← Revenue Builders
Revenue Builders
The Discipline Behind Scaling from PLG to Enterprise with Sahir Azam
01:07:21
High-growth companies demand constant reinvention, yet most leaders underestimate how deeply roles, go-to-market models, and buyer behavior evolve over time. This episode explores what it actually takes to adapt at that level, from navigating internal resistance to aligning product and sales with how customers truly buy, with Sahir Azam.
Loading summary
Transcript126 lines
- [00:05]
A
Welcome to the Revenue Builders Podcast, a weekly show featuring B2B sales leaders and executives. Hosted by five time CRO John McMahon and Force Management co founder John Kaplan, the show takes guests in the barrel behind the scenes with the people who've been there, done that and seen the results. Revenue Builders covers best practices for scaling
- [00:26]
B
and growing your business while sharing the pitfalls to avoid. Enjoy today's episode.
- [00:34]
C
Today we're joined by Sahir Azam, partner at Index Ventures. Before entering the world of venture capital in 2025, Sahir was the Chief Product Officer at MongoDB where he was a primary architect behind one of the most successful cloud transformations in tech history. He took mongodb Atlas from day zero project to a multibillion dollar platform. Sahir is a rare hybrid leader. He cut his teeth as an application engineer in the high intensity sales culture at Blade Logic before becoming a world class product visionary. Today he's at the forefront of the AI revolution, investing in the infrastructure that allows software to see, hear and speak.
- [01:25]
A
Dude, can I give a little bit more? I'm just telling you, I've been waiting for this doggone podcast for a while. Sahir is an absolute intellect giant.
- [01:35]
B
Superstar.
- [01:36]
A
Superstar. And I got to tell you, Johnny, what came out of this podcast for me is the greatest articulation that I've heard in where AI is right now and where it's going. And I can't wait for our listeners to hear it.
- [01:50]
C
Yeah, what he does is he simplifies things, right? He puts things in layman terms. He puts them and he breaks them down into different buckets. So it's easy for almost anyone to understand where AI is today and where it's going.
- [02:03]
A
Gideon, let's take a listen.
- [02:04]
C
All right, so Sahir, after being an application engineer, you rose through the ranks on the product side of the business to become the Chief product officer at MongoDB. And as you look back, are there two or three learnings that stick with you today?
- [02:20]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Good to see you again, John. So
- [02:24]
C
always a pleasure to see you, brother.
- [02:27]
B
So a few things as I've been reflecting on this now, sort of six plus months, kind of removed from being an operator. I think first and foremost, I think the couple traits that really stick out that I've seen be successful in my career, but also the best people in MongoDB and just in the best companies I've worked with is first and foremost adaptability. You know, as I, as I think back at almost 10 years at MongoDB, my job changed significantly every year or two. In terms of the skills and where my day and hours of the day were being spent. And so I think really being intentional about leaning into how your role changes is kind of critical for anyone to be successful in a growth company because that's just the nature of the game. I think the other which comes across I think a little bit more often in the ecosystem but I think is super critical is the idea of kind of growing resilience grit, you know that that whole concept is, is super important. It's really easy from the outside to say I want to be at a, you know, a hypergrowth company. It sounds amazing. Obviously there's a lot of upside in that if it goes well. But I think people underestimate how hard it is and how many challenges they are and how many things you know you're going to hit a wall against and you need to just kind of brush it off and be fine kind of moving forward to continue building the business. And I think the combination of adaptability and resilience are really I think the critical components to success for anyone wanting to be in a high tech growth environment. And then I think the last one, you know, that certainly I thought a lot about it over my career was, you know, it's very easy to simplify tech companies into people who build the products and people who sell the products. And I had a mentor very early in my career back at bladelogic when we were together, John there that said like, you know, there's a real power in being in the middle of those and being able to translate and connect the go to market organization and how we sell the products with the technology and the engineers who are building it and really being that sort of center, keeping things holistic and coherent. So I think those three things are the important pieces as I kind of look back a little bit from a distance that, and distill it down that are most important.
- [04:39]
C
Yeah, well you've actually said that in a hyper growth company you have to relearn your job every 18 months. And the way that I look at it is when you're talking about adaptability and resilience, there's many moments in my career too where I had to look in the mirror and go John, like you, you have to adapt, you have to change now. And it's, it's a tough conversation that you have to have with yourself and then you have to go relearn new skills.
- [05:05]
A
So yeah, that's super important on the adaptability piece. You're a rare bird Sahir, where you, where you can move so fluently throughout these organizations. I think that has a lot to do with your intellect and the resilience and the adaptability that you're talking about. Can you give some advice? Because so many people talk about this like you got to be adaptable, but the things that you were doing, you were moving into areas that, you know, it might not have been resourced the way that it needed to be. It might. There might have been an idea at the board or it might have been an idea from the product people. And you not only have to just say, I'm going to be ready to go in that you have to go, like, where. Where people haven't gone before. And can you just give some advice on that, on the resiliency piece? Because very rarely is it all set up. Okay, so here, here's your budget, here's your resources, here's your, you know, go build this and stay in your little test tube and we'll come bug you for a budget, you know, whenever. It just doesn't work that way. So can you talk a little bit deeper about that? Because a lot of people, yeah, a lot of people move into an environment and the company wasn't ready, they weren't committed, and you. And it's the land of the misfit toys.
- [06:24]
B
Yeah, I, you know, I think if I really distill a lot of what's necessary down it comes to the fundamentals of selling in my mind, you know, to your point, when I, when I joined, you know, MongoDB, there was definitely like a belief in the company that they needed to launch this cloud product and, you know, kind of that, that could in many ways be the future of the company. But there was also just a lot of organizational inertia, which, you know, came across as resistance, but I don't think it was actually resistance that was driving it. And so it took a lot of, you know, of me selling internally, why this was important for the company and very strategic, why what the incentives were for the various functional leaders that, you know, were, you know, had a day job, had a working team, and I needed to make it a win for them to invest in something that was unknown and different and, you know, change the very nature of their function sometimes. And so really deeply understanding kind of what. What drove those leaders and helping them see that as a win and also just like being in the trenches and not just being like, okay, you know, this is strategic. Go execute and do your job and report back to me as the GM of it, like, but actually being in all the early Deals and helping drive a lot of the sales enablement or figure out how the, you know, the customer success organization changes in a consumption based model. All of these types of things, you know, to build the trust of the organization, to bring them along, are ultimately distilled down to selling characteristics in my mind in terms of understanding people's incentives and making sure they get a win out of it. And I think that really came in my case, you know, because I happened to join bladelogic in the early part of my career and you know, obviously the incredible sales culture there and what I got to learn from, you know, a lot of the formative leaders there, I think that has helped in many, many ways across the rest of my career. But that's kind of the, the thing that I think helps bring an organization around even if it seems on paper like a good idea. It's a lot of that just change management and people stuff at the end of the day that matters.
