Dannie Herzberg
President, Baseten. On 2 shows, 1 appearance, plus 2 compilation re-airs not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveoperatorinvestor@dannieherz ↗LinkedIn ↗baseten.co ↗
Dannie Herzberg is President at Baseten and a former growth-stage Partner at Sequoia Capital. She previously led and scaled enterprise sales teams at HubSpot and Slack through their IPOs.
2shows
1appearances
31statements
2resolved
2supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Dannie Herzberg said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Herzberg: Effective PLG sales reps act as extroverted user researchers
“A good seller within a PLG company is kind of like an extroverted user researcher.”
Herzberg: Sales leaders not meeting weekly customers is a major red flag
“If a leader had not gotten in front of a customer, if he or she was sitting in virtual or physical conference rooms for their first two months, and wasn't talking to one new customer at minimum every single week. That is a major flag for me about customer orie…”
Herzberg: First sales hire should be a player-coach, not executive VP
“The next one could be a Player coach who can roll up his or her sleeves, do the selling while simultaneously taking the lead on hiring the next four account executives. And often we see that we look for someone who has led a team before. So they are thinking c…”
Herzberg: Founders must sell the product themselves before hiring sales staff
“So the founder needs to sell the product before anyone else can. So day one, founder equals head of sales.”
Herzberg: Behavioral interview questions yield scripted answers for sales candidates
“If you ask hypothetical and behavioral questions, like what's your 30, 60, 90 plan, you are going to get really articulate, well-scripted answers that do not help you vet the candidate in earnest.”
Herzberg: Testing sales candidates in their comfort zone yields better evaluations
“I want to see what it looks like when they are in their absolute Comfort zone. And I want to see them rock it in their comfort zone. So I would say, pitch me your product, or let's do a discovery call, because I think that's more telling than a pitch.”
Herzberg: Trust hiring intuition over isolated negative reference checks
“Your intuition matters. References are critical, but they aren't everything. And if your intuition is saying, I had a good connection with this person, I've heard plenty of good things around them, and sure, they may have frustrated one person or been a really…”
Herzberg: Striving for approval undermines leadership courage
“And what I realized is if you're striving for people to like you don't have the courage to say hard things, to challenge your peers, to challenge someone you work for.”
Herzberg will hire candidates she dislikes if they have high integrity
“So for that reason, I'm totally okay hiring someone who I don't like per se, so long as I respect the way that they think, and I think that they are a high integrity human being.”
Herzberg: Product teams own the pipeline in PLG companies
“If it's a product-led growth company, then product essentially owns the pipeline number.”
Herzberg: Hour-long sales slide decks are dead
“Slide decks. No hour-long slide decks. They're boring. This is a world where people want to see the product, feel it, see it customized to their context.”
Herzberg: Founders wait too long to hire revenue ops and sales enablement
“They wait way too long to hire revenue ops and sales enablement teams to make the team successful. So they invest all this time and money Into hiring a sales leader, maybe some sales reps, and they don't have the support systems to set them up to thrive and sc…”
Herzberg: Figma and Notion have executed the best recent sales strategies
“Figma and Notion. Community first. Welcome sales assist. Impassioned user base.”
Herzberg: Closing initial deals builds sales empathy and informs product
“And after selling the first 10, 20 customers. The founder will, number one, have a really good sense of empathy for the first official salespeople that he or she brings on, and number two, will learn that selling is one of the most important input mechanisms f…”
Herzberg: In 2010, HubSpot was mostly a media site with little product
“If you're not familiar with what HubSpot was back in 2010, it was basically a media site with a little bit of a product.”
Herzberg: Treating company culture as a product requires dedicated budget and leadership
“We treated culture as a product. So we were constantly shipping new features. It had a budget. It had resources. There was even a senior leader to make sure that we got it right.”
Herzberg: Slack initially harbored internal cynicism toward sales
“To be honest, there was a bit of cynicism around sales in the beginning at Slack, and I totally got that.”
Herzberg: Product is the primary top-of-funnel driver in PLG
“Specifically in PLG, product is the most important component of the top of the funnel.”
Herzberg: Expansion dictates most sales revenue in PLG companies
“Expansion dictates most of the sales driven revenue, which means the sales and success need to work in lockstep with one another, which means you need to build customer relationships for the long run and figure out how to engage exact sponsors, even if a custo…”
Herzberg: First post-founder sales hire should be a player-coach
“The next one could be a player coach who can roll up his or her sleeves, do the selling while simultaneously taking the lead on hiring the next four account executives.”
Herzberg: Startups only need a CRO after proving sales formula
“You need a CRO when you're past the zero to one phase. So the sales formula is working. It's time to scale it to the next level.”
Herzberg: Early startups in low $10Ms ARR should hire VPs, not CROs
“So if you're an earlier stage company, let's say in the low two Tens of millions. I would hire a VP or an SVP so that they have something to grow into. We with sales DNA are very internally competitive, so it's always good if there's something to work toward.”
Herzberg: Sales leaders unable to name followers present a red flag
“If they don't have Three or four people off the top of their head that would follow them. To me, that's a yellow flag, maybe a red flag about who they are as a leader.”
Herzberg: Sales leaders who cannot explain past tactic failures lack flexibility
“And if that person cannot name what won't fit a new culture as opposed to what worked in their old one, they're not showing any flexibility. And my hunch is they're going to be a playbook person, takes a carbon copy and brings it from one place to the other. T…”
The other half of the tape: Dannie Herzberg's own voice is left out of every number here. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Statements about Dannie Herzberg, by other people (1)
Slack grew revenue from $100M to $1B during Herzberg's tenure
“Danny is a partner at Sequoia Capital, and prior to entering the world of venture, Danny spent four years at Slack, As their head of enterprise sales at Slack, Danny built and scaled the self-serve, mid-market, and enterprise sales orgs across the Americas, as…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Dannie's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 20VCLEDGER | President, Baseten | 1 +2 | 31 | — | full record on 20VC → |
 SAASTRLEDGER | President, Baseten | 0 | 0 | 100% 2/2 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |