Sales Millionaires Are Back… Wasn't AI Supposed to Destroy This Job?!

0:00What is happening right now, at least in go-to-market and specifically in sales, is crazier than I've ever imagined was possible. Asad is the CEO of a premium sales talent sourcing agency and he can't believe what he's seeing. The interesting thing is that the standard deviation is way higher this year, meaning that the winners are going to be winning more. Of course, AJ is the CEO of Quotapath and he has hard data on sales compensation across more than 1 ,400 companies. So he's able to bring context on some of the wild trends we're seeing in go-to-market teams today. Enterprise account executives now get paid$200 ,000 salaries,$200 ,000 variable comp plans, up to equity at Sino.

0:41And this might all sound like a boom, but it's far more complicated than that. So in today's episode, who's losing to make room for all these winners? What this market means for your sales team and where sales salaries are headed next. Welcome to Topline. Hey, everybody. It's Sam Jacobs. I'm the CEO of Pavilion. I'm joined by my incredible co-host, two amazing men, Asad Zaman, the CEO of Sales Talent Agency, and AJ Bruno, the CEO of Quotapath, the leader in incentive compensation management with their new agentic companion atlas that can answer any questions, build any comp plan, do anything you need, all in a matter of seconds.

1:19This is the new Quotapath. This is the future of GoToMarket. Did you paint us something for this? That was really, really good. That was off the top of your head, Sam. I am super impressed. That was off the top of my head. Listen, I'm here to support you. I am a shareholder. I am, you know, a small little shareholder, off of the bigger shareholder. Well, the big news is Otzid and I are going to be speaking at GTM all on benchmarking and data. That's for gold, right? We're doing it for Pavilion Gold. And then the day before that, we're going to do live top-line recording either at the Glass House or we're going to find a podcast studio and we can grab a bunch of amazing people and start testing what it would be like to all be in this game.

2:03And Asid will be alive in the flesh, right? He's a real human being. So he'll be there. Even Neil is coming. If it's an event designed to promote Asid's brand, I think he will actually be there. Unlike my wedding. Because I don't know. Because I don't get to that. You want to lock the key to Asid showing up. He said, do things that feed the ego. And we have a fun episode today. We don't have a guest after some time. And so we are going to be talking about three different topics. Each of us have a topic and we're going to share some data, share some insights and then chit chat. And I want to start with the talent market.

2:41I've been dying to talk to you guys about this because it's absolutely crazy. So let me share some data. So right now, if you look back to when Zerp happened, hiring was really hard. We all had felt it. We'd spoken about it. We'd looked at a bunch of the data. It was really hard. The market was hot. Companies were growing aggressively. They were raising money very easily, investing that in growth. Growth required people. The demand for people was skyrocketing. And because people are a thing that you can't increase the supply of very easily in the short term, you saw downstream implications like compensation going up, offer acceptance going down, etc.

3:23etc. And that was the wildest market we'd ever seen. This is multiples beyond that. What is happening right now, at least in go-to-market and specifically in sales, is crazier than I've ever imagined was possible. So I was feeling it for some time where it felt like hiring account executives, especially at the mid-market and enterprise level, felt impossible for some companies. And just absolutely crazy. And so we started digging into trying to figure out like what's actually happening here. Threatively, it made sense where year three of this AI build out last year, about a year and a half ago, a number of companies hit escape velocity.

4:07And they started hiring lots of people. The other part of this that's interesting is now a lot of these companies are in office and are in specific cities. San Francisco is the number one hub for AI companies, New York is number two. I think between the two of them, there's 50 or 60 % of all venture dollars into AI companies are in these two cities. And so they're doing a lot of their hiring over there. And so if all these companies are there in these finite talent pools, then what's probably happening is that those talent pools are getting depleted. So we went and looked into this. In New York and San Francisco, if you combine them, people that are in sales that work in software at companies that would be considered startups or growth stage companies so up till 500 employees there's 38 000 of them in the last two years half of them have taken a new job in the last 12 months 25 of them have taken a new job if you click in now this is not the biggest numbers you actually can click in and see okay what's left here.

5:13And what is left are if you start filtering for 10 years, so people that are very jumpy, if you tape them out, you're left with almost nothing. And so San Francisco and New York really are extremely saturated from a talent market perspective, which is now leading to a few things. Compensation has skyrocketed. Enterprise account executives now get paid$200 ,000 salaries, $200 ,000 variable comp plans, up to half a million dollars in equity at sign-on. That used to be $150 ,000 to$175 ,000 at the top end, just like a year and a bit at all. So it's moved significantly. Offer acceptance is down. So 45 % offer acceptance if you're like a top AI company.

5:59Top, top, top. And AJ shared some interesting data. I think he has more on this as well. But quota attainment seems to be going up. And what does that mean? Number one thing that matters for salespeople is compensation. So if they're making good money, they're probably not likely to want to move again, right? That's, I have a good job, so I don't want to move. And so now when you look at where we are in AI, you've got all these AI companies that are, there's more of them hitting escape velocity, and the ones that did are growing even faster. And so they need to hire more and more where they want to find people.

6:33And I think this hiring problem is going to become a real significant blocker for people. And we'll see crazy and crazier things. Like I wouldn't be surprised if Enterprise AECOM gets to$250 ,000 as a salary and$250 ,000 as a variable very soon. So that's the talent market. That is what is happening right now. Pots. The first thing that comes to mind is like the talent market for engineers in 21 and 22. too like a lot of the stats that you're citing asid are seem very zirp days for engineers where we were just fighting over it and then i mean this is still true for probably ai engineers but you never hear about that for sales and especially when we're talking about a market that's supposedly really challenging for talent more than generally it's fascinating i think that the one that i would love to double click into and i don't know if you have more detail on this is the 45 % acceptance rate of like, is that frontier model companies that are trying to hire sales talent?

7:36Yeah, if you're like a, I would say if you're the tail one application layer, that's what you're wrestling with right now. Is this like Google and Apple fighting over engineers back in like the early 2000s and like having cease and desist? Is that where we think? It's pretty aggressive right now. Like it is, it's, there's a lot of conversations where I'm having with companies where founders are like, I went from like 1 million to 30 million in a year. Like, why is it hard for me to hire? Like, what's harder than this? And then there's companies that have gone from like 2 million to 100 million in like two years.

