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- [00:00]
Sam
Buyers still want to talk to a person they don't want to buy from. An agent. A like, you know, Jack Altman avatar that shows up to a call that is like, not really Jack. So there's no higher ROI on my time than spending time with customers.
- [00:19]
Jack Altman
Sam, what a delight to be here. I'm really excited to do this with you.
- [00:22]
Sam
Thank you for having me. Awesome to be here. I've been a fan of this for a really long time, so it's cool to be in this chair.
- [00:26]
Jack Altman
I'm going to try to live up to the hype of this up. So I actually first learned about you by reading Jason Lemkin's Sastra blog back when I was, you know, starting last, trying to learn about sales. And I remember in there it was like, you know, Jason's talking about my best, you know, sales rep at Echo Sign and he did all of this then. I obviously knew about you through Parker, who we both know from, you know, Zenefits and Rippling obviously. So I've known about you for a long time. Obviously I've gotten to know you well over the last couple years, but I actually want to start by talking about sort of your sales journey. So can you talk through like, maybe just like a quick summary of like how you came up through sales, you know, a bit about these companies and maybe some of the things that you learned in each of those chapters.
- [01:05]
Sam
Yeah, we'll talk about looking into some incredible companies. So Jason and Parker, both of which you alluded to, two of just like the greatest people, but also most influential people on the career that I've had and just like amazing advocates and clients, close friends and all that stuff. So shout out to those guys. And so let's see. I grew up in Kansas City and went to University of Missouri. When I graduated, I was really fortunate that my older brother Brian was in San Francisco doing tech sales. I don't think I ever would have ended up out here but for that. So then 22, moved to San Francisco, got into tech sales. I was at Echo Sign and I appropriately said, like sort of lucked into the relationship with Jason. I was just like, you know, using a recruiter that was introducing me to early stage startups. One of them was, was Echo Sign. And I had a job offer and I took the job. And so I started as an sdr, as many folks do in sort of early sales, go to market in tech startups. I was there for something like six years. The company did relatively well and afforded me the opportunity to move up into, you Know more senior sales roles within the organization. Then Jason introduced me to Parker, went to Zenefits. I was VP of sales there for a few years.
- [02:22]
Jack Altman
Crazy years there which we can get into. But like, I mean what a growth trajectory that was.
- [02:27]
Sam
Yeah, it was awesome. You know, I was there for a little under two and a half years. For two of those, almost two and a half years. It was incredible. And then like towards the end, like sort of left turn and so lots of lessons and we can, you know, it goes deeper or is not as you want there. And then prior to doing Founders Fund and ultimately Monaco most recently in the sort of sales career, I was CRO at Brex and again same idea, just joined a company that was really exceptional from a very early stage. And so I think three times have benefited from the experience of joining when companies are relatively Unknown and near $0 of revenue and then being able to leave when they were much, much larger and lots of revenue.
- [03:10]
Jack Altman
Yeah, so we can spend the least time on this because it's like reaching far back into the past. But like what, what did you take away from Echo Sign? Like obviously those were formative years for you as you thought about like what good sales looks like and what a good go to market machine looks like. But like that's probably where you got a lot of your early ideas about how this stuff should work. So like what were, what were your takeaways there?
- [03:29]
Sam
Yeah, well, I think there was.
- [03:30]
Jack Altman
Were you guys up against. Was Docusign like.
- [03:32]
Sam
Yeah, that's right.
- [03:33]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [03:33]
Sam
So DocuSign was a competitor. Echoes on is private for like three or four of the years that I was there. And then Adobe had acquired us. Echo Sign became Adobe Sign after the acquisition. We were actually beating DocuSign when Adobe acquired us. And DocuSign is maybe the more familiar name now because Echo Sign evolved into Adobe Sign. And so let's see, a couple of things stand out. First and foremost and again, I genuinely lucked into this. I think there's like nothing more influential early in one's sales career than the company that you join and you control a little bit of the success of that business. You know, I was an SDR and then I was a sales rep and I was one of, let's call it like 10 growing into 40 salespeople. There's only so much that I can sort of attribute Echo Signs overall success to me.
- [04:20]
Jack Altman
It's funny I put this in the true but hard to convince people of bucket of things where it's like with you know, somebody earlier in their Career. It's like, you know, you've got like compensation, title and quality of company. And it is very hard sometimes to convince people that quality of company is more important than those other things.
- [04:37]
Sam
It's arguably like we can of course, DM me on the other side. It's arguably like the only thing that matters, especially if you are joining as it is starting to take off. The way that I think about these things, a lot of it is like the risk reward and like the earlier you join, almost definitionally there is more risk. But if you can join like right light at an inflection point when there is some signal that this company is really about to take off. But you also join in a very early stage where you are like the first, the second, the third, the fourth hire in the role or function that you were joining in.
- [05:07]
Jack Altman
And then the path dependency on the career from there just is like so, so strong.
- [05:11]
Sam
That's exactly right. So Echozine. There was this thing that was largely outside of my control that was like the overall success of the business product
- [05:20]
Jack Altman
market fit was just good.
- [05:21]
Sam
That influenced my personal success as much as anything. I think there is a different variable here. I, I have, I sort of lucked into or found a career path that is a good fit for me. Like, I enjoy this a lot and I'm pretty good at it in ways that had I tried something different, I would have probably been less good and enjoyed it less.
- [05:45]
Jack Altman
Okay, I want to go, I want to go to Zenefits Parker, obviously one of the great founders of, you know, the last decade. And you know, obviously Zenefits in some ways, like, you know, he, he basically rebuilt Zenefits and figured out like, you know, these are the product things that need to happen for this to be a super durable company. But there was really strong product market fit there. But I think equally notable, the go to market machine and apparatus that early benefits had was like remarkable. And so like, yes, in the end, like some product things weren't there. But like, can you talk about that early scaling? Because I think it was like at least of that, you know, it was maybe what, 2013, 14 that it was scaling. Something like that.
- [06:24]
Sam
Yeah. I joined in December of 2013 and then Parker and I both left around the same day. Left in quotes around the same day in 2016. I think it was February of 2016.
- [06:34]
Jack Altman
Can you talk about what building that go to market machine looked like in those early days?
- [06:38]
Sam
Yes. So let's see. We've talked about Parker a little bit. I think an inspiration in a couple Ways just in terms of like learning so much on how he is a founder and CEO and runs a business. There's just like a lot of lessons there that you sort of organically, what's
- [06:54]
Jack Altman
one learn from, what's one that you like come back to a lot.
- [06:57]
Sam
There was a thought exercise in March of 2014 that we, when I signed up for Zenefits, we had a revenue target of going from effectively zero, maybe it was a few hundred K when I joined in December of 2013. So we were creating our 2014 plan. We wanted to go from effectively zero to $10 million of ARR by the end of 2014. So in 12 months, which by the
- [07:19]
Jack Altman
way in 2014 year now that people are like, but that's like, that's like today somebody saying 0 to 100.
