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

Summary

Revenue Builders Podcast Summary

Episode: Why Sales Execution Wins in an AI-First World
Guest: Brian McCarthy, President of Global Revenue and Field Operations at Cursor
Hosts: John Kaplan and John McMahon
Date: April 24, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this dynamic episode, hosts John Kaplan and John McMahon welcome Brian McCarthy, a renowned sales leader who orchestrated Rubrik’s pivot to cybersecurity and now leads the revenue organization at Cursor—a rapidly-scaling, AI-native coding platform. The discussion centers on why world-class sales execution remains the ultimate competitive advantage, even in an AI-First, product-led growth (PLG) landscape where technology is easily swappable.
McCarthy shares hard-won insights on avoiding the "PLG trap," building execution machines, managing explosive demand, and constructing a “moat” out of relationships and customer value, revealing what it takes to blend viral PLG with enterprise value selling at monumental scale.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Reflections on Leadership & Transition (03:16–09:16)

• Key Takeaway: True leadership means building a machine that doesn't require you.

• McCarthy recaps Rubrik’s transformation from a “forgotten backup company” to a $1.5B ARR cybersecurity powerhouse.

• Quote:

  “A job well done is the job is done and it doesn’t require you anymore.”
  — Brian McCarthy (02:47)

• For McCarthy, stepping away meant ensuring Rubrik could outperform absent his presence. He recruited and developed successors, notably Jesse Green, to ensure durable institutional capability.

• Not a “playbook guy,” McCarthy emphasizes first principles and frameworks over static processes.

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2. Entering the Heart of the AI Economy (09:16–15:22)

• Cursor Opportunity:
  After exiting Rubrik, McCarthy sought the true epicenter of the generative AI economy and was drawn to Cursor’s unprecedented bottom-up growth. In just a year, Cursor soared from $400K to $3B in ARR—almost entirely PLG-driven.
• Building a Moat:
  McCarthy’s mission is creating a dual flywheel: combining PLG’s viral adoption with rigorous, value-based enterprise selling, turning the sales force into a competitive moat.
• Quote:

  “What would happen if we could build a go-to-market machine that married bottoms up and top-down value selling?”
  — Brian McCarthy (11:33)

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3. The PLG Trap & Need for Sales Execution (15:22–24:38)

• Drowning in Opportunity:
  Upon joining, sales teams were overwhelmed by inbound PLG demand, converting self-serve users (on credit card) to committed enterprise agreements with minimal active selling.
• Key Challenge Identified:
  Capacity bottlenecks limited strategic selling, account expansion, and true customer value discovery.
• Scaling Plans:
  • Segmented and rapidly scaled the sales org (from 100 to 300 in seven weeks).
  • Restructured account territories to allow deeper work on fewer, higher-impact opportunities.
• Quote:

  “Failure will be sewn at the pinnacle of success, and our failure will be because we were too successful in PLG and couldn’t get out and into executing great sales execution.”
  — Brian McCarthy (16:44)

• Reps overwhelmed by opportunity couldn't chase, build, or expand critical deals—many accounts received minimal attention.

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4. The Nature of Competition in AI Coding Assistants (19:45–28:14)

• AI Tech is Temporary; Execution is Enduring:
  The generative coding space moves at hyper-speed. Cursor differentiated itself through user count, agent development environments, and multi-model agnosticism.
• Quote:

  “Technology right now in this space is easily swappable. What’s not is solving business problems. What’s not very easily swappable is engaging and building champions and trusted business relationships.”
  — Brian McCarthy (00:00 & reaffirmed at 36:56)

• Cursor is positioning as the “Snowflake or Databricks” of the SDLC AI space—vertically focused, model and agent agnostic, and integrated with hyperscalers (OpenAI, Anthropic).
• PLG Is Not Enough:
  While bottom-up adoption drives usage, lasting value and enterprise stickiness hinge on business relationships and top-down alignment.

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5. Strategic Account Segmentation & Building the Moat (28:38–36:03)

• Account Segmentation:
  Cut territories, introducing constraints (e.g., no more than 4 accounts for a strategic rep), empowering sellers to do “career-best work” for customers.

