We're just building agents for SDLC and do that better and faster than anybody in the world. And in doing so, we're going to consume and burn down more anthropic usage than I believe Claude will burn down at you know, in due time. We'll burn down more open AI usage than codex. You sell them to pick some of the picks in the shovels for the gold rush, right? Exactly. So that gives everybody a little bit like a codex. That's really good. Amazing. And we have all these deals. Where does account management fit? Reps are trying to figure out if they're doing the best deals, the $1 million deals. Otherwise, they can't get out of bed, let's say. Yeah. Let me help management fit into this picture at all. Totally. So one of the things we did right after I heard that comment about getting out of bed, I segmented the business. So I segmented the business, it took me seven days on the job. I segmented the business like this. I created an enterprise strategic vertical that no rep had more than four accounts. And I opened up 80 reps to go higher, 80 reps across five verticals just for North America. They couldn't have no more than one existing customer in three prospects. And now that becomes a forcing function to go execute and run like both give our customers and our prospects an incredible experience, a buying experience, to understand their needs and and and and be able to help them through their AI journey properly and give them the right attention and focus. And it also lets a seller exercise what they love to do better than anything. They actually have to go do PG and go build business value cases and understand the business value justification and meet the engineer and the top down together in the middle where you're having value based conversations as well as the bottoms up approach. So we did this and a lot of people you all know we've now ended up hiring. I then to enter price business to go from 50 accounts down to no more than 18 and they could have no more than three existing customers so they couldn't chase. Then I created another segment what we call geo they can have no more than 30 accounts and they can have no more than five existing. Then I created a commercial and they are basically everything under 250 engineers and and it john it's the only time in my entire life that ever segmented business and taking accounts away and changed the company. And change the entire structure and nobody complained. In fact every single person in seats that thank God. Like now I can do my best work you're helping me like nobody is saying their territory got smaller they all said. This is I've been begging for you know a calvary to come so that we could do better work. So Brian I'm struck by you know going back and listen to episode 71 one thing that our listeners loved and it became kind of a mantra out in the marketplace is winning the stage. Oh yeah. And at rubric I remember that was such a big part of your discipline was we are talking about winning not winning deals we're talking about winning the stage. Yeah I'm just I'm just sitting here just getting blown away by this conversation because you come from a focus of winning the stage to now I got to limit the number of accounts these birds go after because so much opportunity could you just sit in the seat of. I know your president now sit in the seat of like a sales leader what are some of the things that you are. You know contemplating now do you anticipate that winning the stage is that is it going to come back is this thing going to level out how do you scale and grow a business that's so vastly different than I mean there's like so much opportunity out there I'm just share what does how you're how you're thinking about that and what kind of seller what kind of seller it's got to have an impact on the kind of sellers you're bringing in right now. Certainly so I'll hit on both things one is here's where I think there's absolute truisms that hold for eternity and the truism is this we don't sell software champions sell software our job is to go develop and build champions. Doesn't matter what is and by the way the activities needed to build champions might be different in different places and different times the job isn't to do as many activities as you need to build a champion to build champions and the way that you build champions is helping individuals that have great influence in organizations saw the critical personal professional problems and challenges they have. That's what our job is it's not to sell somebody features functions or whatever it's the engage with people understand their personal professional gaps and challenges meet them there map them to solutions and build them into champions so that when we're not in the room they're selling for us now. What we have done today is champions have built themselves by leveraging playing and using the technology and said this is changing my life and so they have become champions of the product now what are we missing there we're missing the understanding of all of the other potential champions in an organization that we're not talking to and that aren't already solving their own problem. And this is the potential huge opportunity and this is where when the stage becomes critical around where we're coaching and developing is every one of our accounts everyone has engineers using us and something else as well somebody else has champions in there as well. And who has the most champions who has the most influential champions ends up owning and winning the accounts and what I found is today in a self-serred PLG motion champions are just who we're engaged with they built themselves and what we're missing is our critical role in helping folks that don't know yet or have an experience yet the day. The difference yet the differentiation of gross differentiation our product how we can help them and so this is our job to go participate in that you know we said like a million times participate in your own rescue for sellers this