- [07:24]
Sam
That was sort of unheard of. And Parker, let's see Parker as, as he should, has sort of like very ambitious dream, big aspirations and expectations. And so 0 to 10 million was like there weren't a lot of other startups that were doing it. And so then early in the year of 2014 we were trending towards in that. And so he sat me and Matt Epstein down who is leading marketing and said let's go through a thought exercise of instead of finishing the year at 10 million ARR, which is our like, you know, stretch goal or however you want to frame it, what does it look like if we finish at 20 and we want to back into sort of like what are the headcount implications of doing this? What are the sort of like lead implications of doing this? How many leads would we need? What would the marketing spend look like? And you sort of like do whiteboard session on, I don't know, Monday night or whatever and at 1am and we kind of like look around the room and Parker's well, we're not going to tell the board yet, but we're going to do this. And three days later he told the board like the new goal is 20 million in ARR. So there's a takeaway that you can apply that process to all sorts of aspects of the business.
- [08:30]
Jack Altman
And is that basically does that boil down to just people rise to the level of expectations you set and just pushing the boundaries of what great could be just sparks more achievement, is that kind of it?
- [08:40]
Sam
I think there's something there. I also think that there's something around manufacturing urgency and having really audacious goals and there's probably like several takeaways, but that specific process is one that I try and apply and it can be, it can be something like a revenue target. It could also be something like how long is something going to take? What would it take actually if we needed to do this in a shorter amount of time and what would sort of be the trade offs and those sorts of things. And so it's just operating rhythm of the business, something like that.
- [09:08]
Jack Altman
Okay, so you have these ambitious goals for the year. So then like what goes into that? Like when you said, okay, what does need to be true to go to 20 instead of 10, like what's the, what is that conversation?
- [09:18]
Sam
Well, I think one of the things that we benefited from quite strong product market fit at Zenefits, we benefited from the same at Echo Sign, at Brex, now at Monaco. And so then I think that's worth highlighting. I do think that there's like something that we were pretty deliberate about at Zenefits that I took with me to both Brex and now Monaco is being like very intentional about creating what I would describe as a demand rich environment. And I think that many founders, sales leaders, startups, broadly sort of misdiagnosed the opportunity to acquire customers and grow revenue more quickly as something related to conversion rates. So like we have these opportunities that we're tracking. We're in July of 2026, if we look to June of 2026 and we maybe missed our revenue target. The reason that we missed that is because like, you know, gosh, this one deal that we really thought was going to come in and the sales rep said it was going to come in, it pushed and so had it come in, we would have hit our revenue target or something like that. And my diagnosis in many of those instances is actually something like you should have had like five deals.
- [10:37]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [10:38]
Sam
And if three of them close, you finish way over target.
- [10:40]
Jack Altman
Yes.
- [10:41]
Sam
And if that one deal closes, you actually hit your target. But in a lot of ways, like you could have done better.
- [10:45]
Jack Altman
I can't remember was it was either you, Parker or Matt Epstein, but one of the three of you told me at some point when I was like trying to get, you know, go to market advice for Lattice, it was like, look, you can improve your conversion rate by this much. You can improve like your, you know, first deal to up. But like the thing that you can change by 10x is your top of funnel.
- [11:05]
Sam
That's right.
- [11:06]
Jack Altman
And I think that was always deep in, you know, this group's psychology is like, you can improve all these things a little bit, but you can improve the top of funnel. Like if you have a company worth building there's like 100 times more customers that you could be talking to than you're talking to. I think this is like a very underrated thing and it's like kind of like a red pill once you see it.
- [11:26]
Sam
It's something that we, we have lived by and I think benefited from. And just to sort of like reinforce the thing that you just said, I would. Well, if you have 10% conversion rates, improving those conversion rates to 20%, which sounds like you're improving your conversion rates by 10%, but you're actually doubling conversion rates. It's really hard.
- [11:48]
Jack Altman
Yes.
- [11:49]
Sam
And especially like, you know, if you have a sales organization, you have to like train the salespeople. If you're a founder, you have to get like far better, like pitching and closing and all of these things if you have a large enough addressable market. And so this doesn't totally work if you have like 50 potential customers that you can sell into. But for companies like Monaco and many other startups out there, it is far easier to double your leads or opportunities. And so that is where I would put a disproportionate amount of intention. And if you do so actually at the expense of either conversion rates or maybe like efficiency, that is a worthwhile trade off. And so if you feel like as
- [12:29]
Jack Altman
long as, like on a per rep basis, they're still closing enough per person,
- [12:33]
Sam
per year kind of thing, as long as is your growth trajectory is dramatically increasing month over month. If you have something, if you have
- [12:42]
Jack Altman
the efficiency per rep, do you care about that or is that something that doesn't matter till later on?
- [12:46]
Sam
Yes, but you can apply the same logic that we just did at the company level to the rep level also. So I would rather deliver two times the number of leads or opportunities to a rep and actually have their conversion rates like come down slightly, then give them less leads and increase their conversions
- [13:04]
Jack Altman
singular through, like focus on the throughput, the outcome. Yes.
- [13:08]
Sam
How much revenue did we close as a business this month? How much revenue did each sales rep close this month?
- [13:12]
Jack Altman
Yes.
- [13:13]
Sam
There aren't, what's my dad say in golf? There aren't like pictures on the scorecard or something like that. And so like if a rep closes, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand dollars a month. It's not like, and I say this thing to reps all the time. It's not like there's like an asterisk,
- [13:26]
Jack Altman
There aren't points for what your close rate was.
- [13:28]
Sam
Yeah, it's like, but you forgot to email this customer that otherwise could have close like $200,000 of ARR close this month. Like that is the thing that you see. And so like of course you want to. The details matter and of course you want to be const improving and giving feedback on all of those things. But solve for the outcome.
- [13:45]
Jack Altman
Yeah, that's good. So what did you take then when you went to Brex? So like you had the Zenefits experience. It was both amazing and you know, difficult in all these ways which, you know, are, are well documented in the end. But then Bre was like this amazing run. So you've now had the Echo Sign experience. You've gotten the chance to be the leader from, you know, basically the get go at this next company. And now you're doing it again, you know, with the lead seat and the experience. So now, now what? What happens at Brex?
- [14:14]
Sam
Well, I'll touch on the two things that I think actually the three things that influenced Brexit outcomes while I was there as much as anything. Two of which were true at Zenefits, one of which was actually a learning from Zenefits that we started far later than we otherwise should have, that we were able to capitalize on early at Brex, then we can kind of do the same thing. If it's interesting for Monaco because it's a different world today than it was in 2018. The three things, the first is like recruiting and building the team at Zenefits. My first two hires were the top two sales reps at Echo Sign brought them with me. Their names are Matt Plank and Jameson Young. Matt Plank is now the CRO at Rippling. Jameson Young was CRO at Gong. He's now SVP of something important at Rippling in their sales organization. So these are like two of the people that have actually influenced my, my personal success as much as anything. And then you can just imagine that sort of cascading from there. And so at both Zenefits and Brex, now at Monaco, like we just have an incredible sort of like NFL level of, of players in a sales organization. And I think, you know, we can attribute so much of the success of the go to market organizations at these companies to the people that exist within the go to market organizations. I think the second thing we touched on it so we don't have to go much deeper. If you think about early days of Brex, one thing that we did, I think a very effective job of was going out of stealth to like everyone knowing and talking about Brex very, very quickly. And we did things like huge billboard campaigns and gifting campaigns and fundraise announcements and so much of the stuff that like maybe hopefully like Monaco has known a little bit. But you got really loud.
- [16:06]
Jack Altman
I remember that.
- [16:06]
Sam
Really loud. Yeah. And I think the idea was like, we want as close. I don't know if we were as intentional as we are at Monaco today about this, but the idea is that like we wanted close to 100% of our target market to have heard of Brex. And so then when we reach out to founder, finance leader, controller from Brex, holy cold, you know who we are. And hopefully you have like some positive brand association with that. So we're very deliberate about that. And I think again, like the concept of creating this demand rich environment was something that we were very deliberate about early on at Brecht's. The third thing that I think we did, gosh, over time the like grade improves, but it benefits, we get something like a D plus from, from an early stage is like the influence of what would be considered today as revenue operations. And it's just being very thoughtful about. Well, here's maybe the easiest illustration of this. Not all leads are created equal in revenue operations is like far more complex than this specific example. But I think this specific example helps highlight the influence they can have. Not all leads are created equal. And there's going to be influence both on like the type of company that the lead or opportunity that you are potentially selling to. There's also going to be influence at like the Persona level. So who is the person that we are meeting with? One thing that we did at Zenefits, there was a mistake is we treated all leads or opportunities, two sides of the same coin, as being equal. And so we had things like opportunity goals. That was sort of the thing that like fed into what is the ultimate outcome of revenue. That was wrong because what we started doing was getting more lower quality opportunities that converted at lower rates that led to less revenue. And so over this like year of 2015, which was a more challenging year for Zenefits than certainly the 2014 year, I attribute a lot of that to the like diminishing quality of leads and opportunities. And so the thing that we invested in early at Brecht was really understanding like what are the trends in the business and trying to pattern match to what are the companies and people that are most likely to convert and applying that learning back to the sort of top of funnel and where are we pointing our missiles at targeting and acquiring these opportunities. And so then you get the best of both worlds, you get a leadership environment. With the right type of people and companies that, that you're trying to sell to.
- [18:29]
Jack Altman
Yes. One of the things that I'm curious about is for Brex, obviously you had. And this is true at all these companies, but at Brex there was this known highly competitive market with ramp. And I'm curious about, and I would say today more than ever, basically every founder is operating in an extremely competitive environment. Like I think it's felt this way for a long time, but like it really feels that way. You know, like all good ideas have many, you know, you know, many contenders going at once. What did you learn about competition through these and like how did you go to market through highly competitive markets?
- [19:06]
Sam
You know, it's interesting, Echo Sign was certainly competitive with Docusign. And so I think lots of learnings in terms of how to compete through that experience. Brex evolved into being hyper competitive with
- [19:20]
Jack Altman
amp, but it started wide open.
- [19:21]
Sam
Interestingly, it was actually pretty greenfield.
- [19:23]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [19:24]
Sam
When for the majority of my time there. So my years at Brex were 2018 through like beginning of 2022. So 2018, 2019, even 2020, it was mostly a one horse race. There was a company called Divi that was acquired by Bill.com a little later. So there were other players in the space. But Brexit was always like the market leader. And then I think dynamics of the market evolved, you know, starting in, let's call it 21, 21 and then certainly beyond. And I actually what was not with the business for much of, of that period of time. And then Peter has this saying that's like fair. Peter Thiel has a saying that's like fairly famous that I think like it is oftentimes to your point, hard to apply to enterprise software that is seemingly like inherently competitive.
- [20:11]
Jack Altman
This competition is for losers.
- [20:12]
Sam
Competition is for losers. And gosh, like he's so, of course he's right because he's always right. But you know, experiencing Brex in what I would describe, you know, I said this term previously as greenfield environment.
- [20:28]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [20:29]
Sam
Pretty smooth sailing.
- [20:30]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [20:31]
Sam
Monaco today we think of it as pretty greenfield. And so we are displacing incumbents, but aren't competitive today with many new entrants into the space. We should just sort of like assume that that environment won't last forever, but we want to take as much advantage of it as fast as we possibly can to get like as close to a monopoly as we can and then evolve from there. And I think there probably are learnings from the time at Brex just in terms of focus and how quickly you want to move into different markets and segments and those sorts of things.
- [21:07]
Jack Altman
Yep. Okay. I want to come to that before we do after. So you know, this like obviously extremely sort of like this rich journey through sales. Sales after that and before Monaco, you did spend time at Founders Fund and you had like a new chat, like a chapter to your life that was not about startup sales. So like can you talk about what that was, that experience, what you learned? Why'd you come back to what you're, you know, a new version of what you've been doing?
- [21:32]
Sam
Yeah, well, look, I, I've. You and I have both talked about Jason and Parker. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention something about like the learnings from Pedro Enrique Michael, who is CEO now. CEO at a company called Figure and so like equal sort of parts inspiration and then let's see, gratitude for the influence that they've had on my career as well. And again, just like every single time I have been so fortunate in surrounding myself with the greatest people on earth. You know, like you go from Jason to Parker to Pedro Enrique Michael and then we get to Founders Fund. Right. And it's like you've had folks on this many of the folks on the show, we're talking about Brian prior to starting the recording. But gosh, Peter, Bryan, everyone is just like exceptional there. So let's see. I think I can get a little bit personal on like my mindset after Rex.
- [22:27]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [22:27]
Sam
So this is late 21, early 22. I'm reaching like my four year sort of tenure at Brecht's Covid. It is Covid. I'm in Miami. So I've moved to Miami at this point and you know, I just felt like for the first time in my career I felt satisfied, which is very, it sounds positive. It's actually bad. I felt like sort of satisfied with what I had accomplished in this like category or world of technology sales. And you know, I could have, let's make the assumption that I was leaving Brex. I could have done something like go either early stage and maybe like a more strategic title or something. But I would effectively lead. Go to market at a company just like definitionally the probability of joining an earlier stage company that has a Brex like outcome. You know, we were a 12 and a half billion dollar company when I left. Just like definitionally low.
- [23:18]
Jack Altman
Sounds like even if you did, it's like it was kind of the same with just a bigger number.
- [23:22]
Sam
I wasn't motivated to do it. Like I wanted A new challenge. You know, I alluded to my brother Brian very early on in this sort of like career arc that Brian was out in San Francisco doing technology sales when I moved out here. Brian at the time had transitioned. He was a CRO at a bunch of really incredible businesses and then he was a VC at Sutter Hill. I mean, so I had seen him make this transition as, you know, like former sales leader. And I was in Miami. I got to know Keith and Founders Fund had a Miami office and I made the decision that I wanted to get into venture and gosh, if I had like the opportunity to join one of the greatest venture capital firms in the history of the world, I'd sort of be silly to not like take advantage of that. And so mid late 2022, I joined founders Fund and like, couldn't be more grateful for the experience. And the people in the firm are just like truly exceptional. No surprise to anybody that's potentially listening to this. We weren't deploying a lot of capital at the time. It was like 22, 23. And I think at the time I'm Miami based VC. It was a little fish out of water. And so I don't know, I talked about, I did this thing at Echosign and then beyond that I could just tell like, this is a good fit. I don't know, certainly being in Miami, but I don't know that being in B.C. it felt like the right fit. One of the things that Founders Fund has a track record of doing that I gravitated towards is incubating companies. And so certainly like Peter, the most famous of them with Palantir and then Trey with Andurl and there's a bunch of folks that have Scott with General Matter and Dalian, Varden, Moore. And so my brother who I alluded to at Sutter Hill, he took this model to human capital. We decided to co incubate a company that evolved into Monaco. And through that process I was sort of gravitating far more towards like, what is the right fit? It's building Monaco and not being Miami based vc.