• Positive Org Impact:
  Rather than complaining about smaller territories, salespeople welcomed the chance for focus and quality execution:

  “Every single person in seats said, ‘Thank God, now I can do my best work.’”
  — Brian McCarthy (30:30)

• Winning the Stage:
  McCarthy re-emphasizes the hallmark from his Rubrik days:

  “We don’t sell software, champions sell software. Our job is to go develop and build champions.”
  — Brian McCarthy (32:07)

• Selling is about creating influential advocates within accounts—not pushing features, but solving personal and professional business challenges.

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6. Building for Outcomes: Bottoms Up + Top Down (36:03–40:16)

• The Seller’s New Role:
  True competitive advantage is “being the moat”—becoming indispensable and trusted, not just selling what is easily replaced.
• Sellers at Cursor must balance engineering credibility (bottoms up) with the ability to connect value to senior business outcomes (top down).
• Quote:

  “You have to have the top down to do the thinking…but nobody’s ever going to tell an engineer what they can use to do their work. So you need to do both.”
  — Brian McCarthy (40:16)

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7. Seller Profile & Culture for an AI-First World (40:16–44:33)

• What Makes a Great Seller Today:
  • Technical and business acumen (“slope”/clock speed)
  • Adaptability: Excels across personas, products, and verticals
  • Prioritizes learning and continuous enablement
• Quote:

  “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.”
  — Brian McCarthy (41:21)

• Cursor invests heavily in enablement, recently hiring “the best go-to-market enablement transformation person,” JP Boland, to sustain rep learning and execution at scale.

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8. The PLG Trap: Winning Beyond Viral Growth (44:33–50:39)

• The PLG Trap:
  Companies that never transition from PLG to enterprise selling struggle to endure.

• Cursor’s Founders Buy In:
  McCarthy tested for “student of the game” mentality:

  “Anything that’s easily acquired is easily lost…To build an enduring generational company…we have to marry PLG with enterprise.”
  — Brian McCarthy (46:34)

• Future Vision:
  The AI SDLC becomes a factory of interoperable agents, with human “agent managers” orchestrating requirement gathering, code gen, review, and security—all within a harmonized platform.

• Cursor is positioning to “run the entire factory”—becoming sticky and indispensable far beyond the initial code-gen land grab.

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9. Leadership, Legacy, and Building with Soul (50:39–54:09)

• Leadership Style:
  McCarthy is motivated by building companies with heart and “no asshole policy”—organizations that care deeply for people and create rooms full of “world-class CROs and execution machines.”
• TAM and Opportunity:
  With a massive, rapidly expanding AI TAM (“$2 trillion and growing”), Cursor has a legitimate shot at trillion-dollar scale by putting people and execution first.
• Quote:

  “To have that chance, but to do it with a soul, that’s what jazzed me up…Surrounded by a bunch of world class CROs and execution machines and smart people that care about me.”
  — Brian McCarthy (51:36)

• Hosts reflect on McCarthy’s reputation for “preparation meets opportunity,” authenticity, and discipline—a formula that underpins all his success.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "You're the moat."
  — Brian McCarthy, (36:56, repeated theme)

• “Failure will be sewn at the pinnacle of success, and our failure will be because we were too successful in PLG and couldn’t get out and into executing great sales execution.”
  — Brian McCarthy (16:44)

• "We don’t sell software, champions sell software. Our job is to go develop and build champions."
  — Brian McCarthy (32:07)

• “Anything that’s easily acquired is easily lost.”
  — Cursor co-founder, recounted by Brian McCarthy (46:34)

• "To build an enduring generational company... we have to marry this PLG with the ability to get very sticky and be a large enterprise business."
  — Brian McCarthy (46:34)

• “Technology right now in this space is easily swappable. What’s not is solving business problems.”
  — Brian McCarthy (00:00 / 36:56)