8:08And they're like, I thought I'd be able to attract people. They don't even want to talk to us right now. And it is - Where are they trying to recruit from? Like if you're - The thing about mid-market and enterprises, you kind of need people that have certain like relevant experience. So they have to work at companies that are at that stage in their journey, because sales at an enterprise level company is very different to at a growth stage or a startup company. Sales as a craft is just different when you have a brand behind you versus when you don't, when you have infrastructure built out versus when you don't.

8:41And so they need to hire from this like limited talent pool of people that have done similar jobs in and around that stage of business. Similar jobs could be, you could hire a mid-market person into enterprise. you could hire an enterprise person into a strategic role, but you're not going to be that much more flexible than that. I think it's exciting. This is great, in my opinion. Quot attainment's up. We talk about bubbles. The point of a bubble is that asset valuation is disconnected from economic reality, right? Basically. Maybe you make the argument somewhere structurally, well, this is different because they're financing these data center buildouts, It's like the compute CapEx investment is a debt finance thing, and therefore it's not as unstable ground as it would be if Google and all these big companies were financing it from cash flows.

9:35That's the way we would know it was really real. But putting that aside, all of this gives me a lot of optimism. You know, there's all these reports that AI is supposed to be taking all our jobs. And of course, we have Amanda on all the time talking about superhumans and the role that they can play in sales. And I'm sure they can play a huge role in sales. I'm very sure of that. But at the same time, it's fantastic to see that there's demand for great talent. But it's not directly related, and it's not my main tidbit, but my main tidbit isn't really a fact-based tidbit. It's really just a conversation about a debate on action.

10:14The outro moment. Right, exactly. But let me read you this, because it's related. There's just all this fear about AI replacing salespeople, AI replacing go-to-market leaders, AI replacing all of our jobs. employment since the launch of chat gpt the philippines offshore industry eight percent of the country's gdp has grown much bigger employment and it and business outsourcing is up 20 percent to 1.9 million workers and industry revenue is up 30 percent to 42 billion yeah ai is helping offshore workers in the philippines do new more complex jobs they're picking up work training ai models or supervising ai agents hospitals in america are increasingly outsourcing the checking of insurance eligibility and filing of medical records to Filipinos packing AI tools.

11:02I just think, you know, it's Jevin's paradox. It is what happens with every new piece of technology. Everybody thinks the technology is going to wipe everybody out and instead the economy adapts. And I think it's really exciting. So I don't think those things are directly related, but I think in a way, like it is connected because there's this conversation around how companies will need less of each person, right? They'd need less salespeople, less engineers, less all of this. And you could argue that these companies are much leaner than similar sized companies from a revenue perspective than before, but they still can't keep up with their hiring demand, which is exactly what used to happen before.

11:43And so the person might be more productive, but that doesn't mean that you are now like, people is not my main problem. People is very much the main problem for these 100%. And all of the doomers misunderstand that markets want to grow. Companies want to grow. Nobody wants to just pocket all of their profit or pocket all of their cash flow. They want to reinvest because they feel like this is a land grab and we have to gain as much market share as we can. That's almost like now you hear the people that are like, profit is stupid. It means you have nothing better to invest into. There's a little bit of that drawn on on Twitter these days.

12:20That is what Vinod was saying. A lot of people flamed him on X for they thought they were being clever by saying that he's the notes confusing profitability and cash flow. And their point is that there's non-cash expenses or or, you know, there's ways of making profits seem artificially high or artificially low. But you might still be generating cash flow, which is a very technical argument. It's not really his point. The fundamental point is true that if you have a better use for the capital, you tend to invest it in that better use. If you don't have a better use, then you pay a dividend or let it flow out in the form of profits.

12:54So that was the Peter Thiel thing, right? He used to say Google is not spending its money. It's just sitting on all this cash. It has nothing to spend on. Now they're spending it in the markets. Right, exactly. Maybe you're spending too much of it. Well, it's also like Amazon, I think about AWS, where like back in 2014, 15, Walmart and other companies were going on saying, what is Amazon even trying to do? little did they know they had a thing that was spitting off so much cash flow to their main business they could pull down the prices of all of their products uh to to compete at that level and no one even knew it so you're able to like in this world especially at the public markets you're able to hide those things in different business units and people don't even know uh what what you're actually spending on and how you're doing it i think your main point sam is right in the sense that it's like what we're seeing is that a lot of companies were quick to say okay we're going to cut x percent and we're going to say it's ai but then you actually have to pick something up like you lost all this so you're like well we got to actually outsource this and find the right people to to be able to do this job or job to be done and if the philippines or whomever are saying you know what this is a golden opportunity for us to increase our margins even further even though they were low to begin with because the cost of salaries wasn't so high, they're going to take advantage of it, which is often to see.

14:21The margins, I think you have to remember the cost of life and everything in the Philippines is very low. So these people were like hyper profitable for their markets. Like my cousin runs an IT development company in Pakistan. He has a couple of hundred employees, Pfizer as a customer, Staples, the customer on the North American side. They're so profitable. Like if you put it in dollars and you would be like, well, you're not charging that much, but like, because the cost of labor is just so cheap over that, they're hyper, hyper profitable. My fundamental coin is that AI is leading to significant economic growth, or at least it seems to be.

14:58And there's a lot of people saying that it's not, and that it doesn't work and that, and I think we still need to be long AI. And your original question, Asad, what's my reaction to all these salespeople making all this money. And my reaction is that's freaking awesome. I'm happy about it. My number one advice to salespeople these days is that, because there's a lot of people in these markets that then have these like first time leadership opportunities. And I've found myself giving a lot of reps advice to like, listen, there's moments where you can make money. Salespeople's lives are very similar to venture capitalists.

15:35You make money for a few years, market goes down. You know, there are these peak years where you will make the big money. And don't make a silly career choice in this moment. Like this is the moment where you can make millions of dollars right now. And a thing we're doing with a lot of our customers, because we have to figure out like, how do you actually win this fight now? Because you need great people. There's very few of them. How do you win it? And one of the things we've been doing is, can that company be the one that you can make a million dollars? If you overachieve, it's the most efficient path to a million dollars.

16:09So where I've landed is at 300 % of plan, can you make a million dollars? And at a normal quota, so a million and a half dollar quota, and you do 300 % of that, you make a million, which is a faster path to a million than a lot of the other companies will offer. But it works out, it's efficient, like it's not an inefficient spend at that level. And this is the moment when you're a rep, like you, there's so many of those opportunities to make that sort of money this year and next year. Till this thing goes pop, like you can make that sort of money. So don't make silly choices. Don't be like, well, now I'm going to take this like sales leadership job at like a company that's got no revenue and is just starting like where I've been an enterprise AE for the last 10 years.

