Sam Blond
Co-Founder and CEO, Monaco. On 2 shows, 34 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderoperatorexecutiveinvestor@samdblond ↗LinkedIn ↗monaco.com ↗
Sam Blond served as VP of Sales at Zenefits and Chief Revenue Officer at Brex, scaling both companies to multi-billion-dollar valuations. After serving as a Partner at Founders Fund, he founded Monaco, an AI-native revenue platform.
2shows
34appearances
199statements
22resolved
16supported
1contradicted
73%fully supported
43said about them ↓ Everything Sam Blond said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Blond: AI Will Make Software Development 5x Faster Within Three Years
“We can build software today. Let's call it five X faster than we could three years ago before all of the coding assistance. Well, if that's true faster, yeah, maybe more than probably more, it's reasonable to believe that in three years from now we can build f…”
Sam Blond Predicts AI Will Fully Automate Transactional Sales
“Transactional sort of commodity like sales will be disrupted in ways that support has been disrupted, where more and more revenue will be generated from just pure models, converting website visitors to revenue without the sales touch. And I think that will con…”
Outbound sales drives the majority of Rippling's revenue attribution
“We're going to focus more specifically on outbound, which makes up the majority of Rippling's revenue from an attribution standpoint.”
Blond: Parker Conrad Will Build a $100 Billion Business With Rippling
“I just wanted to join this guy's company because he was going to build a hundred billion dollar business. You know, we didn't realize that outcome with Zenefits. He's going to with Rippling.”
Blond: Sales Reps Will Fail If Founders Cannot Close Deals First
“If you as the founder cannot close customers and generate revenue people that sort of specialize in sales will definitely not be able to. There is no one better qualified to acquire your first set of customers than you as the founder.”
Blond: Do Not Hire Initial Sales Reps From Salesforce or Rippling
“If you are hiring your first AE, first AEs number one and two, They need to have seen an early stage startup environment. Do not hire from an extreme example, be Salesforce, but gosh, even today, you know, don't hire from a rep who came from rippling. And join…”
Blond: Brex Never Used Recruiters to Source Sales Talent
“At Brex, we did not use recruiters, internal or external, to source candidates for the sales organization Ever.”
Sam Blond: Generating demand, not conversion rate, is almost always the startup bottleneck
“And I just believe that demand masks a lot of other potential problems and almost all startups. The bottleneck to growing faster is demand. We are constrained by the number of opportunities that we are creating. We are misdiagnosing this as a conversion rate p…”
Sam Blond: Account executives must generate their own demand from day 1 to 1000
“Salespeople should absolutely be responsible for controlling their own destiny in a way, generating their own demand that often manifests through outbound. I think this is true on day one. This should be true on day 1000.”
Blond: Early-stage startups should build fully in-person sales organizations
“I think if you are starting a business today, I am very biased towards building the in-person both the, you know, the entire company, but also the sales organization.”
Blond: Founders Fund avoided AI, health tech, and ed tech deals
“You mentioned AI founders fund didn't really do AI. So even if you were dot AI the last 18 months, it was like a no-go regardless of the success of the business. We didn't love the categories of like health tech and ed tech.”
Blond: A $1B exit no longer moves the needle for large VC funds
“What you're describing is as Peter described the power law venture, where there can be a series, a, an exceptional company that is raising money at 30 to forty million dollars, which I think is probably the Middle of the road series a right now and a billion d…”
Sam Blond: Spreadsheet-based sales hiring caused productivity to regress dramatically
“We made decisions based on a spreadsheet. We had a historical data on rep effectiveness in 20, 20 and 20, 21 in finance plugged the number going from 10 reps to 14 reps into the spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet said this was what was going to happen when we go…”
Demand-constrained SaaS companies close more revenue by firing underperforming reps
“You will close more revenue with fewer salespeople when you are in an environment that is demand constrained.”
Brex tracked customer spending on Amex by snooping linked bank accounts
“We could sort of cheat at Brex in that we could see the payments that were flowing to other cards. We linked to folks' bank accounts and we could see how much they were paying us and we could see how much they were paying American Express.”