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Essential Timestamps

• 03:16–09:16: Rubrik transformation and McCarthy’s philosophy on leadership succession
• 09:16–15:22: Cursor’s explosive PLG growth and the opportunity for go-to-market excellence
• 15:22–24:38: The PLG trap and organizational bottlenecks
• 28:38–36:03: Segmentation for sales execution and product-market fit
• 36:56: “You’re the moat”—salespeople as the enduring competitive advantage
• 40:16–44:33: Seller profile, enablement, and culture
• 44:33–50:39: Why marrying PLG and enterprise is essential; Cursor’s future state and AI factory vision
• 51:36: Building with soul and company culture

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Conclusion

Brian McCarthy’s journey from Rubrik to Cursor underscores the timeless importance of sales execution—even in the era of AI and viral product-led growth. His stories spotlight how people, process, and principled leadership combine to create enduring business moats, proving that trusted relationships and champion-building remain irreplaceable, regardless of how fast technology shifts.
With tactical details on scaling, segmentation, hiring, and enablement, this episode is a masterclass for anyone navigating the crosscurrents of PLG and enterprise sales in a world that won’t stop innovating.

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Transcript

[Brian McCarthy]

Technology right now in this space is easily swappable. What's not is solving business problems. What's not very easily swappable is engaging and building champions and trusted business relationships that go parallel.

[John McMahon]

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 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.

[John Kaplan]

Revenue Builders.

[Podcast Host]

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.

[John Kaplan]

If you want to know how value

[Podcast Host]

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 moat. Let's get after it.

[John Kaplan]

So, Brian, it's amazing to reflect back on episode 71 with Revenue Builders that we had with you, and you were talking about the leader. A job well done is the job is done and it doesn't require you anymore. And I know that it's kind of a perfect segue into your moving from one opportunity to another. Would you just kind of reflect on that for us a little bit?

[Brian McCarthy]

Yeah. I mean, first of all, Rubrik's an incredible company. You know, life changing for me and McCarthy family and life changing for a lot of folks that were part of that run. And, you know, a lot of my best friends in the world are over there. And you, you both know John and Cap like what it's like when you go build something special and have tremendous economic outcome for a lot of people. You know, it's deep. It goes deep. And so, yeah, we went from 100 million, 118 million in 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, that's old. They missed their window to, you know, recreating the space, pivoting to cyber, building an execution machine and re accelerating growth, which I don't know had ever happened before. The year before, they grew at 6% and then they went on to grow at a 80% CAGR in the last two years were the highest publicly traded company in growth in the public market. So that's actual in SaaS. For SaaS, companies with growing revenue over 48% both the eight quarters we were public. So 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 Rubrik and.

[Co-host or Guest]

Great guy.

[Brian McCarthy]

Yeah, just phenomenal. Grew up under both of you, by the way, you know, at. At Mongo and became a really phenomenal leader there. Like, honed his craft. And I was. It's really interesting. When I was recruiting for. 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. Right. And it was more about like him being ready to kind of 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. And Jesse was somebody that was used to calling a big number in a public company. And I only targeted one guy. It's the only person I recruited for it was Jesse Green. And the first call was to sell before you buy. It's just to kind of get them excited. And 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. And I see those.

[Co-host or Guest]

A lot of guys went from Mongo to work for you over at Rubrix.

[Brian McCarthy]

Yeah, exactly. And so we ended up, you know, hitting it off and he came on board. And one of the things that was important for Jesse was to go from growing up in one discipline and kind of, you've probably all heard me say this before, like, I'm not a playbook guy. And the reason I say that is because I think first principle thinking is primarily the way you build companies. And the, the thing that's beautiful around what we've built with force management and is it's actually first principle thinking. It's just like, what is the problem that we're trying to solve and how do we use, you know, tools and common language and a framework to address and close those gaps to help us deliver more value for our customers? And he wanted to kind of, you know, 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 comp planning, productivity model, understanding how to build the plan from the bottom up, interacting with product in a different way, where you start reinforc sourcing product and what product needs to be built and, and how to prioritize product and product release, really driving, you know, the company build. And so when I pulled him in to run the Americas, I was actually running a very broad, a lot of functions post sales, pre sales, customer success like the, you know, 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, how to shape the business and you know, our ratios and you know, 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, 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. I gave me an opportunity to say, all right, this is time to go do what I love to do better than anything, which is lay new train track, lay new tracks versus keeping trains on time. Not that, not that I'm not good at that operating keep trains on time, but it's not, it doesn't feed my lifeblood as much as like going and, and building and shaping and laying the foundation and framework of putting trains going places that they never were going before. And so that's what led to the transition, me jumping into this AI economy epicenter of the AI economy and code generation.