16:50It's like, no, no, no, like become a leader later. Go make money right now. To that point though, Asa, the question I have is, yes, this is all true on the high end of the market and that 3X OTE and all of those numbers are great but what's happening on the like the early part of the market where you were who cares about the bottom of the market no no no i mean this from a career standpoint like if you're you you those those uh high-flying enterprise level sellers they got their start somewhere right they got their start as sdrs as uh full sales cycle aes at transactional companies those jobs though like you're saying who cares about that but no i'm saying a lot of shitty companies well not shitty i'm not talking about shitty companies i'm just talking about like the you know this this consolidation as we talked about with amanda roles and responsibilities well those folks that are in that top of the funnel or solutions engineer even they eventually become the enterprise aes so where are those crop of enterprise aes that we're seeing at this height Where are they going to get their start in their careers?

17:57I don't see any situation where companies are not hiring BDRs, SDRs. Like, I don't see it. I think companies are hiring a ton of SDRs, ton of BDRs, ton of SMB AEs, because you've got a lot of companies that have SMB motions. I think companies are hiring an aggressive amount of technical salespeople. Like, I just don't, I think any amount of efficiency gets competed away by just the growth of the market. So let's say if every company is 50 % more efficient from a headcount perspective, we had the Replit guy on, they have 300 employees, they're going to do$2 billion this year, that's bananas, right?

18:34Like, so maybe by the end of the year, there'll be like five or 600 employees, but they're not like 2000 employees. So they're like, let's say you're 50 % more efficient than previous generations. we remember we used to talk about the rate at which company the growth of new companies in a market you know g2 used to have that data was seven percent per quarter that's obviously accelerated so it's probably like 10 per quarter so it just like averages out so i don't see a situation where young people can't find jobs in sales like in this world in sales you can find jobs this is the change remember maybe it was a year ago it was some time when we were all talking and you were saying you were very worried about underemployment for out-of-college graduates.

19:19Have your fears on that receded? Are you no longer worried? I think it's just more texture than nuance, right? Because I think depending on what you were studying. I don't have room for texture and nuance. I want a blanket statement. This is a binary world, Otzir. I don't think it matters if you went to university as a salesperson. I think if you are born with just the capability, like, let's be honest, you're born with something that can enable this career path for you. If not, you can't read a book and like practice and get good at this. So it's like, it's kind of a God given skill to some extent that you can nurture and evolve and hone.

19:58I think for those people, life is great. I think the challenge is also fine on the engineering side, because you've got a lot of people that are going into those universities, I mean, now lots of them need to get hired. Now, if you're a literature major, or... What if you wanted to be a consultant? What if you wanted to get trained at McKinsey? Those jobs are down. So I was just literally having dinner with a partner at one of the top three firms, and those jobs are down. They've hired a lot less of them than in previous years. So I think depending on what your career path is, it's different. But the other challenge, okay, so maybe you can get that role, but think about what the role is doing.

20:38It's a lot of automation. You're a GTM engineer in the clay world, and you're using clay, and you're using Unify, and you're using all these tools. That's just, it's propaganda. Like, no, you're not a go-to-market engineer. You're an SDR. Like, you are doing an SDR's job. But how many cold-call conversations is this person having today? Very similar to the previous world. Like, I just don't see that much of a difference. Like, at the back end, there's some, like, fancy AI stuff doing data, you know, enrichment and helping them do more reach-outs and do all of that stuff. But at the end of the day, the job of that person is the same job, right?

21:17Do you think they can hone their sales craft as well as they did? And we think about our careers. Have you seen these new tools? Like even if you look at what they're doing, OneMind, there's a use case for that sort of a thing for role-playing. They're not leaning into that use case, but we have another client that we're working with, Avara. And Avara does role-playing specifically. That's an enablement use case. And I think Kyle Norton and Matt Braley both used it a lot. and that's just it's powerful man like if you're a new grad joining a company how much role-playing practice would you have gotten before making your first hundred calls in the old world where you had a frontline manager and now and how textured is that role-playing compared to like you had bob your frontline manager who's like one-dimensional compared to this thing that is like ai that can give you all the flavors that you're going to be dealing with in the real world and so i think sam Marty said he doesn't care about texture.

22:18I'm just kidding. Braley, Matt, actually, I asked him, what was the one tool at Elise that he would, he was like, I loved it, that I would take with me to another role. And he said, Avara, without a hesitation. Avara is great. Which I get, I understand, because it gives you that reps like much, much faster. And it's like, well, tell him, so I can see it there. I, we grew up in a world where I went to Oxford Business School of Sales, literally meltwater sent us there for uh six months and like what yeah like oxford had a business school for sales under saeed is that how you pronounce it is that what their business school is called uh yeah they um for sales this was brand new it was revolutionary 2009 or 10 i can i think and we went through all of like the uh myers brig to start with and you do like never what the difference type of work.

23:13That is the old school part of sales that I'm just not sure is carrying forward that I think we're going to miss. I think you're completely wrong. Like, I think it's the job of a CRO to build a university inside the business. Like, what's your job? It doesn't matter what scale. As you're achieving scale, right? Initially, you're just trying to get to a point where you have the right to build this sort of infrastructure. But once you've hit some sort of a state velocity, so once you're at growth stage, company, maybe once you are 20-ish million in revenue today, your goal is now to create a repeatable, predictable, scalable, go-to-market motion.

23:52People think go-to-market motions that are repeatable, predictable, scalable are about the winning by design nonsense, right? Like, let's have the measurements and the this and the steps and this and give it fancy words and show it. There's a lot of that. But it's really about trying to develop great people. He called it nonsense.

24:12I think it's secondary. Like it's not primary. The primary is you just need an amazing group of people and you need to develop those people out. And so you're going to hire people and you're going to have to have some sort of a university training program that they go through that makes them the best in the world. The lesson at PDC was not that Medic was the reason they won. The lesson at PTC was that in addition to Medic, they were the world's best at developing people out. And so what happened, it was a product that was not differentiated to their two other competitors in market, but they were the winner of the category.

24:47It was the first time in the public markets where a company was thriving because of the excellence in go-to-market. And it wasn't because they knew how to qualify a deal. It just they had amazing people that knew how to follow steps, but were also able to use that creative freedom from one step to the other to make the right calls and create opportunities and fan fires and close deals. That's the job of a CRO today. So who cares what training programs are? I think it's like you have to contextualize it to what you're trying to build in your company. It's your job. Yeah, well, and I think about Oracle.