- [08:30]
C
So you talk about, you know, product market fit and also go to market fit. So do you think that based upon your experience that a lot of product leaders should, would be better off starting in the field?
- [08:42]
B
Yeah, obviously I'm biased in that because I started in the field, you know, in, in pre sales, a bit of sales and you know, fair amount of product marketing work as well. So I view that being, you know, a huge advantage to how I approach the job. When I moved into product in the second half of my career for sure. That's not to say that every chief product officer or product leader has to start in the field, but if you're not, then I think you have to over rotate in really spending the time with sales, with pre sales engineering, with customer success, with, you know, professional services and be out there to try to inject that sort of empathy and understanding of how complex those jobs and how hard those jobs really are.
- [09:21]
C
And then you started the PLG motion, you know, at MongoDB and you were definitely active in the enterprise sales motion. So you see a lot of founders today that, you know, they get a lot of love on the PLG side and they start on the PLG side, then they have a really difficult time, or sometimes almost an impossible time branching over to the enterprise side. So why do some of those people fail? Why can't they make that bridge?
- [09:48]
B
There's a lot behind that. I think if I at the foundation, I think it's really important for any person building a technology and trying to find product market fit to deeply understand the customer behavior in terms of who makes the buying decision and who makes the, who's the actual user and how those two cohorts kind of interact. And you know, I say that because I think there was a time in which like PLG was all the rage on every podcast and everything. And I'd get calls and be like, oh, how did you move Mongo from enterprise sales to plg? And I'm like, I never looked at it as an either or. It was like there were some segments of the market and direct to developer adoption that wasn't going to happen because a very savvy seller outbound, you know, cold called into them. And therefore we needed a very frictionless self service way to, to meet startups and developers that are getting hands on. And on the other side there were large enterprises who are regulated that are never going to buy anything on a credit card. And you needed a very sophisticated seller to understand how to even break in and get that first land, let alone the large expansion and enterprise relationships over time. And so what I cared about was how do I get this product as big as possible into as many customers in as many segments globally and then work backwards from that to a go to market architecture that combined aspects of plg, you know, high velocity sales, customer success and then of course strategic enterprise selling for the large accounts. And we tried to do that in a way that was cohesive and the handoffs of customers across those channels was also as smooth as possible. And that's a constant work in progress. It's never done. And the reason I think that's important is I think a lot of times it's just too simple to say, okay, I would love to have a PLG motion, but my product doesn't even ever work that way. It's always going to be a top down decision or conversely, a product starts with PLG in the bottom of the market and then the board's like, hey, you got to go up market, drive high on the ksp' and like that's a retooling of the whole product and the whole company in a lot of ways. And so you gotta, gotta be recognize what, what that takes to make it happen.
- [11:56]
C
That's where I think they get caught. They caught in the trap. They start in only plg. They build a financial model and a company around the PLG motion with no emphasis at all on the enterprise. Then the board tells them you gotta get bigger deals, you gotta go up market and the company's just not made or built and the financial model is not made or built to do that.
- [12:17]
B
And the Culture. I mean there's a cultural shift that needs to happen and you know, the founder, CEO in particular has to be open minded enough to say that listen, I need to view sales and distribution with the same intensity and differentiation as I view the product and the technology. And that's really something I learned from, you know, Dave from Blade Logic all the way through, through Mongo was like it's equal parts differentiating on both sides of that. And I think that gets lost a little bit especially with technical founders.
- [12:46]
A
I think the other thing is if it's not, if you don't hear the mindset and the context around outside in versus inside out. If all of your reasons for making a move are like growth revenue and especially in the old days when they started tried to go to, you know, from enterprise. Now we got entered, we're going to do a lower cost of sale, we're going to go into plg. Those were all inside out thinking it had. Nobody was thinking about a customer, nobody was thinking about how that customer buys. Hardly anybody was thinking about what's that going to do to our existing go to market infrastructure. So there's two big things I've always thought that you've done really, really well is this. Well the biggest one is this outside in mentality. The first thing you always seem to ask is okay, what's the impact on my customer? And in your case, your customer wasn't just the end customer. Oftentimes your customer were the other constituents inside the company. I think that has a ton to do with your success. Huge.
- [13:46]
B
Appreciate that.
- [13:47]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [13:48]
B
I mean we were lucky to have just a great team across the board. I know you've had Cedric Pasha on the program before. Like he and I had an amazing partnership over the years, you know, trying to construct the right balance of PLG versus sales or how we expanded the new products and all of that. And ultimately it does take the hard work of all those functions trying to be working in tandem even if it's not always perfect.
- [14:13]
A
Well done.
- [14:13]
C
So see here, I know you know from experience that as the chief product officer you were extremely involved in the sales side of the business, making countless sales calls all over the world. A lot of miles. Yeah, a lot of miles. And as you think back, can you think about some of the salespeople you saw and the best attributes of the best salespeople?
- [14:39]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a few things that I call out.1 and I think it's critically important, especially in today's buying environment is intellectual curiosity, technical buyers have an increasing or decreasing tolerance for sellers who don't know the product and the technology and how it gets used in the reality of the organization. And I think if you're not intellectually curious enough to really understand the product and the technology, I don't think you're going to have credibility. And I've seen that actually change over my career where the bar gets higher and higher around that. And it doesn't mean that you need to be deeply technical, but you need to be able to spend the time to learn and be able to connect with that audience. And I think the other aspect is even if you're selling high in an organization, the average CIO today is much more technical than they were, you know, 15 years ago. And so the idea of it just being like a, you know, business relationship sale, I think, is very rare today. Sure, that's additive, but I think it starts with really understanding the business problem and the technology in a way that really can connect with the buyer. And so that, that intellectual curiosity, I think is the through line for all the best sellers, no matter what personality and background and profile they've had. I think the second thing I've seen, especially for complex enterprise sales is the sellers that orchestrate the resources in the organization on their behalf are really powerful. It's not like they're always the face of it. You know, they're. They're obviously leveraging the pre sales engineer, but they're also bringing in executives at the right moment. They're bringing in, you know, references that have, you know, from the ecosystem in the right way at the right time in the sales cycle. And they're almost like playing a backseat role sometimes of playing orchestrator versus being just the loudest voice in the room.
- [16:28]
C
Yeah, very good point.
- [16:29]
B
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think the other piece that I kind of connects both those things is, you know, learning being in John, this is one I learned from you is like being a great listener. You know, the best sellers ask the best questions and just extract information and get, you know, that arm, that organization that they're going to bring to bear with all the right points that they need to bring up by first deeply understanding what's happening in the business, what's driving the champion, you know, what. What's top of mind for them. So I think those are some of the things that really stick out. And I've been lucky that, you know, I've had the privilege of working with a lot of great, you know, sellers across various companies through my career. And those are kind of the things that if I try to simplify it, it comes down to, yeah, really good.