[Co-host or Guest]

So everybody what you're doing now.

[Brian McCarthy]

Yeah, so unique opportunity actually. And it's funny John, that you opened up with the timing thing because and you know we have a lot of mutual friends. You can talk with Matt Murphy about this. I remember Matt Murphy reached out to me who was on our board at ABD and then also, you know, is on the board at Anthropic and he reached out to me early for the Anthropic CRO gig. And I remember saying hey, can't do it not. And it wasn't like not interested, not a good company. It was, it was precisely what you said, John. It was like Rubrik wasn't in a position I could leave. We had just gone public, we were 2/4 post going public when he first reached out. And I couldn't do that to the business or you know, 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 same decision. I was like guys, there's timing is bad. So once I got to a period of time in which there's like 8/4 public markets, it's running on a rhythm, we're beating, we're raising, have 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, you know, 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. A go to market machine that married bottoms up and a top down value selling and could we go on as the Sal's execution and go to market machine become the moat, you know and 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 gen to field. In fact every employee that they had was only in two offices. There was no remote even 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 gen engine in through plg.

[Co-host or Guest]

So was there any enterprise sales reps when you went in or is it just all PLG motion at that time?

[Brian McCarthy]

There is, there, there was. And, and the team under Tomer first like sales leader on the board, you know they started last year with an enterprise, what they would call enterprise sales LED 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 LED motion was not able even to keep up with capacity and they have. So you know, they started the year with four people in go to market, ended the enterprise in the enterprise, ended the whole company had 38 people. Yeah, that's why I asked last January, right. They had four people in in go to market. They finished the year, that year they went from $400,000 in sales led to almost 300 million in Sal's led and they went from you know, 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 4 go to market people to like 80, 80 go to market people. But that, that's how the year ended and I started that February and there

[Co-host or Guest]

also be another armwares, PLG sourced and enterprise, you know, LED or closed.

[Brian McCarthy]

Yeah, so. 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 bottoms up motion, high slope, high technical IQ and maybe has really good PG skills and maybe actually has really good value selling skills. But, but they weren't able to use them and deploy them because they were actually drowning in opportunity. If I'm being super clear, they literally were drowning in opportunity. I don't mean that as 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.

[Co-host or Guest]

So 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 chart. So I know what is my benchmark to know that I'm chasing the right deals to maximize it even more. Like so the question always becomes compared to what? Yeah, we're doing good, great compared to what?

[Brian McCarthy]

Yeah, and I don't think that was able to happen. And so the challenge, the big challenge, you know, and I said this. I spoke at their SCO or our scoff. I think it was like day one, February 7th or something. Seven days into the year I said our first, second and third biggest problem at cursor and 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 sewn at the pinnacle of success and our failure will be because we were too successful in PLG and couldn't get out and into executing great 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 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've hired Europe apj. I resegment 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. 40 sellers were going to do 2,300 million. Forget about the PLG that will exit 3 billion this quarter in total. ARR. But just in the sales led, I think we did 270 or whatever last year. We'll surpass that in Q1. We'll do 320 plus of new arrival 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, you know, there was deals that just weren't even getting to. 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 Fougere told me one time when he went to Datadog, he said, brian, sometimes it doesn't have to be that hard, you know, 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.

[Co-host or Guest]

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 now 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.