25:21We used to hire a lot of younger talent out of Oracle because they had such a great sales training program. And then, and this is more Austin, but like MongoDB. And you would think about like the world-class CROs at that time that built those training programs. Maybe I haven't been as in tune with it. I just don't hear of CROs building that level of craft. It's that like what Mongo was, there's new versions of that that are getting built. Like you have, and it's the same people, by the way. Like the funny thing is like in Golden Market, it's very much the same people. A lot of that John McMahon lineage is moving around and doing its thing.

26:02And so you have Carlos who did the MongoDB stuff. He's at Harness right now. Harness is known to be the next MongoDB. be. You have people that are at Factory and Cursor and SAI and sorry, SAI slash Cursor. So you have that. I think what's going to be interesting is that because in 2021, 2022, we were not remote. So we were remote. So everybody had just more room to run when they were hiring. And now companies are far more constrained. So they're having to wrestle with like, how do we still go to market while staying true to like wanting to be in office, wanting to be city specific, that's going to have to shift for them to keep stealing their go-to-market teams.

26:40I think reps have this unique opportunity to make a killing, but there's a lot of people that are still having a tough time finding a job. I think this market is like, if you ever go to a gym in LA, you just realize, like, you know, it's a shocking experience. It's like everyone's so beautiful that you like come away with. Like if you had an unfit person going to the gym in LA, it's not going to be a great experience. I think this market is a little bit like that, where if right now you don't have people trying to kick your door down and hire you, the market is showing you something and it's the moment to make some real changes and shifts.

27:16Companies cannot hire. And so as long as you're decent, you should have people lining up to try to talk to you, at least. That's the market, guys. That's the market. This episode of Topline is brought to you by Tourette. Every CRO is asking the same critical questions. Why are win rates dropping? What are my closers doing differently? How do we beat competitor X? Despite massive AI investment sales teams still can't get complete answers or take action on partial insights. Tourette changes that. It's the only answer to action engine that gets to the root of revenue issues, then executes with relentless precision.

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29:37No presentations, no posturing, bring the problem you're actually dealing with and work through it with people who understand the job. It's the team you need, but can't go higher. Wait, Sam, is it GTM or is it sales? I can't remember. PG says it's GTM, my brother. Because we can include sales, marketing, CS, and rev ops in Pavilion Scale. Scale also includes priority access to curated Pavilion dinners, plus a dedicated Pavilion Navigator to help you get more out of the network. 100 seats for our founding group. Applications close September 15th. Go to joinpavilion.com forward slash scale. Asad, AJ, we are part of a small council.

30:16What has been the impact on your life? We were the jumping off point of this. We helped actually test the idea. Yes, you did. And have you gotten anything from the group that we meet with right now? My favorite group. absolutely favorite i like i was surprised how much i fell in love with everyone like it like genuine like friendships and like companionship on this wild journey and i'm skeptical of these sort of things up front i i love our group i enjoy listening more to everyone else's challenges and opportunities than talking about my own in that group i mean the last one i didn't even go because i was fine because i was like really interested here's what i think is awesome uh we've got people in our group, we were all worried about them at different points.

30:59I'm sure some people were worried about me. And there's a steady, maybe it's just life and maybe it's the bull market, you know, maybe it's AI, but all of our professional lives have improved significantly since we started participating in the small council, which is part of what scale is. And, you know, one of our friends is a CEO. His business is now doing incredibly well. STA is doing incredibly well. Quotapass doing incredibly well. One of our other friends is a CRO that's probably going to become a CEO pretty soon. We hope we cross our fingers. It's pretty wild. It's pretty awesome. And that is the power of a small council.

31:37So check it out. Joinpavilion.com forward slash scale. If you're listening to this, Dan Brown is out there. Charlie Moss, all the folks that are out there that are listening, we want to get you into our program. I know Ryan's already going to be a member. Jackie's going to be a member. But we look forward to welcoming you as one of the founding 100 in Pavilion scale. That's cool. I think, Sam, your topic is related to this a little bit. In fact, Asit at the beginning of this entire conversation around talent, use the terms GTM in sales. And I've always thought of, when I hear sales, I think of a part of GTM, but also if you're using it as GTM, I think of it in like 2007, you were calling it sales versus GTM.

32:22But GTM is many, many different parts. Marketing goes under GTM. Why don't you contextualize it? What are we talking about? Well, we've got a tweet from someone pretty well known that goes by initials that made a controversial tweet. What was that, Sam? It took everything in you not to just do my bit. No, I didn't. I wasn't going to do it all. If you want this to be your topic. We haven't done the three of us in months. And I know we're a little rusty at this, guys. I get it. I get it. But Sam, I was setting you up for it. Well, thank you very much. PG, Paul Graham. Austin was like, screw that.

33:03Get to the point, AJ. Sam. Let's get a tweet. I don't quite know. Oh, I think I do know what prompted him to write this. But this was yesterday. He wrote, is the term sales being replaced by GTM? This is Paul Graham, founder of YC. Seems kind of bogus, frankly. And I thought it was interesting for a couple of reasons. The first is that go-to-market is a pretty, at this point, if you haven't heard go-to-market before, there's go-to-market fund, there's go-to-market partners, there's go-to-market OS, there's go-to-market the conference that we'll be that we'll be hosting. So I found his lack of, and by the way, it generated this whole conversation and one part of the biggest compliment anyone has ever given to our market partners.

34:00That's a topic for another time. The point is that there's a lot of people in the thread that are like, yeah, salespeople are always trying to change their name. And this is people trying to make themselves sound more important. And it's not that PG said that sales is stupid, but there is an underlying tone of dismissiveness that continues to emanate from him and from technical people in Silicon Valley around the concept of sales. So AJ, we were texting about this before and AJ's like, well, he didn't technically say anything bad about sales. I'm like, no, but there's a tone. There's a tone there of dismissiveness.

34:35It's like this incel tone, you know, like incels are just upset that other people were born good looking with personality. This is like that version of it. You're just sad that like some people have this and you as a technical person just don't you're not the full thing. Like you just there's a missing piece of the game without which you're not undeniable in every area. And that insecurity shows up in a lot of this tonality. Well, here's what I wrote. So I responded to him. Not that he this is like acting like we were engaged in a conversation. We were not. He doesn't know. We were having a back and forth.

