20Sales: Inside Figma's $1BN ARR Revenue Machine | Why We Do Not Have Customer Success or SDRs | Why I Do Not Believe in Sales Quotas with Shaunt Voskanian, CRO @ Figma

22:04Harry Stebbings:When we think about kind of teaching them and converting them, I think sales comp is a very hard thing to get right. We've had the CRO from 11 Labs on the show. they have a 20x quota. Is that a new world of PLG? Is that 11 lab specific? And how do you think about the right quota setting? I've got controversial, I would say, opinions on quotas in general. My perspective is quotas are kind of made up. What I mean is, I think there's this kind of prevailing wisdom with quotas that I've seen, especially when you're going into planning and you're trying to map out your year, where you kind of go, okay, how much ARR do I need to generate?

22:40How many people do I have? How much quota do I need to then dish out to feel like I've got enough coverage where if we're trying to add 500 million next year, if I've got 600 million of quota out there, that means even if people end up at 80 % attainment, I'm good. And I just think that's made up. I don't think that has anything to do with how people are actually going to do. The way I think about quota is it's more about philosophy that you're trying to implement around what is the work that needs to be done and how much reward do you want to dish out for that work that needs to be done? I think it generally comes back to that.

23:19And so I don't have a singular philosophy.

23:21Harry Stebbings:Can I tell you, if you don't have quota or don't believe in quota, how do you think about setting urgency, setting incentives? I believe in quotas. We have quotas. What I'm saying is I don't necessarily believe you completely de-risk your year by making sure that you've dished out enough quota to cover your target. I think that's a bit of like a false sense of comfort. What I believe is that with quotas, you want to try to determine what are you trying to accomplish. And the way I would think about it is I don't think there's like a single answer. And I think even at Figma, we've evolved, right?

23:58In the early days of Figma, which may be similar to what's happening at 11 Labs right now, It was, you know, the job was primarily take this product, make your customer really happy, know the product really, really well, support them, and then viral expansion would happen. And frankly, if you think about the job to be done, there is a pretty wide population of people that could likely do it. If they come in and they care about, like, learning and the product, et cetera, that's one thing. And so if you have that business, you have to think about what is the reward for that? What is the population of people that you can do that job?

24:33Harry Stebbings:Is that job not quite easy? You're essentially an order taker. When people are pulling the product out of your hands and desperate to use it, kind of easy, no? I mean, I think there's things about it that are hard. I don't want to say it's easy, but I think the way I think about it more is like, how many people out there could probably do it if we brought them in, trained them, and they had the right personality, they had the willingness to learn? I think about it as you don't need to have 20 years of sales experience to figure out how to do that, even if there's things about it that are challenging.

25:00I don't want to diminish what the job is. But I think in that type of situation, right, you're probably focused more on driving efficiency in the business. Where we are right now in that SLG motion in particular, which is again, mid-market enterprise strat, what we're asking people to do, the stuff you just heard me get so warm and fuzzy about when I heard customers talk about in terms of bringing insights and building champions, that is strategic work. You need people who can really understand how businesses operate, who really understand not only the product, but the landscape that we're operating in, who are able to PG and build these relationships, bring these insights, manage complex multi-stakeholder deals.

25:39That is hard work. And it's very, very strategic work. So our philosophy now at Figma is kind of the opposite, which is we want to have really aggressive as in like relatively easy quotas compared to what's out there in industry standard because the work is hard and it's strategic. And we want to really reward people that are doing that great work. And we also realize the population of people that are capable of doing it is smaller, right? They need more experience. They need certain qualities and attributes. So again, I think what 11 Labs is doing is probably perfect for them. I'm in the opposite side of the spectrum right now where it's like, I want people to feel like Figma is a place where you can come in, you can do this hard strategic work that's really driving value for your customers.

26:23and then you can be outwardly rewarded by it. And so our, you know, an average enterprise rep here might have three to 4X their OTE for a quota. And we're happy with that.

26:34Harry Stebbings:You can have someone who's sold that size of contract before or who's worked in or around the industry problem area that you solve, but you can only have one. Which one do you have and why? If those are the two options to choose from, I would take the person with the experience doing the deal because I think the industry experience you can teach to the person who's got the right willingness to learn and the curiosity. And obviously, you need to make sure you have that in a person and you test for it. I'm kind of making a bit of an assumption that with those two choices, the person who's done the really big deal hasn't just got a bluebird, right?