Blond: Zenefits generated less total revenue after massively overhiring sales reps
“And so the actual result of hiring a bunch more SDRs and AEs wasn't that we had incrementally more revenue, but sort of less efficient revenue on a per rep basis. We actually had less revenue. We closed less revenue by hiring all of these people because it was…”
Blond: Cutting Underperforming AEs Increases Total Revenue in Lead Shortages
“If you cut the bottom performing whatever percent of the AE team, what that means is you will give the limited number of opportunities that you do have to performers that have a higher conversion rate and actually convert more revenue or more sales with fewer …”
Blond: Startups should not prioritize domain experience when hiring sales leaders
“There are only so many really amazing sales leaders that exist to begin with. And if you limit your candidate population to a very small domain, like let's just say property tech or something like that, how many unbelievable property tech sales leaders are the…”
Blond: Zenefits Erred by Branding Around Fast Growth Rather Than Product
“Embracing this identity around sort of like fast growing tech company raised a bunch of money. That was a mistake. And I think the right thing to do or what to try and do is associate your company with what you do. Had we been known as, you know, the best heal…”
Blond: Brex framed Divvy's advanced budgeting features as unnecessary complexity
“Divi had a sophisticated budgeting tool. There was a feature that Rex did not have. And we actually positioned that as a negative. We said, you're a, you know, 50 person company. You don't want to have a lot of sophistication around rules around where cards ca…”
Blond: 2022 SaaS slowdown not driven by budget cuts on new sales
“I am not seeing much influence on a company's ability to sell their product, to acquire new customers. And I am not hearing, you know, one of the biggest Problems today in our business is that potential customers are cutting budget, and they're not able to buy…”
Blond: Sales Revenue Targets Should Be Set With 90% Confidence
“I set the target with 90% confidence that we're able to hit it.”
The other half of the tape: Sam Blond's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 41 times in 16 episodes across the shows. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Jason Lemkin 22Harry Stebbings 8Brian Singerman 6Ashley Kelly 3Brendon Cassidy 2
Statements about Sam Blond, by other people (2)
Lemkin: Full-stack AE model does not work for most SaaS companies
“He talked about how even Brex, which is, which was still relatively SMB for a long period, how the AE's had to do half of their own deals through outbound, and so he really described, in a way, a full stack AE, right, and people talk about that, and I think th…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 23
the Official SaaStr Podcast 18
2026 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2025 6 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- AI, Sales + GTM in 2026: This Changes Everything with Jason Lemkin and Owner CRO Kyle Norton
- a16z's $20BN Fund & Founders Fund's $4.6BN & Why Josh Kushner Has Mastered the Game · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- What Happens When AI Kills Your SaaS Growth? Live Q&A with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
- 9 Things You Can Do to Grow Faster This Year with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 11 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- How to Hire a Great VP of Sales Today with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin
- Ashley Kelly: The Playbook to Start and Scale Your SDR Team | E1162 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Brendon Cassidy: Why You Should Never Hire Someone You Do Not Know in Your First Five Hires | E1124 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Fundraising from VCs and Hiring VPs in 2025: AMA with Jason Lemkin SaaStr CEO
- Jason Lemkin: PluralSight S*** the Bed & The Next IPO Candidates | E1160 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- How to Build Go-to-Market Efficiency in SMB Sales with Owner.com CRO Kyle Norton
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 4 mentions in 1 episode
2022 16 mentions in 3 episodes 5 per episode
- Brian Singerman: How I Became a Partner at Founders Fund, Why We Put $400M into Anduril | 20VC #943 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- The Answers To Scaling, Hiring, And Everything Else: An AMA With Saastr Founder & Ceo Jason Lemkin
- 16 Ways to Level Up in 2022 with SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin | SaaStr Software Community
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Sam's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SAASTRLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Monaco | 33 +1 | 165 | 76% 13/17 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Monaco | 1 | 34 | 60% 3/5 | full record on 20VC → |