- [17:14]
A
How about the sales leader? If you go up one level, what you just said, Sahir is so powerful because you've got all these, I call them the hundred pound brains. And you are definitely in that category. 100 pound brains inside the company that's the best. The companies that do it the best. I think the companies that do it the best are the ones that harness the knowledge of how a customer buys and therefore documents how we're going to engage, what it's going to take to engage what, you know, what stages we're going to do, what exit criteria and then, and then a clear understanding of how we're going to engage the Saheers of the world. It's got to be qualified customers. Got to be qualified, we've got to be qualified. So it's like that next level of the, you can go hire that talent that has that intellectual curiosity. They can, they can, they can gather the resources. But if you don't have at a company level, meaning the sales leader mind that says I'm going to build an engagement model around the, really the interaction and orchestrate the interaction of that you're not gonna be a great company cause you're gonna, the best sellers, they're gonna hoard all the resources which you would expect them to do. We're gonna wear out the Saheers of the world. We're gonna have people working on unqualified deals and that's how companies just, they can't scale. And I know if you work with Johnny, you were in good orchestration. You were in good orchestration.
- [18:42]
B
Yeah, gap. I'm totally with you because there's almost like layers of this. The question I was answering earlier was more about the characteristics of the
- [18:51]
A
selling
- [18:52]
B
but I think in terms of, at the leadership level it's, you know, it's a few things. I think it's the operational rigor kind of aspects that I think you're bringing up in terms of a playbook and resource management and, and really, you know, territory manager, all the things that kind of go into that. But I also, also think it's culture. You know, I've also seen not so great sales organizations where there just isn't a culture of accountability, you know, where there isn't that, you know, it's marketing didn't give me leads or oh, I don't know how to run my forecast because it's a consumption based business. Like at the end of like, you know, that's Just to me, a cultural challenge that I've seen with, you know, some of the sales organizations that are not as high performing as the ones that, you know, John have. I. John and I have had the privilege of, you know, kind of working on together. And I think the other piece that kind of fits into that from a leadership level is just a deep investment in enablement. I mean, you can have somebody who's intellectually curious and, you know, incredible, but if you don't define their ideal customer profile, you don't teach them about the technology, you don't take the best learning from the best sellers and then, you know, make it programmatic such that you can ramp the next generation of sellers in the organization, then, you know, you can never do it in a repeatable way at scale. And so I think that really has to start from the top. And it's not an easy decision because for many sales leaders, the easy answer is give me just more quota capacity that'll solve itself in terms of, you know, driving the revenue. But the reality is the better dollars might be spent elsewhere on these leverage, you know, functions that are harder to maybe attribute the impact of, but actually can unlock the scalability of the organization.
- [20:26]
A
Well said. That's going to be a clip that's going to be replayed over and over and over again. That was well said.
- [20:31]
C
Yeah, well done. So here we're going to get to, you know, your role now as a venture capitalist. But before you became a vc, you did do a bunch of advising and, and even investing in companies. And you, when you look back at that time, you know, you were still an operator also. But what are some of the aspects of the startup companies that made it versus the ones that didn't? Can you talk about why some of them made it and why some of them didn't make it?
- [21:02]
B
The. In terms of the actual founders or entrepreneurs that, especially in the companies that I, you know, was an angel investor early advisor in. I think the thing that really sticks out is how many, what the spread is between the entrepreneurs that really leverage the resources they have outside the company and those who don't. You know, if I think about the winners, they're the CEOs or the executive teams that, you know, treat me like I work for the company. You know, they're calling me every week on something and, you know, bouncing ideas and all of that. And then I think of the, the other end of the spectrum where it's like, all right, you've got this amazing set of angel investors and hopefully I'm One of them around the table that can add a lot of value. But like crickets after that initial investment, which you know, it just tells you a lot about like the mindset of the team in terms of how insular they are or just not even recognizing like how to, you know, bring a lot of help around the table to get the best outcome for the company. And you know, when I first started advising her angel investing, you know, I just assumed that it would be like obvious, but there's a real disparity there. And I'm sure you've seen this John as well in terms of leveraging.
- [22:08]
C
But I don't understand why, I don't understand why they don't use those resources.
- [22:13]
B
Yeah, it's really fascinating to me. And then, and I think the other piece is just, it kind of comes back to what I mentioned earlier around this idea of either coherence between the go to market and distribution model and the product or overweighting the culture of the organization where only one side of that has too much resource, too much focus. And it's either like a sales led company or it's a engineering led company. The reality is the best companies are the ones that have a healthy balance of that in the organization. Sometimes there's tension in between that and it's products job to kind of mitigate and mediate that in a lot of ways. But I think you really, you know, it's easy for the culture of an organization to swing in one direction or another. And maybe early on that's fine to be very engineering focused and, and all of that. But the most successful companies treat both with equal intensity. And if you have one side of that kind of being weak, it's really hard to build a big.
- [23:12]
A
I got one that I'd like to throw on the table that, that I've seen. It's a telltale marker of whether I'm going to have a good time or a bad time in advising a company. But it's this, this technical founder that sales is almost a bad word or it's a. Yeah. And I want to, I want to even be kinder. I want to say there's no intellectual curiosity about go to market. There's like it's going to solve itself. Why can't these people just understand the value of the product? They're talking about the customers.
- [23:41]
B
Yeah.
- [23:42]
A
And then they're talking about why are we paying those people so much to be able to go and sell when, when a technical founder is struggling with that and they're. And they're not open, they, they rarely make it.
- [23:56]
B
Yeah, that's like, I completely agree. That's like a huge red flag to me in terms of just if that's the mindset and you know, it's, it's totally fine to not have the skill set and never seen it before. That, that's very common. But you know, that can be solved by intellectual curiosity, you know, bringing some great people around the table, hiring well, all of those types of things. But if the mindset is just like, oh, those are second class citizens in the organization and you know, the end, you know, the technical folks are the only, you know, people that really are creating value for the enterprise. I just think that's completely false in terms of how to build or they're
- [24:30]
A
thrilled to give out a million dollar bonus check or they give out a million dollar bonus check in their handshake and they look like they want to throw up. I mean that's seriously. And I think that's why you guys have done so well in the marketplace, is because you've understood the connection between the two. The product market fit, somebody said it in the beginning, Johnny or Sahir, one of you said it. The product market fit means nothing without a go to market fit.
- [24:55]
B
Yeah. And listen, the reality is in situations you're pushing in one direction or the other. You know, some of the sales leaders that I'm sure will watch this to be like, I don't know what's talking about. We were always, you know, at each other because there were many times I had to push back on sales, you know, for various things that they were asking for where I didn't think, you know, they were delivering based on the commitments, you know, they were responsible for. If I were putting something on the roadmap. So it's not always black and white that, you know, the field is always right. But I think in the aggregate in the industry because just the very nature of technical companies often being started by technical founders, it tends to rotate more in the direction that you're talking about Cap.
