


9 Aug 2026 · 1h 14m · 30 chapters

Mutiny CEO Jaleh Rezaei explains how AI forced a go-to-market “pivot to AI-native,” including deliberately shutting down an eight-figure SaaS business, rebuilding for faster iteration, and rethinking B2B marketing, PLG, and sales-team AI spend.
Jaleh Rezaei is co-founder and CEO of Mutiny, an AI agent used by go-to-market teams at Snowflake, Uber, Rippling, GitLab, and others. Previously, she led marketing and business development at Gusto, growing customers from 500 to 50,000 in four years; earlier she was director of product marketing at VMware. She has a BS in mechanical engineering from Berkeley and an MBA from Stanford GSB.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes.
Jaleh discusses her transition from Gusto to Mutiny and the decision to pivot to AI.
“Another incredible week of happenings in Go-To-Market.”
Exploration of AI's impact on go-to-market strategies and the move toward automation.
“around companies from previous eras and their ability to convert themselves into an AI-first company.”
Jaleh reflects on the challenges and conviction needed to pivot her business model.
“In SaaS, you really do focus on workflows.”
Discussion on the personal impact of making hard decisions as a CEO.
“In the sense that you shut the eight-figure business down.”
Learn about the challenges and reflections involved in making fast, impactful decisions as a CEO.
“And, you know, I definitely would have said the job of the CEO is you have to make the hard calls.”
Explore the timeline and emotional aspects of transitioning a product and company focus.
“But we couldn't create the right sort of separation of focus to be able to do both at the same time.”
Understand the importance of maintaining customer relationships during significant business changes.
“It's like, if we can figure this out today, instead of this week, right, we should be doing that.”
Discuss the balance of financial resources and risk management in business decisions.
“And this is how I think your enterprise sales team can do this.”
Analyze the implications of AI integration in business strategies and market presence.
“yeah, it's not working for X period of time and that's okay because we'll still be a company.”
Discussing the challenges and responsibilities of adapting to AI technology in business.
“So I think some part of that is we don't really have that many options.”
Exploring the important decisions founders must make regarding business growth and pivots.
“Like when you're hearing this way, it's different to the approach you've taken.”
Understanding the difficult leadership choices and their impact on teams.
“would be a really hard call to say no we're not going to do this because we've raised and we've built infrastructure to go heavy into that area.”
Jaleh shares her foundational motivations behind building Mutiny and the role of technology.
“around what you were optimizing for when you decided to build this company.”
Jaleh shares her foundational motivations behind building Mutiny and the role of technology.
“You need the answer to a simple question, but the information is buried across Slack, Email, Granola, Salesforce, and Jira.”
Discussing the importance of ROI in the AI-driven business landscape.
“If you're in New York and you're listening to this and you don't have a ticket, we're not friends.”
Strategies for optimizing sales team productivity and value extraction.
“People just have this anxiety of we have to lock down the credits.”
Explore how sales performance metrics impact resource allocation and strategy.
“But you think of somebody that's closing it, you know, like this rep from Ripley closed$1.2 million within a matter of months.”
Discuss the personal challenges and mental health aspects of leading a pivot.
“I mean, the other part of this, Sam, that also you're talking to is energy and like just going forward, but the mental health and fortitude that it takes to do that as well.”
Learn about the shift from sales-led growth to product-led growth and its benefits.
“I grew up with, you know, like I grew up in war, you know, when I was a little kid, it'd be like, let's run to the basement because, you know, country's being bombed.”
Examine how brand perception is becoming a critical competitive advantage in tech.
“And for us, we're selling to our users or sales reps, as you guys know better than anyone, they're only going to give a new tool a few minutes before they move on if it doesn't deliver.”
Discover how to craft compelling brand narratives that stand out in a crowded market.
“Are you how do you think about this dynamic as a founder of a technical company with like a brand muscle as well.”
Discuss the impact of AI on marketing tools and strategies for engaging customers.
“I mean, you can write the same article today that you would have written two years ago, and you get less than one tenth of the engagement and interaction.”
Learn how unique customer insights can drive innovative marketing.
“Where do you think there's a lot of alpha to be found?”
Discover how an AI-generated raccoon video made a marketing impact.
“Did you think the raccoons were actually?”
Understand how unique marketing materials can drive sales engagement.
“which part of this did you think was not AI?”
Explore the factors influencing quota attainment in sales teams.
“We used to go door to door and sell this lawn service called lawn aeration where we would basically poke holes in people's lawns to let this compressed air out.”
Examine whether AI tools enhance or diminish salesperson engagement.
“Quotapath has thousands of customers, most of whom are probably not benefiting from AI.”
Discuss predictions for salespeople's time spent on revenue activities.
“specifically salespeople more present or less present?”
Explore the limitations of AI in enhancing productivity for salespeople.
“okay, I have a really good assistant or I have a really good chief of staff.”
A discussion on whether money will exist in the future and the implications of AI.
“I had a bulls versus bears question for you, Asit.”

Get the gist, explore an idea or ask about something said.
On Topline, what are the key points of this episode?
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.
0:00December and January, especially January, are some of the most tense months I've had at Mutiny because it was like, oh my God, this has to work, right? In a past life, Jaleh Rezaei helped grow Gusto to 50 ,000 customers. Now she's the co-founder and CEO of Mutiny, a product that helps companies like Snowflake and Uber close enterprise deals with AI. In this episode, she opens up about one of the most terrifying decisions a founder can make, how she deliberately shut down a thriving eight-figure SaaS business to rebuild as an AI native company. The only way that I could get the company to be as fast as a YC startup was to and to honestly not have a backup plan.
0:42We also get Jale's perspective on the tactics actually getting results today in B2B marketing and why playing it safe is an increasingly risky proposition. Anything we do on marketing, like if it's not different, just stop doing it. It's just not going to matter. Plus, we debate what's a reasonable level of AI spend for your sales team, what's behind the tech industry seeing a sudden spike in quota attainment, and whether AI note takers are actually destroying our memories. Welcome to Topline. Hey everybody, it's Sam Jacobs. Welcome to Topline. Another incredible week of happenings in Go-To-Market.
1:18I'm joined by my amazing co-host, AJ Bruno, the CEO of Quotapath, and Asit Zaman, the CEO of Sales Talent Agency. And we've got a very special guest on the show, one of the leaders in AI transformation, I would say, Jaleh Rezae. And she's the co-founder and CEO of Mutiny, the AI agent that helps companies close enterprise revenue used by go-to-market teams at companies like Snowflake, Rippling, and Uber. Prior to Mutiny, Jaleh was the head of marketing and business development at Gusto, where she grew the company from 500 to 50 ,000 customers over four years. She was also director of product marketing at VMware prior to Gusto.
1:54She holds a BS in mechanical engineering from Berkeley and an MBA from GSB from Stanford. Jalé, welcome to Topline. Thank you for having me. I've been a big fan of the show. Oh, well, we're so excited to have you. As you know, Asit is our moderator. AJ and I are here for hot takes and humorous quips. Mine are a little bit more metaphysical and philosophical and insightful than AJ But AJ is the king of pop culture references Well, before Someone that knew about Jimothy, so Yeah, let's just start there Osset and Sam have been living under a rock and did not know who Jimothy was And that is shocking So, yes I'm telling you, many of our listeners do not know who Jimothy is either So, Jale, why don't you tell us, who is this infamous Jimothy?