- [25:20]
Jack Altman
I asked you the other day just like about like, you know, I don't even remember why, but it was about like, you know, know, interests outside of work. And you were kind of saying like, well, to be honest, I don't really have hobbies right now. I'm just working a lot. But you're like, you know, I did have them in Miami and yeah, was that like a. It feels to me almost like you had this like very busy Career. It almost feels like you took a breather and then you're like, I'm going
- [25:46]
Sam
back into the coal mines, potentially unintentionally, meaning to take a breather. I think what you said is exactly correct. And this may be like, it could be received negatively. Meaning today I don't have many hobbies and if I'm not literally in the office, I am thinking about Monaco and doing something sort of related to it.
- [26:09]
Jack Altman
I think it's very lucky to be so immersed in something that you don't have any hobbies. I think that's like a blessing.
- [26:13]
Sam
Yeah, no, it was certainly a deliberate decision. I knew that this was what I was signing up for when I made the decision. And to your point, yeah, when I was in Miami, gosh, I was in really good shape and maybe that's like correlated both with the place and the like flexibility of the job or something like that. I was on the water a lot. There were plenty of hobbies that existed. And when I went all in on Monaco, you know, I moved back to San Francisco. I live right by the office.
- [26:43]
Jack Altman
It is high contrast chapter to chapter though.
- [26:47]
Sam
It is, it is 180, like fairly stark contrast. And again, it was deliberate and thus far I'm like very happy with the decision. I'm loving this.
- [27:00]
Jack Altman
It's awesome. Okay, so let's talk about Monaco. So I guess so this is why you started, like why this company? Like why, why was this the one that you're like, this is, I mean, I guess it's a little self evident but like what was in your head where you're just like, you know, this, this is going to be what I'm going to do.
- [27:13]
Sam
It wasn't part of the plan. Meaning I had joined Founders Fund to be abc. I didn't join Founders Fund thinking I was going to start a company, move to San Francisco, actually become co founder, CEO, leave Founders Fund. Right, right. And so started this company. It like was just pulling me and felt very much like this is so obviously what I should be doing in my calling. So I think part of it was just the fit for me. And I think maybe the best way of articulating that is something like there's only one type of technology company I'm qualified to be the founder of and it is a sales or go to market technology company. There is this other thing that is highly influential and that is timing. And we are in the sort of early innings of this platform shift that is AI and I do think that there will be a new market leader that emerges in the category that we are building in, which is go to market or sales technology.
- [28:15]
Jack Altman
Yeah, it's like this, this paradigm, you know, in some ways seems to be like, I guess going back to cloud. It was like, like, you know, I guess we, neither of us were really working at the beginning of that shift, but it was maybe we're students of
- [28:29]
Sam
history though or something.
- [28:30]
Jack Altman
And it's like you could see that basically it's like there are all these on prem companies and if you started a cloud company at the right time, it was just really hard for those old companies to turn the boats quick enough to come do what you were doing. And it was just a genuinely better offering for customers. And so it just dominated. And in just like category after category, like the cloud version just, just won and the old companies couldn't get there and the customers just preferred it and bam. And it seems like in AI there's a version of this happening now where it's going from selling tools to selling the work and it's just dominant to customers and the old companies can't seem to catch up.
- [29:04]
Sam
I think you articulated it perfectly. These platform shifts rhyme. Where Siebel, that was maybe the incumbent or market leader in this category that Monaco is building in, which is go to market or sales, was the market leader, there was nothing inherently wrong with the business. In fact, like one of the most incredible businesses at the time in history. The same thing is true with the market leader today, which is Salesforce. Just incredible business. And I think that they are any market leader and you can pattern match to other functions within enterprise software. They're faced with an innovator's dilemma where they have an existing set of customers on a platform that was architected pre AI. And so they can either continue serving the needs of those customers and focusing on where they are generating revenue and building on top of this existing platform, or they can disrupt themselves. And seemingly every time businesses are faced with this innovator's dilemma during a platform shift, they gravitate towards the former, which I think for us equates to opportunity where we can. And by the way, I think like what Salesforce and what other companies are doing, they are overlaying AI on top of a pre AI system architected platform, which is better than no AI, but less good than being truly AI native, which is what a company like Monaco is. And so for us we can go after a sort of narrow segment of the market today, which is startups. And if you think about Salesforce's revenue, how much of Salesforce's revenue is concentrated in early stage technology startups like certainly less than 1%. And so we can go after that market, we can build a better platform, we can build a platform that's truly AI native. We can get close to monopoly market share there and then we start to move up market and we start to organically expand outside of startups and hopefully eventually evolve into the market leader. But whether it's us or somebody else, it seems a foregone conclusion that the category leader, the platform of record in sales in, let's call it five years, will be a platform that is architect, architected with AI in mind and not one that was architected 20 years prior.
- [31:32]
Jack Altman
You had a choice to make which was obviously what you're selling is like work and outcomes and you're selling sort of like revenue in some sense. Sense. You chose to also be a system of record. You didn't have to do that, but you made that deliberate choice. I think to the extent that you won't integrate with a system of record, even though you obviously could, you know, you can imagine a world where you chose to do that. Many others, many other companies, right, because it's easier to say, look, I'm not going to try to, you know, be your HubSpot, but I'm going to give you these tools that let you get more revenue and set up all these meetings and do all the, you know, accoutrements around the CRM. You've chosen to say, do you want to work with Monica? We're the CRM. Why'd you choose that?
- [32:07]
Sam
That's right. Well, several reasons. I think there are two categories of companies that are sales products. There are system of record companies today that is a CRM. We actually believe that forward looking this like concept or category of a CRM will evolve into something of the past. We are more orienting around outcomes. And so we think that what today is this like system of record that manifests as a database. CRM eventually becomes a revenue automation platform that's actually oriented around outcomes and not things like storing data. So we believe that there is like a new type of company that emerges from this, that is a system of record, but doesn't look like the existing systems of record.
- [32:54]
Jack Altman
What does it mean to be the system of record? If it's, if not, if not just like a database, what is,
- [33:01]
Sam
is? Well, look, HubSpot is appropriately named. It is the hub. Everything orchestrates from the system of record
- [33:09]
Jack Altman
because it's the source of truth, of data.
- [33:12]
Sam
That's right. And you asked A question like why did you make this decision? Well, if we bucket these company types or products into two categories, there's system of record and there's point solutions. Point solutions are layers on top of what today is a CRM system of record. If we think about the outcomes of those types of businesses, backward looking, we have market leaders like Salesforce that today are 120 plus billion dollar companies just a few months ago are significantly larger than that and then several others that are actually like quite large businesses. If we think about the category of point solutions that integrate to these systems of record, there are some that experience some early revenue growth and early maybe marks of low to mid single digit billion dollar valuations. But none of them, historically speaking, have realized generational technology companies outcomes. We're not motivated by being a point solution. We're not motivated by an outcome which would again like a really exciting outcome for those that experience. We want a shot, we want a shot at being a market leader in one of the largest categories of enterprise software that we think will actually evolve from here. If you think about Salesforce and maybe enterprise software companies today, broadly, their market caps are predicated on IT budget.
- [34:30]
Jack Altman
Budget.
- [34:31]
Sam
We are disrupting labor. And so the future market leader has both that IT budget but also has the labor budget. Monaco is way more expensive than the sort of legacy system of record products because we are doing the labor on behalf of our customers.