- [25:32]
A
Well said, well said.
- [25:34]
C
Along those same lines though, just to, you know, add more to that. I've seen it where the founders believe that everyone's going to buy their baby.
- [25:42]
A
Yes.
- [25:43]
C
You know, and in the first couple sales, they actually make the first couple sales. So they think they could sell it and they can sell it to anybody. So why do I need these salespeople? And because they think that everyone's going to buy their baby, they put resources in the wrong places. So they're putting resources on you know, giant financial services companies, selling to the government, selling to big insurance companies, things that are going to take forever for almost any salesforce to sell into. They don't take the time to really think hard about the ICP and where I'm going to gain the most amount of productivity from my company and generate the most value for the customer. So big mistakes, they waste resources, they waste time and then sometimes it's just too late. Even though it's a great product, it's just too late.
- [26:37]
B
It's easy to say I want to go after JPMorgan Chase or some large enterprise because you know, the big dollars are there. The complexity of doing that I think is drastically underestimated by a lot of founders who have never actually seen those environments. Both from the complexity of selling, you know, in terms of how hard it is to orchestrate a decision with real dollars in those organizations, but also just the product requirements. You know, like there's a lot of roadmap that is really specific to highly regulated financial services, insurance, etc. That's expensive to build and you know, sequencing that in the right way at the right time is, you know, is super critical. I mean I believe a lot of companies do need to get up market to ultimately be big large businesses. But I think being intentional about it, both from an investment standpoint in the field but also in the engineering roadmap is I think sometimes lacking.
- [27:30]
C
How about Fed Ramp? That took a while.
- [27:32]
B
Oh my goodness, that's what we need. Regulatory reform. I think that's the way to fix that.
- [27:39]
A
One last point on that did not to just bash technical founders because I want to explain, I want to explain what I've seen there because they're brilliant. And when Sahir, when I find the real difficult ones are when they do come from the JP Morgan Chase, like they come from those environments where they started develop a technology that, and they had some ideas. They couldn't, they couldn't get it spread throughout either the big company and then they go up and they start a smaller company. I'm not talking about the people that started in their garage or what have you, but a lot of them started in these bigger environments. And the, the only, I think the language that works with them is they're just unconsciously competent because they go out and sell in those environments and they say well this is how we did it at JPMorgan Chase or this is how we did it in the Israeli Air Force or whatever. They have huge competency because they've done things in those environments and the only missing link is they're just unconsciously competent on how to get that information out of their heads. It's there, but get it into the hearts and minds of the sellers and what I call a three foot conversation and that's called sales consumable. And it's not really that difficult. But if you, you just have to be open. If you're, if you're a technical founder you're struggling with go to market. A lot of times it's not that you don't have the answers, they're in your head. What you haven't done is translated them into go to market language that will allow people to, to be successful in a three foot conversation without your brain, without your vast knowledge and experience. That's going to come over time, but it's not going to be there on day one. And they really struggle with it.
- [29:19]
B
And I think the, from an engineering perspective, you know, I think it's very easy for, for an organization to slip into it. I've seen this like into the idea that engineers don't talk to customers, you know, because we've got product as the first, you know, layer around that and then obviously the field is going to feed input into the product. But you know, I think it, I found the best engineers want to be directly involved with the customers as well. And there's kind of a, in this engineering, the CTOs, the VPs of engineering that kind of create that culture, you know, I think are really, really powerful. Because the reality is no matter how great your product organization is, there's nothing like getting an engineer to speak to a practitioner who's using their product directly and you know, from time to time it can't be, you know, taking all the hours in the day. It's not their fundamental job. But getting the right exposure of that can really create an incredible empathy and connection across the functions internally in the organization, but also leads to a better product. When engineers have a real feel for how their technology is being used and it's not, you know, telephone translated between three abstracted organizations, you know, before it gets to them.
- [30:29]
A
And then they change their communication style, those same engineers and same product people change their communication style to the sellers that says, hey, let me explain to you why this is such a big problem for a customer. Yeah, like they help the seller stand in the moment of pain of the user. And when you do that, it's gold if you just say, hey, this feature is like 10 times better than XYZ competitor. The best companies, I believe are the ones that Change their language to put it into. It's just. You said it earlier. In the beginning of the podcast, you said you were constant. You looked at everything as a sales interaction. And it's the, what problem are you solving? How do you solve it? How do you solve it differently or better? And what's the value of it? I always used to ask the engineers, so what? They tell me something like, hey, this is a new feature. And I would just say, so what? What I meant to say was, what does it have to do with a problem that a customer has? And then how do we do that differently or better than anybody else? And the engineers, the technical people that learn that language, they kill it. They kill it because it shows up in front of a customer.
- [31:38]
B
You reminded me of a. So my first week as a sales engineer back at bladelogic, I was doing a mock demo to my manager, and I remember, I was like, check out this feature. It's really neat. And he's like, stop right there. Nobody gives a crap if it's neat. You got to explain why. What does it actually solve? And what's the pain that it's going after? And, you know, I remember that moment of never say neat.
- [32:04]
A
Well, you know, the problem with that sometimes, Sahir, the problem with that is when you're talking to, like, engineers are talking to engineers, and you say, it's really neat, that other engineer can look at that and go, that. You're right. That's incredibly neat. Because I learned that at PTC is when the engineers were talking to engineers, they're like, oh, my God, like, that's amazing. And what I always struggled with was, why is that amazing? Like, because I didn't know. I didn't know how long it took them. I didn't know. And just adding in that. Okay, adding in that next level of what impact is that going to have on the business is. Is amazing.
- [32:40]
C
All right, so here you know, venture capitalist at Index Ventures, Eddie Warbucks. Let's talk a little bit about your transition from, you know, chief product officer over being a vc. And you talked earlier about relearning, you know, new jobs every 18 months. Were there certain things that you need to learn or unlearn as a vc?
- [33:07]
B
Yeah, I think, you know, it's sort of the shift sort of happened organically. As you mentioned, John, I was getting more involved with, you know, sort of angel investing and, you know, advising companies. I sat on a couple boards, and at the time, I was spending quite a bit of my day job at MongoDB in the foundry ecosystem, trying to learn about AI and its implication. Excuse me, implications for MongoDB, as well as building up our little ventures fund. So all these kind of things were happening just in my day to day. That kind of got me to the point where I was, like, interested in making a career change in, you know, in my 40s, which has its anxiety in itself in terms of, you know, being in many ways, in an incredible role at MongoDB, a company that's, like, continuing to crush it and to make that change. So.
- [33:51]
C
Still look like he's in his 40s.
- [33:54]
B
I think the lighting is hiding the grays that have eliminated.
- [33:59]
C
When he first came into the office at Blade Logic, I remember coming out of my office when he was walking in with. Who is your manager again?
- [34:06]
B
Damon Miller.
- [34:07]
C
Damon Miller. So he's walking in with Damon Miller, and I was like, oh, this looks interesting. Somebody's bringing their. Their kid to work. Bring your kid to work day. So I had to go over and say, hey, who are you? Yeah, I'm Saheera Zan. Well, what do you do? Well, he said, it's my first day at work. I'm going to be an application engineer.
- [34:27]
B
Yeah, that was the same day as the neat comment.
- [34:30]
C
Yeah. And then, like, two weeks later, he was so. He was super impressive. Super impressive.
- [34:36]
B
Thanks, John.
- [34:37]
C
Still looking good, brother.
- [34:39]
B
Trying, but. But, yes, that was kind of how the transition happened. You know, I was, I think, on the other side of it, I was like, there's a handful of great funds where I think it's worth doing the job. And if. If it's not one of them, I think it's a very tough job. And, you know, index, luckily, is a, you know, top tier. We've had an incredible run over the last 30 years and, you know, super excited to be part of the team here. I think there's just kind of two things, you know, that over the last, you know, six, seven months that have been interesting to me. One, you know, it comes back to how much of the job is the sales job. You know, you're serving entrepreneurs with, you know, key help along the way of the hardest job there is, you know, many ways building a company. And so whether that's advice at the right moment or introducing some critical leadership hires or customer intros to the first lighthouse customer in a particular area, that's a service and sales job at the end of the day. And, you know, capital in many ways is a commodity. And so selling the value of yourself and the firm you're representing is the job. And you know, in a market right now, that's super, you know, high velocity. You know, I just flew across the pond, you know, last night because of a very active deal. It's like, you know, it is a sales job in many ways. So I think knowing that from the outside, you know, was true, but it was obvious. But then, like, feeling that day to day has been definitely one aspect of the transition. And I think the other is time management is very different than it is as an operator. You know, an operator, like, yes, as an executive, you've got to prioritize and choose where to spend your time. But there's a natural operating rhythm to the company. You know, there's an operating rhythm with your team, there's an operating rhythm with the, you know, the quarter in terms of financial results and executive meetings and team meetings and one on one. So your calendar is easily swamped just by keeping the business running on, you know, and doing all the hygiene you need to kind of keep that going. Here, I feel like, is there's many different ways of doing the job, even within our own partnership, you know, partners work in different ways and, you know, figuring out the right operating rhythm of not just filling up my calendar with meetings just because I can take calls with interesting companies, you know, it might be better served that I spent two hours reading about something, you know, in the middle of the day, which feels like totally, you know, weird as, you know, spending 15 to 20 years with my calendar back to back in terms of, you know, meetings. So I think definitely that aspect of, you know, the cyclicality, the urgency that can come up suddenly if, you know, an employee, really important opportunity comes up and then really reflecting on, am I spending my time in the right way to have the best prepared mind to find the right entrepreneur and right opportunity, Those are the things that are just quite different than, you know, being in a, in an operating and leadership context.
- [37:28]
C
Well, on the first point, you have to sell yourself too. Right? I mean, they're like you said, the money spends the same way from any venture capitalist firm. Right. So you have to sell yourself on what you can do for that company. And there's many VCs out there that talk about, here's all the things I can do for you. Then they get on your board and they just come and eat your donuts and drink your coffee and ask questions that you wonder if they even know what investment they made. So it's really helpful to find a VC that can actually help you as an entrepreneur.
- [37:59]
B
Yeah. And I think on that point, even amongst the top tier of venture funds. There are differences in terms of the incentive model, the engagement model. And I think sometimes entrepreneurs are just indexing on a particular brand or a particular, you know, sort of check size or valuation or whatever it might be. But I think the smartest entrepreneurs are actually looking to understand, okay, is this the right partner at the right firm for where I am in building my business? You know, just as a anecdote, I was, you know, talking to an entrepreneur recently and they're like, oh, well, you know, your competition is offering 100 intros to, you know, CIOs. I'm like, you don't have a single salesperson. So what happens when you get those hundred intros? They're not all going to suddenly turn into revenue. Like, who's going to prosecute those opportunities, understand which ones are qualified, move them through a sales process, let alone deliver on that. Like you're not at that stage yet. They may be incredible later on in the journey, but right now you need help building the team and the infrastructure around you to even be able to get to that point. Just as an anecdote and so, you know, really being thoughtful around the differences there. Also just the incentive structure. You know, some funds are very much, you know, it's the partner that sponsored the deal. They're all in maybe, you know, with you, but the rest of the partnership or the rest of the fund doesn't even really care because it's not their portfolio company. Right. You know, index in that way is quite different. We're an equal partnership. So everyone's incentivized to jump in and help and make, you know, companies successful. But I think really figuring out which fund around which stage, you know, the partner you're working with and the incentive structure behind the fund that you choose is something that has a lot of nuance behind it that especially first time entrepreneurs may not fully realize.
- [39:41]
C
Let's talk a little bit about AI you made.
- [39:44]
B
Yeah, let's go.
- [39:47]
C
I want to talk about one of your investments because you wrote about the shift from clicks and screens to AI agents that see, hear and speak.
- [39:56]
B
Yes.
- [39:57]
C
You made an investment in Live Kit. So talk a little bit about that and what maybe the ui, because it's not going to be clicks and screens. It's going to be see here and speak. Yeah. What does a UI look like next year or the year after? What do the UIs look like?
- [40:14]
B
Yeah.
- [40:14]
A
Hey, before you do that, Johnny, can you. So here, can you go back one level back, because I need to nerd out here. A little bit in. Well, you're going to nerd out for me.
- [40:26]
C
You're going to nerd out again.
- [40:27]
B
I don't know.
- [40:28]
C
That's not going to work.
- [40:29]
A
No, no, come on, I need to
- [40:31]
B
hear to do it.
- [40:33]
A
No, I need to hear to do it for me.
- [40:35]
C
Look at this big of a nerd to go up against Cap. That's the point. I could nerd him out.
- [40:42]
A
Are you done? Are you done? Okay, I want to talk about before you go into the user interface, when you talk about inference versus inference is the new runtime. Like this was making a lot of sense to me for a lot of different reasons on both the buying side of AI, the using side of AI. Could you explain what you mean there? And then we can go into like user interface? Because I think this is a big part of what you're actually bringing to knowledge to the market right now.
