Kyle Parrish

“We've, we have like nine high impact production use cases of AI air are booked per dollar out on, on a per AE basis is three X any team I've ever managed before.”

“I think a lot of founders overcomplicate things, trying to think, think of someone that worked at a big name company, say Google, Salesforce, whatever it may be, and not really someone who has the right experience, whether it's working in the industry and kind…”

“I think that some level of repeatability needs to exist. And if you're doing Sales, and you're doing that founder led motion. You've understood what are the questions that you're asking these customers that will ultimately expose some pain or opportunity to th…”

“Do they spend a couple hours before that meeting, before that formal interview, really getting to know your company, your product, what it is that you're looking to do? Because if they can't do that and they just come in and they say, Hey, I worked at this com…”

“Because early on, you spend almost more of your time with engineers, designers, product leaders, as you do customers, because everything that you do is so iterative, is so tight knit in this closed loop, that if you can't work well with other parts of the busi…”

“I think it's really like you want to get to the meat of the interview, and that in my mind is a discussion, a brainstorm, where you can kind of get a sample size of what's it like to be in a room with this person solving problems, because so much of the job is…”

“You're coming in and the first 30 to 60 days is observing, talking to customers, talking to the people that are building this product, that are marketing this product. That are designing this product and really understanding how does this business tick? What's…”

“Sales motion experience is probably more relevant than domain experience.”

“When I joined the company, it just raised our series B a few months earlier. I think there was about 40 to 45 employees, give or take. No sales team.”

“And the other thing that Dylan asked me actually to do in the first month of joining was to join the support team. He asked me to not do anything on the sales side, spend four months with the support team in the support queue, working on bugs, understanding th…”

“And in that first few months, I started realizing that, you know, more than half of our user base on any given customer account was not a designer.”

“We were able to focus the sales motion and all the early enablement efforts on taking people from anywhere from three to six products into one all-in-one design platform, collaboration built in, and if we got them to do that, and they're already doing a little…”

“I think there's generally three pillars. Can you impact the end users in converting to enterprise? Security. You know, that could, that's a very large bucket. And I think the admin experience, whether it's managing users or managing content, and we had thought…”

“So for Figma pro it was 15 dollars a month. If you wanted to pay monthly, you could do it annual and that was 12 dollars a month for the year. And then our enterprise tier was 540 dollars for a design editor.”

“The other wrinkle I'll stay with Figma that was interesting, this is the first in my career, was that early on Dylan said we don't discount. We're not discounting the product.”

“Three days, 19 interviews later, I ended up getting the job at Dropbox”

“That passion, that conviction, and you know, the technical aptitude and exposure in terms of like what you're trying to do and go build. I think it's critical in getting whatever your first 500 K, your first two million ARR.”

“Founder-led sales isn't scalable. It's not repeatable”

“I think the one thing to call out is it's the cheaper route. You're not going to give away as much equity. You're not going to be probably paying these people in very early stage, high amount of cash”

“You need to bring in someone who just has more perspective and playbooks. I don't think it's about copy pasting what those people have done in the past, but it's about coming in, understanding where they're at today. And from first principles, starting to buil…”

“The best sales reps, they treat that as like a customer meeting. Right. I'm going to show up to that prospecting block at nine 30 at 10 o'clock. I'm going to put the hours in. I'm also going to come prepared. So I don't spend the 1:30 minutes saying, who am I …”

“Coming into a startup, I think product feedback from the customer, which is one of the most valuable parts of hiring an early stage sales team is critical.”

“Some founders get, you know, really, really star eyed around, Oh, they were at Salesforce for 15 years. There's such a great fit for my 40 employee startup to come and build sales or come and be the first rep. And I'm not saying that they couldn't be, but gene…”

“When I joined Figma, for example, there was nobody in a customer facing role.”

“So what I learned early that I think the founder and that sales leader should be meeting at least weekly is my expectation for an hour, you know, at minimum, I think going into that, and this is a general framework that I follow for all the people in my team i…”