SPOTLIGHT: How CEO Sam Jacobs Is Redefining Pavilion's Identity | with Sam Jacobs, Founder & CEO @ Pavilion

0:08Sam Jacobs: Welcome to Topline, the podcast for the best founders, operators and investors in B2B tech. Every week, AJ Bruno, Asad Zaman and me, Sam Jacobs, will break down what's important for you to know to be the most well-informed professionals in the market. this episode is brought to you by atio the ai native crm built for the next era of companies connect your email and atio instantly builds your crm right before your eyes with every company every contact and every interaction you've ever had enriched and organized with atio you can build ai powered automations and use its research agents to tackle complex operational processes like finding key decision makers and triaging incoming leads.

0:55Join industry leaders like Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and more. Just head to atio.com slash topline and you'll get 15 % off your first year. That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash topline for 15 % off your first year. Now back to the show. Hey, friends. Welcome to Topline Spotlight. You know Topline Spotlight. it's our weekly segment where we get to talk to one of our great guests today we have the absolute best guest in the world he is known as apparently by some uh llms as the best top line co-host in the entire world one and only sam jacob sam's been pointing to himself for the last 30 seconds i think that's what actually my people i feel like sam you just wake up in the morning and

1:49Sam Jacobs: you're like yep this is me i am him i'm the man with the plan uh sam this segment is uh all about you and what is one challenge business challenge that you have conquered you've taken down in the last what 12 months 24 months what are we doing 24 24 months 24 months 24 months yeah i'm going to open up the horizon here there's 24 months this is this is my show now actually

2:26Sam Jacobs: you've asked the question now i should start answering it i think that's how this works This is how this works. You should say, amateurs. First you say, who are you? I say, I'm Sam Jacobs, CEO of Pavilion. You say, before we get started, tell us about Pavilion. That's how these introductions work. We assume everyone knows. I'm AJ Bruno. I'm AJ Bruno. I am the CEO of Quotapath. You have Asad Zaman, CEO of Sales Talent Agency, and Sam Jacobs, CEO of Pavilion. Sam, welcome to the show. How are you doing, Sam? Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. Yeah. We're happy to have you some. Sam, can you first tell our listeners a little bit about Pavilion?

3:09Sam Jacobs: Yeah, I sure can. Pavilion is the world's leading go-to-market community for operators. We're 10 ,000 people all over the world. And our mission is to help operating executives within go-to-market unlock and achieve their professional potential. What does that mean? It means that the world is constantly changing in go-to-market and the jobs are not stable. And so we've created a community and an educational institution called Pavilion University, whose job it is to equip you as a sales leader, a marketing leader, a customer success leader with the education and insights you need, with the peers that you need of whom you can ask questions and solve difficult problems, and the experiences you need to lead the best and most fulfilling operating professional life that you can.

3:52Sam Jacobs: That is what we do. You're launching Pavilion Gold or have launched Pavilion Gold. Yeah, we are. We have we are launching Pavilion Gold. We can talk about that if you want. That is our elite membership tier. It is invitation only. It is for operators, current operators from 50 million in ARR up to a billion and sometimes north of a billion. And that is a membership tier that sits on top of the 10 ,000 people that are all over the world. And it includes notable operators like Kyle Norton, the CRO of Owner.com, Ashley Grek, the CRO of Zero, Nick Worswick, the CRO of Upside, Keith Pierce, the CMO of Gainsight, Gaurav Agarwal, the COO of CookUp, and many more.

4:36Sam Jacobs: If you're interested in learning more, feel free to drop me a line, but it's invitation only. You've got to go through an interview process. No CEOs, no service providers, no consulting. This is like revenue collective. If you're going to be a fractional, you can't have been a fractional for more than six months. You have to be an in-between fractional pursuing the next big opportunity. You can be a consultant and advisor rather than fractional probably then, right? No, you can't really be a consultant and advisor, not professionally. You can be an advisor because you left Databricks or you left OpenAI, but this is for operators.