- [41:11]
B
Yeah, this, you know, I think on the inference comment that you're referencing is in relation to a company called Fireworks AI that's in our portfolio and it's a company I actually started working with at MongoDB because we participated in the series B investment. And they build a software layer that powers some of the most widely used AI products in the world today. And inference is really about serving models in real time, in production, at high quality, high performance and also doing it in a costly way. And one of the things that's a challenge with AI right now is many companies cogs are just really consumed by the underlying model costs and therefore the economics and unit economics of the business overall are quite weak. And what Fireworks has been able to do is introduce technology to bring open source models to bear at much lower cost, good performance, but then allow the customer to fine tune that based on reinforcement learning techniques to be very high quality and high performance for their specific use case. And that's why they're taking off. They're one of the AI high flyers with just an incredible revenue ramp into the hundreds of millions of in a short amount of time.
- [42:23]
A
But talk about what the impact, because this one, this one is messing me up a little bit because I'm like, wow, I wasn't even thinking about this because in the AI world, not like the MongoDB world. And you describe it, I've heard you describe it as, you know, I don't, I think it's like deterministic or. So I go in, I ask for an answer, I ask for question and the database gives me back the answer. Now we have a, not an exact answer, we have approximations of answers. And we have, we have iterations of that. Can you just explain to the layman people what that really means to users, what it means to cost, what it means to actually selling this to people that think that they're going to get 100% answer back and they might not get the 100% answer back. How do you minimize hallucinations? This for me is like very, very interesting.
- [43:17]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And I think this kind of bridges sort of both fireworks that I just mentioned in terms of being this core new primitive that AI applications need beyond just standard compute storage and networking, but how to serve these models effectively. And I think what John was talking about with the very nature of applications changing with companies like Live Kit powering those new experiences. So if you think about more traditional software, they're kind of very predictable and deterministic in nature. Code has a very reliable set of outputs, which means that it's very good for a certain set of tasks in knowledge work that we're all used to. And so this is accounting, this is customer management, these are all the kind of applications that we're typically involved with. But generative AI by its very nature can now start to reason and solve problems that are much more open ended than something you could just code in a very deterministic way with software, which, which is why everyone's so excited because now software and technology can go after a whole range of problems that previously could only be solved by labor. And you hear a lot of this idea of, you know, AI is going after the services and labor budget, not necessarily the traditional IT and software budget. It's because it's automating problems that were never been able to be automated by technology before and now the difference there though is you talked about deterministic versus probabilistic is you're not necessarily going to get the same results every time out of an AI model, even if you ask the same question and you got to deal with, you know, potential hallucinations or not understanding your own internal data or policies while consuming the answer. And there's a whole ecosystem of technologies that are being built to help improve the quality reliability of these models such that they can be brought to mission critical use cases, especially in regulated industries. So that's continuing to progress. But I think the exciting part for me is like, you know, if you that classic Marc Andreessen quote of software eating the world or whatnot, you know, the last 15 years we've all seen software, you know, all across our personal and business lives. I think we're Barely seeing where the world is going in terms of it now becoming even more pervasive in how we do work, how we live, and how we actually, you know, interact with technology in general. And so I think we're at the very early innings of that now, you know, talking about sort of the nature of that software changing. The way we interact with software is also changing. It's no longer just applications on a home screen of your phone or, you know, web pages on your, on your computer. You're seeing natural language as an example, become a modality that we all use now with AI, you know, if you think about, you know, you pull open your favorite model, you pull open ChatGPT, or you pull open XAI or Grok or whatnot. They all have sort of ways of interacting for consumers in natural voice, right? And we can talk back to you, have a conversation. But that's also making itself into the enterprise. You know, think about how much money is spent in call centers around the world where you have to have somebody picking up the phone, often outsourced overseas just to collect some basic information. More and more of those interactions are going to be driven by voice agents across a variety of different areas. Let's say it's a bank auto dialing somebody to make sure that it's, you know, not a fraudulent transaction. That's something that can be easily automated by an agent right now. And so you're seeing kind of voice become a pervasive way of interacting, but you're also starting to see, you know, video. And if you really look out there, voice and video and human interaction. Think about where the world's going with robotics. You know, we're all talking about humanoid robots or household robots or manufacturing and robotics really taking off in the next decade or so. When that happens, how do these machines interact with the physical world? They do so through cameras and they do through, do so through microphones. And so that has implications for the complete underlying infrastructure stack. If you're talking to an agent, it needs to feel very natural. You're going to hang up the phone if you're very obviously talking to a machine and not a human. So it has to be able to converse with you in a way that feels like you're speaking to a real human. That's a very hard challenge both at the model layer, the infrastructure layer, to make sure that's high performance and low latency. You know, same thing goes with a robot. If a robot's interacting with the real world, it needs to be able to have computer vision, understand those environments course correct and make safe decisions so it doesn't hurt people around you. That's a whole different level of infrastructure models, technology that's required for that to be applied. And I think we're going to get into a world that's even more kind of ambient and proactive, where maybe you're not even asking your Apple, your phone or your computer to do anything, but there's a variety of things around you in the real world that are helping you along the way, you know, and I think you see glimpses of things like that with meadows glasses or whatnot, where they're mixing kind of the real world with the digital world and just being much more integrated as opposed to I'm interacting with a computer. And so all of this I think we're starting to see glimpses of in the industry. But what it means to me is just like the idea of software being this static thing that we interact with in a flat 2D environment to being something that's much more integrated into our lives is where things are going. And so from an investment perspective, that that's been where I'm spending a lot of my time. You know, I talked about fireworks in terms of serving these models for more and more of these critical applications. Live Kit, which is the voice and video infrastructure to deliver those at high performance, low latency. So the quality and experience is really great. Other companies in our portfolio, Clickhouse, who's serving the data layer behind many of these applications. There's kind of a theme here around AI infrastructure that's very different than the traditional cloud platforms and software stack that we're used to for this, you know, traditional deterministic software you reference, you just
- [49:21]
A
stay there for just a second and go to that level of AI infrastructure. We've got a lot of people that are getting recruited by AI firms and the allure of AI firms, you're now talking about different layers, you're talking about AI infrastructure. Could you just give the layman view of like, where are all the opportunities to join in the AI market if you're a seller and maybe just some of the where you think the hot ones are going to be?
