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: Location-based pay inherently means getting paid less for identical output
“It's universally applicable that you're getting paid less for producing the same, depending on where you're located.”
Blond: Startups should not blindly copy ElevenLabs' 20x sales quota
“What works for 11 Labs at 20 X quota, meaning if you are paying a rep a 100,000 dollars a year, they need to generate two million dollars a year. That works for 11 Labs. It does not mean that we pattern match that to all other startups the way that we might, t…”
Blond: Sales leaders should adjust quotas mid-quarter if reps fall behind
“We can adjust it in quarter to you know, make it more motivating for the team. The last thing that you want is like approaching the end of the quarter in reps, like trying to get to 20% of their number, like talk about a depressing sales environment to be in.”
Blond: Brand awareness significantly improves outbound AI agent reply rates
“The brand does matter. There are three people in, in this meeting room right now. It's Jason, Amelia, and Sam. And on Monaco, it's Jason, Amelia, and Sam, meaning like an agent that is representing any of the three of us, the likelihood of that getting a respo…”
Blond: GTM Agent Market Will Consolidate Into Single All-in-One Platforms
“Philosophically we believe that the like direction of the market is that you just want one vendor in one vendor is your inbound agent, your outbound agent, your insights. And it is all of your agents living on one data plane with full access to all of the info…”
Sam Blond: Traditional CRM Forecasts Are Fundamentally Wrong Due to Bias
“The only problem is it's entirely wrong. And, you know, you have like a sales rep that is adding their own like subjective Experience about the account. Like they may want to influence the sales manager to think that the deal is going to close, or they may be …”
Blonde: Early startups can manufacture winning cultures by setting highly attainable quotas
“You can manufacture what I would describe as like a culture of winning or an environment where people are making good money. And what I mean by that is like, you set the quota, you decide what the commission structure is. And if early on, you want to be delibe…”
Sam Blond: External Sales Recruiters Take Far More Time Than Network Sourcing
“So I think ultimately you are spending far more time leveraging external recruiters because of the process that I just described than if you're able to leverage your personal network and find some people that you know were top performers at a prior company.”
Blond: Top Sales Candidates Rely on Reputation, Not External Recruiters
“The best candidates don't really use external recruiters. The best candidates oftentimes want to go somewhere where their reputation precedes them.”
Blond: Hiring More Reps in a Demand-Poor Environment Hurts Conversion
“The result that most people conclude in this environment is we need more sales. We need to hire more salespeople. That is the wrong answer. More salespeople oftentimes will focus on the middle of the funnel. And so if you have a limited number of opportunities…”
Blond: Prioritizing demand generation drives more revenue than optimizing conversion rates
“Focusing effort in the form of resources. So people, and then focus on demand instead of on the existing funnel will produce more revenue for the business than focusing on what I would again describe the middle of the funnel conversion rates.”
Blond: Brex Saw Triple the Conversion Rate From In-Person Sales Meetings
“One thing that we measured while I was at Brex was conversion rates. When people were selling remote virtually, they didn't meet the customer and conversion rates when people met the customer in person. And when we met a prospective customer in person, we had …”
Blond: Startups should prioritize startup experience over domain expertise when hiring initial AEs
“Where people over index is domain. If you are hiring your first AE, first big AEs number one and two, they need to have seen an early stage startup environment.”
Top sales talent avoids third-party recruiters
“Most of them do not go through a third party recruiter. They want to go somewhere where their reputation precedes them a little bit.”
Blond: Move on from underperforming sales hires who lack effort or attitude
“If the performance isn't there, you sort of default to, okay, what is the effort and the attitude like? And if either are lacking, this is either like a zero time or one time conversation with the person around performance.”
Blond: Assessing early sales hires should take 30 days at most
“I, the number that was coming to mind for me, it almost doesn't matter how long the cycle is with these early hires in particular, I think, 30 days. And in here, you're probably closer to right with your week. Most, you know, many folks say a quarter, many fol…”
Blond: Brex AEs Sourced More Revenue Than SDRs at $100M ARR
“When we were a relatively mature startup so let's call it 50 to a hundred million dollars of annualized revenue. One of the things that we noticed was that the AEs were sourcing far more of their own revenue than their SDR counterparts.”
Sam Blond: AI Cannot Devise Creative or Unconventional Sales Campaigns
“I think what, at least today, AI does not accomplish that humans still do is this aspect of being creative. You know, the AI isn't going to tell you here is your contrarian or unconventional outbound sales campaign that is different from what everybody else is…”
Blond: Run late-night, small whiteboard sessions for contrarian sales ideas
“At a ten-person startup, Harry, you're the founder, you're gonna be in this meeting, the two sales reps are gonna be in this meeting, and then maybe we have, like, somebody in growth, that person's gonna be in this meeting. So we've got four people in this mee…”
Blond: In-Person Meetings Tripled Sales Conversion Rates at Brex
“We measured conversion rates at Brex. When we met a customer in person, we had three X the likelihood of closing that deal than if we didn't.”
Blond: Remote-only Zoom sales models are becoming obsolete
“And so like the days of working from home, doing Zooms only to meet with customers, not meeting customers and developing personal relationships those days, I think are going to be a thing of the past, if not already.”
Blond: Modern Salespeople Are Lazy and Overdependent on SDRs
“Today's salespeople have gotten a little bit lazy. And I think they and we, cause I consider myself, you know, part of this community. Couple of things have happened. One, we have become overly dependent on marketing, SDR, anybody to source our own leads. We a…”
Blond: Excess 2021-2022 venture capital was a net negative for GTM teams
“What I've seen Certainly in 20, 21 and maybe 20, 22 is that the money was a net negative and what the money led go to market organizations to do was twofold. And I'll maybe take it like a marketing and a sales angle. I think on the marketing side, when there w…”
Startups over-resource CSMs and under-invest in critical onboarding and implementation
“I see lots of resources in this category of CSM, which is like ongoing maintenance and servicing of customers and under resourcing in implementation. And I just think the initial experience that a customer has on a product or with a company has so much influen…”
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 → |