The Ledger, every show
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks, across all 44 shows. Pick shows below, then mix any filter with any other.
shows 
every show 44 of 44
Snowflake Grew Its Sales Organization Faster Than Any Company in History
“Chris and I took a sales organization and grew it faster than any sales organization has ever grown in history. It's snowflake. There might have been others since that have grown faster, but at the time, nobody's done that, right?”
Chris Degnan Is the Only CRO to Scale From $0 to $3B
“Chris is the only guy that's ever gone from zero to three billion.”
Customizing Product Roadmaps for Single Enterprise Deals Kills Startups
“You've just taken the company and diverted all resources to go build a list of things for a company that may or may not buy, but even if they buy, you've killed the company. Right, because you've taken all the resources to focus on one account, even if you get…”
Startups Should Establish Direct Sales Before Launching Product-Led Growth
“You can nail PLG and enterprise. I just would argue that nailing one does not necessarily make you more likely to nail the other. So if you can do both, but you got to, in my opinion, you got to start with direct sales and then let the product get to where the…”
Wiz Is the Only Startup to Successfully Launch Enterprise-First
“Wiz is the only one I've seen do it successfully, where they started in the enterprise.”
Sutter Hill Forbids Sales Forecasts Without CRO Agreement
“Now, our companies are different. This cannot happen in our companies. We will not allow for this, right? So, Sutter Hill Company, CEO says, here's a forecast for next year. We say, great. Chad Peets, John McMahon, your CRO are in agreement with this, right? B…”
Hiring the Wrong CRO Is Founders' Biggest Mistake Scaling to $10M ARR
“They hire the wrong CRO. Pure and simple. You hire the wrong CRO because you have no idea what you're looking for.”
Snowflake's sales organization was the fastest growing in history
“Chris and I took a sales organization and grew it faster than any sales organization has ever grown in history. It's snowflake. There might've been others since it have grown faster, but at the time, nobody's done that.”
Sutter Hill Ventures hires CROs before startups build products
“So we do something unique at Sutter Hill in that we bring in a CRO pre-product, right?”
Chris Degnan is the only CRO to scale revenue $0 to $3B
“Chris is the only guy that's ever gone from zero to three billion.”
Account expansion is a sales function, not customer success
“What I don't agree with is the rep does the land deal and walks away, and they, the customer success rep is responsible for expansion. Expansion is sales, right?”
Paying reps on bookings in consumption models drives severe churn
“I'm paid off of bookings, so maybe they're only going to consume 50, but I think I can get them to commit to a hundred. Can't fault the sales guy. He wants to get paid, so he's going to go book a 100,000 dollar deal, and then a year from now, you're in deep sh…”
Sales hiring managers unable to decide in two hours are the problem
“If you can't make a decision on whether or not to hire somebody after two hours with them, you're the problem. Not the candidate. It's you.”
Startup leaders must block new VPs from hiring unvetted former colleagues
“This is the profile. I'm not deviating from it. Back to the conflict thing I said. So let's just say you hire, hire a new VP of the East, right? And he has his background or she, and he's got five people he wants to bring with him, which is a good thing becaus…”
Wiz is the only startup to successfully start enterprise-first
“Wiz is the only one I've seen do it successfully where they started in the enterprise, right?”
CROs who accept unrealistic forecasts will be fired in nine months
“CEO's, CRO's got a decision. You either stand up for it right there, or you accept the fact you're getting fired in nine months. Because you know you're not hitting that number, and I promise you they're gonna blame you, and this happens a lot.”
Peets: xAI sales reps perform all of their own product demos
“Like our sales guys at XAI actually do all of their own demos, which as you can attribute a test to that's not the norm.”
Peets: Losing top sales reps leads to permanent team quality downgrade
“And if you lose A players, you don't replace A players with A players. As soon as the A players go, the rest of the A players know that they shouldn't go there. So now you're going to lose your sales org and you're going to replace an A player sales org with a…”
Peets: Raising a venture capital round is not a business accomplishment
“Raising a round doesn't mean shit, ok? The fact that you were able to get, you know, three guys to write you a big check doesn't mean you've accomplished anything”
Chad Peets: Snowflake sales rep productivity rose continuously despite rapid hiring
“Snowflake was the first thing, first company we had ever seen where we couldn't hire fast enough to bring the productivity number down. No matter how fast we hired, it kept going up”
Peets: Critical enterprise sales will always require human relationships
“My guys are not allowed to send notes. They have to call because it's the same thing. People get inundated with the crew. They have to get the phone number and make the phone call. And so I don't think the day of the sales rep is changing. I just don't. As lon…”
Peets: Wiz Built World-Class Sales Org Under Dolly Rogic
“Wiz had a world-class sales organization under Dolly Rogic.”