2:44So our company mascot is a raccoon. So naturally, any trivia about raccoon, we tend to know about it. But Jimothy is this super adorable raccoon that's taken the world by storm. He's got a little hunchback, a short spine. And so there's all sorts of sightings of him on social media doing different things. But I think there's a couple of different accounts now named after Jimothy. But it's a lot of fun to follow. What was the second choice to a raccoon as a mascot? There was no second choice. Oh, it was just a clean cart, like straight winner. It was raccoon or bust. I think it's not a raccoon.
3:26It wasn't pandas. I was happy to want to start this company if my mascot can be a raccoon. And by the way, this is not the first show I've been on where we basically just talked about the raccoon. And he's like, I have one question for you. Tell me everything. And I was like, okay, we have six minutes. I guess I will talk about the raccoon. Okay, that said, let's jump into go to market. There's lots to discuss. Okay, the place to start is there's this whole conversation that's happening because of AI around companies from previous eras and their ability to convert themselves into an AI-first company.
4:07And so you've got the SaaS apocalypse happening in the public markets. You've got all these question marks around private companies. And it's it's oscillated a bit like last year you had people like Lemkin that were saying that any SaaS era company that hasn't shown growth yet, it's done. It's over. It's just not possible. And then what you've seen now is actually a number of SaaS era companies have been able to make the required changes internally, culturally, operationally, and implemented in their products. And growth is now showing up. And the markets are very happy about that. So the question for you guys have gone through a pretty dramatic transition.
4:46Talk to us a little bit about your thinking of how did your worldview of where go-to-market was going evolve based on what you saw with AI? And then how did that drive your thinking around the changes you had to make in the business to be able to fight this fight? So prior to starting Mutiny, I had led marketing and sales teams. And that had shaped a lot of my view. And in particular, as an engineer coming into go to market, I found it really challenging that you owned the number, but you didn't own all of the resources that you needed to hit that number. And that was kind of crazy to me. And so when I was at Gusto, we built a 20-person growth team and we brought engineers, designers, and just kept moving towards that consolidation of skills so that we could get what we needed done done.
5:42Ultimately, I left to start a company with the mission of empowering go-to-market teams to be able to move at the speed of all of their ideas and to be able to create amazing customer experiences without all of these dependencies. So that was the mission. That was in 2018. We tackled that initially through the website. We said, okay, let's take the website, something that required a lot of design, technical resources, product marketing, very cross-functional, and let's make that very easy for the head of revenue to be able to optimize and turn it into a revenue machine. When AI first came out, I don't know if you guys remember this.
6:27I feel like the AI years have been like dog years, but it was really good at, Or it was starting to be good at copywriting. And so a lot of people were using it in these really surgical ways of, okay, how can we generate copy with this? And so initially when AI came out, we were really excited. I don't think we fully understood how transformational it was going to be. And it just felt like, oh my gosh, it's this great tool that we can add into the mix and make the product a lot better. About a year into that journey, it became clear that AI was a reasoning engine. and that you could completely transform go-to-market.
7:06The level of automation that you could do with something like this was becoming clear. And the slope of that trend was also becoming clear, right? You're like, oh my God, holy shit. If this thing keeps improving at the rate that it's improving, you can do some really interesting things with this. And that was the point at which I felt quite limited by the existing SaaS product. I was like, well, it's not just about the website. We want to automate all sorts of things within go-to-market. And if that's what we want to do, the website goes from a strength to holding us back because we're locked into a particular customer.
7:44We're locked into particular workflows. And that's when we started, you know, we created a separate team that was focused on building the new AI native thing. And that also had its challenges, which I'm happy to talk more about. Well, one of the things that you're talking to is it's interesting because a lot of companies at that time were actually going the opposite. They were really honing in on their persona and their use case. You had verticalized SaaS, the rise of SaaS in that direction as well. So what you ultimately are saying is you took a step back, actually, no, we need to go broader and go to market.
8:20And the site, if we just focus on the site, even though it's a really clear use case, we think we're going to run out of headroom really, really quick because of AI. Is that what I'm hearing? Yeah, exactly. So in AI, you can focus on outcomes. In SaaS, you really do focus on workflows. And because you have to build everything screen by screen, it really limits the strike zone for the product. And I think we always have this really big ambitious mission. And so it was just a lot more interesting to think about how can we really address that now. And we can get into this a little bit more. I think you still need to start somewhere and expand, but you have to have a foundation for the product that can scale as you expand your use cases.
9:13And I think that was the tricky part about that SaaS foundation around website. It wasn't one that was going to scale to all sorts of new use cases. We were very limited by that. Charlie, I have a pretty tactical question here because I went through, I mean, Quotapath and Mutiny have similar stories in terms of the, I think, raises where we were grown up and how we were born. We were starting in 2018. We've raised$70 million over the years, East Coast with Insight Partners, but have had to reinvent ourselves. But the challenge that I saw in 21 to 24 really was like, if you're pivoting the business, you know, you're going to have churn, you know, you're gonna have to call it out.
9:54Your investors are going to get very, very weary. You have all of this. You have a lot of money to spend, but you feel like in some ways your hand is tied behind your back because your, your investors are going to be like, well, look, until you fix the leaky bucket problem, you, you really can't do anything. and you're going to have to be held at this, like accountable at these burn levels, which will be much lower when you're looking at your balance sheet and be like, man, I really need to go like experiment and innovate and AI is here. But did you go through something similar to like, does that resonate well with you?
10:26Or did you feel that your board was like, no, just go do whatever you can to like catch this wave? Yeah, so we had really supportive investors. So Sequoia is our lead investor and they are very much go big or go home. So I have a lot of support to do whatever we needed to do to build the biggest possible company that we could. But we did do a lot of trial and error internally because, you know, when you start a company and I'm sure you experienced this, AJ, you know, you've built this thing and you've overcome all of these different odds, right? your first instinct isn't let me go kill it all so I can build a new thing from scratch and figure out how to get that to product market fit, right?
11:12You have this extreme empathy around what it took the first time. And there were no examples at the time of how companies have navigated this. I think Intercom was the one example that we had. And in their case, they had not fully shut down the business, but, you know, they had to eat a lot of glass to figure out how to build the new agent business. And so we went through a bunch of trial and error of trying to do both. So we initially thought of it as the existing SaaS business was going to be the cash cow. We had all these big, happy customers, and that was going to fund the AI investment. And what I learned during that experience was that it was kind of impossible for us to do both at the same time.
12:08The zero to one journey is a benevolent dictatorship. And running a scaled business is all about delegating and autonomy and giving people goals and OKRs and planning and things like that. And so those two vibes were completely at odds with each other. And it really surprises your team, right? Because you're like, no, no, no, like I have to make all these calls. And you're going from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. to 9 p.m. Sometimes you'd make three pivot on a decision that you already made. That's really bad to do in the scaling phase. And so the two modes were really different. And then I would say, in addition to that, you know, now it's really obvious how different it is to build, you know, an AI business and you have to build the harness and all the things that goes into it.
13:03Over the course of building those, that was also emerging, that the way we measure product, the way we do pricing, the way we do planning, all the stuff is going to be different. And so by going through it and trying really hard to run both, to isolate, to take all these measures. I just reached a conclusion that I wasn't going to be able to do both at the same time and that we had to make a choice. And if we had to make a choice, the choice was clear. It was a pretty dramatic choice, right? In the sense that you shut the eight-figure business down. Like eight figures in revenue is like this dream.
13:41Like on LinkedIn, you have all these influences saying, you know, it's the fuck you money is when you get to 10 million in ARR and that's eight figures. You were just like, you shut it down. You just went like pretty binary with it. That's so interesting. And it takes a lot of conviction to do something that intense. Yes, it did. It did. I mean, this is one of the reasons I wrote about it a lot, because I think as a founder, it's just really helpful to have those stories so that you can make those decisions and, you know, reflecting back on the experience, you know, you're always asking yourself, what is the job of the CEO?