is participating in your own rescue for engineers and if they haven't already done the work themselves which we're missing out where they're stuck in something else where they've got a bad narrative or they live on. It acts or Twitter and they they don't understand what cursor you know can do for them they're missing out we have a moral obligation to go get in front of them and help them understand how we can absolutely transform their life personally professionally by making a more productive and and solve their business challenges this requires pg this requires a proactive outbound approach to engage the engineers and the most in the support engineers and the pre-sales and the marketers and the product managers where they live and the only way this can happen is if you have time energy and opportunity to put a pg plan together to do the research to understand who's who within the account why are you going after them what are their real pain points and how do you uniquely solve them and you can't do that if everybody's calling you to just upgrade and you just have to eat you. Like you don't have time to engage in that conversation and the population of people at love you and the population of struck with this is like the opportunity so big in the land of these engineers and yet with AI we know that the chasm between IT and lines of business is starting to get very very mired like it's not traditional anymore so these lines of businesses they don't know the codes they don't know the they want late they want speed they want accuracy they want so you can't just and this is probably why you're so perfect for the job is it's this winning at the bottoms up approach and then bringing in the value sale to business outcomes because if somebody stays just on the technical business capabilities of this industry you could get you served totally I mean spot on actually this is what this saying in six weeks so I already started I've already started saying is over here but the saying is you're the mo and I've been saying that's because technology right now in this space is easily swappable which not is solving business problem. It's not very easily swappable is engaging in building champions and trusted business relationships that go parallel so yes you can swap best model best time in an out code generation but the person that's in front of them that's building trusted relationships that's they know they're going to anticipate their needs and they're going to build for the incomplete STLC is going to win the accounts. The only way you can do that is to get your s off the sea and to get out into the place you know where you're in front of people and you're engaged with them and so that is the big transformation at cursor as we go from a hundred go to market to eight hundred and sixty six this is not a hey go build you know an army of people they're standing around reporting the news this is to go give our buyers the best possible experience this is to go give them the best possible evaluation experience Cisco build partnerships in the field in the end you know with them to be to build the mo and and you said something super interesting about the bottoms up top down the engineers interesting because in general as I say this I just want to be super clear this is an over generalization not all engineers think like this but the engineer often is disconnected from the whole meaning like their job is to go build and execute their portion of an application it's a checkout check in you know solution and because of that if you live only in selling in that area you can't really be outcomes based because the engineer that you're selling or developing the champion around you might champion them in their ability to generate the code for that piece really well but if you try to sell them on or or articulate the value of hey you actually reduce your RFV backlog by a hundred percent and that that feature increase has allowed you to drive I don't know 80 million more in revenue this quarter they that doesn't resonate with them so you have to have that conversation with who it does which is going to be you know CTOs that own the own application development as a whole or that you know president CFOs board level folks that have mandates to reduce R&D as a percentage of spend and now you're having a conversation that says hey I can have a three point impact on your R&D as a percentage of your revenue to deliver more applications more tech faster and do it at higher quality and improve the line of the of your people as well. That, but you can't just go top down because in the end, nobody's gonna make that check. The business owners or business leaders are never gonna look at Chingle Bryan. You know, I'd be shocked if my people don't buy you, but I'm not gonna tell them to buy you. - Exactly, this is, this is, this space so different. You have to have the top down to do the thinking as the board level conversations around R&D, or happening and formulating, but nobody's ever gonna tell an engineer what he can use to do as much as that. - You need to do both and you need to spot him up, which brings us to your question, which was profile. And I think profile at Kursher, we've been really thoughtful around. We want people with tremendous slope. I've always said clock speeds really important. Do I need everybody that has gone to MIT, Stanford, and Harvard, no, but I need everybody that has a tremendous ability to understand technology quickly, digest it, and articulate it. They can't just speak in value without understanding what the day-to-day life is of their end user and their buyer. So they have to have an engineering mindset and be able to go have those conversations and have a technical acumen for that. So they call it, you know, the term would be like, slope around like intelligence. I actually think of it really as clock speed is most important. And I think I've said this before, innovation is not held back by the speed to which you can build