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Mark Leslie

Lecturer, Stanford Graduate School of Business · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

Mark Leslie is the former CEO, chairman, and founding team member of Veritas Software. He is also a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business focusing on enterprise sales and entrepreneurship.

14statements → 2claims → 1claims resolved → 3.71/5average certainty → 2.43/5average debate potential → 8said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 2 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 assertions · 12 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Mark argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Mark Leslie: Typical enterprise sales account executive OTE is $300,000
“So the typical, what they call OTE, on target earnings, is today around 300,000 dollars. Half in base, half in incentive.”
Mark Leslie Feb 26, 2019 ▶ 7:31 a16z Podcast | Stories and Lessons in Enterprise Sales

How they sound: speaking style how? →

274 words/min while actually speaking · 1.4 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Mark Leslie: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to 4,292 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Mark Leslie is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

Everything Mark Leslie said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Mark Leslie: Founders solving unexperienced problems face lower success rates
“I think that the probability of success is much lower when you're trying to solve a problem that you've never personally experienced.”
Mark Leslie Feb 26, 2019 ▶ 1:24 a16z Podcast | Stories and Lessons in Enterprise Sales
Insight
Mark Leslie: You cannot teach someone to become an entrepreneur
“You can teach an entrepreneur How to go start and build a company, but you can't teach someone to be an entrepreneur who's not an entrepreneur.”
Mark Leslie Feb 26, 2019 ▶ 2:45 a16z Podcast | Stories and Lessons in Enterprise Sales
Insight
Mark Leslie: Leaders cannot change people's behavior because character is immutable
“I think character, my personal opinion, is as immutable. I don't believe that you can change behavior of people.”
Mark Leslie Feb 26, 2019 ▶ 3:23 a16z Podcast | Stories and Lessons in Enterprise Sales
Insight
Mark Leslie: Founders cannot subcontract early-stage startup sales
“At this point in time, there is nobody better equipped in a startup company to talk about the beauty and the benefits of the product, and the vision of the future that we're painting. There's nobody better equipped to do that than the founders who started the …”
Mark Leslie Feb 26, 2019 ▶ 4:57 a16z Podcast | Stories and Lessons in Enterprise Sales
Assertion Supported
Mark Leslie: Typical enterprise sales account executive OTE is $300,000
“So the typical, what they call OTE, on target earnings, is today around 300,000 dollars. Half in base, half in incentive.”
Mark Leslie Feb 26, 2019 ▶ 7:31 a16z Podcast | Stories and Lessons in Enterprise Sales
Insight
Mark Leslie: Engineering projects cannot be on time, fully featured, and high-quality
“So my experience with engineering projects is that they can either be on time, they can be fully featured, or they can be high quality. I've never seen it all come together on the same day.”
Mark Leslie Feb 26, 2019 ▶ 9:20 a16z Podcast | Stories and Lessons in Enterprise Sales
Insight
Mark Leslie: Company culture is defined by crisis decisions, not published values
“Culture in a company has nothing to do with the values that are published. Culture in a company has to do with what happens in a company when things get bad and people have to make decisions on how do they react.”
Mark Leslie Feb 26, 2019 ▶ 18:30 a16z Podcast | Stories and Lessons in Enterprise Sales
Insight
Mark Leslie: Set sales quotas so 75% of reps hit 100%
“It's my belief that you want to have a company where 75% of the people get to a hundred percent. Then you have a reputation as this is a company where people make money.”
Mark Leslie Feb 26, 2019 ▶ 26:04 a16z Podcast | Stories and Lessons in Enterprise Sales
Insight
Mark Leslie: Technical founders struggle with asking for customer orders
“So one of the things that technical founders, you know, they're pretty good usually at the vision thing. They're not so good at asking for the order, right?”
Mark Leslie Feb 26, 2019 ▶ 5:29 a16z Podcast | Stories and Lessons in Enterprise Sales
Insight
Mark Leslie: Organizational trust operates like a bank account with no loans
“I think of trust, I think of it as a bank of trust. So in a bank of trust, you can make a deposit, meaning you can express trust and give people that sense. In times of need, when things are bad and you need people to stand by you can make a withdrawal from th…”
Mark Leslie Feb 26, 2019 ▶ 17:33 a16z Podcast | Stories and Lessons in Enterprise Sales
Insight
Mark Leslie: Dysfunctional sales behavior stems from flawed comp plans, not salespeople
“And the reason that salespeople don't behave right relative to their compensation plan, it's not the salesman, it's the compensation plan.”
Mark Leslie Feb 26, 2019 ▶ 22:26 a16z Podcast | Stories and Lessons in Enterprise Sales
Insight
Mark Leslie: Enterprise sales compensation plans should fit on a 3x5 card
“I think a compensation plan should be on a three by five card. This is what your base is. This is how much you're getting. These are the, you know, kind of notches as you go up the thing. And here's what we're paying you for.”
Mark Leslie Feb 26, 2019 ▶ 23:44 a16z Podcast | Stories and Lessons in Enterprise Sales
Insight
Mark Leslie: Early-stage startups need adaptable sales reps over process-driven hires
“But when you're just starting out, You want delta force. You want resourceful people who have minimal resources, and can react in a way, and can pull other people in the company, and can do amazing things that you can't, that you don't, you know, a big sales f…”
Mark Leslie Feb 26, 2019 ▶ 26:52 a16z Podcast | Stories and Lessons in Enterprise Sales
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mark Leslie: Sun Microsystems offered top salespeople Rolexes to break comp plans
“So, they got their five top salesmen in the world, and they brought them into the home office, and they said, the guy who breaks the compensation plan most significantly gets a gold Rolex. It worked. They found out all the holes in the plan.”
Mark Leslie Feb 26, 2019 ▶ 24:11 a16z Podcast | Stories and Lessons in Enterprise Sales

The other half of the tape: Mark Leslie's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 2 episodes on the a16z Podcast. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Andy Rachleff 6Peter Levine 1

Statements about Mark Leslie, by other people (1)

Disclosure
Rachleff: 60 VCs, including himself, rejected Veritas before its $1B success
“Now, Mark hates venture capitalists because the company that he grew to be a billion dollar business actually was very, very hard to finance, and I think 60 venture capitalists, including myself, turned him down.”
Andy Rachleff Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 6:12 a16z Podcast | From Teaching Leadership to Being a Leader

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0041822019episodesmentions
0122019episodes it came up in
0021422019episodesmentions per episode
2019 7 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | Stories and Lessons in Enterprise Sales Feb 26, 2019 18m
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