14:22And, you know, I definitely would have said the job of the CEO is you have to make the hard calls. But what I learned in that experience is that it's actually about making the hard calls really fast, which means you're getting there before everybody else on your team is there. Because if everyone's like, oh, my God, please do this already. It's really late. You've waited too long. Like, what was the experience? Let's look into that a bit more as an individual going through making that decision. Like, how were you sleeping during those days? How much did you go back and forth on the decision? Like, I imagine if I was going through something like that, I wouldn't be sleeping all that well.
15:04And I would really like, I would oscillate between doing the binary thing versus, you know, to get to the, what was that experience like? How long did it take you to get to the decision? How did it feel during those days? And then once you did it, like, what was the feeling like? Were you like, oh, shit, we just shut down an eight-figure revenue business. What am I doing? Or was it like, oh, yeah, that was the right move, clean and clear? Yeah. So I would say the trial and error prior to that really helped with the connection that this is what we need to do. Because if I had a conversation with someone and they were like, have you tried this?
15:47Have you tried this? Have you tried this? My answer to everything was yes, and it doesn't work. Yes, and it doesn't work. Yes, and it doesn't work. My underlying, I would say, opinion was very much informed by are we moving as fast as possible? Because I think speed is the most important thing for a company. And so, you know, if you and I are solving the same problem, but you're faster than me, you're going to win, right? Right. And I think, you know, a lot of us have that have that innate sense of pacing. And so as I was trying these different playbooks, OK, what if it seems like our sales team is really happy to sell the thing that they know how to sell and therefore we're not learning enough with selling the new thing?
16:32OK, why don't we let them not sell the old thing and now they just have to sell the new thing? What if instead of having executives run the teams, we become more founder led and the founders plug directly into the team? So we tried all of these different versions. And at the end of all of them, I would ask myself, are we moving as fast as possible? And my answer was no. And the only way that I could get the company to be as fast as a YC startup, which we understood because we were once a YC startup, was to not compute every decision through these two different lenses and have a singular focus.
17:09And honestly, to not have a backup plan, I think that is sometimes really helpful as a startup where if you don't make it, it's not going to work. And so that's ultimately, yeah. How long did you give yourself as you're cycling through these different modes, these different frames? Is it a week? Is it a month? Is it a quarter? To the point of speed, sometimes trying something, like many things don't work at first. Yeah. And that's why you have to commit to the direction for some period of time. And I can imagine, I mean, it's great that Sequoia is supportive and the board is supportive, but many boards would feel like that lack of conviction is grounds for serious discussion.
17:55You know, if you're trying all these different things and you don't seem to know which thing is the perfect thing, that calls into question a bunch of other dynamics. Yeah, yeah. So we went through about three quarters of trying different. And I wouldn't say we were trying different products as much as we were trying to build the new thing that we needed to build as fast as possible. But we couldn't create the right sort of separation of focus to be able to do both at the same time. And so that took about three quarters. And then I would say the last quarter was when, you know, I started to come to the decision and we rolled it out.
18:36So November of 2025 is when we made the decision to fully deprecate the existing product. Well, before you jump to, because I'm curious as well on like the, what you're seeing and the traction you're getting. But the other question that you posed that I read about was, this was a brilliant question, is if you were walking into YC today, is that how you and your co-founder would solve the problem? and like having that sounds like it's a really challenging spot for a lot of founders to get to to just really be able to be vulnerable and as honest as you possibly can and so walking into that november 2025 to fully deprecate it sounds like you and your co-founder had had like the really hard conversation and in terms of burning the boats so to speak to get there yes and i do remember that conversation very vividly because I was 110 % I had arrived at the decision.
19:36And so I wanted to fully convince him and bring him across the finish line. And that was the question where, you know, our answer to that was very clear. And it made the decision final, right? It's like, okay, if this is what we want to be building and that's different, then, you know, we should go do that as fast as possible. Yeah. And then to Sam's point, I mean, it seems like things are going well. Even in the last, like, couple of months, what are you seeing and how's it going? Yeah. So we deprecated in November and let's say November, December and January, especially January are some of the most tense months I've had at Mutiny because we, yeah, because it was like, oh my God, this has to work, right?
20:33Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we, you know, we moved in person, everybody's building out of an office and we weren't remote anymore. and we were in the office every single day 996? Or are you doing the 996? Yeah. So Brian Halligan dropped in, he confirmed his priors, everybody's 996.
21:03Yeah, 996 is an interesting topic in and of itself, which we can talk about some more too. But yes, it was a very intense period. And I do my best work when I don't have a safety net. And it just creates extra urgency around everything, right? It's like, if we can figure this out today, instead of this week, right, we should be doing that. And I think in that setup that we were in, it wasn't even today. It was like, we can figure this out in the next hour. Every single hour mattered. And that's how we operate it. So in February, we released a private preview. We didn't even build pricing and billing into the product because we were like, oh, it's going to take a lot of time for it to actually do the things that we need it to do.
21:54And we hit all of our GA metrics that Friday. So then we started scrambling to build billing and like, oh, we should probably charge for this. These AI credits aren't cheap that we're getting away for free. And so we build all that stuff and then we officially GA'd the product in April. So four months ago. And today it's used by over 3 ,500 organizations, including some of the ones you mentioned, like Rippling, Snowflake, Uber, GitLab, all sorts of large enterprises as well as a lot of AI native startups. What percentage of your previous customers were able to transition over to the new AI native product?
22:37So the way we did this, the transition was we lined up a partner and we did all of those conversations because we had to deprecate the product. We had to tell the customers that we weren't going to support that anymore. And we knew that we wanted to have a date at which we no longer had to do that versus, you know, going going until the end of the contract size. Right. And so we did every conversation in face to face with the customers. and we had a partner lined up that had guaranteed their pricing, we would do a white glove migration for them. And we had pre-negotiated a bunch of extras that, you know, we thought that our customers would want that we hadn't necessarily yet built into our product.
23:22And so that's how we handled the transition. And I think as a result of that, a lot of them maintained a relationship with us and felt they walked away being like, I understand where you're going. I understand why you're making these decisions. And so many of them ended up converting into the new product. Now, the tricky thing was that we did the deprecation in November. The first product came out in February. But nonetheless, we, you know, for example, like at Snowflake, I emailed the VP and I was like, And we did PLG, which has been really interesting shifting from sales led to PLG. But I was really adamant that this needs to be something that people can use on their own.
24:08And so, you know, we just created an account for them. I was like, hey, here's the product. Here's your login. Here's what I've done for you. And this is how I think your enterprise sales team can do this. You should just check this out. And one of the really interesting things is Uber, same thing. The VP saw the product and was like, we're using, we're going to be using that. And so many of them just at the leadership level, once they saw the product, they're like, oh, this is absolutely something that we want to roll out to the sales team. So we were able to convert a decent number of them who had that interest in enterprise sales, which is what we're focused on now.
24:47If you're giving advice to founders, this is, I think, one of the fundamental decisions a company has to make is, are we willing to go this route or not in this transition? And I would imagine that this is a very hard transition to make because it's mentally very taxing to make a decision of this sort. And sometimes you just can't even because of board dynamics and things of that nature. But the other, the trying to balance those two things out, you know, Sam Sam likes that quote about acute pain versus, what is it, Sam? People like acute pain versus chronic pain. So people are willing to endure an endless amount of, you know, a nudge in their side versus making the hard decision all at once.
