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Nitski: judge token spend by outcomes, not one salary ratio

Osvald Nitski · Mercor Head of Product on Revenue Concentration from Frontier Labs · Jul 25, 2026 · at 10:29

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“I hope that we can move towards a future of better accounting of the outcomes being driven by token spend. Because even here, I think in a company like Salesforce we have so many, a company of that size, certainly you're getting, you should have different spend profiles depending on what the team is doing. Again, here you have teams that might be more, like solutions engineering or forward deployed where The you have to think in terms of unit economics and teams doing R&D where you can be more, you can have more tolerance for spend. So I think at the large companies, you have to consider, like, which parts of your organization are doing what, and how much tolerance should you have in different areas.”

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