5:13Sam Jacobs: This is for people in role. I love it. Sam, what was really interesting was seeing you build this community out and the speed at which it increased. Before we go into the challenge you've solved, tell us a little bit about why you think this community became what it became so quickly. There was this early group that had come together, and then it just shot up. What was the state of the greater community that this was so needed? What was happening? There's a few, and this is also directly related to the mistakes I mentioned in our last full episode that I've made a number of, that there are material flaws.

5:55Sam Jacobs: There are flaws in the business that I created, and it was by veering away from what I'm about to say. So the first, there's a couple pieces. The first is that, as I just mentioned, originally Pavilion, formerly Revenue Collective, had very strict membership requirements. You couldn't just sign up online and you had to be an operator. In our world, the people that are celebrated are investors like Chamath or David Sachs or Bill Gurley or Brad Gerstner or Harry Stebbings or its CEOs and founders. All you hear about are CEOs and founders and you hear about investors and you don't hear about operators.

6:31Sam Jacobs: This was a club for operators and not for those people. It was actually in the face. It was an FU to those people. So first, who it was for was very, very clearly defined and who was not allowed to join and who it was not for was very clearly defined. Related to that, it had a very strong point of view. And the point of view was that effectively it was a union for operating executives and or a guild. But it was an association whose business it was to advocate for the operating executive. We taught people how to negotiate. We taught people how to ask for severance. We taught people about equity.

7:03Sam Jacobs: We taught people what double trigger means and how to do a cashless exercise. We taught people to bake in the right to consult into their employment agreements so that us as CEOs couldn't tell people, you know, you can't do any side work or moonlighting when it was noncompetitive. So we equipped people not just with like the skills of how to do go to market, but the skills of specifically how to lead their professional lives with more security and stability. So that point of view was critical, absolutely critical. And then, of course, there were some like other stuff, right? Like not everybody could join.

7:35Sam Jacobs: So there was big FOMO. I would say that the technical innovation that was that made this possible that was not previously possible was twofold. One of them was LinkedIn and the second was Slack. So the first this business would not have happened without LinkedIn. People started putting Revenue Collective on their LinkedIn profile and it became a badge of honor and it became, you know, this thing that we measured very carefully. and then Slack became an opportunity for like a really more sophisticated group chat than like iMessage that could be organized. And it became a place where people could share and it felt real time.

8:09Sam Jacobs: It felt real time. And they felt, people felt like they were learning stuff they couldn't learn, you know, by Googling. So I remember this one thing that I noticed in the first couple of years, this go-to-market community, the way I'd seen it play out was that everybody was very territorial about their playboats and the way they thought about things and the way they did things. They viewed almost every other go-to-market leader as competition. And that's a little bit of like how this market functions. But you would see people holding on to their alpha or their edge. And I noticed that after a couple of years of the revenue collective being around, it became very common for people to start sharing openly and not feeling like by giving you my playbook, by giving you my framework, I am now going to be in a worse off position, like realizing that there's probably some benefit for me to be had if the whole community gets better.

9:09And that was, I noticed this is like direct correlation to you guys still. And I think it's one of the most beautiful things you guys achieved in building this business.

9:17Sam Jacobs: Thank you. So yeah, I mean, that's, it was on the back of LinkedIn, all these people seeing it, people talking about it. So huge net promoters, because all of a sudden there was this moment where you could learn about equity and nobody else was teaching it to you. CEOs and founders benefited from you not understanding the terms of your equity agreement. So it grew very quickly. And then we made a series. I made, you know, their mistakes. You make them in the moment. They don't feel like mistakes, but the mistakes relate to losing focus on what got you there. And that's essentially it, losing focus on what got you there.

9:50Sam Jacobs: So we started that. everybody could join yep okay so now everybody could join asa could join as a recruiter uh chris gannon could join everybody could join and um and then we moved away from just focusing on uh go-to market executives and we let in ceos and we let in and then we were thinking about building operations collective for up for cfos and coos and we just got so diffuse in our focus and um That was, you know, and we are unpacking the impact of some of those decisions years later. And I think we will work our way through them. And now, I would say now it's that the main membership is more of an educational institution than it is a private club.