and deliver and ship product. Innovation, the governor on innovation, is how fast your field can digest it and bring it to the market. And so clock speed in a super fast moving business has become the most critical element. And in years past, people tested it for intelligence around, you know, probably your SEs or your engineers. But I'm notically focused on smart sellers. And I think that's super critical. Brian, that slope, one of the inputs has to be, and I know your feelings on this, you have to feed that slope. Oh, yeah. If somebody has slope and they prove that I have slope at rubric, does not necessarily mean I'm gonna have slope at cursor. Totally. So you have to put an input, there's gotta be something that they can consume. Can you talk a little bit about that? Well, just today, I think it hit LinkedIn that we hired JP Bolin. (laughs) Yeah, as you can imagine, JP is like-- Incredible. And I am a person, probably the best go to market, enablement, transformation person I've ever been around in my life. And the thing that makes them so unique is, as you both know, he's a world class sounds leader. And one of the things that makes, you both do so incredible around teaching and coaching development is you were world class sounds leaders, built world class sounds teams and organizations. And JP brings that from his PTC, BMC blade, and Mongo days, this is one of the best sellers that's ever walked the earth. And so when he tells you and teaches you and coaches you, you're not wondering, who is this enablement person teaching me? It's like, oh no, I'm gonna listen to this. So you're exactly right. We have to, from a profile, let me just be like super clear, a profile, what I actually am looking for is somebody that has had the ability to sell at multiple different places, different products to different personas. 'Cause what that tells me gives me visible evidence if they've been successful is that they can digest new information, understand it, and communicate it in a thoughtful way and be successful. And so that's the prerequisite that says, hey, they might never sold into engineering. They may not have PLG experience, but they can think and they can digest and they can learn. And then I put that into place with incredible ability to teach, to coach and put a program together to bring both content, learning and digestion for the field together. And that's the right profile wrap with right infrastructure to keep them fed. So master, but it's a lot of people that, the three of us know enterprise sales really well. And there's nobody probably in the world better suited to do what you're trying to do at Cursor. But there's a lot of people that are financial people that they'll never understand, you know, a tenth or a hundredth of what you know in enterprise sales. And why, what your approach is the right approach. So these people that probably feel like they're in a PLG trap meaning, in a sense, this company took off on PLG, it was fast, we had short sale cycle, low cost model, financial metrics, which is beautiful. Now we bring this guy Brian McCarthy, Ironhall, these expensive sales guys, you know, we're burning money, you know, and only they're only looking at it from my financial standpoint. And, you know, you as great as you are, you still probably have a challenge where you're gonna have to convince some of those people that this is the right model. Right? Oh, the three of us all know it is the right model. Yeah, super spot on. What, one of the things I had to test for, and I'll just, just as I say, like I talked with Michael, brilliant, brilliant guy, but young, right? I mean, I think Michael's 25 years old founder, 25 years. Yeah, your co-founders are in their 20s, right? Yeah, yeah, they're all 25 Jordan, Michael, Swally, I'm on, they're all, you know, 25, 26 years old, brilliant. And they're great company builders, but what I really had to test for was, are they students of the game? And they are some of the best students of, I've ever seen, they've done all their research, they understand what makes great companies. And I asked him this question, I said, like just as a test, why do you need me? I'm very expensive. Right. Lily says, I like literally, I'm very expensive. And I'm gonna change everything you've been doing so far. Exactly. Like everything. Well, yeah, it seems to be working. Why do you need me? And Jordan and Michael's both take was, anything that's easily acquired is easily lost. And so to build an enduring generational company, that has the ability to be a trillion dollar attempt, is gonna require us to marry this PLG with the ability to get very sticking to a large enterprise business. And they walked through it and they did their history. Companies that grew up in PLG, but never made the conversion into enterprise, most of them felt. Yeah, they called it the PLG trap. Yeah, most of them felt. And so they've known it. And so they understood it and they're willing to invest in it. And we also built a plan together that walks us through gross profit. And when we cross over and what's that gonna look like and get really focused on what the guard rails are and so how we get there. So we're not reckless, but they understand that this is the path to building an enduring company. And just on that, we also realize, you know, this is kind of like the thing I'm giddy about, is the tip of the spear is really this code augmentation and code generation. That's the thing that's sexy that everybody's up into the right, you know, it's like, hey, you can go from zero to three billion in, I don't know, it's 10 quarters, right? Like that's just mind blowing. But how, you know, but in doing so, the key understanding is that piece is the tracks all the engineers. But when we expand upon that, so we bought this company called Graphite and integrated what's called code review. Code review is a team sport. Code review has multiple people reviewing and looking at code. That's sticky. So now I built this code review