25:33And so I think this is like one of those situations. If you're sitting down with someone and they're trying to figure out, should I try to balance these two things or should I shut it down and go all in on the new thing? What's your advice? How do you make that decision? Because I imagine not 100 % of companies should do it this way, but a big chunk should. How do you decide if I should do it this way or do it the other way? I'd probably ask them one question, which is, is there one really hard decision, maybe one that scares the hell out of you that you don't want to do, that you can make that would make 50 subsequent downstream decisions a lot easier for your company?
26:18And if the answer is yes, you should make that really hard decision. Exactly what that decision is, how they set it up, I bet that that all lives in the gut instinct of the founder, whether it's to deprecate the old business or to do some other type of incubation for the AI side. They know that, but often it's just exactly what Sam said. We tend to live with chronic pain because we're not willing to perform the surgery. It probably, I mean, it has to also do with your balance sheet, I would imagine. You know, if you feel like you have to be able to withstand a certain amount of like, yeah, it's not working for X period of time and that's okay because we'll still be a company.
27:03Do you think it proves the other way too, Sam, if you have too much money? There's probably a sweet spot. Like you need like a year's worth of runway, but not much more than that. Because if you have so much runway, you might not make the drastic decision. You might feel like you're in a very secure resource allocation, balance the various initiatives type of situation. Whereas you're like, you know what, let's create a clock here. I also, I think it has to do, but Jale, you can disagree with us or correct us. But it's, you know, Alexander, my old boss, many years ago at GLG, used to say the balance sheet strategy, the capital strategy is the strategy.
27:40And so the point is, if you've got Sequoia on your board and on the cap table and a bunch of other venture investors, like the conversation at the board level is you can't, we are not playing this game to play this game. You know, we are playing, we are here because we're going, as you said, going big or go home. We know how this world is going to go because we can look at companies that are, you know, a step ahead like Clary or Outreach or whatever or Airtable today, which, you know, I did their Series D at 13 billion or 11 billion and traded at 1.2. So I think some part of that is we don't really have that many options.
28:16If we're, for what? Oh, did you say you did this? You did, you participated in the Series D? No, no, I'm saying last time you did the calculation on the 1.2. I thought you said you participate. You meant you participated. No way. No, I'm saying if you want to play that game, you have to be prepared that the asset will get written down to zero. And so part of the math is Sequoia is here. All the other investors are here. We're trying for a multi-billion dollar outcome. This is the path. But correct me if I'm wrong, Jaleigh. Totally. I mean, we started the company to make a real difference in the go-to-market space, and that journey wasn't done, right?
28:58And I think it's really hard to look at a technology like AI and then not admit to yourself that this is going to fundamentally change every product in this market. AJ, do you think about this? Like you are in a similar situation. Like when you're hearing this way, it's different to the approach you've taken. Is that part of you that's like, yeah, throw away the other side of the business. Let's do it. Like, can you see the upside of doing it this way? Because you've taken the opposite. I would say that the way I would look at this and coming into every year, we have this conversation is, okay, we grew 50 to 100 % last year.
29:48Do we have the exact signals to make it? Do we need to make any changes to the business? And now I've thought a lot about what Jolly's been talking about today and just like the burn the boats mentality. I think every founder every week thinks about this and has to evaluate their business and just be as objective as possible, but it's a little bit different flavor so the example that i'll give for us is like as we make um i wouldn't say a pivot but make a pretty big swing for next year we have to in the next three months have 30 conversations with 30 cfos and then decide at the end of that the those conversations in the board meeting in october 15th if it's a go no go in a direction that we're heading and it would be a really hard call to say no we're not going to do this because we've raised and we've built infrastructure to go heavy into that area.
30:42And so like the question really is like, if I take a step back from the business and I look at where we are and I hear pushback from my team on specific changes or making, you know, making budget cuts, like we are going through departmental budget cuts and I get a ton of pushback at some, at the end of the day, the CEO has to be the bad guy. That's just what it really amounts to. And you are going to make unpopular decisions and you just have to know that those are going to be unpopular decisions. Doesn't matter if it's your co-founder. Doesn't matter if it's your exec team that you've worked with for years on years over multiple companies.
31:16You just ultimately have to make some of those really tough decisions. Some of those could be firing someone that you've worked with for 15 years because it's not a good fit any longer. Some of those could be massive pivots, but they're always, you're always thinking about these things and decisions. And so what Jolly has been talking about is just I'm sitting here thinking about the decisions that we've made over the last year. And then what are those decisions need to look like next year? What are those big hard pivots to make as well? Yeah. Jolly, I'd love to understand your mindset around what you were optimizing for when you decided to build this company.
31:55Because I imagine you have this like North Star. You've mentioned it a few times around. We want to build the biggest business we can build. and this doesn't even though this is an eight-figure business we're at the fuck you money level already it doesn't feel like this is going to be that so whatever let's go do something different to build it if this hadn't worked what was your like what were you thinking at the back of your mind like we're gonna try this it doesn't work was it going to be like keen cut then we're gonna come back and build a different thing like was it very keen and clear in your mind that I'm here to build this generational business and if this doesn't work, I'm going to come back and try it again.
32:33I would say it's not that different than my mindset when I started the company, right? Which is we're going to build a generational company and why do I believe in that? A lot of my conviction comes from having sat in the shoes of our customers and understanding all of the challenges are in there. Having been in this market and sold to customers, that conviction grew even more, right? They were struggling even more than we were when I was an operator with all of these limitations that got in the way of them giving their customers the best experience and being able to bring all of their creative ideas to life.
33:16And there's something very grounding and first principles in that. And I think most folks, when you start a company, like you believe in that, right? And so if nothing has changed about that world and it's only gotten worse, and now you have a technology that can actually deliver on that mission, it's almost exciting to run towards that, right? If you look at it from first principles, I would have loved to have LLMs when we first started Mutiny. this episode of top line is brought to you by Tourette every CRO is asking the same critical questions why are win weights dropping what are my closers doing differently how do we beat competitor x despite massive ai investments sales teams still can't get complete answers or take action on partial insights Tourette changes that Tourette is the only answer to action engine that gets to the root of revenue issues then executes with relentless precision Tourette answers your questions with a complete revenue graph, operationalizes those answers for your teams through AI architects, and deploys them to reps through AI agents.
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35:49Thank you, DevRev. The future of go-to-market will be built in one room. Join us September 28th through October 1st in New York City for GTM 2026 by Pavilion, featuring keynote speaker Jeffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, my good friend Nick Mehta, the co-founder and CEO of Gainsight for a very long time, alongside 1 ,000 other VPNC-level operators in sales, marketing, customer success, and RevOps. We are also celebrating the Pavilion 10-year anniversary. Yes, it's true. Pavilion got started as Revenue Collective in New York City in 2016 when I was working at Livestream for Jesse Hertzberg.
36:27And we're bringing the band back together, as many founding members as we can possibly get a hold of. It's going to be an incredible event. And we're talking about how to be human in the age of AI. And Nick and Jeffrey and the entire team are so excited to bring you this event. I want to see you there. I want to shake your hand in person. We're actually doing live top line recording at the event. so Asad and AJ are going to be there and we hope to see you there. Go to attendgtm.com to learn more. Attendgtm.com. If you're in New York and you're listening to this and you don't have a ticket, we're not friends.
37:00I want to be friends with you, so buy your ticket. Thanks for listening. I'll see you at GTM September 28th through October 1st. How important is the underlying math of the AI software development supply chain come into your mind. And what I mean by that is traditional SaaS software has 90 % margins. You write the code by hand for sure. That's not fun. But once it's there, you can deploy it at zero cost to every new customer. Whereas if you're building on top of, until probably a couple of weeks ago with Kimmy3, but if you're building on top of ChatGPT or OpenAI or Anthropic models, all of a sudden margins play a role in the design or construction of your business that you never even thought about them for five years, six years of running the company.
37:51On the other hand, and probably you're talking at the boardroom with Sequoia and a bunch of others, and they're saying, listen, over time, the cost of compute and intelligence and reasoning is going to go to zero. So we'll take it on the chin for now. We have plenty of money. But let's assume that we will get back to 90 % margins in time once we launch all the data centers in space and in the ocean and stuff. But did you consider the construction, sort of the mathematical construction of the business as you were pivoting? Or it was like, listen, we'll figure this out. But right now we need a product that people want and that they're going to buy.
38:22So we, I would say at the outset, very focused on how do we add value and how do we improve the lives of our customers as fast as possible. Living in it and the margin thing is very real. And you, because, you know, for example, we have credit-based pricing, right? And the more credit somebody uses, the more revenue we make. And that credit is tethered off of what we pay for it, right? The biggest cost being the cost to the foundation companies. And so it's a very new and real muscle that I think every AI company has to build of the thinking about that and what's the outcome you're creating for the customer?
39:10How do you communicate ROI? How do you quantify value? Because I actually think in a way, customers have gotten, they're moving in the wrong direction. They're just like, I just don't want to spend this much money on credits. And it's like, well, how big is your bill? Well, what value are you getting out of that bill? And does that not make sense? I think that's how people used to buy software. But Because, you know, with tools like Claude, they just have examples of, oh, my God, one guy spent$50 ,000 in a week. People just have this anxiety of we have to lock down the credits. We have to lock down the credit.
39:44I was hosting a CRO dinner and people were going over their Claude bill and what's going on. And I was getting to, OK, well, how much are you paying for each person? And it's amazing how much we're willing to pay for an engineer versus for a go to market person. And it's like, oh, well, you know,$50,$100. And it's like, why? Why do you think of it as$50 or$100? So to give you an example, I used to, when I made decks, I used to have a designer that I paid$5 ,000 to. And it would take two weeks of back and forth. And I paid$5 ,000 to get to something that I was pretty happy with, but it end-to-end took a month.
40:24Now, in six, seven hours, I can build that in Mutiny. and maybe that does cost me 50 credits. That's really freaking cheap relative to what I used to pay that designer and not to mention how much faster that happened, right? And so I do think it's important for companies like us to make our own ROI case and make it really clear how should a customer think about the budget allocation for every single rep? Because if you leave it to them, it becomes more of a broad, oh, let's just minimize all of the AI bills and less about how are we empowering our team to solve a problem. So for instance, Mutee is a broad technology.
41:06You can use it in all sorts of different parts of the organization, but we have focused on enterprise sales and enterprise revenue in particular because I think that's where we can have the clearest ROI and we can command the highest price for what we're doing, right? In enterprise deals, every touchpoint with the customer needs to be completely tailored to that account from the research that can support really deep discovery to the multi-threading to the decks, the follow -ups, the business cases that you make. And that's the piece that Mutiny is really good at, right? Building this really bespoke, rooted in research type of experience.
41:47So we plug into their email, their calendar, and then we create all of these things for them. Now, if you were to just give that to any SMB rep, you might not be willing to pay maybe$200,$300 a month to empower them. But you think of somebody that's closing it, you know, like this rep from Ripley closed$1.2 million within a matter of months. He's at 150 % of his annual quota in strategic accounts. And so you look at that and you're like, OK, well, this makes a ton of sense. Let's give him more. Like, why are we only giving him 300 credits a month? Like he should have whatever he wants to be able to go close those deals.
42:25So I definitely think like it's very important to think about ROI and how you're going to quantify the cost. Because as you know, in go to market, it's a little bit challenging to go all the way to outcome based pricing the way you can in CX right now. I have a different question and then I'll give it back to my wonderful co-host. But 2018, you started working on this business, just like AJ. And AJ's been open and honest about the journey of being a CEO. And I'm just curious, you know, this pivot sounds, as you said, right? And you said you had some thoughts on 996. Was it hard to maintain the energy?
43:02In some ways, you know, you have an install base. You're not starting from completely zero, that's for sure. But you just said you shut a deprecated legacy instance in November and you didn't even launch the new thing until February, that's terrifying. And how do you maintain, or was it a problem at all to maintain the energy, the endurance, to stay in the fight and to say, it's okay, if this is day zero, that's fine. I can do this for another 10 years if I need to. Or was that a personal journey that you had to go on as you were thinking about this pivot? Because 2018, that's eight years ago.
43:35That's a long time. I mean, the other part of this, Sam, that also you're talking to is energy and like just going forward, but the mental health and fortitude that it takes to do that as well. So that's a big part of that equation too. YC has this, you know, really good saying, startups die when the founders run out of stamina or money, whichever one comes first. And so I think we were in the lucky position where we had the money. And I mean, I really believe in what we're doing. And I think there's a lot of really unique perspectives that we have where I almost, I feel like if I wasn't building this business, it wouldn't get built right.
44:19For example, a lot of the tools that I look at, they are building for marketing or they're building for sales. And one of the unique and really important perspectives that we have is the blurring of those lines. I think that reps should have, should be able to run an entire go-to-market from cold to closed and have everything that they need to be able to get that deal across the finish line, including access to what historically was marketing, product marketing, account-based marketing, all of that, running ads, all of that stuff should be within a click of a button for an enterprise rep that is bringing this much revenue into the company.
44:58And I think a lot of people look at that, they're like, oh, how could we give these marketing resources to reps? No one would allow that. I'm like, but I've sat on the marketing side. And I can tell you that marketers would be really happy if they didn't have to make another one pager or do another one-to-one campaign for a sales rep. They just want their brand to be protected. They want guardrails around budget and things like that. But outside of that, they want to get out of the way. They want their company to grow as fast as possible. And they know that they can't scale that. Those types of ideas, people are going to come along when they see it in action, when we actually build it and we give it to reps and they're using it and they see, oh, wow, like this is great.
45:42You know, when we first started, ABM people were using Mutiny and we're doing all of this stuff for enterprise reps. And we had this big push of you need to give this directly to the salesperson. They're like, I can't let them come in and create decks and these things. There's no way. And we pushed and every company that we pushed and who took the leap, you know, they went from two users to seven users to 25 users to 30 users to 100 users to 200 users. And you just saw that growth happen. And I think some of these convictions, they just come from having lived this job and having a point of view on what I think is needed for companies to be really good at growth.
46:22And so it's really exciting to be building those. And I get a lot of energy from that. And then I guess the other part of it is just, I don't know, I'm from Iran. I've seen some shit. I grew up with, you know, like I grew up in war, you know, when I was a little kid, it'd be like, let's run to the basement because, you know, country's being bombed. You just kind of grow up quickly. And, you know, in my family, the attitude is if you fall down, you just get back up and you keep going. And so I think there's probably also a bit of that on the stamina side that I draw from. But it's definitely really, really challenging, I would say.
47:03You like playing life on hard. And one of the hard decisions you've made is going from sales led growth to PLG, but focused on the enterprise customer or enterprise sales, which your customers are not baby companies. Right. And so that's that's a really interesting transition. Would love to hear your thoughts on it. But the thing I've been thinking about a lot is that AI companies have to hold the hand of the customer a lot to help them understand how to get the value from the product and specifically help them understand how the spend is being justified, how there's this ROI that enables them to spend more, invest more, not just renew, but actually enable that users to use this more and more so that the spend increases.
47:51A, that transition, how has that been? You know, do you miss sales-led growth? Or are you like, this is so much better? And then B, how are you thinking about helping the customer get the most value from it, helping them do the analysis of ROI so that you guys can keep expanding within those accounts? Yeah, so TLDR, I love PLG. It has been life-changing. I highly recommend it to everybody. Yeah. Seriously? I know I really mean it. It's been really awesome. I mean, when we launched in that first week, we had a thousand signups. And these are massive companies like DHL, Google, et cetera, that are signing up for the product.
48:36And so we have a funnel where when customers come in, everybody gets stored. We have a live stream for all the enterprise channels. That all goes into a Slack channel. So even if they don't request to sign up and talk to sales, we will convert that into a demo request. So we will identify them. We will reach out to them. We will give them more resources. We offer them opportunity to talk to us. and the trend that I have seen with AI is that it's a very hands-on technology and you know it's not that you don't want some of these things it's more that it's not possible to do them yet you don't believe that you could build a product that a sales rep could use with the same precision that a designer and a product marketer would do you have to see it with your own eyes and the only way to do that really effectively is through a PLG product.
49:35And the other just philosophical belief that I have around PLG is that I think it forces you to operate in a more prioritized way because you have to build a better, more complete product out of the box versus when we were building SalesLead. There was over time, there's just so many things we're like, well, let's just ship, let's move on to this other thing and ship that. The CX team can show them how to do that. And everything becomes, let's show them how to do that and show them, you know, how to navigate the UI and all these things. And for us, we're selling to our users or sales reps, as you guys know better than anyone, they're only going to give a new tool a few minutes before they move on if it doesn't deliver.
50:16And so the mindset of everybody at Mutiny needs to be, you have 60 seconds, you know, to earn the next 60 seconds, to earn the next 60 seconds, or, you know, those users are gone. So I really like this for us. And it has brought in a ton of enterprise deal, way better and easier than we had with sales-led outbound motions. I really like what you're saying about the product side of this, that it forces you to just have a better product in essence. And one of the things I've been thinking about is your background is interesting because you were an engineer, but then you went into marketing and go to market and then became a founder.
50:53and when you started the business, when both you and I just started your businesses in the SaaS era, a lot of it was about the technical advantage you could build, right? Like you could create a product advantage and it would take a long time for somebody to catch up. And the interesting thing about technology waves is that with each wave as it gains steam, the barriers to entry go down as well as the ease with which we can make things increases. And so you've seen that right now. there's more competition, as well as every company is pushing a lot more product. So product built based advantages seem to be fleeting.
51:32And on the other side, that's making people think that maybe brand as a moat or as a real competitive advantage has more strength now than ever before. Are you how do you think about this dynamic as a founder of a technical company with like a brand muscle as well. Yeah. So as a hardcore physics and mechanical engineer major, I was really surprised to find that I was better at brand than I was at math. When I entered the world of marketing, I have a lot of hot takes on brand, as you might imagine. I think a lot of people that own brand aren't actually good at brand. And the reason is, I think great brand comes when you marry deep customer knowledge and a willingness to take risk.
52:28When you combine those two things, you end up with something really, really compelling that it's like this high arousal experience for your customers, right? They're like, wow, like I can't, this is, I can't, they understand me. I feel seen. It's funny. I can't wait to tell other people about it. And, and I think a lot of times people that own brand, they, they don't necessarily either have the deep customer knowledge or they don't have the, the, you know, the, the ability to take that kind of risk inside of the company. So a lot of the work ends up being really diluted. So I think if you approach brand in this way and build stories and movements that your customers really connect with and can't wait to be associated with, that type of brand has a massive moat in this market and also in previous markets.
53:25Do you think the reason it also has a massive moat is because so many people are so shit at it? Yes. You know, there's this whole argument from marketers and B2B that like CEOs aren't allowing us to invest in brand. And I think the counter argument is that what are the great brands from the SaaS era, like the ones that emotionally broke through and connected, not many. And so maybe you guys aren't good at it. So we won't give you money for it. And instead, we'll have you focus on performance marketing. That's the counter argument that you hear in market. Do you think the reason it can be an advantage is because the average is so bad?
53:59Yeah, totally. I mean, brand is your ability to wrap a reason around your product for why someone should be excited, right? And like nobody gets excited about, let me talk about these features, right? It's about that story and people wanting to be a part of something bigger than the product. and so if you can accomplish that then then yes it's it's a mode but it's also not easy to do and it's really hard need to be companies are really shit at brand and i think a big part of it is the risk piece like ramp is really cool like what a boring company in essence right like spend management like i forgot say like who who gets excited about spend management but then like Like they've built this really interesting brand.
54:48Like they care about copywriting and they've had these like funny ads that actually like make you notice. And the average person knows Ramp in a way that they don't know most B2B companies as well. And it's like, that's really well done. Like it's so well done for a company that has no reason to be that sort of company based on what they do. And that's the challenge I think with brand is these companies are kind of boring. And how do you make them not boring? That's really hard. Our team makes fun of me here, but anything we do on marketing, like if it's not different, just stop doing it. It's just not going to matter.
55:21The market is so crowded. There is so many things. I mean, you can write the same article today that you would have written two years ago, and you get less than one tenth of the engagement and interaction. I would argue maybe even one hundred. Can we click into that? Like as a brand builder, what tools are interesting now in an age of AI with all the slop floating around? And you're PLG, so you have to use, you know, marketing to drive momentum. You know, the written word versus video versus all the different things you can do. Where do you think there's a lot of alpha to be found? And what are things that you could invest a lot of time, but it's not going to move the needle.
56:08The long form written word is not going to move the needle. Video is. How are you thinking about that? So I will answer the question, but I will preface it by saying the reason I can't fully answer that question for each company is that I don't know their unique customer. So you have to start with what's unique, unusual, weird, whatever about my customers, and then take a risk to put something out there that's going to speak to that that's different than what everybody else is doing, even if it means you fail. So, for instance, for our launch video, right, everyone has launch videos of talking heads.
56:47And we did an AI video of this colony of raccoons that live on the eight and a half floor. That was an AI video? That was an AI video. No. You're joking. Did you think the raccoons were actually? No, they trained the raccoons. No, no, but like that was all made with like, I was like this band with animals in Toronto. Yeah, yeah, sure. But like I thought it was very like human animation style. I didn't think this was all AI genre. It was really well done. Yes. And, you know, the bits about it that are more tied to our persona is, you know, we sell to sales, right? These are fun people. They party and the raccoons are smoking cigarettes or popping champagne.
57:28There's not a lot of brands that are comfortable with that type of thing inside of their main B2B video, right? You also got in that video, there was a moment where like the raccoon stopped and the person had sent like their forecast or something. And then the CEO, CRO responds, congratulations, you got into President's Club. And then the raccoon celebrates. And that was cool because I think people don't realize how important President's Club is to salespeople. Like that's the thing that matters to them almost sometimes more than quota attainment is this president's hub. That was really smartly done.
58:04I thought that was cool. So which part, by the way, Austin, which part of this did you think was not AI? Just for the record. There's a human in there. We used to make animations all the time pre-AI. I thought this was like AI video wasn't doing that well. Like I didn't think you could make something this. There was a true line in this and I didn't think you could do that this well many months ago with AI. Yeah. Yeah. I'm pulling up the video. I'm watching the video right now. This wasn't a sloppy video. That's why like you saw this agent, you thought AI? Yeah, I did. But that's okay. I think you, I said this just a second ago, but you and your band of furry little animals that live there with your rabbits and your squirrels.