10:36Sam Jacobs: And so the trick is, can you build a private club on top of the educational institution? Can you build Harvard while many people are taking Harvard online? But can you still make it so that there is a Harvard and that is what's driving the brand halo of the Harvard online? Sam, I don't think I've ever told you this, but I first found out through about Revenue Collective when my current director of AIOps, Brandon Smith, he was running sales ops at the time. He got declined from his application process because he didn't meet the qualifications of the executive branch, but he meant the associates.

11:12So he actually joined the associates. And I remember thinking about that. And I had FOMO immediately from that. Like what community doesn't qualifies you at that level. And then I heard your name at one of our customers, Michael, the CEO, I'll think of his name in a second. He's like, oh, you should meet Sam Jacobs. So I was like, well, I heard he doesn't like CEOs. So I don't think I'm welcome. But that changed. And so there's this beautiful thing, as Asit would say, there's this beautiful thing where you have on one hand, this qualification, this really tight knit community. But on the other hand, you have this opportunity to welcome a greater group of people.

11:54And being able to merge those two things feels like there's been some decisions in there that have been conflictive. Are there any, is there anything that stands out? You're talking about this of like mistakes. Are there any mistakes specific to that that stand out to you that you're like?

12:08Sam Jacobs: Yeah, I mean, we we we made it so that you could sign up online without talking to anybody and we let in so anybody can join. That's the single biggest mistake we've made. How do you go about so you recognize you do it? You do it for some logical reason. You believe it's a good thing to do. You do it. It plays out. And then walk us through the moment you realize, oh, no, this was a mistake. And how you then think about correcting it. And usually the thing that I'm most interested in is what type of patients do you have to deploy in fixing it? Because you can't just like, can you just immediately change it?

12:43Are you facing it through? How does that work?

12:46Sam Jacobs: No, I tried to do that in 2022. You know, I was much, much more reactive in 2022 and as a leader. And that really cost us, and we'd raised money. And so it was, Laura would come back, LG, and she wanted to pursue teams, corporate memberships. And so we built out a big sales team to drive teams. And of course, the whole point of Pavilion is we're not going to sell to you. You know, you're not going to sell to each other. But all of the SDRs that we hired were just prospecting into the membership. So we did that. And then we built out a big educational team that was somewhat slow moving. And all of a sudden, our cost structure became so bloated.

13:23Sam Jacobs: And it's why McKinsey says that it's much easier for a low growth company that's profitable to find and discover growth than it is for a high growth, unprofitable business. to find its way to profitability. And I'm quite proud that we did reverse course and find our way back to profitability. But exactly your point, Austin, the thing that emerged was like, I have to slow down to slow as smooth and smooth as fast. And that fixing, quote unquote, fixing this will be a generational, not generational, it'll be five years. It's gonna take three to five years to fix because we wanna preserve, there's still a good part of it, which is that there can be a pavilion for everybody.

14:03Sam Jacobs: We do want everybody to take CRO school. We do want everybody to take CMO school. We do want everybody to have P &L fluency, but we do need to, and we do want to roll out programs for people that maybe are not the very best of the best so that they can have a valuable membership where they have connection with people and they feel connected to this bigger thing. At the same time that we need our Birkin bag, you know, we Philip Patek, Patek Philip, whatever. Like we need the thing at the top. We need the Black American Express card because that brand halo is what gives value to, in some ways, the platinum and the gold card.

14:41And so that's what I'm building with gold.

14:45Sam Jacobs: And the beautiful thing, I will just define it. The beautiful thing is like, thank freaking God that nothing has changed. Thank God that it's still that the genitals of the founders and CEOs are still the ones that are played with. It's still investors and founders that are thought of as the most celebrated heroes of all of these stories. And it is still true that the operating executive, so even, even the CMOs and CROs of large organizations, aside from, you know, Chris Degnan or Ron Jabrisco, but aside from like a handful of CROs and CMOs, they still feel like they're under pressure. They still feel like they're being asked to do things that are very, very difficult to accomplish.

15:27Sam Jacobs: There's still an opportunity. There's still an opportunity. And they don't get any recognition for the wins. Like I get actually really awkward by all of these because we are in this moment where there are these companies that are accelerating at a pace that we've never seen before. And when they're announcing their fundraisers and all of these things, not once is somebody saying, you know, kudos to the CRO who took this company from like a million to like 50 million in three years. Like that required some sleepless nights and some amazing execution over a long period of time. Kudos. Like you don't hear it as much.