27:09That they've managed multi-stakeholder, long sales cycles, have to build a lot of champions, have to get to EBs. They're likely leveraging something like Calm and they're using Medic and they're familiar with these concepts. There's a lot more confidence that I think needs to be built over time for people to be really good at that. And I think generally speaking, smart people can learn industries and landscapes in a shorter period of time. So if those are my two only choices, I would probably take the person who's got the deal experience.

27:35Harry Stebbings:When we're running a process now for hiring people, how has what you looked for in sales reps changed over time? I don't know that it's changed that much, to be honest with you. I mean, the first thing there is, I think, what you see on paper. and I think that matters. And I think increasingly I've become more opinionated on what I'm looking for there and what I'm not. I have to admit some people don't agree with this. I have usually a pretty visceral reaction to people who are super jumpy, you know, in terms of a resume. And when we say super jumpy, I know it sounds awful, but this is like one year, one year, one year.

28:10Harry Stebbings:Exactly, like 12 months here, 18 months here, 12 months there. There's so many reasons why people would encourage me to have more of an open mind for it. And I get all of that, But generally speaking, when you're doing this at scale, I don't know. I think it's total bullshit. If you've done it four times. Right. It's saying something. Yeah. Once it could be culture, it could be family, it could be whatever. But four times. Yeah. So, I mean, look, then when you're talking to someone, it's a lot of the obvious things, right? Can you learn from them that they have the grit, that they are willing to persevere?

28:42That's a really important one for me. How do you tell? Oh God, it's so hard. I don't know. It's really hard. I mean, you know, I think like what Dan will tell you and and he I think he mentioned it when he spoke to you is like he really wants to get like the full history of the person kind of going back to school days and how they made their decisions. I will do that from time to time. I don't always do it. Frankly, the thing that tells me the most on that front is the resume. You know, looking at the places they were and having a sense of like the arcs of those places when they were there. Is this someone who was just chasing something that was easy?

29:19Or were they really actually sticking with something and making success out of something that wasn't successful? I think that's a big part of it. you know even you can create a process that forces perseverance through it in terms of an interview process so we always make people do you know a challenge or an exercise at the end that requires some some heavy lifting in terms of like learning a bit about our business but also showing off your you know basic sales skills run discovery so i think that's a way to do it too but it is hard

29:48Harry Stebbings:it's hard what is what is the challenge your exercise is the take-home assignment it's a take-home It's some assignment. We've evolved it over time, but it's kind of a combination of disco, demo. You know, it's basically like we want to give people a use case, you know, a case study. You're going to go pitch to this customer. Here is some information about them. Learn about them and come in prepared to lead a conversation. Do some discovery and then, you know, turn around and get in the product a little bit and show us a quick workflow that you think would be interesting. Personally, I'm much more interested in how they do, frankly, on the discovery side of that, because I think, you know, it's probably a little bit unfair to expect someone to be doing this amazing demo of your product with just a few days of playing around with it.

30:31But I do think, actually, the product piece we've kept in there, because it does show an element of perseverance. If someone is actually willing to spend the time to learn a little bit of it, I think it's telling. and then the way they approach the discovery part, I think tells a lot around, you know, their ability to actually be curious and do all of those things.

30:50Harry Stebbings:Okay, so we're really impressed with this candidate, me and you, and we're thinking, great, we should hire them. And we moved to offer stage. Is there anything in the offer stage that gives you green lights or red lights around a potential sales hire? One of the things that I always try to do is backchannel. I think that's a little bit outside of the question you're asking, But I think getting signals outside of the process in some ways, I think, are like the most valuable insights that you can get on someone. I think on the offer stage itself, look, you have some people who are going to naturally negotiate.

31:23You're going to have people who are not. I don't necessarily make strong judgments there because I actually think oftentimes the person who's not negotiating is not negotiating at the end because the hiring manager, the recruiter have done a good job of positioning ourselves and our offer in a way that makes them really just happy to jump in and take it. But the biggest thing I'm looking for at that point is someone's got to be all in. Like they have to be really excited to come on board. And look, I understand people have choice and I fully respect going through process with multiple companies.