58:48He's already trained them. He's trained them to pump their foot and stuff. He's like, that's what we do with furry rodents. Chipmunks. There are a lot of these chipmunks around. Here's another example of a brand move that I really, really like. So there was this company that sold to directors of data science. And they made a children's book about the data science job, which I think is such an amazing overlap of those two things that we talked about. Right. Which is if you understand data scientists, you know, it's so hard for them to explain to people what they do. The best stuff I need for the high-up course.
59:29It's a data analyst that lives in Palo Alto or San Francisco. But if you have to explain that to your kids, to your parents, it's really hard to do that. And so, you know, and obviously you're proud of what you do every day and being able to bring that to this like super special moment at night when you're reading to your kids. That's really nice. And by the way, over 30 % of their pipeline comes from this book. That's crazy. I know how hard it is to explain to people like what you do. When I was in university, I had this job. We used to go door to door and sell this lawn service called lawn aeration where we would basically poke holes in people's lawns to let this compressed air out.
1:00:11And so I told my mother, I started this company and we do lawn aeration and this is why we do it. And I was like, I don't think she understands it. I went back to Paisan the next year and she had told all her friends that I do sidewalk cleaning. she's like he's into sideboard cleaning that's his business i was like what it's close uh okay we are coming to be amazing go for it fantastic um we have our final segment we have bulls versus bears and so we're gonna ask you a question and you're gonna tell us if you're bullish or bearish about this and we'll start with aj just to get his read on things and you can see what this is about um aj the question i have for you is where quota attainment is going to go over the following years and so by the end of 2028 are you bullish or bearish that quota attainment will be 30 percent or lower on average uh bearish it's going to be much higher i believe what um so i actually have data on this much higher yeah i shared this data a few months ago that we were trending down on quota attainment i just looked at q2 numbers and they're trending wildly back up we're actually the average quota attainment for a quota path customer was 76 in q2 whoa that's amazing that's a bubbly mockage that guy rubin on here so you can duke it out with him um yeah i'm gonna share I'm actually going to propose and Sam actually called me a few months ago about this, but I'd love to run a comp study with Pavilion on this because the Q2 data is absolutely fascinating on what's happening.
1:01:57Doesn't that scare you a little bit? It doesn't that make you think that this is more of a bubble than anything? Because when you see 70, 80 % of reps hitting numbers, is there a red alert type of sign there as well? I don't think that means it What I think actually ended up happening Is that we had been trending down For the last several years Really and I think in Q1 A lot of this got right sized In terms of the sales teams What the teams were doing I think operationally teams just got much more Bullshit You think this is improvements We're better sales people this year than we were in previous years You just asked if I was bearish or bullish I'm just going with bearish So on your hands.
1:02:42That's a crazy thing. Using mutiny. Apparently, that's why we're getting better. In Q1, we became that much better. We went from 40 % to 71 % quota attainment as an investor. This bubble is not evenly distributed. Quotapath has thousands of customers, most of whom are probably not benefiting from AI. So I think it's something else. Sam, I promise you at your total market event that's about to happen, the average person will be much happier than the average person was last year or the year before. On average, people are winning more as well. Yeah, I think that that's... So that's... Well, then you're bearish as well then.
1:03:15About what? About that... You said bullish. You said you were bullish. You said it'll grow up even higher. Oh, then 30 %? Yeah. 30 % average quota attainment. Yeah, sorry. I'm bullish. You're bullish too, right? No, I'm bearish. I think it's going to grow down. We have 25 ,000 monthly active users. So it's a scaled, there's a scaled number there. I'm going to share this data with you guys. It's actually super fascinating. I just got it last week. Jale, would you agree with him? I think we're in this unique point in time where we're selling products that we don't quite know how to set quotas on.
1:03:55And so your timeline was three years from now. I think we will have probably figured... End of 2028. I think we will have figured it out by then and we'll reach whatever. This is also a good point. Yes, median. Because we're just going to keep increasing quotas. If people are overperforming, we're just going to keep increasing it, right? That's another reason why these numbers weren't so high. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You think you're going to drop? Yeah. So to that point, Asit, below 30%, come on. That's ridiculous. Well, they were 40-ish percent on average. Asit's point. That's where it's been.
1:04:31Guy Rubin, again, the great, the estimable would tell us that like, quoted, Shalei, don't worry. He used to run a company called EBSA and he presents a pavilion EBSA benchmarking report. And so he's on stage a lot for us over the last couple of years. Asad, what's your question for me? My question for you is around something I've been thinking about a lot. Are you bullish or bearish that AI note takers are going to make people and specifically salespeople more present or less present? Where do you go on the spectrum? All right. Well, I understand that you're saying people are going to pay less attention.
1:05:06That's your point. I don't know. Is it an interesting question? I think it's very interesting because salespeople that pay less attention are going to do less good and salespeople that pay more attention will just be better at their jobs. Is this technology that's promising to make you more present actually going to do the opposite? Like as granola gains more market share, will the average person become less present, not more present? I think yes, less present. Not to steal the spotlight from you, Sam, but I literally had this thought the other day because I'd been thinking like, why has my memory gotten worse?
1:05:42I feel like I don't remember shit from any meeting that I'm at. And because I go in and instead of writing, which if you write things down, it will stick to your memory more. Now Now I'm just pressing a button and hoping to go back and look at the notes, which you may or may not do. But I think you're on to something there where we are tuning out a lot. I think so. And I mean, like this is part of like with Mutiny, we're really big on you have to approve it before it gets sent to the customer. So forcing the rep to come look at the content, edit the content, as opposed to just AI generated this.
1:06:20Let me send this to the customer. I think they'll have much better outcomes if they still are involved in that process. But sorry, Sam, I'm curious to see what you think. Well, Ajala, before Sam answers, do you know what ghost notes are? Ghost notes? No. Yes. Okay, cool. Just making sure. I'm on your side with this, AJ. It's like, I had three. So we had Amanda from One Mind On and she explained to us what ghost notes are and we had no idea and we looked like idiots. And then I had like three CEOs text me after listening to the episode and they're like, I had no idea what ghost notes were. so it's not a thing uh sam go ahead here's what i will answer the question in a different way will people pay less attention yes is there still massive massive leverage in granola running in the background of every conversation you have and then piping that into clod so that you can figure out what's happening in your life and how to interpret things yes but here's my but there is a contextual interpretation layer that ai that every model is placing on every transcript of every interaction and you have to be extremely extremely careful about the hyperbole that ai will introduce into an interaction because i found myself over the last couple of weeks going having like a strange conversation or having a conversation with somebody that i work with and then asking claude like what do you think about that and claude would make it much more dramatic like much a much more heightened interaction and much more conflict oriented they're like you said this but that's nothing that's just a blah blah blah blah blah i literally told it i said stop fucking taking this tone with me you're annoying me and it said okay i'll stop i'm sorry i i don't think people should have any of these ai note takers i actually think like there's some counter measures one has to take to be your most effective self and know how to like use ai to get juice from it but not let it actually degrade you.
1:08:16And the position I'm taking is, I don't think connecting it to your email inbox is all that interesting. I don't connect it to my calendar. I don't think it's interesting. I can look at my calendar and see what meetings I have. I don't need like a update in every morning saying, here are the five meetings you have. And the thing that I really think is not interesting is these AI note taking things. Like I've never needed it. I've used it. I've never found it interesting. Can't wait to do the ad read for granola here in a second. not sponsoring this faddle they do they're one of our sponsors have you seen all right your last i was gonna say have you seen pocket which it's like i think that's really creepy yeah what is it it's basically this attachment to your phone that like just stays in your pocket but records everything granola has there's one of these things has it now on the iphone watch where like you'll go to a conference and it'll just like you'll start talking to someone else start automatically recording it.
