Owner

“I remember last week I was at a board meeting for owner, which just raised at 2.3 billion, right? It's sort of a next gen, next dish generation, AI infused restaurant platform.”

“When rippling is hoovered up 30, and owners hoovered up 20, and Revolut's hoovered up 10, you just, that strategy worked three years ago. Like, it's too late. Like, everyone is just sitting there hitting refresh, hoping these smart YC companies fail so they ca…”

“I'm on the board of a company called Owner. It just crossed a billion in sales for restaurants, for SMBs, for its customers, talking about the agents they built, their AI CMO.”

“I don't think that is the right answer for 99.8% of the world. It might work for owner, and I'd love to learn from you. It might work for us, but most folks should not think about, most folks should realize you need a nerdy human managing your agents.”

“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.”

“He built the infrastructure in like three weeks and like everybody else told us that was like a multi-month project. And it was just like prompt layer and a bunch of models. And he was writing some custom code. And then we were sending 1800 cold outbound email…”

“Kyle from owner was here and you know, they're coming up on fifty million growing, 10% a month is raised at a billion.”

“For the venture business to work for us all, you're going to have to see more of these five billion dollar market cap outcomes. Yeah, as you say, the hinge helps. The owners of this world start to take place, and I think it will.”

“Even if you beat Andreessen, and Andreessen's offering 50, and you say, listen, the best I can do is 30, and I've done this multiple times, because 30 is the highest price I pay. It is, it's on my website, so there's multiple deals I've done where the price ha…”

“In the early days of owner, I could post a role We would get 1200 applications. We would get 60 to a 100,000 impressions on every single job post I put up”

“I'm hiring SMB reps, so I'm like, 70% DNA and mindset. I just want people who have a professional Performance track record of excellence, and I don't care if it was sales or the valedictorian, captain of a sports team, first chair tuba at their, like, you know…”

“And now really pressing on, like, no, no, no, I need your last two direct managers. Maybe not the one they work for now, for obvious reasons, but being really specific there, and if there's any hesitation, or oh, well, like, I don't know if I can get in touch …”

“We're at, like, 40 today. Under under three years.”

“It's falling pretty rapidly for us. We're getting more and more efficient as we grow, but we've also made tremendous investments upfront.”

“So we use Momentum that looks at the transcript of every single sales call, and it fills in the Salesforce fields for the rep. It fills in their opportunity record, it updates the account, the person, it says whether or not the event was run or not, all of tha…”

“They do a lot of launches every month on a per person basis. Over 20 per person. Plus they're Latin American based.”

“He is the Sierra of owner, which just raised at a billion dollar valuation the other day, this week, Tuesday, you announced it just for SAS.”

“The ACV is higher than you might think it's approaching 10 K, but this is a hard sale.”

“Our machine is anywhere between three and four times more efficient on a per rep basis.”

“In any leadership role, there's a component of the interview that's now, what are you doing with AI? What do you know about it? How are you using it today? And I really want to unpack it. And it's been a mandate. I don't care how good this person is if they're…”

“With Windsurf, I can legitimately, so I've got to get my GitHub repos and I've got it all set up so that I can actually do what I want to do. And so I'm pulling stuff out of the lever API to run analysis on how we're hiring.”

“I'm now hiring for a GTMAI lead, so somebody who will do nothing but this within the rev ops organization.”

“We've, we're probably up 25 to 30% in terms of the revenue generating activity time because they don't have to fill out CRM after. They don't have to update the notes for the launch team. It's all done.”

“I'm in the process of building a What I call the management intelligence layer, which is what is the always on layer for the manager to understand what's happening on a rep by rep basis and get prompted when things are either off base or off track and so that …”

“We spent eight weeks at the beginning of the year redeploying what I call my like core operating methodology. And so we wiped every single meeting off of the calendar, started from a zero base and said, okay, what are the most important activities? Coaching is…”

“If you're not closing a call on the demo, it's usually on that follow-up call. And if you're not getting them on that follow-up call, the win rate falls precipitously.”

“And now like almost 50% of our tier one support tickets are AI contained.”

“Yeah, they're at forty million growing 10% a month sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but the trailing is there, right?”

“I don't think I've actually invested in a company with more competition than owner, not a single one. They direct competitors, adjacent competitors, virtually identical competitors.”

“So we lost not only our product market fit overnight, but all the customers that we just spent two and a half years. Grinding like crazy to initially acquire and build relationships with. And as a bootstrapped company, that was our funding. And we had to get b…”

“Over those next 10 months. We went from no customers, no revenue, about to be no money, to then thousands of customers, over a million in revenue, over ten million dollars in venture raves from all these famous investors.”

“We were charging 2000 dollars a month as a website builder around driving dine in and reservations. Which, to put that into perspective, typical website builders that restaurant owners use are Wix and Squarespace, and they're like, 49 a month products. So we w…”

“So from the beginning, we took this very contrarian stance that customizability is stupid. What we actually want is this proven system that has all of the best practices out of the box in a way that the small business owner can't screw up, and we're not going …”

“I think most people would assume that the utilitarian part of sales, sales, sales is 90 plus percent of the equation of whether they continue to retain and use the product, but I would argue that it's at least 50% emotional, if not more, and 50% sales oriented…”

“This was after we'd signed PF Chang's as a customer, which alone was worth over a million dollars a year as that revenue expanded for us.”

“It was just a week later that we had this signed term sheet of this seed round and all of these people that I'd admired for years, like Naval Ravikant from AngelList and Sean Radd, the founder of Tinder and all these other great people, Kimball Musk. Who was a…”

“We said you can't buy one without the other because they work so well together, which we still do today. Like you've got to adopt the whole system because the whole system is designed to work together. And if you're buying us to grow your sales, this is what i…”

“You can think of them as free research and development factories, where they're constantly running a bunch of experiments on the same group of customers, and when some of those experiments Work well. It makes a ton of sense to just shamelessly copy that approa…”

“To summarize my thinking on how to make the Very brutally difficult economics work of serving local business owners and restaurant owners. It comes down to making sure that the LTV to CAC ends up being very favorable, well over three.”

“Which ends up giving us customer acquisition costs in the future that look more like Squarespace or Shopify with lifetime values that are even greater than toasts over time because the attach rate is so high once you earn the trust on free products.”

“We've got more than 20 founder types throughout the company with superpowers that have previously started companies.”

“I, on the skill set dimensions, don't assess those in an interview. I assess those via references, which I do a huge amount of references on any key hire.”

“Interview 30 kids of any age and be religious about this. Just only hire one you would buy your own product from. Don't give on this. I don't care whether they worked at Toast. I don't care if they worked at Owner. I don't care if they were the first person in…”

“I invested in a company that's adjacent to Toast called Owner, which is like marketing for restaurants. They're, they've crossed twenty million. They're growing almost 10% a month every month.”