- [49:48]
B
It's incredible right now because I think the expansiveness of just innovation because of AI and what people are willing to invest in is just so broad. Like, you know, if you rewound three, four years ago, before this big AI boom, you know, it was like trying to find the small micro, you know, SAS company for a vertical that hasn't been touched. And it was kind of narrow There wasn't like a lot of, you know, innovation happening, but now it's really touching every layer. And I don't. And I think the way I tend to break it down is certainly there are application layer companies that are applying AI to go after, you know, various problems. I talked about customer support agents via voice. But you know, there's automated SDR companies, there's companies that are focused on, you know, every domain and function of the company, trying to think about how AI can, you know, improve the way the productivity of the knowledge workers in those spaces and let alone the consumer side. But that, so there are definitely application to your companies, many of which are fighting it out right now. I think the big question mark, always with application companies that, you know, the ecosystem is always debating who knows what the right answer is, what are the models just going to eat versus what's really going to be differentiated and you know, and deep enough to, to be sticky and durable over time. Then there's sort of where I've spent a fair amount of my time thus far and where my portfolio companies are really in that kind of powering those applications, which is the infrastructure lay there. I tend to like that as a, as a product thinker, just because it's a way to index a big wave of the market. You know, you don't have to pick necessarily which winner in which application segment is going to be the next driver of consumption. As long as you're doing a great job capturing a broad swath of companies, you can kind of let all flowers bloom and kind of grow with that.
- [51:36]
A
And you're the plumbers, you're the selling
- [51:39]
C
picks and shovels to the.
- [51:41]
B
That's right, exactly, exactly. I saw that among godb and you know, there's a whole wave of that happening at various forums in the AI space. But also like for the first time in a long time, the underlying hardware infrastructure is changing too. You know, you're seeing a lot of innovation and specialization in semis, you know, which, you know, for a long time venture investors hadn't touched. You know, there was kind of a dark period there. But now there's a lot of innovation happening there. You know, new new forms of memory, new forms of networking technologies, all the way down to energy as well. People are investing in, you know, hardware for, you know, data center power and nucle generation because there's just, you know, the core bottleneck for everything right now is energy, which then feeds GPUs and chipsets that then drive these models, which drives intelligence, that drives all these applications. And so you're seeing kind of every layer of that have investments in innovation for the first time and I think a long time in terms of the dynamism of new companies being formed and so, you know, where values accrues. I think there's going to be winners in every one of those layers. You know, the hard job is figuring out which are the ones that are going to long term. That's always, you know, a top of mind for people like me. But I think as a, you know, as a, as a seller, it's really interesting time because there is so much opportunity that's driven by AI, even if it isn't an AI direct company. You know, one of the flashy names that we hear about all the time. And so, you know, that was amazing.
- [53:12]
A
That was amazing. You nerded out well, dude, that was amazing. Thank you.
- [53:18]
C
Now you're seeing tons of AI pitches and so a lot of the, on the app side, a lot of the stuff that I'm seeing is just seems like an LLM wrapper around a little bit of an application and a bunch of data and then people think that that's really AI. But I'm not seeing a lot of apps that are built with tons of domain experience and truly AI native apps yet.
- [53:41]
B
Yeah, I think it's early and I, and I think even beyond, you know, the, the new vendors or startups, I think it's even earlier in large enterprise where I think they're still scratching the surface to figure out how to differentiate their business in a unique way. Yeah, they're buying some of these apps to your point, John, but they're not necessarily there yet in terms of applying it in a broad based way to their business. For custom applications that really define their business, I think both sides are quite early. Clearly the startups and the ecosystem there move faster so we're seeing more shots on goal in terms of trying new things there.
- [54:17]
C
Anyways, from a former goalie.
- [54:19]
B
Yeah, long time ago, but I missed those days.
- [54:24]
C
Now what about you in, in your current job as a, as an investor? I heard that you're like a fan of Perplexity and maybe even like Gemini Deep Research. Are there certain tools that have found their way into your daily life?
- [54:39]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I, I, you know, I know they're maybe not as buzzy as they once were, but I continue to use Perplexity because I think they have the fastest, snappiest, best search experience in a lot of ways and they've got some new cool stuff like the computer product that I'm playing around with but it's early on my work side of things. I'm like, I'm totally clawed pilled. Since we invested in Anthropic I've really gone deep into trying to really work with Claude in terms of not only research but automating a lot of the workflow that I have day and day as an investor. And you know, there's a lot of buzz in the last few months about how, you know, even Claude code is now being used by people who are not writing code day to day, you know, like myself. And so you know, I feel like that product is definitely keeps getting better and you know, I think it's very early but I try to be very broad. You know, I use Claude all in on my business and professional work. I use ChatGPT daily for my personal life and it knows everything about me and you know, it is now even surfacing up proactive recommendations. I use perplexity for search. So I tend to, you know, try to get as broad of a view because I do think things are changing. You know they're always one upping each other and all of that. And we even started, you know, there's a lot of internal usage of AI at index and you know, we do a lot of hackathons and showing each other kind of what the latest things are. So I do, I am a believer in this technology overall though I think it's early to your point.
- [56:04]
C
Absolutely.
- [56:05]
B
But it's incredible. I, yeah, I see my own token usage going up almost like week over week in terms of how I use it now.
- [56:12]
A
Johnny, I gotta ask.
- [56:14]
C
Go for it.
- [56:16]
A
And I don't want to take it offline. I don't want to take it in the wrong direction if you want to go somewhere else. But I would like to hear, to comment on this, the death of the seat of a SaaS software. Is that real?
- [56:30]
B
Yeah, you know, I think, you know, this is a hot and active debate and you know, I was thinking about this, you know like probably about a year ago there was that big public spat between Marc Benioff from Salesforce and Satya from Microsoft about systems of record being dead or not or whatnot. And I do think that there are some structural headwinds for SAS companies, especially ones that are seat based because if, if the number of knowledge work employees, if you believe it's going to shrink, some people think it'll just grow because we'll be all more productive. I don't know where I stand on that argument but I think that if you believe that organizations are going to be leaner then by definition there's going to be less seats to sell. But I think about it even in terms of my prior life at MongoDB and just to use illustrative numbers because I don't really know what the real numbers are but, but let's say there are you know, 6,000 person company, maybe half the company has Salesforce licenses, you know, and many of those are in the field, they're using it day and day. I ran a product organization, I don't know, Maybe there were 100 licenses of Salesforce or you know, in the product organization. I could probably write on a napkin the questions. A product manager goes into Salesforce for a couple of times a week. Who's the rep or CS lead on an account? What's the product mix, what's the current ARR? You know, those are the things that, that are probably being looked up. Do I really need a full on license for Salesforce for that or can I just put an LLM on top of the data warehouse export and answer that question a lot easier without necessarily needing that license.
- [58:06]
C
Or the flip side could be that everyone has Salesforce and you're only charged on consumption.
- [58:11]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so now there then it goes to. Okay, does that mean that the category of all SaaS companies that are CPACE is dead? No, I don't believe that at all. I think way more about the individual situation of the company, the strength of the leadership, how much they're willing to overcome innovators dilemma and actually, you know, change their product and pricing, integrate AI into it or whether they're just going to be stuck, you know, with the inertia of their prior lives. And that is company specific. It's about how bold the leadership is, how much risk they're willing to take, how they're able to manage their investors through that change. And so I tend to avoid these broad based all SaaS is dead kind of doom and gloom because I think a lot of it comes down to execution at the end of the day. And as we know some companies are going to well execute through these transitions and some companies are really going to struggle and not be able to overcome those headwinds for a variety of reasons that aren't necessarily just structural.