1:09:16It's really creepy shit. Okay, last question is for you, Jale. The question is, by the end of 2027, are you bullish or bearish that salespeople will start spending 85 % or more of their time on revenue-generating activities? Mark Roberge believes they currently do somewhere between 25 % to 35 % of their time. Yeah, yeah. And probably more like 20 % in customer meetings. I think they typically count like pipe jam as part of that. I do not think we will get to 85 % in customer meetings. I think it'll probably, I'm hopeful that it'll be above 50%, but I don't think it'll hit 85%. That just means that, because even when I think about, okay, I have a really good assistant or I have a really good chief of staff.
1:10:07and so how much more leverage would that give me? I don't think you would get to that 85%. I think that's a measured and fair take because I do hear a lot of people say, we'll get into the 80s and 90s. I think AI would have to be like 10 times better than it is today for that. It'll have to be able to do so many more things for you end to end. Like right now it can be so powerful, right? You can do that deck in six hours rather than one month of back and forth with a person, but still six hours of your time of wrestling with it to get to something good. And I think that's kind of where we are with it.
1:10:45And till the AI gets so much better, it's going to be hard for salespeople to just be able to delegate everything to AI and just focus on customer meetings. Yeah, and don't you think it'll be kind of hard to have that many meetings? Like I'm trying to picture an enterprise, maybe for SMB, but - Really tired looking people. Context switching. I think it's going to degrade. So I think it'll probably, if you can get to 60, 70%, that's amazing. If you can just flip the numbers, that'll be a huge outcome in productivity for their team. So if they're doing 60 to 70 % on revenue generating activities, what is their quota attainment then probably?
1:11:26Well, it depends. She's raised it so high. It's like everybody's got to generate$100 million per person. but it's not 30 percent it's not 40 percent higher than that it'll be a bit question mark of how high quotas can grow to is right now we're in this like really boomy period right but at some point things settle down and does the increased competition for every dollar make it so that we actually can't increase quotas that much more everything's more expensive and everything's harder and salespeople stay relatively the same level of productivity that's the other side of That's very possible too.
1:12:00And on that positive note.
1:12:06I had a bulls versus bears question for you, Asit. Oh, do it. Let me ask one last one. Are you bearish or bullish on the end of money in 15 years? Like over under. Oh, no. Elon said in the economist interview within 10 years, we're not going to have money anymore. I think that's obviously. He also said we were going to land on the moon last year. I don't think humans have created a better mechanism to control other human beings than money. I don't think humans are going to give up their desire for power and control. And so I don't think there's any chance in blue hell that money disappears because I can't envision something more powerful to control us with unless the world becomes this monopoly where AI is controlled by a handful of people and that's the control mechanism.
1:12:52But as long as it's not that, money will be the next best thing and so it'll always be that. On that note, Shale, you were an incredible guest. Thank you so much. We'd love to have you back if you're up for it. And we want to check in on the progress of Mutiny. It's really inspiring to see the transformation. So keep going. And thanks for being our guest and give us five stars wherever you rate your podcasts and smash the subscribe button on YouTube. Thanks for listening everybody if you are looking for more top line check out the top line newsletter at toplinemedia.substack.com that's toplinemedia.substack.com or if you're a video person check us out on YouTube.
1:13:42Topline-media is what you want there. Have a delightful day, everybody.
Jaleh Rezaei, Co-founder and CEO of Mutiny, joins Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zaman to explain how she deprecated a thriving 8-figure SaaS business in November 2025, shipped a private preview in February, and GA'd an AI-native product in April that is now used by more than 3,500 organizations including Snowflake, Rippling, Uber, and GitLab. Topics include why running a scaled SaaS business and a zero-to-one AI bet at the same time proved impossible, how to price and defend AI credit consumption when a $5,000 design project now costs 50 credits, and the shift from sales-led outbound to product-led growth for enterprise go-to-market. Plus, why brand is one of the few remaining moats in B2B, an AI raccoon launch video that fooled (some of) the panel, and a bulls-versus-bears debate on quota attainment, AI note-takers, and whether salespeople will ever spend 85% of their time selling.
Key Takeaways:
- Make the hard decisions FAST. As Jaleh Rezaei, CEO and Co-founder of Mutiny, put it: "I definitely would've said the job of the CEO is you have to make the hard calls. But what I learned in that experience is that it's actually about making the hard calls really fast, which means that you're getting there before everybody else on your team is there." Her test for founders weighing a similar bet is a single question: "is there one really hard decision, maybe one that scares the hell out of you that you don't want to do, that you can make that would make 50 subsequent downstream decisions a lot easier for your company?"
- AI budgets get cut because vendors let buyers anchor on the credit bill. Instead, they need to help buyers see the value of the work the credits replace. Jaleh Rezaei, CEO and Co-founder of Mutiny, reframed it with her own before-and-after: "I used to have a designer that I paid $5,000 to, and it would take 2 weeks of back and forth, and I paid $5,000 to get to something that I was pretty happy with. But end to end took a month. Now in 6, 7 hours, I can build that in Mutiny, and maybe that does cost me 50 credits. That's really freaking cheap relative to what I used to pay that designer." She argues the vendor has to build the ROI case for the customer, per rep, or budget conversations default to minimizing every AI bill.
- Brand is a durable moat in B2B mostly because so few companies are willing to pay for it in risk. According to Jaleh Rezaei, CEO and Co-founder of Mutiny: "great brand comes when you marry deep customer knowledge and a willingness to take risk … a lot of times people that own brand they don't necessarily either have the deep customer knowledge or they don't have the ability to take that kind of risk inside of the company." Her internal standard is blunt: "anything we do on marketing, like, if it's not different, just stop doing it. It's just not going to matter."
- Quota attainment is snapping back hard, and the data has not caught up to the narrative. AJ Bruno, CEO of QuotaPath, brought Q2 numbers to the bulls-versus-bears round: "I just looked at Q2 numbers and they're trending wildly back up. We're actually, the average quota attainment for a QuotaPath customer was 76% in Q2." Asad Zaman pushed back that a jump from roughly 40% to 76% in a single quarter reads more like a bubble signal than a sudden improvement in selling, and AJ offered to run a comp study with Pavilion on the data.
Connect with the Hosts & Guests:
Host: Sam Jacobs, CEO at Pavilion - https://www.linkedin.com/in/samfjacobs/
Host: AJ Bruno, CEO at QuotaPath - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajbruno3/
Host: Asad Zaman, CEO at STA - https://www.linkedin.com/in/azaman1/
Guest: Jaleh Rezaei, CEO & Co-founder at Mutiny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jalehr/
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Chapters:
00:00 Introducing Jaleh Rezaei
04:00 Can SaaS Era Companies Go AI Native?
05:01 From Gusto To Founding Mutiny
07:00 When AI Became A Reasoning Engine
11:28 Why Running Two Products Was Impossible
13:32 Shutting Down An 8-Figure Business
16:18 Winning Formula: Speed, No Backup Plan
20:17 The Hard Months After Deprecation
24:47 Acute Pain Versus Chronic Pain
29:17 CEO Has To Be The Bad Guy (Sometimes)
37:17 AI Margins And Credit-Based Pricing
40:10 A $5,000 Deck Versus 50 Credits
47:03 Sales-Led To PLG For Enterprise
50:37 Brand As The Remaining Moat
1:00:34 Bulls and Bears