- [34:47]
Jack Altman
Which by the way is the story of all these AI native companies is it's true, it's both dramatically more expensive in some sense and it's also dramatically cheaper in another sense than what you would be doing alternatively to, to get the same outcome.
- [34:58]
Sam
That's exactly right. And people not only are customers willing to pay, this is what they want. You asked a question that maybe I want to touch on because I think it could be insightful or maybe helpful for other founders that are starting businesses today. There's an application of AI in Monaco like products that is seemingly obvious, which is we are AI native. We just talked about it. It's the labor disruption. We are using agents and compute to replace workflows that founders and salespeople would otherwise be doing themselves. And it is more expensive when a human does it and it actually produces worse outcomes when a human does it. The thing that I think is less obvious in terms of an application of AI that we've been very deliberate about, certainly intentional from the very early days. The cost of building software is trending to zero, zero. And so we want to take on as much scope as we Possibly can, starting with the system of record, but also displacing all of these point solutions that we believe are actually features of a broader platform and not independent product lines or independent businesses in many cases.
- [36:09]
Jack Altman
By the way, this extreme breadth focus was obviously sort of, you know, like Parker was kind of like one of the like early canonical examples of like what a software business really is at the end of the day is like these customer relationships that allow you to extremely efficiently build and sell more products to them and the customer just gets a straight up better experience because the data is tied together. It ends up being cheaper for them. In summation, you don't have to have all these different vendors, all these things. Seems like now with AI you should actually take that to an extreme degree.
- [36:42]
Sam
The compound startup, maybe phrase or terminology that I think Parker made famous and
- [36:48]
Jack Altman
now it's like that should go like exponentially far.
- [36:50]
Sam
Well, I think Parker to his credit was probably ahead of his time on this. Right. Because Parker started Rippling in something like 2016. Zenevids was maybe less of a compound startup than Rippling was in. Rippling is more of a compound startup. I think that today, and I don't know like the exact sort of math equation here, but we can build software, it's something like 10 times faster than we could just a few years ago. If that is true today, that is going to be true a few years from now where we can build software 10 times faster than we can today. And so we want to go after as much sort of breadth of what we can do in the platform with the assumption that AI is going to enable us to build a product far faster. And that is what customers want. Customers want to come to one platform. The outcomes are actually better because you don't have data in a bunch of different silos. The system of record, the thing that does your call recording, the thing that does your outbound, the thing that builds your database. It is far more difficult to overlay an agent on top of this arbitrary set of tools with data silos than it is a single platform and source of truth that both has all of your data, but also takes all of your actions inside of the same tool.
- [37:59]
Jack Altman
Totally. So when you think about what you're selling to customers, in some sense, I guess you're kind of selling well wrapped tokens that can do all these different things, but you're kind of selling intelligence to the customer that the end of the day. So have you thought about like you know or I know you have. How have you thought about what this means? In terms of the way you price the long term, of what your cost structure is going to be and like what that all looks like from an economics perspective because it's obviously very different than build software and you know, sell it for, you know, a per user per month kind of situation.
- [38:29]
Sam
For sure.
- [38:29]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [38:30]
Sam
Well, two things come to mind. One is Monaco. And we at Monaco are very opinionated, I think, that there are certain applications of AI and maybe applied to different functions where it's largely like ones and zeros. And what I mean by that is like support is close to this, where you're like driving towards an outcome which is a resolution to somebody's support ticket. It's even more pronounced, I think in the world of like finance and accounting where there is like an actual number, there is like a real 10 type number that is the calculation of everything that comes back before it. Yeah, I think sales is like we start with finance, we move to support, we progress to sales, there's like far more subjectivity that goes into sales. Then there is this sort of like black and white binary outcome that is true in the world of finance. And so we are very opinionated in things like how do we determine which types of companies to reach out to and when to reach out to these companies and what are the signals that we're leveraging and how does that be incorporated into messaging and these things that, that many of our customers today just don't have experience doing.
- [39:43]
Jack Altman
Right.
- [39:44]
Sam
And so then that is the first thing that comes to mind is like the opinionated nature of the product.
- [39:48]
Jack Altman
Yes. And then meaning that you're helping. It's funny because as you were saying that I was like, I didn't know what you're talking about. You're talking about both, it's both about who you're reaching out to, but it's also then, you know, implied is who your customers ought to be reaching out to. And all of that, you know, everything you're talking about is kind of like what you're selling to the customers that,
- [40:03]
Sam
well, we're certainly running on Monaco. And yes, I think customers hopefully benefit from the opinionated nature of the platform itself in ways that if you think about our customer, most of them are startup seed Series A. They don't as founders oftentimes have sort of deep go to market experience. And so we can take much of the sort of like decisions and strategy, which is a word that I don't hate, but I don't like, but I can't think of a better one right now. Sort of off of their plate. And then we enable them to do the things that are super high leverage on their time. Things like meeting with customers, coming up with creative campaigns that today AI is less good at. But if you think about the workflows that I just described, building a database, overlaying signals, finding buyers, coming up with messaging, these are things that Monaco is certainly better than me at and arguably better than just humans. And so then you can sort of outsource this thing to free up your time to do the highest ROI use of your time in a sort of like world of go to market, which is like customer facilities facing. And then you asked a question around pricing. We are. Our pricing is correlated towards outcomes. Outcomes are relatively objective when it comes to Monaco now, like the ultimate outcome or excuse me, outcomes are relatively objective when it comes to the category of like go to market or sales.
- [41:22]
Jack Altman
It's revenue, right.
- [41:23]
Sam
How much revenue are you generating? Yep, there are some inputs. These are things like meetings and conversion rates.
- [41:30]
Jack Altman
Yep.
- [41:31]
Sam
And so we rigorously track towards the ultimate outcome of revenue. The inputs of are we generating meetings, are we improving conversion rates? And our pricing is aligned with how much a customer is using the platform. And that should be highly correlated with the impact or benefit that a customer is receiving from the platform. That is like fairly easily measurable.
- [41:56]
Jack Altman
So. So I would love to unpack kind of the go to market strategy you've had so far. You launched like February, so let's call it four or five months ago. And we talked about this with Brex, but definitely you like, you flipped the bit and like everything, everything was loud. So like, what I'm curious about is can you sort of share what was in your head when you were like, okay, it's time to launch, we're going to be loud. Here's the things we're going to do to sort of like get this whole brand going.
- [42:21]
Sam
Yes. I think I'll describe our approach. It was the right approach for us. I'll also sort of caveat with a couple things that I think are worth calling out that may be like advantages that we have as a business that don't necessarily apply to every startup. We wanted to take the approach of operating in stealth through this design customer phase and then have a big sort of shotgun style launch, which we did back in February. February, where we went from almost a definitionally unknown company, nobody had LinkedIn Monaco up, our website said coming soon or some version of that. And we certainly spent $0 on marketing up until the day that we launched. And the reason that we wanted to take that approach is again, I haven't come up with a better analogy for it than this, which is the boiling frog thing where you can imagine if you are the frog and you're in the pot and the water is heating up and you don't totally notice it. Well, we can apply that to like, if you do marketing campaigns over a two year period and you like, as a consumer you may see like bits and pieces of somebody's marketing campaign here and there. And like, yeah, I've maybe heard of this company but like I heard about them a long time ago and they like did this thing. You can imagine the sort of like psychological impact of that relative to like dropping the frog in the boiling water, which is like, oh my gosh, we are seeing Monaco everywhere all of a sudden. Like, I see the plane and I see the billboards and I see the poker tournaments.