31:56But if at the end of a process, you know, with Figma, spending a couple of weeks doing all this work, if you're not like, all right, I'm in, I want to do this, it tends to be a little bit of a yellow flag for me. If they're actively trying to pit you against another company, I just get nervous because we've seen some people who we've hired like that. And then, you know, as soon as things are tough or, you know, they didn't have the initial success they expected or that other company that maybe they didn't tell you, but they're actually more excited about came back with a better offer or a different offer, they leave.

32:32And so do all the investigation you want to do during the process. But then by the end, like both sides should feel like they're all in on this candidate.

32:40Harry Stebbings:What do you do when you have to ramp a sales team hiring plan fast? Is it better to fill seats and bluntly get rid fast and be quick with decisions? Or is it better to go slow and miss hiring plan? I think it's between those two choices, I would prefer to go slow and risk potentially missing the hiring plan. Because if you make that wrong hire, it doesn't matter how fast you move, you've cost yourself time, in my opinion. And look, it's a balance. But look, at the end of the day, if someone comes to me and they're like, hey, I know I've been sitting on this open headcount for three months. I have someone.

33:15I'm not that excited about them. I think they could maybe grow into like a solid B player. I'm never going to say hire that person. I'm just not going to do it, even if it risks the hiring plan.

33:25Harry Stebbings:I met a founder yesterday and they were increasing their sales team by 200 reps in the next 12 months. And I was just like, honestly, how many do you think will be good? And he was like, probably 20. Yeah, I think it's slightly different than resigning yourself to hiring that BRC player. But I think it's facing the reality that you can build the best process. You can have the best instinct. And I still come back to the little joke I made earlier, which is like really figuring out if someone's great in an interview process is actually freaking hard. You have to realize that only part of the job is getting the person in.

33:58That's when it actually, it really starts where you have to figure out, do you have someone who's going to be able to grow and be successful? Or did you make a wrong hire? And do you have to do something about it? And I also think that it's not always as simple as right hire, wrong hire. I actually think most people have the potential in them. Some don't. And you might make some mishires, right? But a lot of people, I think, have potential. And there's so many factors that actually contribute to are they going to be successful or not? You know, how great is their leader? How great is the enablement?

34:35How much of a chance did you actually give them? I've got people who've gone on plan. The person I'm thinking of actually from my last company went on a performance plan and was really struggling. But we kept looking at like all of their inputs. There were so many great things that they were doing. and we said, let's focus on just coaching around the areas that are gaps. And came off of it, I'm long gone. That person is still there, multiple promotions, one of their most successful reps. So I actually think that it's not as simple as, did you hire the right person or the wrong person? But did you put them in an environment where they can succeed?

35:08And are you actually holding them accountable to the right things?

35:11Harry Stebbings:Can I ask you, how big is your sales team today? We're probably pushing 500 in my whole org. That's not just sales quota carriers, But if you include some of the supporting resources, et cetera, yeah. Will sales teams be larger or smaller in the future? Is DLM pushing you to be more efficient? No, I think we're kind of going the opposite. Truly, we talked a lot about efficiency in our early days. And I think now, like, how much more efficient can you get, right? You've got a half million customers you're trying to support with, I don't know, 300 quarterly carrying reps, whatever the number is, like, you're pretty freaking efficient already.

35:46So I think this might be like a unique Figma thing that for us, I'm pushing and Dylan is on board with more headcount in sales to do more of the strategic work with customers that we really are seeing great results from. I think we're going to continue investing in sales headcount.

36:03Harry Stebbings:Going back to the hiring process, when you've made a mishire, what did you not see that you wish you'd seen? like for me one is like when i'm constantly pushed by the candidate on role and they want an increased title and i always push it to the back i'm like well they're brilliant so of course they want to be a x no no it's always the problem and it always ends badly what's yours i think it's anything like that that suggests mercenary versus missionary and look we're all in sales like there's little mercenary in all of us. And I get it that in some ways where sales, this is kind of what the profession calls for.

36:39But it's some of my best people over the years where money wasn't the first thing that they were thinking about. Now, career growth, learning and development, different. That's very, very different to me. But I think the best people actually kind of know that if you're prioritizing those things, the money comes. And I think, in fact, some of the people who've been the best earners that I've been around in past 10 years, they haven't been the ones that were focused on, I got to maximize my W-2. And in fact, I've seen people who, when they're chasing that, it goes the other direction. So that probably is my answer.