- [59:08]
A
That's a great point. The last point I want to add to it is what the impact is happening on the seller right now if you are, and I think these are two critical things based upon what you just said. If you are not an understanding what is going to happen with the ecosystem of data, the system of record or what have you for your solution. You could have the greatest solution for that organization, for that problem that you're solving. You are now going to get introduced, I believe, to people that are trying to understand what's going to happen to the other licenses inside the company. So your deals, I'm seeing it right now, deals are getting elongated, everybody's on board, it's got a great return. And somebody says, do we need all those Salesforce licenses? Or somebody says something else. If you're not doing that proactively, and I'm not saying you personally can say, oh, I can tell you how many Salesforce licenses you're not going to use. But if you aren't multi threading in those conversations, you're going to get stalled. I'm watching it happen right now on forecast.
- [60:10]
B
Yeah, and you know, Salesforce is pretty critical to the organization not going away anytime soon. But think about the, you know, 50 tools around that that have, you know, just are solving a very unique point thing because it's a deterministic piece of software for a particular kind of narrow problem. But now you can apply AI to the problem and really orchestrate and automate away a lot of the need, the fragmentation that's been there. I mean there's not a single CIO of a large enterprise I know that isn't thinking about tools consolidation in some way, shape or form and thinking about how I can remove a lot of the cost structure. They're not only on the tool side, let alone the manual effort. So yeah, I think that there are real headwinds, but I think that does not mean the incumbents are necessarily going to be the losers because I think there are a lot of strong operators there that see it coming. And it's not like 15 years ago where the legacy companies were asleep at the wheel. Today every strong CEO is paying attention to what's happening in the ecosystem. They're paranoid by definition and are willing to make bets to disrupt themselves in a way that just was not the status quo.
- [61:18]
A
Who's to say those big system of record companies aren't sitting back and waiting and going to go gobble up with all the cash.
- [61:26]
B
I'm not going to bet against Benioff. He can buy his way into new markets. He's got thousands of engineers building the right agent interface for Salesforce. I'm not saying it's definitely the winner, but it's not so simple as to just say because. Because it's SaaS or CP based things go away.
- [61:41]
A
Well done.
- [61:42]
C
So since. One more question. See here. Since we have a bunch of sales people on this podcast, are there any new AI sales products you've seen or out there that you believe are going to disrupt enterprise sales process, you know, as it stands today, or anything you see on the horizon?
- [61:59]
B
It's harder for me to pick a particular name though. You know, I've been personally using granola quite a bit, which I think is magical in terms of its ability to keep me focused on a conversation and summarize in a succinct way and not just give me a raw transcript. I find that very personally useful in terms of just my own workflow. And I know that's very applicable and I'm sure there are many sellers who have heard of it or starting to look at tools like that. But I think at a, at a more macro level, there's no question the job of sales is going to change in a meaningful way and be assisted by technology like I think about like research. Right. You're looking at trying to understand your company, you know, distill what's in their S1s, what are the key initiatives for the executives. Build the value pyramid up in terms of how to align your technology to that. That used to take hours and hours and hours of painstaking work and now it's, you know, you can go have an amazing, probably better version than I could ever create. At least, you know, out of an LLM them automatically if you just give it the right resources and then you merge it with now call transcripts. Which gives you real context of truly what the sentiment of a conversation is. It removes a lot of the subjectivity that's just, you know, natural in terms of, you know, thinking about where you are in an organization being, you know, applying judgment across sellers and teams in a way that's way more neutral than any, any human could handle. So you talk, Johnny, you know, you like to talk about being that, you know, the, the mirror of reality. Like I think in many ways I can be a mirror of reality of where you are in a sales cycle. Is that person really selling, you know, sending buying signals or they actually underneath the language they're using, you know, skeptic AI is incredible at kind of peeling that out and from a, from a conversation or a transcript in, in a very kind of neutral way that can somehow be, sometimes be hard to see, you know, if you're emotionally connected to the environment. And then as a leader, you know, you know, typically, if you know how many first line managers spend all their time either with their lowest performer and you know, don't spend enough time with their best performer or spend, you know, all the time with the best performer and the lowest performers of the mid. Performers don't get time. Well now AI is a coach in real time in terms of what you should be saying, you know, to handle an objection, giving you, you know, feedback in a way that's way more democratized and then, and that allows the leader to get a better view of who's progressing as well and probably get more leverage in terms of spending time with their team, let alone, you know, automated forecasting and you know, territory analysis and all these other things that these tools can do. So like I'm just giving color around every segment of the job. I see how AI is used and applicable to all aspects of that. Now what's harder to pick is like, is it going to be five AI tools for all those different areas? Is it going to be one platform platform that does this for both ICs and leaders? You know, I think that's, that's really where I think the battle between these technologies and tools is going to come into play.
- [64:58]
A
And tech sprawl is going to be protected big time for sellers. Yeah, big time. You can't throw, you can't throw 15 new applications, 15 new, you know, logins onto a seller's workflow. It's just not going to work definitely.
- [65:15]
B
And it comes down to intellectual curiosity. I think the best sellers and leaders are going to be the ones that lean into these tools and differentiate themselves and how they work. And I already seen that, you know, in with people I work with. But, and I think people, there is a reality like I get tons of, you know, inbound pipeline generation emails and have for years and you know, if I'm honest, like AI writes a better PG email targeted to me than the average SDR all day long. You know, and so like, you know, there are going to be certain functions that need to be evolved and changed to, you know, versus the way it's always been done. And I think the people who recognize that as leaders or as I sees and lean into that and leverage these tools as an advantage are the ones that are going to best benefit from it.
- [65:57]
A
I'm getting ready to rip the heads off chickens. McMahon. Let's go, let's go. Well done. Well done. Sahir. Sahir. Unbelievable. I, I knew I had to take my prepage in before we, before we got on this, before we got on this podcast. I had to be alert and ready to go and you didn't disappoint. Thank you so much for coming back on and congratulations on all your success and you're amazing dude. Thank you.
- [66:27]
C
Thanks here superstar from the day I met you till today and and into the future superstar. Love you man. Thanks a lot for joining us.
- [66:36]
B
Learn a lot from you always John. Every day. So appreciate it. I haven't seen you guys on this probably in a few years so thanks for having me back and this was super fun as always.
- [66:44]
C
Yeah, good buddy. Thanks, thanks, thanks. John Kaplan thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of the Revenue Builders podcast.
- [66:55]
A
Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe,
- [67:00]
B
rate and review the show to help us reach more people.
- [67:03]
A
This show is brought to you by Force Management where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at
- [67:10]
B
the point of sale. Check out forcemanagement.com for more information.