- [43:52]
Jack Altman
Your, your, your, your plan in your billboard gave no explanation of what Monaco was like. It just said Monaco. And then like the billboards had like a big dollar sign, which I thought was hilarious and I loved it. But like, you didn't say, you know, new AI sales platform. You know, you just were like, Monaco.
- [44:07]
Sam
Yeah. We benefit from having a geographically concentrated target market. So we're selling to startups. You and I are sitting here in San Francisco. Many of our customers are also in San Francisco. So if we were selling to H Vac company, we shouldn't be flying planes around San Francisco or putting billboards up around San Francisco because they're like fairly well distributed and not highly concentrated. So there are like maybe two aspects that we were deliberate about solving for. One is brand awareness. That's the plane, that's the billboards, and more. When we do things, there may be like two impacts of brand awareness. The first is we do a lot of outbound. Monaco does our outbound for us. When we reach out to a company that is graduating yc, reach out to the founder, they receive the message from me. They have heard of Monaco because they've seen the plant, whatever. Like the thing is, the likelihood that they respond to that outbound message is exponentially higher than if they didn't know me, if they didn't know the business. So like the brand awareness is something that we're very deliberate about. There's a second application of that, which is when they take the meeting, they are far more likely to convert because there is comfort in like knowing and understanding a brand like the one that we are hopefully creating around ourselves in ways that maybe other folks aren't deliberate about and haven't created for themselves. The other type of marketing that we're delivered about is like demand gen. This is very targeted. This is sending people the poker sets that we send to founders when they graduate YC or something like that. This and hosting the poker tournaments and inviting specific founders to that poker tournament with the expectation that that specific founder is going to be somebody that we convert. So we solve for both. I can talk about maybe like a couple marketing principles that are things that we apply to marketing.
- [46:00]
Jack Altman
But yeah, I love that because, you know, like one of the things I often think, I don't think this applies to every startup obviously or I know it doesn't apply to every startup. I think there are many startups that could be investing much harder in their brand that that don't. And it's hard because it's like, well, if I do this demand gen campaign turns into revenue and if I do this brand thing or you know, I spend this money on these sort of like brand campaigns, it's like not going to show. So it's hard to. But it just seems like a missed opportunity for so many people.
- [46:27]
Sam
Yes, I think everyone should do this in their own specific approach. What Monaco is doing isn't relevant to most startups. We can do it because we sell to startups. The geographic concentration, again, most. But there's a version of itself for almost everybody. There's a version of it for everybody. I think there's a process that every company should follow and, and then I can talk about like maybe, maybe a couple principles in case they're helpful. There is a process which like most companies do not follow. You've got to try stuff like, like you just have to just do stuff and you can't be afraid to fail. And I do think that most companies here, they just, just don't really do anything.
- [47:09]
Jack Altman
I do think that on this point a lot of people are afraid of the embarrassment of a brand campaign that failed or some marketing or sales effort that just looked stupid and didn't land. And that's psychologically harder than just building product or doing other things that are not publicly embarrassing.
- [47:31]
Sam
I think there are two things. I think there's one thing that is like I'm not good at this. So I'm an engine. Not me personally. I'm saying like putting myself in the shoes as a founder. I'm an engineer, I build product. I like, I'm gonna index on the thing that I'm very good at. I don't know how to do like
- [47:46]
Jack Altman
a marketing campaign, which is funny. You know, our CTO at, my co founder Eric at Lattice came up with by far our best billboard, which was like, invest in your people, not crypto during 2019. And that just like landed super hard. And that engineer.
- [47:58]
Sam
Yeah, yeah. So I'm not, I'm bad at this or not experienced this or whatever. I don't want to spend the money. I'm worried about like, you know, lighting the money on fire or something like that. I think those are the two variables that probably lead more towards stagnation or just like lack of effort in this category. The reality is like no one starts being an expert at this stuff. You just got to like try stuff and learn. And I actually spend a lot of time with our customers doing exactly this. Like my time, I spend customer facing all day. Let's come up with some cool campaigns that we can run for your business and just ideating on this. And I think that's hopefully high ROI to our customers. And you can do inexpensive campaigns. Like one, you don't have to be an expert at this. Two, there are campaigns that are inexpensive. I'll give an example. These like poker sets that we send to founders that say Monaco Casino. They're on brand, that are prefab because Monaco has a casino. They're like 110 bucks. You can do a test, send this to 50 people. You're spending $5,000. It's like, like now, like if you were truly bootstrapped and have like, you know, no dollars to spend, sure you, you can't do the like $5,000, but
- [49:07]
Jack Altman
you can still do stuff. There's always stuff you can do.
- [49:09]
Sam
There's always stuff you can do and you don't have to break the bank to do it. So you run a process. Here's what we do internally in case it's helpful for others. We run a process at least once a month. We want to have like a big splashy marketing campaign that we are trying. Get a handful of people in the company, define them as like the marketing committee or whatever it is. They don't have to be marketing folks. It can just be you and your co founder. If you're just two people, come up with a few ideas, put them on the whiteboard and just do it. Just like jump. Don't be afraid to fail. Try something. If it doesn't work, chalk it up as a win because you learned and you're going to try something new that is going to be more effective or something like that. But you do want to have like a Bit of process around this, where every single month, you're trying at least one or two different things that are in this, like, category of marketing, brand awareness, demand gen. However we want to frame it, and I think we really want to be. Contrarian is maybe, like, not the right application of that word, but we do want to be creative.
- [50:05]
Jack Altman
New stuff.
- [50:05]
Sam
New stuff.
- [50:06]
Jack Altman
Like your plane. The plane was awesome. Can you talk about the plane?
- [50:09]
Sam
Yes.
- [50:10]
Jack Altman
I feel like there might be one flying right. Right now.
- [50:12]
Sam
We. There isn't. We took it down. We'll put it back up at some point. I think, like, probably reached diminishing returns or something over time, but it was like.
- [50:20]
Jack Altman
Yeah, anyway, go ahead.
- [50:22]
Sam
We. We were at Saster, which is Jason Lipkin's conference. It's awesome conference. And we knew that there would be, like, a large contingency or concentration of people at this event down in San Mateo. And so we didn't think this was, like, that creative. In fact, it wasn't that creative in that there was at least one, maybe two other planes flying at the same event. And so we had the banner trailing the Monaco plane at this conference. I don't know what we paid. Let's call it, like, a couple thousand bucks to make the banner. And then I was surprised at how relatively inexpensive putting this plane in the air for many hours during the conference was, which is like 6,000 bucks a day. And, you know, we do it for two or three days at the conference. And I was just sort of thinking, like, we already have the banner. We already know, like, the cost of flying this thing.
- [51:10]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [51:11]
Sam
Do you guys, like. Like, I haven't really seen these in, like, San Francisco proper. Do you guys. Can you guys fly over the city? And part of my assumption was, like, there are air restrictions that, like, you couldn't fly in and around the city or whatever. And they were like, yeah, we can totally do it. And so I was like, you know, starting to do the math on this thing. And it was like, 6,000 bucks a day pay for 10 days. 60 grand. We have a lot of billboards. Some of our billboards are significantly more expensive than 60 grand. This is one of those that's like. It's a $60,000 learning. Like, like, the worst case scenario, we fly this thing around. It doesn't totally work. We, like, learn from it, and we don't do it again. It worked. So we, you know, both like, messages on my phone, people posting on LinkedIn and Twitter and everywhere else. It was. It was sort of everywhere. And so we kept it up for A little bit longer. And so it was one of those things that was like, like just an evolution of something that we had tried at the conference. Let's like try it in the city. It worked in the city. We learned from it. We'll put it up again when we do a big like announcement that we have coming up.