37:15I think there needs to be a passion for growth, for career acceleration, for learning development, for collaboration, from people who want to just get better. The growth mindset, I think, is the biggest thing. And so if people are too focused on things that aren't suggestive of growth and is more focused on the individual and this like point in time thing,

37:37Harry Stebbings:that's a yellow flag for me. So we make this hire and it's time for them to ramp. And I'm a founder. You're an angel investor in my company. I'm sorry, you've just probably burnt your money. But go with me on this journey. How do I ramp new reps effectively? Take me into an enterprise rep and give me their onboarding. I think for an enterprise rep, one of the things we want to do is kind of as quickly as possible, even before we teach them all the product stuff and the sales skills, which hopefully they're bringing some with them, we kind of want to get them into their account and their territory.

38:11First thing, kind of throw them into the fire on, you know, you've got one or two accounts and these are accounts that are spending a lot. There's so much work to be done. before you came in, likely there was another rep that was working on it or the manager or director is talking to them. Let's get you engaged and let's just get you having, building relationships and learning that business. And then I would say after a couple of weeks, like they've, you know, they've gone through, they've got their laptop, they understand what account they have. They've maybe been on a few calls where they've listened in.

38:42Now we want to get them into like a proper onboarding. And the way we think about that is, what are the things that this rep needs to know to be really good at their job? A strat rep, in this example, they better understand the landscape really well. So they need to know the product, obviously, in our platform, but even more so, what is happening in tech around our ecosystem?

39:05Harry Stebbings:Do you create a playbook for them on that? Is it like, here's a file of facts, go learn it. This is... To be honest with you, we're rebuilding this right now. What we're talking about right now, we're rolling out. We actually did this week, we're doing our soft launch of the new version of it. But that is what we are striving toward. It's very much like we're also moving to classroom style in person. And in the COVID days, we kind of got away from that. But we're going back to classroom style. We're going back to in person. We're bringing in the thought leaders across the organization, across these different pillars.

39:36And absolutely, we're going to educate them on this is what's happening in the tech ecosystem. These are the different players that your customers are going to be thinking about potentially using. Here's our positioning in that conversation. Here's what our best customers are doing. Here are the things you need to understand about the product. And then of course, here's our sales process. They need to understand our sales process beginning to end, all of the resources that are available to them along the way, all of the things that we're going to do to help them, pipeline reviews, forecast calls, the operating rhythm that we built here.

40:09So it's taking them through all of those things. Again, once they've got a little bit of footing underneath them, and then it's ongoing enablement. It's something new happened in the market. How do we make sure the whole team is educated on it? So we have recurring enablement standups that we do where it's like, okay, something new happened, whether it's a product launch on our side or something launched in the ecosystem that we think is important to keep people updated on.

40:32Harry Stebbings:What sales communications platform are you on? When you think about you as a team and there's an update in the market, is it Slack? Is it email? How do you ensure synchronicity of knowledge across teams? I think, honestly, we have work to do there. I think if you talk to our reps, it's one of the things I'd complain about. If I'm being completely honest, we have improvement to do there because we kind of use it all. You know, we have our sales enablement platform. Then, of course, we have Slack and our Slack is as noisy as, you know, a lot of the other companies that get to our scale. You know, we are doing things in person.

41:05We are doing things on Zoom. We have content everywhere. And again, we have so many customer stories that they end up in multiple systems. And of course, we have, I didn't even mention our CRM, that I think we have more work to do to make searchability better across all of these different places. Or to just say, look, we're going to take a different approach and we're going to have everything go to one place and have a singular approach. So I'm being honest, we don't have that solved yet.

41:33Harry Stebbings:How do you think about pushing the boundaries of sales technology adoption within the team? Like, again, Jason's one of my best buddies. He is so versed on qualified, momentum, artisan, all the different providers. Do you worry that you're too focused on execution, that you don't pull your head up enough to invest in the future of sales tools? I do worry that, if I'm being honest. Like, that is not something that has been top of mind for me historically. I've been much more focused on the inputs. Like what are we doing every single day, getting better ourselves, the conversations we're having with our customers.