code market. So now I'm generating all the code and now I'm doing code review. What are the next things for us to do? Well, it's to go do the design area, the secure the code area and the implement the code area. And in doing that, we become a very sticky enduring SDLC machinery. And in an AI factory, like you're gonna hear it here first. Think about it. And AI factory, the future state of software development. I said early was like tab, you know, complete. Then it's a build. The end state is agents going and doing, you know, require gathering design work. That agent work gets passed off to another agent. - Agent, agents run an agent. - That then gets generates the code that passes off to agents to do code review that passes off to do secure the code and scans the code that passes off to do implement the code. In this AI factory, the only way this world will work is if agents have interoperability and agents to talk to each other with various different models. You can't trust, you can never trust one agent or one model to check itself across. You need one model to check another model. The only way that future state can happen is if you can bring that together in a singular harness like cursor that a code X operating on an open AI model can pass to a cursor, you know, agent, reviewing on Composer, can pass to a claw that can pass someone else and complete that and bring all of those models together for review and all the agents together in a singular platform. And now engineers turn into agent managers that are going and managing the agents in spot checking them. And that's the future state what this is gonna move to. And I bet you, it moves there faster than anybody believes it's going to. - If you listen to this episode, and you're not excited about letting me go. - Holy smokes. - No, right. And, you're out of your mind. I'm ready to come to work for you, Donald. - Ready to rip the heads off chickens, buddy. Let's go. (laughing) Johnny, you know what this sounds like? This sounds like, and we should just send a note to it whenever you're ready, dude, 'cause like Johnny and I are big, big fans of the all-in podcast. What he's articulating at the reality side of the execution is exactly what they are wondering on that podcast if anybody can do. So, you're amazing. - You're going on the all-in podcast. - You're amazing. - Well, listen, love you guys, man. This has been, I learned a lot from both of you over the years. You're great partners too. We'll certainly be leaning in. You know, to help you get some help as well. - We get an office there, bro. - Yeah, we'll get you in. - Yeah. (laughing) - Lot of fun, lot of work. But the ingredients are there to build something really, really special. - Oh, not. - And to do it, you know, here's my last little thing I would just add to this. To be able to have a chance, you just want to have a chance. A lot of companies, no matter what they do, they don't have a chance to build a trillion dollar company 'cause the time isn't there. The time in this is two trillion bucks. Like we, and growing faster than the GDP. And so we have an opportunity to build something super special. So we've had chance to be one of these trillion dollar companies. And to have that chance, but to do it with like, to build a company with a soul, that is, that cares about human beings, that has a no-asshole policy. We care about each other, we love each other, we're doing the best work of our career. You kind of look to your left, you look to your right, and you're like, man, I'm in the right room. I'm surrounded by a bunch of world-class CR rows and execution machines and smart people that care about me. That's what jazzed me up around like, getting to go lay new train tracks. So that's why I'm fired up. - Tony, I got one before we go. I got one little story to tell. I'm not even sure I've told Brian this. I might have alluded to it, but I got called by the search committee that was searching for the Rubric leader. And you probably remember this, Johnny, because I called you. They called me and asked about this guy named Brian McCarthy. And I said, I definitely heard of Brian McCarthy, but I don't think I know Brian McCarthy face to face. I called you. I called a lot of my great mentors and friends, and everybody had heard of Brian McCarthy, but there wasn't that many people, at least my circle, that had like, you know, app dynamics, for sure, the app dynamics, but for this job that they were asking for. But one thing I heard about you, brother, was authentic leadership, incredible discipline drive. And I remember thinking, my feedback back to the group was, this sounds like where preparation meets opportunity. I feedbacked after I did the back channel. My feedback back to your search committee was, this sounds like where preparation meets opportunity, like this guy is prime. Congratulations, dude. You're, you're just, and by the way, when I did meet you the first time, nothing's changed about you. Yeah, you have more experience, you have more, you have more stories to tell about things that you've done, but the same attitude that you're taking to this new opportunity is exactly who you were when I met you before. - Oh, thank you, guys. - Yeah, no, very blessed, super blessed. We all are, man. Yeah, it, it, it, well, like you think about this, my dad was, you know, unloading, unloading ships on a dock and was a tax cab driver. He, he watched the floors at a macular conception. You know, we're blessed. We could be digging ditches somewhere. We have an opportunity to go build companies. Easily. - Hey, man. Happy Holy Week, brother. - Yeah, you too. - Yeah, you too. - Thank you, John, Cap. Thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of the Revenue Builders by Jeff. (upbeat music) Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe. Ray 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 Rose strategy at the point of sale. Check out ForceManagement.com for more information. (upbeat music)