[Brian McCarthy]

Yeah, it's an interesting thing because, you know, the AI space is like this. So first one, not the AI space. Let me be very specific about this AI space. A massive space that does a lot of things. Our world 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 you know, big banks or whatever, build applications faster and, 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 a. It started off, this space started off with what we would call engineering assistance. Originally it was tab. So it was like think about autocomplete on your phone, right? You're texting and a word comes up and it 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 was the start of co generation. 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 used it, they had the best ability to anticipate what they were going to write and complete the code. That's why cursor blasted onto the environment. We had 3 million engineers using it, we were the best at anticipating code completion. Like it wasn't a comparison. And so we. It exploded. And you didn't need cells to do that. It was just get engineers using it. It's self serve.

[John Kaplan]

And they did that, Brian, at the AI level, at the task level. Right, that's that. So they're, 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.

[Brian McCarthy]

Yeah, totally. So essentially, as people were building and building code in what was referred to as an ide, which is the individual development environment, their environment is in there. They're in there writing code and they're going out getting 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 pivoted from that. That was, I would say, you know, these lifespans 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 like n. And then it went and got disrupted in months. And so then what happens is Claude 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, 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 there is fine tuned 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, Claude 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 in Cursor it has its own agent build and its own model that comes and what happens is Every

[John Kaplan]

which has 3 million users.

[Brian McCarthy]

Yeah, exactly. And so every few weeks, models jump each other. Opus 4.6 was the best model in the world, and then OpenAI 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 objectively measured on performance, ability to generate the code, completeness of code and quality of code, amount of code kept, it was inarguably better. So every time the models keep jumping and then you have Devin from Windsurf or the Cognition folks, you have Deepseek and the open source models 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 CLAUDE and you're a CLAUDE 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 CLAUDE and you can use the anthropic models in the, in the cursor harness, you could use codecs. 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 term, it doesn't matter.

[Co-host or Guest]

Or switch based upon capability and pricing.

[Brian McCarthy]

Exactly. So we provide essentially a very differentiated IT 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 OpenAI announced, I think they said like, you know, five exabytes were already consumers, like a week ago or two weeks ago of 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 6. And there's a cost trade off between speed, quality and the dollars it takes to go build that and agent build. 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 OpenAI is going to be our best partners in the world for a long time. That's why I talk with Paul and Brad regularly. I'm engaged with these guys, you know, and I look at them as the hyperscalers. And we're the snowflake data bricks of the world in that we're building the vertical expertise for sdlc and they are building models and agents to solve maybe the largest TAM in the history of time human work, which is a $50 trillion TAM. 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. You know, in due time, we'll. We'll burn down more OpenAI usage than Codex.

[Co-host or Guest]

Selling the picks and the shovels for the gold rush, right?

[Brian McCarthy]

Exactly. So that gives everybody a little bit like a.

[Co-host or Guest]

That's really good. Amazing talking about that though. And you have all these deals. Where does account management fit? Reps are, you know, trying to figure out if they're doing the best deals, the $1 million deals. Otherwise they can't get out of BE, let's say. Yeah. Where did top management fit into this picture at all?

[Brian McCarthy]

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 was. And I opened up 80 wrecks to go hire 80 reps across five verticals for just for North America. They can have no more than one existing customer and 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 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. Right? Like 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, you know, value based conversations as well as, you know, the bottoms up approach. So we did this and a lot of people you all know, we've now ended up hiring. I then segmented the enterprise 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, and John, it's the only time in my entire life that I've ever segmented business and taken accounts away and changed the entire structure. And nobody complained. In fact, every single person in seats said, thank God, like, now I can do my best work. You're helping me. Like, nobody explained that 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.

[John Kaplan]

So, Brian, I'm struck by, you know, going back and listening to episode 71. One thing that our, our listeners loved and it became kind of a mantra out in the marketplace is winning the stage.

[Co-host or Guest]

Oh, yeah.

[John Kaplan]

And at rubrik, 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.

[Brian McCarthy]

Yeah.

[John Kaplan]

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 gotta limit the number of accounts these birds go after because there's so much opportunity. Could you just sit in the seat of. I know you're president now. Sit in the seat of like a sales leader. What are some of the things that you are compl. 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 with us 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. Totally.