35:09I'm one of 10 ,000 people in this thread. But he wrote, I wrote, revenue generation is a team sport and involves the interlocking pieces of product sales, marketing, customer success, and ops. GTM doesn't replace sales. It just encompasses or seeks to a wider purview that includes more disciplines and seeks to recognize the reality that money is made across a series of connected steps. So then Pranab Salayan Pranab. His handle is PRBSL. GTM necessarily is related to bringing something entirely new to market. You're just misusing the term. I think his handle just had BS in there, didn't it? A bunch of BS right here.

35:49I felt like I had a really good little response to Pranab. I said, as one of the principal purveyors of the term and someone that runs a conference called GTM. It's possible, but unlikely. Anyway, so the comment, the conversation is probably just still related back to what is the value of sales? Do we think go to market is BS? Do we think it's just people like the three of us moving the deck chairs or rearranging acronyms so that we can be more important? Or do we, do we think there's a there there? Asit, what do you think? I think it's just fascinating, like how consumer focused, like I think Martin from A16Z said, seems like a consumer guy talking.

36:32And that really was what I got out of it. And I started thinking about OpenAI. And one of the fundamental mistakes OpenAI made, which they're correcting really well right now, was they lean too much into the consumer business, not enough into the B2B business. And if you look at YC, the biggest winners are these consumer companies that have come out of it maybe Stripe is a B2B play, but it also has like consumer tendencies in terms of like, right? Like how it scales, but like, there's not a lot of true enterprise software companies that have come out of YC. And it's just fascinating that I think you can be great at so much in tech and we expect everyone in these roles, like PG's roles to know everything and to be like so well around it.

37:22And it's like, they're more one dimensional than we think. And this is a blind spot for them. They don't understand enterprise. Hence, they don't understand go to market, something that has become, that started happening 10 years ago, like when SaaS became a thing, like more than 10 years ago, when SaaS became a thing, we realized NRR is important. When NRR is important, we realized these silos turn words, so we now have to combine them. And then the chief revenue officer became a thing. And then when the chief revenue officer became a thing, we realized It's not sales market. We need a name for this whole division.

37:52It became growth market. This wasn't like something new. This has happened a long time ago. But you can like totally miss it. It's so funny that he's like, this is how long it takes for him to hear about it. You know, isn't that crazy? And like, he's a billionaire that runs YC, which is the largest accelerator in the world. And like in 2026, he's like, what's this growth market thing I'm hearing about these days? Shit. That's fascinating. AJ, what's your reaction as a tried and true salesman trained in the bowels of meltwater? The bowels, the deep, deep bowels of the ship. Well, Austin said something that was interesting.

38:31He said not a lot of B2B companies have come out of YC. I guess what you know, if I think about companies that have come out of it and maybe maybe they don't have a big sales team, but you have Stripe, you have Deal, you have Rippling. Rippling has a big sales team. you have Brex and Chucker. But you use one of YC companies? Enterprise software. Yeah, that's also, it's a very interesting one. It is. But I would assume that Parker Conrad wouldn't need YC. So maybe he needed a group of people to align with him after his fight with ACTS and Z. Yeah, that's true. He went in the second time. But again, all the companies you've mentioned are not enterprise-focused software companies.

39:12And that's what's missing. that's what it is not energy but it is a b2b play yeah b2b but by plg oh well to the question you just asked sam i think about the when we had katie bullard on she uh i don't i remember from the conversation if she's actually worked in sales but when i think of go-to-market builders like true gtm builders katie is a true gtm builder and so you just like bring it up a level and you're really talking about the business model the unit economics the does do all of the pieces in this pendulum swing together in a way that creates harmony and creates a great business and i think like even companies github github's a good example i uh years ago had a chance to sit down with the former cro of github and he joined when the company was around 20 million in revenue and he said when he joined that the CEO, technical co-founder and CEO didn't even want to meet with him.

40:14They're like, how are you going to hire a CRO without ever even meeting the CRO? And that's how little he thought of sales. And what he had said, which is true, is you have this ability to take a$20 million business, Snowflake, kind of a similar situation, and up-level it in a big, big way by packaging it at the enterprise, packaging it in B2B. Real companies, regardless of how they get their start, if you don't think Stripe is a B2B company or deal, well, they all have real enterprise sales teams today. And that's how they've actually been able to grow and continue their 30, 40 percent growth year over year when you're already well scaled beyond 100 million dollars.

40:55I'm not saying they're not B2B. I'm saying that they're more SMB and PLG, and maybe now they have like enterprise motions, but they're not like built the way that like a harness is built. Like harnesses as a business is only for the end, like Mongo was built for the enterprise. So there's like enterprise motion that requires like a go-to-market build that happens there. And there's a sophistication there and an appreciation for enterprise. Like any founder that sells into enterprise, especially second-time founders, they understand that the complexity is go-to-market. When you're looking at these companies right now that are getting built, your Decadrons, your CIRRs, et cetera, like why is CIRR so cool?

41:38It's because you have a technical person who has an appreciation for what it takes to work with the enterprise. And it's very, very difficult to work with the enterprise. You need to know how to open those doors. You need to know how to help them digest the technology. You need to know how to expand within those organizations. like Sierra right now has gone from a use case that is support to using that almost as a beachhead to be a much broader enterprise solution for these organizations. Like you can see them now broadening out. That sort of sophistication and a founder, that's the founder a gold market person wants to work for.

42:20I have a question for you. Do you think that it's possible to be a great CRO now without having started in sales? Like you said, Katie hadn't done sales, but she'd done everything else. Like in this future, like is that gonna happen more and more or less and less? Well, in your future of like the MongoDBs and the Carlos, I think that the answer is no, you have to have worked in sales. I think you absolutely have had to have that DNA in like ingrained. I think you have to be the best salesperson to be the best CRO. I don't know if I agree with that. I mean, I think once you reach the CRO level, you probably are the best salesperson.

43:03But when you say best salesperson, you mean like as an individual contributor, you were crushing it and you were at the very top of the year. company if somebody has if there's a meeting that has to be won and a person has to be in that meeting who can help win it that cro is going to be a difference maker in that meeting and that means at some point in their career they were very very good at sales i i don't believe that people like there's this like style of cro that's like very like quiet and subdued and not very like you couldn't have imagined them as a well-flossed salesperson i just don't see that working so well Okay, I actually have a good data point on this.