- [52:16]
Jack Altman
Yeah, you know, it's interesting, like history kind of. I'm sure you've read behind the Cloud, the Mark, you know, the early Salesforce book from Benioff. And like one of the things that like struck me was like early Salesforce did a lot of really creative marketing. They did really creative and like some of it was that the message was created like the no software thing. It's like, well you know, that's interesting. You know there was a lot there and just like the way they even did like customer dinners, you know, I think was like kind of creative and you know, it's like all became sort of like tried at some point. But like being the first to do a good go to market idea is worth a lot it seems like.
- [52:46]
Sam
I think they're the one that I understand as much as any was like the protest. It may be like a big Siebel or Oracle conference where it was like the no software which I think was really smart.
- [52:58]
Jack Altman
Yep. So like when you're thinking about this, are you, are you like, I'm gonna do new activities and then I'm gonna put them on some back burner? Or you like I just have to always be like, do these things stack and build over time? Or are you just like I gotta always have a new thing.
- [53:12]
Sam
There are two things that I am thinking about which maybe like go back to. I said maybe some marketing principles that we try and apply that I think my guidance to any customer that I'm working with is like you should try and apply the same logic as well. The first is if you think about marketing spend as a category, you can sort of separate it into two buckets for the purposes of this first illustration. Then we'll do it separately for the second illustration. The first is like third party advertisers in the first is in. The second is like creativity. The first is like it's oftentimes lower friction to do. It's mostly paid online advertising. I think if we looked at maybe like series C plus technology startups, where is most of their marketing spend going is likely going to third party advertisers. And I surmise like at the top of that list is probably like the Google's metas LinkedIn's of the world where it's paid online advertising. Maybe they're doing some like offline out of home type stuff. This is like easy, low friction marketing spin. And it is easy to do. It's not creative, everyone is doing works. It's also like the lowest roi. It's like a fairly efficient market at this point.
- [54:25]
Jack Altman
Yes.
- [54:26]
Sam
You want to be spending, especially at the early stage, you want to be spending more of your marketing dollars on creative campaigns that aren't going to third party advertisers that are. These like what can we do that are different than anybody else is doing. The categories here are going to be things like gifting and events and you know, I'd even put the plan in that category. It's the things that like no one else is doing and you want to try. They oftentimes require more operational complexity than do the like efficient market. Paid advertising marketing spend where most of our marketing dollars collectively are going. So that's like maybe a principle. Be creative, try new things, allocate some percentage of our spend towards that category.
- [55:14]
Jack Altman
Yep.
- [55:15]
Sam
The second one and I don't know that like either is more influential or important, but they're sort of related. The second one is like the vast majority of marketing dollars go to third party advertisers that in no way benefit the person or company that we are targeting to try and acquire as a customer. So these go to. And we do this too by the way. So these go to the billboard company, the clear channels and outfronts of the world that we are paying to put ads up around San Francisco. These go to as I referenced the Googles, the metas, the linkedins, those sorts of things that are online paid advertising. Very little marketing spend directly benefits the person that we are targeting to try and acquire as a customer. Early on I would try and bucket like 100% of the marketing spend actually to something that benefits the person that we are targeting. And if you put yourself in the shoes of a prospective customer, you are a. Well let's take Monaco as an example. You are a YC founder.
- [56:17]
Jack Altman
Yep.
- [56:18]
Sam
Would you rather have Monaco or any company that is trying to acquire you as a customer spend money on like LinkedIn ads that follow me around that like message something to me that I sort of scroll past and then billboards and whatever else the spend is going towards?
- [56:34]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [56:35]
Sam
Or would you rather have Monaco send me a like poker set from like heavy clay poker chips? Totally. Exactly like the I founders play poker that like we can use for our poker night as a company Would you rather throw like a poker tournament? We had, we give away $100,000 Monaco Invitational. You were there?
- [56:53]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [56:54]
Sam
The final table gets all of it. Let's say there are 100 people that start playing. We end with nine at the final table. Eight of the nine finalists that received wires from Monaco were Monaco customers. Would you rather have Monaco as a customer of Monaco or somebody who you might, who might be using Monaco? Would you rather have us throw this poker tournament that you come to have? Hopefully a blast. Make like a bunch of money at the final table? Or again, like pay Google for like the SEM, whatever stuff that's like, following me around when I go to different either websites or Google searches. So use that as like a bit of a thought exercise. Allocate your marketing dollars that would otherwise be going towards very expensive and efficient markets around this paid advertising. Do things that benefit the customer directly. We take it a step further. We spend a lot of money on customer marketing. And so what we want to create is like a bit of a Monaco community through our customer base, but the like, the most effective marketing spend that we have. And when I like, approve this going out, it is like my favorite bill to approve of. Literally any bill that I approve at the company. Company is the like, referral. It is the like, customer referral where we are paying somebody $2,000 because they told their friend that they love Monaco. That friend should check us out. That friend signs up.
- [58:17]
Jack Altman
Yes.
- [58:18]
Sam
And look, if we're doing a couple grand a month, we're paying people like $10,000 to send us customers. It's like the, the highest ROI use of what is effectively a marketing spend.
- [58:27]
Jack Altman
Yeah, right.
- [58:27]
Sam
That is a customer acquisition cost.
- [58:28]
Jack Altman
That's right. Yeah. That's awesome. So. So when we. So I mean, I guess this is the like, kind of air cover and then the other half, I guess of early startup go to market is like the ground game. And maybe just to wrap, you know, this conversation, can you talk about. You're sitting there like, that was like a very good illustration to me of like, if I'm like a Monaco customer, like, and I'm meeting with you, like, I can now like immediately imagine how I'm going and thinking about doing that. The ground game side where I'm like, okay, now I also need to, to do the sales calls and build the early machine. And I'm like a series A or late seed stage founder with early go to market. But I've got like, you know, a handful of reps or 2 reps or 10 reps. Or whatever. What are like the principles you're teaching me or talking to me about as you know, you know, a sales org, you know, builder.