42:11So to your point, just in these last few weeks and months, I've been much more passionate about where can we invest more in either agentic solutions or exciting tech that can make some of this stuff easier. It just comes back to, I want to make the job of our reps easier. It's very clear where they're really happy and where there's frustrations. I think every company you're going to have both. And I think the frustrations on our side right now would be from the fact that there's a lot on their plates. And I think if we can leverage some of these new technologies to remove some of the friction on the duplication of data entry and those types of things, I think it's not a hard thing to do that will make a meaningful impact.

42:52Harry Stebbings:I don't mean this badly. Do you think you and the team are equipped to train agents in the way that they're needed to be trained? Again, I go back to Jason. Jason is so good now at training agents and he assumes that everyone else is. I don't know many sales reps that are that versed in how to train the next generation of sales agents. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know that we are. We will need to explore and figure out if we're capable. And if not, we're going to have to learn how to bring in more resources and knowledge on that subject. It's certainly not something that I'm an expert at personally.

43:25Harry Stebbings:This is why consulting businesses will do very well in the next few years, my friend. Seriously, implementation and adoption, I think, will be one of the biggest things that you can learn and improve on as a company. Cass, you mentioned sales performance and hot takes there. What are the hot takes around sales performance? I'd love to hear those. Probably my hottest take on sales performance, which is not a new thing. I've said this for a very long time, is I kind of don't care if you as a rep hit your quota or not. And what I mean by that is, first and foremost, similar to the discussion we're having before, I've been in situations consistently where we're doing our best to set a quota based on that philosophy, right?

44:02I just shared our philosophy right now is to try to do aggressive ones, really reward people. I've been in other situations where we're focused a little bit more on efficiency based on the job to be done. Whatever the philosophy is, I've been in situations multiple times in my career where the year starts going and you realize you didn't actually get it right. And that could be in either direction, right? You set them too high. Oftentimes you set them too low, whatever, compared to what you expected. I think of quota as both something that's more systemic than something that is entirely on the individual.

44:35Also, the other reasons for this is I just think it's too much of a lagging indicator. And I think what my fear is it creates lazy leadership if we're performance managing based on the idea that someone got to their number or didn't get to the number at the end of a month, quarter or year. If you're a strat rep, you know, we don't really know how to judge you until the year is over. Right. If you have one account and you're building towards this big renewal at the end of the year from a quarter perspective.

45:03Harry Stebbings:So then how do we judge people? If it's not unquoted, how do we judge them? I am obsessed with behaviors and competencies as the core facets of a performance framework. Okay, but then how do we make that specific behaviors and competencies? You write it out. So we have written out, and by the way, it's probably, if I'm being honest, maybe too detailed. But one of the first things that we did is we wrote out a performance framework and we said, by the way, quota is part of it, right? There's a results category and I'm not dismissing quota entirely, but there's a results bucket and that's just one bucket.

45:38And that is not just results from a quota perspective, it's PG, it's all the success metrics that we are tracking and then behaviors. And we documented what does that mean? And then competencies, we documented all of the competencies that we actually care about.

45:53Harry Stebbings:Can we just dig in on what is behaviors and competencies though? Because if you have like curious and ambitious, Dude, I can be curious and ambitious and sign no contracts. Yeah, well, I mean, I think the behaviors one is like probably a little bit simpler and straightforward. It's how are you showing up? Are you collaborative? Are you lone wolfing it, just looking out for yourself? Are you collaborating with your teammates? Do you have a growth mindset? Are you someone who's, you know, negative constantly in the office and impacting the people around you? I mean, there's like some basic things there.

46:21Competencies, which I think are like the most critical. Those are, hey, if these are the things that we've defined as important for you to be good at your job day to day, what are they? So that's the ability to do PG effectively. That's the ability to do discovery effectively when you're talking to a customer. The ability to actually manage your pipeline effectively, you know, leveraging our medic framework. When you're doing discovery, we teach calm. We call it Figma value selling. But are you leveraging our methodology when you're doing discovery? So it's all of those details. And then back to just quickly the point around the hot take on quota, where I come back to is if someone says, hey, this person is not doing well.