43:40So Ryan Milligan, R.O., he never worked in sales. He's never worked in sales there. We just hired our VP of strategic sales, Max Bergen, who was my right-hand lieutenant at Trendkite and worked with me at Meltwater as well. And it's really interesting to have those two as a dynamic because I know Max really well, but it's also clear that he has had and carried a bag throughout his career where ryan fantastic cro but there's definitely times where that like sales strategy of a deal is just different if that makes sense like you can just like tell when you zoom into that level but when you go up at altitude ryan's fantastic uh and i wouldn't i trust him to to jump on calls i mean he's running the account management team.

44:32So he's also on customer conversations as well. And he has the urgency to do it. But I do notice a difference in like how how they sell and what that actually instinct. There's an instinct that develops that is just like it's hard to be academic about it. I don't know. It's the same way as when Jockrell like made a post recently about some company, I think it was Airtable. And like at the end of the post was basically that. I'm paraphrasing aggressively here, but the idea was that if Airtable had worked with winning by design, they would have had a different outcome. Right. And I would argue that's not the case.

45:16Oh, my God. That has to be. That's hilarious. Is that's not that has to be nothing to what he said. That's sarcastic. Go read the post. It was literally, it was very close to that. Like it was like, if for these SaaS companies, like that to not have this sort of mundane outcome, like they have to have this revenue factory with these like growth loops, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, I don't think a company that has lost product market fit as aggressively as that would have had any better outcome if they'd had a better mechanical infrastructure in the market. They did let go of like 95 % of their CS team a few years ago, even when they were on like their high growth.

45:58They let go of like 200 people, one fell swoop. That was just CS and they kept four people. So there is something to like that they definitely didn't. They definitely had a change in how they were thinking about their growth teams and CS in particular. Go to market cannot make up for product market fit. I think if you have like equal product market fit to two other companies in a category, go to market can be a difference maker like for PTC. But I don't think go to market can be the difference between a three X and a six X multiple if you don't have product market fit. Like that's not what it does.

46:34Like it's like saying that by working with a trainer, you're going to get fit. No, unless you work out and eat better, you're not going to get fit. Like unless your product has fit in market, you're not going to be able to have the sort of revenue growth and retention that justifies that multiple. Like great people is not going to make a difference. Better systems is not going to make that difference. So the end of the day, you firmly believe to have a great outcome as an enterprise company, you have to have a B2B sales team, go-to-market team. 9%. Yeah, like it's impossible. Everybody needs a sales team.

47:15You need a sales team. You can get, you know, unless even Google has a sales team, the greatest consumer product of all time, has a big sales team. Impossible not to. Like, I think this is the difference between first and second time founders, is second time founders realize that building a generational company is a combination of a bunch of things that has to go really well. The first thing you have to do is build a great product. The second thing you have to do is build a great go-to-market team. The least important, but still extremely important, is your G &A function. But it's like that's the order of priority.

47:52Like build a world-class product and build a world-class go-to-market team that can give you the sort of acceleration and retention you need. And then have a good administrative arm and leg of the business to keep things moving forward. I got really good advice from one of my investors. This was a few years ago when we were going through some challenges in 23 and doing the RIF thing that all SaaS companies were doing. But it was just pretty simple and straightforward to the point. What you just said, Austin, is that a company of builders and sellers, that's it. And that's like figure out who the builders and sellers are and then make sure you don't have the fat.

48:31I left GLG and I had these weird, uh, cause GLG was so successful that it had weird job titles. And so I was head of research management for a long time. What is research management? It was really customer success, but we didn't know that. We didn't know that we didn't have the words for it. And I got into software, true software companies. And I'm like, exactly what you said, AJ. I'm like, Oh, I get it. You're either building it or selling it. Everybody else is incidental. I don't know how to build it. I guess I'm going to sell it. Maybe that's PD's point. Maybe that's just like the point, I guess, is that we're built, they're builders over there and builders always have an ego about who they are.

49:11And like the sellers and slinging software should be easy. You don't need fancy titles for it. I don't know. I have a question and it's going to relate to AJ's talking point, but it's, it's for Asid. So Asid, you're working with all these companies that are, you said you've talked to a founder that's gone from two to a hundred in a year. There was a period in 2024 or maybe last year when Bessemer came out with supernova shooting star, all these new benchmarks. Do you still, is that true that like, yes, there is a class of companies. Uh, the enterprises have not expand expended. They, they're not, uh, they haven't burned through their AI transformation budget.

49:47There's open budget available for companies and companies all the time that are being started right now can go from one to 10, 10 to 100 in 24 months, and that's a regular trajectory? I think there's many examples, more than I think any one of us would have guessed that there would be of companies that have had this sort of astronomical acceleration. And you see it like up to quite a stage, right? Like you see certain companies that are maintaining this pretty crazy growth up to 500 million in revenue. but so it's more than even I would have thought that would have been possible at the same time it's undeniable that the market is becoming a little bit trickier and tougher so if you are a pure play enterprise AI company so you're selling Sierra as a good example your revenue acceleration cannot be like a lovable and a replete it by nature cannot because the enterprise is slower to buy, harder to sell into, etc.

50:51So what astronomical growth looks like for a Sierra or a Decagon is different to a Reclate. And that doesn't mean that they are less valuable or worse companies. It's just they're playing different games. Decagon's last valuation was 125 times ARR. And so the market does not view them as like lesser than. But depending on where you are selling, there's just by the nature of how those companies buy a different level of what good looks like, number one. Number two, enterprise buyers are, they are spending a lot and there are more questions today around ROI, which is why you have seen this huge uptake in the FTE role and companies leveraging it to try to help these companies get an ROI because they're not set up themselves to figure it out and AI is very complicated.

51:49The intelligence evolves very quickly. It's extremely jagged in its capabilities and so to get ROI is very complicated and so you do need hand-holding and you can see the update of the FTE model is basically proof of how difficult it is to work with the enterprise and get them the ROI. That said, I think even though there's more questions around ROI and there's maybe a little bit more diligence companies are doing today than before, enterprises are still, they still think of this as a massive threat and a massive opportunity at the same time. And those questions are not going to result in less spend because what everyone forgets is every four to eight weeks, we have new capabilities.

52:38And so if you're an enterprise, are you going to decide to stop leaning into AI today when the AI is better than it was six months ago because the spend of six months ago didn't give you an ROI? You're not. And so as long as it keeps improving, they'll keep spending. AJ, it's your turn. Good answer, Austin. My third. I've got two topics. Before I do, I do want to make one statement that I just looked this up. Rippling was part of YC and Parker Conrad was already a very established founder. we already knew this having previously founded zenefits which was yc itself in 13 winter of 13 um rippling wasn't the typical unknown founder going through yc story but yc officially considers rippling a winter 17 company there you go so oh i know i looked it up you're right oh well i it was i don't always know my audience doesn't know i'm right sam you always know I'm right.