[Brian McCarthy]

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 it is. And by the way, the activities needed to build champions might be different in different places in different times. The job isn't to do as many activities as you need to build a champion. It's to build champions. And the Way that you build champions is helping individuals that have great influence in organizations solve the critical personal and professional problems and challenges they have. That's what our job is. It's not to sell somebody features, functions or whatever. It's to 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 to date 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 on their own. 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, you know, the accounts. And what I found is today in a self serve 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 haven't experienced yet the differentiation or gross differentiation in our product and how we can help them. And so this is our job to go participate in that. You know, you've 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, or they're stuck in something else, or they've got a bad narrative, or they live on X or Twitter and they, they don't understand what cursor, you know, can do for them. They're missing out. And we have a moral obligation to go get in front of them and help them understand how we can absolutely transform their life personally and professionally by making them more productive and solve their business challenges. This requires pg, this requires a proactive outbound approach to engage the engineers and the most in and 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, an 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 like, you don't have time to, to engage in that conversation. And just with the people that love

[John Kaplan]

you and the population I'm 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 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 usurped.

[Brian McCarthy]

Totally. I mean, spot on. I actually this is, I have this saying in six weeks. So I already have started, I've already started sayings over here, but the saying is you're the moat. And I've been saying, because technology right now in this space is easily swappable. What's not is solving business problems. What's not very easily swappable is engaging and building champions and trusted business relationships that go parallel. So yes, you can swap best model, best time in and out, co generation. But the person that's in front of them, that's building trusted relationships, that's there, they know they're going to anticipate their needs and they're going to build for the incomplete SDLC is going to win the accounts. The only way you can do that is to get your ass off the seat 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 100 go to market to 866. This is not a, hey, go build an army of people that are 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. Let's go build partnerships in the field with them to build the moat. And, and you said something super interesting about the bottoms up, top down. The engineer is interesting because in general, as I say this, I just want to be super clear. This is an overgeneralization. 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 and their ability to generate the code for that piece really well. But if you try to sell them on or articulate the value of, hey, you actually reduced your RFP backlog by 100% 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, that own application development as a whole or you know, presidents, CFOs, board level folks that have mandates to reduce R and D as a percentage of spending. 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 lives of your people as well. That, but you can't just go top down because in the end nobody's going to make that tech.

[John Kaplan]

The business owners are, business leaders are never going to, they're going to look at you and go, Brian, you know, I'd be shocked if my people don't buy you, but I'm not going to

[Brian McCarthy]

tell them to buy you exactly this, this is the key which makes this space so different. You have to have the top down to do the thinking. As the board level conversations around R D are happening and formulating, but nobody's ever going to tell an engineer what he can use to do his work. So you need to do both and you need this bottom up. Which brings us to your question which was profile and I think profile at cursor. We've been really thoughtful around. We want people with tremendous slope. I've always said clock speed's 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, 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 I, 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 test it for intelligence around, you know, probably your SES or like you know, your engineers. But I'm maniacally focused on smart sellers and, and I think that's super critical

[John Kaplan]

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 and does not necessarily mean I'm going to have slope at cursor totally. But you have to put an input, there's got to be something that they can consume. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[Brian McCarthy]

Well, just today I think it hit LinkedIn that we hired JP Boland. You know, as you can imagine, JP is like incredible person, probably the best go to market enablement transformation person I've ever been been around in my life. And the thing that makes him so unique is as you both know, you know, he's a world class sales leader and one of the things that makes you, you know, what you both do so incredible around teaching and coaching development is you were world class sales leaders, built world class sales teams and organizations. And JP brings that from his ptc BMC blade and you know, 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 going to listen to this. So you're exactly right, we have to would from a profile, let me just be like super clear profile. What I actually am looking for is somebody that has had the ability to sell at multiple different places and different products to different Personas. Because 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, that's right. Right profile rep with right infrastructure to keep them fed.

[Co-host or Guest]

So there'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. They're not really, they'll never understand, you know, a tenth or a hundredth of what you know in enterprise sales and why what your approach is, is the right approach. So there's people that probably feel like they're in a PLG trap. Meaning since this company took off on plg, it was fast. We had short sales cycle, low cost model, financial metrics, which is beautiful. Now we bring this guy, Brian McCarthy, hiring all 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 going to have to convince some of those people that this is the right model.