15:58You see a lot of like, I want to thank my CTO or my this or my that, but you don't get it for the CROs.

16:04Sam Jacobs: People don't like, they still don't like sales and marketing people very much, at least not in, well, it depends. It depends. I think technical founders find them hard to come to terms with. But I will say to the answer to the question, the first question, which is, you know, how did I solve whatever the challenge was? And the fundamental answer to the question, which is to the point, is taking a longer term view. And there was a moment, actually, I don't know if it was this year, but it was in the last six to nine months when, you know, the board said, what do you want to do with this thing? And I realized that I hadn't answered that question for anybody.

16:39Sam Jacobs: It doesn't mean, you know, do I want to sell it? I do. Just to be clear, I am trying to generate, you know, massive, massive wealth. I'm not on a yacht and I should be. So that's part of the goal. But really, the point is, like, where are we taking the business? And so what I did was I built a three-year vision that specifically articulates, this is what I want to do. This is when I want to do it. These are the pieces that will go into it. We'd never had like a three-year vision with a coupled financial plan. I presented that to the company two weeks ago. And I feel much better because I just know this is where we're going.

17:12Sam Jacobs: It's going to take some time. It takes time to build these things in the right way, particularly clubs. Cool clubs take some time to build. so um and it's really easy to like if you if you reduce this if you get too fast with things we saw this with soho house right when they tried to grow too quickly and expand too much it didn't feel as exclusive the good the beautiful thing because one of the questions i was going to ask on the last episode though is uh can a can a club that was once cool ever become cool again and the answer i think is yes and i think uh soho house is a good example of that i know people that are really excited about their Soho House memberships.

17:50Sam Jacobs: And it's because you just make the restaurant great. Like you make the restaurant great. People want to go there. In London, it got to, it got really crowded. And London has a lot of private clubs. It's probably the place where you have the most private clubs there. And so people really appreciate that type of experience. And the Soho House did become really large and very open to people. But then they opened a second location. And that one is like as exclusive as it gets, meaning like some of your most famous people in the world can't get in for two months and so that became shiny again so it was very quick it didn't even take a long time it took like let's open this thing make it extra exclusive and everybody will want to be there and we do cool things over there and there's a cool event and some cool artist is there and everybody wants to be around that thing and so yeah clubs can get cool they opened the one i mean in austin and i remember the build-up to it it was like two years waitlist but just more recently i've uh there was a text thread where they're talking about getting out of it so i definitely think it's like a city by city situation and i mean sam that's kind of one of the challenges i was curious about you have all of these demographics and cities and different areas and you have to localize pavilion in them right yeah how do you like do you have you've had gms in the past you have them now is that how do you manage that process and we We have a team.

19:12Sam Jacobs: We invest in chapter operations and chapter enablement. We treat them. We try to equip them with marketing materials. Last week, we sent them all a little stand that they can say pavilion event that they can take to a happy hour. We run automations for them. It's a team that we directly invest in. And again, that was like a realization. It's not an afterthought. They are the heart and soul of pavilion and we want to make them great. Yeah. Well, we are running out of time, Sam, and from the desks of the amateurs of Asad and myself, we had a professional guest on today. Sam, this has been great.

19:49This is Topline Spotlight from your host, AJ Bruno, CEO of Quotapath, Asad Zaman, CEO of Sales Talent Agency, and of course, Sam Jacobs.

19:58Sam Jacobs: I will say before we go, I will say if you're interested in Pavilion Gold, Haleche Boy, Ryan Burke, if you're out there, I think you could be a good candidate. We're not going to let everybody in, but if you think that you qualify, please do let me know. You can reach out to me. You can find me online. Great. Thanks, Dan. Bye, everyone.

20:25Sam Jacobs: Thanks for listening to Topline. new episodes come out every sunday if you like what you heard today subscribe so you never miss an episode leave a five-star review and share it with your friends don't forget to join our top line slack channel to connect with us and discuss the topics we cover with other listeners click the link in the show notes lastly if you're interested in joining pavilion you can learn more about membership at joinpavilion.com forward slash membership thanks again for listening