53:37So I've got two, they're both kind of small, but I'll start with the, we're working on a lot of benchmarking data and we're getting Q2 numbers. And I think the last episode, I stated something pretty, I don't know if controversial, but maybe surprising, which was 76 % of AEs hit their quota in the first half of 26. That is true. That was very specific to a specific set of aes in a quarterly cadence but we looked at the some of the numbers and the first half of this year quota attainment is almost identical to the first half of last year so 2025 and 2026 for annual quotas those numbers are 58 percent this year hit are hitting their annual targets, the first half, and first is 55 % last year.

54:30And that's annual plans. But this really interesting is that the standard deviation. Does that mean that halfway into the year, they've hit the annual number? Halfway into the year? No, because what we do is we split that quota up. They're currently at tracking to 55 to 58%. But the second half of the year for annual quotas is typically when you actually like, similar to like a quarterly quota, where the last two weeks of a quarter, you're selling 60 % of the business. So I would expect those numbers to jump quite a bit. Yeah. But the standard, the interesting thing is that the standard deviation is way higher this year, meaning that the winners are going to be winning more right now.

55:13So if you were thinking about as a barbell curve, there are a lot more people at the bottom end of attainment and at the top end of attainment and not nearly as many people in the middle. So we're seeing like a lot more losers, a lot more winners. This kind of matches what you're saying, what you said, Asit, as well. AJ, is it 58 % meaning of 100 people, 58 of them are on track? Or is it of 100 people and their quota, let's say that's a billion dollars, in a way my point is are the overperformers overperforming? Yeah, it's the latter. Total dollar quota attainment is 58%, even though individually it might be only 30 % of people that are actually putting up those numbers.

55:56Correct. Yeah, that's exactly right, Sam, which is the point on the standard deviation. So it's more like a barbell than it is a bell curve at this point in time. That's really interesting because we see this now in organizations. There are reps that are making, so setting quotas has become really difficult. And there's actually a pretty big disconnect right now in market, which is there's one group of people, which is kind of the older like PTC lineage people that are saying even today, the right quarter number is 1.5 ish million. Having people achieve a lot more than that is a sign of inefficiency and you're leaving money on the table is this argument that they make.

56:35The other side of the argument, which is kind of what Benchmark and their people are making, is that this quota capacity type of analysis that we do, we have to start from a first principles-based perspective. When buyers think what you sell is magic, you're not generating demand. You are trying to harness as much momentum out of this excitement and interest as humanly possible. And quota attainment in that environment is going to look very different. Hence, quotas would look very different. And you do see that some AI companies, their reps making five,$10 million attainments in a year. And so that company might have 10 reps and$100 million target, but two of those reps might have done half that entire number.

57:20So, because I was worried that Guy Rubin would be disproved because he always talks about a 28 % quota attainment rate. But I think that's the number of sellers, like 28 % of sellers are achieving quota. Were you really worried that he was going to be disproven? I think you secretly wanted that. No, a little bit. I think he looks at the market the wrong way. And his number is not like what the data is helpful if you can do something with it. What are you supposed to do with that 28 number? Oh, he has a much deeper benchmarking report in his defense. He has very prescriptive strategies. And it is about I've read his his whole thing.

57:57It all comes back down to like the winning by design style of like better systems, better this. Targeting and segmentation, I think, is what he says. Yeah, great. And I think the argument I'm making is that this market, while being the technology market, there's many different games being played now, and you just have to measure them very differently. So if you're an AI company, you're going to, in this sort of analysis that, AJ, you're doing as well, you're going to get bucketed into the same group as like the SaaS companies. And so that's why you have these low attainments. I think Airtable's average quota attainment, I think less than 20 % of reps were making target at Airtable.

58:34And I think Airtable itself's attainment against revenue goals was very low. If you're an AI company, it's very different. And so you have to kind of break these things apart now and look at them very, very differently. Otherwise, they'll muddy the number and you won't know what to do with it. if you're an AI company, you should only compare yourself to other AI companies and see like what's happening there and what's the game. Whereas if you're a SaaS company still trying to work through a transition, you have to compare yourself to other SaaS companies. Otherwise, the world won't make sense to you.

59:07I think you're, I mean, I think that that is exactly right. Asa, it goes back to your point around talent and people hiring like these top performers to be able to compete at the level in the industry that they're competing at. I just sent you guys a text that was the direct stats that Graham had sent me just to, you know, share some level of what we're actually seeing with these numbers. And the question I have then is that, okay, if you have like four performers that are way at the top and then the other four at the bottom, you're probably going to get rid of the four at the bottom. You're raising quotas, right?

59:42You have to, you're going to raise your, cause your capacity, you're going to need, you're letting go of those four and you have four that are way outperforming. So you're going to raise quotas, but then you're bringing people in. And so the ramp will most likely be a lot longer, I would think, with getting into these type of sales teams, right? I just don't think you can do much with what your outlier performers are doing. Like, what are you supposed to do with that? Like your quota can't be$10 million. Like, you know, that's no, no rappers are going to sign out for that. And so I don't think, I think you could say maybe a quote is$2.5 million or$3 million and you can show like real attainment.

1:00:19Like I just had this conversation with an early stage founder. Founder led sales got him to$6 million in ARR. That's fantastic. $6 million, one young kid selling$500 ,000 average deal sizes into big banks. This guy is like, I think 23 years old. And your word, he's a gangster. Gangster. I called it. Pure gangster, right? I thought you were going to say it. Call it. Biggest nerd, like just pure amazing gangster figured this out. Great. He's hired one rep and that rep is going to do some good numbers this year. It's trending well. So now they need to hire a bunch more reps. And so they set up the quota to be$3 million.

1:00:57And I was like, no one's going to sign up for this. Each person is supposed to generate$3 million in new business. And I was like, you can't do that. You just can't do it. He's like, but look, I did Sates. and my one guy is trending so well and say, dude, you need like to sell this story to a rep. You need 10 AEs to be doing crazy numbers for you to say, listen, in our company, this is what's real. But if you don't have that, then you have to start with this conservative like 1.5 and take the hit. Like if it ended up being too conservative, so what? Like you had reps that you paid a little bit more money to like, what's so bad about that?