47:03OK, the first thing I'll ask is why. And if they say, well, they didn't hit their quota, I'll immediately go, OK, well, let's talk about why they didn't. And let's get into those competencies and let's get into those behaviors. And if someone says, well, actually, this person's like totally busting their butt and they're grinding. They've got amazing work ethic. They've got a great attitude. Like every day they're trying to get a little bit better. And oh, by the way, their PG is really good. It's just taking some time. It's not translating. When I listen to their calls, they're executing calls really, really well.

47:38And pipeline is being developed. It just hasn't translated to their number yet. my argument is if you're going to move that person out of the business, what are you hoping to get to take that person's place?

47:50Harry Stebbings:I get you. If you're doing PG really well and you're doing qualification really well and you're showing up to the calls, you will convert. I agree with the exception of what if we got it wrong? What if we got the quota wrong? What if we set it too high? And that happens. It truly does. And I agree with you, Harry, but we're trying to manage things at scale. And what I don't want is to create a culture of lazy leadership. I want leaders to be in the details. I want leaders to not be talking by, well, I got to move this person out because they didn't hit their quota. I want them to say it's because this person isn't showing up right.

48:27They're not working hard. They're not capable of translating our enablement into conversation because that tells me the leader is in the boat with the rep. They're not lagging indicators. They're more real time.

48:39Harry Stebbings:I'm a lone wolf, but I make a lot of money and I close and I'm not bad for the culture, but I'm not collaborative and I'm not a team player. You got a problem with me? I think that there's a place for that, honestly. And I know some great reps who you would probably define that way. And actually, when you talk to them about it, they don't even want it. It's not like they're proud of being a lone wolf. It's just that this is how they're wired. And, you know, like the job means something different for everyone. So I don't really have a problem with it. And I think I've actually seen people who are categorized that way where once you talk to them and you say, hey, buddy, like you're great.

49:15But you know that like some people are defining you as a lone wolf. Is that how you want to be known? And they go, oh, shit. No, I don't even know. That's what people thought of me. Thank you for the coaching. And there's others who they're like, you know what? I'm going to be a lone wolf. But I promise I'm not going to poison any wells. I'm not aspiring to be a leader. I just want to like do my thing, make money and be successful. And I think that's also perfectly OK, as long as it's not negatively impacting others.

49:42Harry Stebbings:That's one thing that I've really learned. I've allowed bad apples to persist because they've made money and I've forgotten how damaging it is to the rest of the apples. That is a different situation. That is a problem. And I think you can't move fast enough in those situations. And we've seen them. We've had those experiences. Multiple companies I've been at. You can never move fast enough, is my opinion. I will say sometimes I don't know that they know. Even in those situations, starting with giving feedback and coaching, I think sometimes you'll find that people are like, oh, wow, I didn't realize I was coming across that way.

50:17Other times it's very apparent and it is more malicious. So I still feel like you give the feedback, you give the coaching, but then it's still persisting. You have to make a move.

50:26Harry Stebbings:We were kind of aligned, actually, in what we were saying around quota. And you said, well, sometimes you've just set the wrong quota. If you're advising another sales leader or me, a founder of an early stage company around how to set quotas effectively, pretty hard to do, thumb in the air. I think it could be this. What would your advice or lessons be around effective quota setting? I think it's start with what are you trying to accomplish in what you're trying to do with your sales team? And be really honest about where your business is right now. And is the market pulling you? Are you pulling the market?

51:00I think it starts with those things. And if where you're ending up is, hey, we have an opportunity, we love what we're doing, but we have to push it to the market. And we have to do that in a very proactive, strategic, outbound way. And we need X type of people to do that. Then index towards giving people more favorable quotas to entice great people to come in and do that kind of hard work. And you're going to reap the benefits of it. If you're in a position where the market's moving so fast and there's so much market pull and you're just trying to figure out how to keep up with it and its job is more transactional at the time, then you probably want to build in some safety nets and focus more on the efficiency pendulum.

51:46But I think it starts with what are you trying to solve for?

51:48Harry Stebbings:How do you determine when enough is enough and when the rep's not performing? Is it better to fire fast and make the decision or is it actually better to give people more time? I think it depends on where their challenges are. And again, I am generally pretty patient. If you tell me someone's working really hard and they're improving and they have a growth mindset and the tools are there, it's just not quite coming together yet. I generally tend to be more patient because again, I'm always thinking about at scale, I need hundreds of people, right? Like what is the alternative to this person who's busting their butt and getting better every day and has the desire to win and seems to have, you know, the aptitude and it's just taking time.