- [59:16]
Sam
Yeah. Well first maybe at a more. We've already used this word in a different context and more like meta level. I think that there's, there's something that is worth maybe touching on. It is like how should we be applying AI to go to market? And then what does that give us leverage to like focus our actual time and energy on? Which is the thing that you just talked about backward looking. I think most labor in the sort of like category of startup go to market was on what I would describe as workflows that today AI is actually better at doing. This is like building your tam, scoring your accounts, overlaying signals, finding buyers, writing messaging, all of this like fully online workflow orchestration that agents are just better than any human in the world at. And so it is, it is true that that is like what Monaco does for you. All of this sort of like non customer facing sales related activities, building your database, scoring your accounts, finding leads, engaging with buyers after you finish a meeting, updating your pipeline, reminding you who you need to reach out to, all of these things and what that does, whether it's Monica or not, it allows you to spend your time on higher roi, higher leverage activities. I think there are two categories. One is, and this is the thing that I spend all of my time doing, but it is meeting with customers Today, especially if you were in like B2B, buyers still want to talk to a person they don't want to buy from an agent. A like you know, Jack Altman avatar that shows up to a call that is like not really Jack. So there's no higher ROI on my time. Maybe on I would suspect our customers time then spending time with customers. And a lot of the things that we're able to leverage with AI allow us to spend far more of our time, whether you're a founder or a salesperson, on that human connection, developing relationships, customer facing. I think the second thing is this category of creative operationally complex campaigns. We've talked about a bunch of them. You could do like a ChatGPT conversation where you're like can you come up with some marketing ideas for me I think it would be hard for that to result in the plane as an example. I think that today AI will sort of pattern match to things that have already been done because that is what AI is trained on. And so if you are trying to do something like truly creative innovone innovative, I Think it is more likely to surface inside the four walls of your company by doing the sort of like ideation that I talked about, which is let's come up with two ideas, each person multiply by four, that's eight ideas, put them on a whiteboard, talk through each of them, pick the two or three, the best ones that we're going to do and Monaco and I actually give us the like ability to spend our time doing those things. Yeah, that is how I spend my time with customers. Is, is the less about the sort of like, how should you be meeting with customers? I do like how should you sell those sorts of things? But it's coming up with like creative campaign ideas. Count me in. Is like one of the people that comes up with the ideas that we put on the whiteboard.
- [62:37]
Jack Altman
Yeah, that's awesome. And then I guess like on that last piece, is there anything worth talking about in terms of like how to actually sell or like the, the practice of, you know, the, the time with the customers itself?
- [62:51]
Sam
I think there are two things that stand out as and then there's like a laundry list below it. Right. But this is maybe the like broader generic advice that I would have to certainly founders that are starting to sell their product and don't have a lot of go to market experience that I think have maybe more impact than any other, you know, below these two. The first is I would be fairly prescriptive about how to effectively buy your product because if you aren't educating the buyer on how to onboard receive value and ultimately buy your product, the customer like doesn't know how to buy your product. And so I would come in with like a bit of a combination of like agenda and opinion on here is the like happy path from where we sit today. And if this resonates with you and is something that you think you can receive value around to like where we are when you are fully onboarded and receiving value from the product. And we can just sort of roadmap together. Here are the different steps now like Mr. Customer, is there anything that I have left out of this process that is important to you that we should incorporate? Whether it's like security checks that you may need to go through or procurement that we want to introduce or legal reviews that I haven't included. But we sort of start with and this is very abstract, we sort of start with like we, you know, meeting two. We come with like our pre built custom environment to show you exactly what it would look like on our product. If that resonates with you. We Sit. We put you in like a two week free trial of the product. During that trial, like, here are the outcomes that we're going to be driving towards. If we deliver on these outcomes, we like onboard the rest of the team. Let's like schedule meetings that sort of align to these different steps and so then you and the customer aren't flying blind. I think the thing that happens more often than anything when I meet with founders, it's sort of like we have so many of these opportunities that are in like purgatory where it's like we pitched them, they said they liked it, we ended the call, I followed up three times. They aren't really responding. And if they do respond, it's like, give me a week and I'll get back to you. A week passes, they don't get back to me. And it's because, because we haven't like aligned on the like, happy path to receiving value from the product that we're selling. So I'll pause there. That's like one of the two things.
- [65:13]
Jack Altman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the other?
- [65:15]
Sam
The second thing is like a little bit of an urgency driver where if you can create some form of fomo, for lack of a better word, I think that much of sales is psychology. And so for many customers, what I'm about to articulate is true. We certainly never want to say anything that is untrue or misleading. But if we have, you know, we're in the month of July, if we have a goal to onboard three customers to pilots in the month of July, what we articulate to a customer as part of the maybe like first call when we are receiving feedback, like, yeah, this is actually really cool. I'd love to try it. What we say is something like, like, we are onboarding three customers into our pilot program this month. Two of those spots are already spoken for. There is much interest in the third spot. If you would like to move forward with a pilot, if you could let me know, that would be like, really appreciated on my end. But also like, I, I can't guarantee the spot if you don't speak for it today. Yeah, and I think that in that case that's true.
- [66:21]
Jack Altman
Cause you can only onboard so many at this stage.
- [66:23]
Sam
That's exactly right. Yeah. But it does sort of force a decision and potentially drive some urgency. There is like a psychological aspect to this where it's like, oh gosh, two, two thirds of the, the spots are already spoken for. Like, I better speak up to, to like, you know, get this thing that a lot of folks are already incredibly interested.
- [66:42]
Jack Altman
I assume also important in all of this is sort of just like having like a. A willingness to disqualify when you genuinely think that the product is not to help the customer. And I feel like people can feel that, like, if you're like, hey, my goal here is not to sell you something that you don't need or want. My goal is to sell you something that's going to be useful to you for years. And so if I don't think that that's going to be the case, I'm going to stop selling it to you.
- [67:04]
Sam
Man. When you say that, it's interesting where my mind goes, which is something different than what you just said. But, like, I think it is true that, like, growth solves a lot of problems. I think, like, an input to that is something like demand solves a lot of problems. And what you just articulated, I think is a symptom of not enough demand, which is where founders and salespeople are, like, hanging on for dear life. To the, like, one guy that I pitched over the last couple of days because, like, they kind of seemed interested.
- [67:34]
Jack Altman
But if you're like, I've got, like, four more calls I should get to. And, like, I think this is going to be painful. And by the way, I get paid also on you retaining. And so, like, I don't think I want to sell this to you anymore.
- [67:43]
Sam
You can. Parker, I stole this from him. You can sort of swipe left. I've never been on one of the dating apps, but I think Tinder, you sort of like, swipe right if you like them and swipe left if you don't. And so
- [67:58]
Jack Altman
an abundant pipeline allows you to only try to sell the product to people who need it.
- [68:03]
Sam
That's exactly right. And it's not. When I say that it's not like, disrespectful to the customer or being inefficient about not following up. It's actually that, like, like, you are focusing your resources on the people that are truly interested that will receive the most value from the product and not on the, like, person that took a call that was like, said a lot of niceties.
- [68:24]
Jack Altman
Yeah, but.
- [68:25]
Sam
But like, actually probably isn't actually interested. By the way, a lot of it
- [68:28]
Jack Altman
is like a not now. But, you know, let's come back to this.
- [68:30]
Sam
If you're like, oh, we have so many customers.
- [68:32]
Jack Altman
If it's somebody who's like, you know, I am just getting started. I don't really have product market fit yet. I don't have any reps, you know, I'm interested. You might be like, it'd be better, like, sure, if you want to buy it now, but like, it might be better if you bought this in six months once you're going a little bit.
- [68:44]
Sam
We're. We're four months in. Four or five months in. Launched in February and Monaco does an awesome job of continuing to engage with older customers on our behalf. But I cannot tell you. Well, I can tell you that the amount of times where I'm just sitting there and resurrected from what effectively is the dead, a company that we demoed back in February that Monaco sort of re engages with on my behalf, response comes in. I see the response and it's like I'm ready to go. And again, all of this stems from more demos in February. Right. And so I think lots of sort
- [69:24]
Jack Altman
of
- [69:26]
Sam
anecdotes of what a demand rich environment evolves to.
- [69:31]
Jack Altman
Sam, this was awesome. I learned a bunch every time we about talked. Thank you for doing this with me.
- [69:34]
Sam
You are the best. Thank you so much for partnering with me on Monaco and it's just an absolute pleasure to come on the show. So thanks for having me.