1:01:36You said conservative 1.5, but what's the the OTE for each of these reps? 400 ,000. Okay, so you still have a four to one quarter to OTE ratio. Three point something to one. Yeah, that's what I'm saying that he should be doing. They wanted to do six to one, basically. No, I know that's crazy. Yeah, that's not going to work. So there's that. You know, the part of the market that is like getting kicked in the face, left, right and center is private equity. So private equity companies have traditionally never given equity to ICs in sales. and they have kind of gotten by with that for quite a long time.

1:02:13Any company that's under Toma Bravo's portfolio right now, one of these Francisco partners, etc., they are having a really tough time with retention and with hiring because no one wants to work. It's like you have a stool with three leads competing against a stool with two leads and no one wants to sit on that silly stool right now. That is the situation. I feel like a natural point. We can keep talking about HubSpot, AJ, if you like. Well, that's a smaller one. HubSpot came out with their earnings, and they beat the market across all of their metrics. They did revise down for the end of the year, and their stock dropped 20%.

1:02:55And I just think it's interesting in this SaaS apocalypse that we're talking about. I'm not a pundit for the market whatsoever. there's funds and firms like citadel that have been shorting sass and long ai and so there's a big part of just the algorithm is just going to continue to push and push down stocks like hubspot i just do find it fascinating when you dive into the numbers there uh they aren't hitting as many new logos as they're going to project for the year but their expansion is very out very well um outperforming what they thought they were going to do and beating the market and just it's interesting just to see this and watch it uh from the outside of course i work closely with hubspot a level uh a lot of levels but even just from where the numbers are it just continues to be this like nightmarish situation it's rebounded a little bit but some markets a 10 billion dollar company i mean that is that is going to do 4 billion it's going has a billion and a half in cash.

1:04:00Yeah, but they only had 45 million in profit last year on$3 billion of revenue. And this company is just not that impressive. I don't know if that's true. They have a billion. Well, so if they have a billion and a half in cash, that you can take that away from the 10 billion market cap. So they're worth eight and a half billion for 4 billion in revenue. That is punitive. Yeah. So are you a buyer of the stock? I'm a buyer. I did buy again. God, AJ, there's so many better places to put money. Austin, yeah. Well, Austin wanted me to get in on a deal of Vanta going public for this year. On Polymarket, there was like a thing that you could get like, I think, twice your money betting against Vanta going public.

1:04:44I was like, that's the easiest money you can make in the world. That was back in April. Yeah. And you would have made that money. Yeah. Did you do it? No, I didn't. But I put my money in CrowdStrike and I'm up 100 % on that so far. Yeah, look at you. Yeah. I just don't think that HubSpot is like, you know, HubSpot's a really good example of a company in the SaaS era that's just going to have a really tough time with the transition. I think it was the benchmark, Eric from Benchmark that was saying that the tough thing about, he said this thing that was really interesting, kind of aligns with the transition we had last week.

1:05:16He's like, every day that you are hitting your revenue targets as a SaaS company, you're destroying enterprise equity value. and he's like that's the problem that a SaaS company has to deal with is like you're programmed to like hit your number do this stuff he's like but you have to almost burn it down and do something different and the bigger you are the harder it is to burn down he said this other thing he's like most SaaS companies are running their business from nine to five and then from five to eight they're trying to do AI and he's like you kind of have to do it the other way so it's just interesting.

1:05:50I think that's the challenge. And HubSpot has scale, which is the thing that makes it hard to make that transition. So their product, when you use it, similar to Salesforce, is not very exciting and how they want to compete. Well, stay tuned, my friends, because in a future episode, we'll talk about how Quotapath burned it all down and did a restart. That's exciting. It's coming. you all it's it's gonna happen we support you aj as my largest investment ever in the private i'm telling them for the first time that it's all you know to the point uh asad and i'm obviously i'm a smaller investor than asad but we're both investors and i think it's a perfect articulation of some of the challenge that like stebbings and lemkin all these vcs are talking about which is it's not that we're not going to make money on the investment.

1:06:44We absolutely will. It is the opportunity cost of being in. And I'm, I mean, I'm a bull on Quotabath, just to be clear. This is not me being dismissive, but it's like, you could be in SpaceX or you could be in Quotabath, you know, and, um, it's a challenge. It is a challenge for investors and it's a challenge for founders because as founders, you're hearing that your company isn't, isn't cool, which is why, you know what? Um, it's got to be for the love of the game. You got to build a great business and be in love with your business and have fun doing it. Because if you're white knuckling it and you know, you're pushing yourself and it's nine, nine, six, and you're going all out and you're not seeing those results.

1:07:21I feel like that's part of the, part of the air table story, which Manny was talking about as founder fatigue. Good news is I'm both an investor in Quotapath and SpaceX.

1:07:33He's hedged. I think the founder fatigue one is a really big part of this, but there's the other side of the argument is be a cockroach like a who gives a shit what your evaluation is if you're not raising money right so that's the only time it really matters is when you're in a public company or when you're raising money but nvidia didn't have ai for 20 plus years of their journey or even more than 20 years of their journey like companies have second phases they find new things to do like the game can be long and it can be extremely you can play a very different game down the line than you're playing right now.

1:08:04But if you get exhausted, then that's when that's where I was going. You got to, you got to fall. That's where I'm at actually right now, which is what I'm falling back in love with my business after a long time of sort of being somewhat indifferent to it. And if you have that energy and you like your life, just like you with STA, I said, and I think AJ, you're enjoying Quotapath. Like if you're having fun, we can do it for a long time as long we don't run out of money. Isn't it strange how much it's like a real relationship with like your life partner? Like if you look at these like marriages and companionships, like you kind of have to fall in love with each other like five different times over a lifetime, right?

1:08:47And because you keep changing as people and you have to like find new ways to like new phases of your relationship. And like, I think having a business, founding a business, running a business is very some a little bit strangely. No, I completely agree with you. And it's, I would say to the point of outcomes and exits as a parting thought before we let everybody go, but nobody should love your business more than you. So if you don't love your business and you're the founder, don't expect some great outcome because you got to be the most in love. You know, like, I just think it's unrealistic to be like, I think this is a piece of shit, but here you take it.

1:09:23Yeah. and if you don't believe it like it'll come across so if you're not getting the best multiples there's probably a little bit of that that's coming across in the pitch as well well this was a fun episode everybody uh we're going to be live in gtm asad and aj are going to be presenting comp data to pavilion gold which is going to be awesome and they're going to get to join us at a very special dinner you guys are going to be blown away so we're going to have a great time in person but until then we'll talk to you next week thanks for listening everybody

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