52:33You know, like you said, if you hire 200 people, maybe 40 of them are good. Like there is, it's hard to find great people. And I think those characteristics are really fundamental in what great people look like. If the problems are different than that, if they're like, we talked about their bad seeds or they're not working hard, you know, they're complaining, those types of things, then I think you have to move much faster. I have like super high bar in patience for the people that are doing all the right things, but it's not clicking yet. And I have a very low bar for the people who are not exhibiting the will, because that's just so, I feel like it's so in our individual control.

53:08You might not be able to control the quota. You might not be able to control, did we give you the right enablement or not? But you can control your attitude and how you show up every day. And if that is not there, I have no patience.

53:19Harry Stebbings:Final one for you, dude, before we do a quick fire. I believe in verticalized sales teams a lot. I think specialization and focus drives efficiency and outcomes. What would be your biggest advice to founders or sales leaders on when and how to verticalize sales teams effectively? I think focus and specialization, no question, as early as possible, in my opinion. Now, if we're talking about verticalization, that like by definition, peeling off specific industries and focusing people in a subset of types of customers, I think that is, again, highly dependent on the product, the platform that you're selling.

53:55So I can tell you at Figma, we, to this day, have not actually done any type of industry-based teams. But what we have done is we thought about sales motions, personas that we're selling to and creating, in some cases, it's been trial and error, but some overlay teams. You may know we acquired a company called Weavey not that long ago. and the way we're going to market with that product right now is in a little bit more of like an overlay motion. And what we're coming back to is like, what are you asking one person to do? And is it too much? You have to just make the call. At the point where it's too much for one person, you have to think about how do you create more specialization.

54:35And that might be segmentation, it might be verticalization, it might be overlay, you name it. But that's where I always come back to is like, are we asking reps to do too much? And too much means understand the product, the vision, the landscape, PG, managed deals, et cetera. You know, one of the equations will be if we're then asking them to go master a new persona or a different type of motion, that might be too much. But I think it depends on each organization.

55:02Harry Stebbings:Dude, we're going to do a quick fire. I say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Okay. Which sales org other than your own do you most respect and why? Datadog. I mean, I did work there, so I maybe cheated a little bit, but they have been able to keep great people there for years and years and years. They really believe in promoting from within. And they're another one of those few companies where they've kind of mastered all the segments, SDR, to very, very strategic. What is an outdated sales tactic no longer is relevant? Sending gifts. Sending gifts.

55:37Harry Stebbings:Yeah. You don't think that still plays? I mean, I've never understood it, to be honest with you. I think I have like a pile of gifts that are sitting in some office in San Francisco that I don't occupy right now for me. But like, it just feels so transparent to me. It's called a bribe. Yeah. Like I don't, it just feels like you to me. I don't get it. Could it work? Maybe. It doesn't feel right to me. Are remote sales teams dead? Are they dead? No. Are they harder? I think so. It just puts a lot more pressure on the system, I think, if it's fully remote. But are they dead? I don't think so. I honestly think like, if you go completely the other direction, I think you're probably keeping yourself from being able to hire some really talented people that are, you know, they've moved to cities where they're not going to have families now.

56:23They're not going to go to New York. They're not going to go somewhere else. Like, so I do think it puts more pressure on leadership for sure. I don't think it's dead or you're missing out on some real talent.

56:32Harry Stebbings:What's your biggest regret and why that? I try to not live with a lot of regrets. I will say going back to my early days at Figma, I feel like I had it in my head that like I really wanted to come in and not be the guy who's just like coming in hot, trying to like change something I didn't know anything about. And so I probably went maybe too much the other direction in terms of like too much time kind of like observing, trying to understand the culture that existed. And that's not to say we didn't start implementing some things quickly, but I think I maybe overdid that. it's not a regret but I think looking back on it I think it's something that I maybe would have approached slightly differently final one I like optimism I'm a positive dude what are you most excited for in the next 10 years personally or or in it can be anything so like for me mom's got out mass I'm very excited about drug discovery for kind of rare diseases or kind of maybe chronic illnesses I think that's super exciting well we could take this offline but I've had health things surrounding me and I feel very similarly.