[Brian McCarthy]

Right.

[Co-host or Guest]

The three of us all know it is the right model.

[Brian McCarthy]

Yeah, super spot on. One of the things I had to test for and I'll just say, like I talk with Michael, Brilliant, brilliant guy, but young. Right. I mean, I think Michael's 25 years old, founder, 25.

[John Kaplan]

Your co founders are in their 20s, right?

[Brian McCarthy]

Yeah, yeah, they're all 25. Jordan, Michael, Swally, Aman, 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 that I've ever seen. They've done all their research, they understand what makes great companies. I asked them this question, I said like just as a test, why do you need me? I'm very expensive. Like literally says, like literally, I'm very

[Co-host or Guest]

expensive and I'm going to change everything you you've been doing so far.

[Brian McCarthy]

Exactly.

[Co-host or Guest]

Everything.

[Brian McCarthy]

Well, 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. And so to build an enduring generational company that has the ability to be a trillion dollar ten is going to require us to marry this PLG with the ability to get very sticky and be a large enterprise business. And they walk through it and they did their history companies that grew up in PLG but never made the conversion into enterprise. Most of them failed.

[Co-host or Guest]

Yeah, they called the PLG trap.

[Brian McCarthy]

Yeah, most of them failed. 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 going to look like and get really focused on what the guardrails 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 big 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 0 to 3 billion in, I don't know, it's 10 quarters, right? Like that's just mind blowing. But how, 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 go to market. So now I have, 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 going to hear it here first think about this. In AI factory, the future state of software development, I said early was like tab complete. Then it's agent build. The end state is agents going and doing requirement gathering design work. That agent work gets passed off to another agent, agents running agents that then generates the code that passes off to agents to do code review. That passes off to do security 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 could never trust one agent on 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 codex operating on an OpenAI model can pass to a cursor agent reviewing on composer can pass to a Claude that can pass somebody 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 and spot checking them. And that's the future state where this is going to move to. And I bet you it moves there faster than anybody believes it's going to.

[Co-host or Guest]

If you're listening to this episode and you're not excited about me, holy smokes, McCarthy, you're out of your mind. I'm ready to come to work for you, brother.

[John Kaplan]

Ready to rip the heads off chickens, buddy. Let's go, Johnny. You know what this sounds like? This sounds like. And we should just send a note to it. Whenever you're ready, dude. Because 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, you're amazing, dude.

[Co-host or Guest]

On the all in podcast, you're amazing.

[Brian McCarthy]

Well, listen, love you guys, man. This has been, I learned a lot from both of you over the years. You're both, you're great partners too. We'll, we'll certainly be leaning in, you know, to help you, you know, to get some help as we get an office there, bro. Oh yeah, we'll get, you'll get you in. Yeah, A lot of fun, a lot of work. But the ingredients are there to build something really, really special and, 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 because the TAM isn't there. The TAM in this is 2 trillion bucks like we and growing faster than the CDP. And so we have an opportunity to build something super special so we have a 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 CROs 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, that's why I'm fired up.

[John Kaplan]

Johnny, I got one. Before we, 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

[Podcast Host]

guy named Brian McCarthy.

[John Kaplan]

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. Yeah, I feedback 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 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.

[Brian McCarthy]

Well done. Yeah, no, very blessed. Super blessed. We all are, man. Yeah, incredible. Like you think about this, my dad was, you know, unloading. Unloading ships on a dock and was a taxicab driver. He. He washed the floors and immaculate conception. You know, we're blessed. We could be digging ditches somewhere and we have an opportunity to go build companies easily.

[John Kaplan]

Amen. Happy Holy Week, brother.

[Brian McCarthy]

Yeah, you too, guys.

[Co-host or Guest]

Thank you, John Cat. Thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of the Revenue Builders podcast.

[John McMahon]

Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe rate and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out forcemanagement.com for more information.