57:39I'm always, you know, I don't know if it's real or fake, but I'm always reading stuff about the advances that are happening with AI medicine. I'm very optimistic that that's one of the really good things that's going to come out of this new wave of technology. So I've got kids, they're nine and seven. I feel like I've got maybe five years where I'm still, and their mom are still like the most important people in their lives. I really, really want to do my best to enjoy that and just be in it with them. So that I'm interested in obviously like continuing to grow this team. And I'm really excited about the future and just how the landscape is evolving and where we're positioned in it.

58:23So there's a lot of things I'm really excited about.

58:25Harry Stebbings:It's fascinating. By the time your kids are 18, they've spent 92 % of the time they will have. I know. I've seen that. It's appalling, isn't it? It hurts me. And it's really scary. And I'm always feel like I'm trying to be so in it. And I think I am, but then I'm always asking myself if I could have done better. And I think that just comes with the territory. You know what? The older I get, the more I think we need to forgive our parents for that, Aris. Oh my gosh. No one really knows what they're doing. Oh my gosh. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And my parents, you know, we're trying to make ends meet.

58:59And to their credit, I look back at my childhood and I thought, It was wonderful, you know, and there was plenty of drama mixed in, but they did the best that they could. And that's all you can ask for.

59:12Harry Stebbings:Dude, thank you so much for being so brilliant. Thank you so much for putting up with my inquisitive questions and meandering thoughts. Dude, you're amazing. The curiosity is incredible and just a privilege to be on the show, to get to meet you, to, you know, be amongst all of the other really brilliant people that you've had the chance to speak to. So thank you. But before we leave you today, a quick shout out to a company I've been genuinely blown away by and have been tracking closely, ROX. I've been watching this team closely and the speed they're operating at and the level of applied AI talent they've assembled, it's honestly remarkable.

59:46Harry Stebbings:ROX is pioneering revenue agents for the global 2000, plugged into your data warehouse and CRM and delivering board level ROI in just 90 days. These sales and revenue agents handle the end-to-end sales process for large enterprises, from research prep to deal risk, outreach, and opportunity management, so sellers spend more time with customers and less time in tools. This isn't another productivity app. Christ, we've all had enough of those. ROX gives reps a single interface on top of their GTM stack, powered by a knowledge graph across your internal and external data. So if you want to boost AE productivity, increase revenue per rep, and consolidate your stack, try ROX at rox.com slash sign up.

1:00:29Harry Stebbings:And speaking of great companies, we have to talk about Monaco. For years, I've watched some of the best founders and early go-to-market teams struggle with sales. Too many CRMs, too many point solutions, too much manual work. Well, that changes with Monaco. Monaco replaces your legacy CRM and fragmented sales stack with a single AI native platform. Monaco's agents automatically build and score your entire TAM, layer in real-time signals, create and run outbound sequences, schedule calls, and record and transcribe meetings. Your pipeline practically manages itself. Monaco creates reminders, drafts, follow-up emails for you, and keeps deals moving forward.

1:01:09Harry Stebbings:So that means more meetings, higher conversion rates, and faster revenue growth. If you're an early-stage startup, tired of duct-taping sales tools together and looking to grow revenue faster, check out Monaco at monaco.com. While Monaco runs your sales pipeline, Framer runs your website. A website should help your business grow, not slow it down. If updates to your.com feel harder than they should, Framer is the shortcut you've been looking for. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder that works like your team's favorite design tool, and it's used by companies like Perplexity, Miro, Mixpanel to move faster.

1:01:46Harry Stebbings:Designers and marketers can fully own the site with real-time collaboration, a robust CMS built for SEO, and advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing, so you're not just shipping pages, but you're maximizing what works. And when you're ready to ship, changes go live in seconds with one click, publish, without relying on engineering. Plus, Framer is built for scale, with premium hosting, enterprise-grade security, and 99.99 % uptime SLAs, whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com. Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site fast.

1:02:27Harry Stebbings:Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a Framer specialist, or get started building for free today at framer.com slash 20VC for 30 % off, 30 % off a Framer Pro Annual Plan. That's framer.com slash 20VC for 30 % off. Framer.com slash 20VC. Rules and restrictions may apply.