Chad Peet: Salespeople who only worked at large companies fail at startups
“To me, startups are life and death. And if you've not been through something like that, you don't really know. That's the other thing. Like, I want somebody that's been at a small company. If you've been at nothing but large companies, you just don't know.”
Peet: Integrity, grit, and logo acquisition cannot be taught in sales
“I can't teach you how to have integrity. I can't teach you how to have grit. I can't teach you to be fucked in the head. I can't teach you how to go close new logos, but I can teach you my technology. I can. With proper enablement, I can teach you.”
Peet: AI startups like xAI and Parloa close huge deals unusually early
“What we are seeing with AI companies, back to your earlier point, some of them, XAI being one, are closing very large transactions very early. We've never seen this before, like that company I mentioned, Parloa. Parloa is closing really, really big deals at a …”
Chad Peet was brought into Snowflake to fix go-to-market inefficiencies
“He and Sridhar Ramaswamy, the CEO of Soflake, asked me to come in, in, 18 months ago to help find inefficiencies within the go-to-market function and maybe to drive a higher level of performance than we were getting.”
Chad Peet: Continental European sales requires native, local reps
“Germans want to buy from Germans. French people want to buy from French people, right? Like you can kind of get away with the UK sales force for a period of time, but usually if you want to go sell it, I'm dealing with one of the companies now, like France, Ge…”
Chad Peet: 80% of selling in Europe is identical to the US
“80% of it is the exact same. Hard work. Pipeline generation. All of that stuff is applicable in Europe, just like it is in the US.”
Chad Peet: Erring on low sales quotas is better than setting them too high
“Set quotas too low, not too high, ok? Because if you have to err on one side, what's the downside to setting them too low? Ok, I blew out my number as a company, ok, I expected to do ten million, I did Fifteen million. And I paid more commissions. Okay. Probab…”
Peet: Universally Liked Sales Leaders Are Wrong For The Job
“If your sales leader is beloved by everybody, you got the wrong guy.”
Peet: A Leader's Need For Popularity Prevents Right Decision-Making
“That's the biggest shortcoming I see of a lot of leaders. They cannot stand not to be popular with the people that are beneath them. They avoid conflict, and which means they avoid making the right decision.”
Chad Peet: Maintaining hardcore company culture at 50k+ employees is impossible
“You know, can you do it with 50, a 100,000 employees to it? No, I don't see how you can do that. I just don't see how that's possible.”
Peet: Prior sales training matters more than domain experience in recruiting
“So people will say, focus on domain, focus on this, focus on scale. Bullshit. All I care about is where has this person worked? Who trained them? Do they come from a world-class go-to-market function?”
Peet: OpenAI initiated talks with him before he joined xAI
“There was a high-level individual that I spoke to at the company maybe a year ago before I decided to go to XAI. Yes, I didn't feel it was a good fit. And I'm not saying they offered anything. I'm saying we had an introductory conversation that they initiated.”
Peet: Elon Musk Has No Close Competitor in Scaling Hardware
“There is no close competitor to doing hardware at scale than Elon.”
Single-Vertical Products Severely Constrain TAM and Maximum Company Scale
“If you're going to sell A product that only goes to one vertical, you're seriously limiting the size that the company can be, right? Just think about the TAM.”
Screen Sales Candidates by Verifying Job-Change Motivations Across Resumes
“Super easy. I'm going to pull up your resume. So help me understand. Why did you go from this company to that company? Why, what was the motivating factor there? Why did you make that move? Oh, well, they offered me a bigger base salary. We're done. Why did yo…”
Every Sutter Hill CRO Was Placed From Chad Peets' Personal Network
“Every CRO at every Sutter Hill company, right, and I've placed them all, has been somebody that I know, that comes from my ecosystem.”
Hiring a Pre-Product CRO Requires $10M in Seed Funding
“Usually you're going to need more than a couple million bucks to do this. You don't need 20, but you probably need 10.”
Product Roadmaps Built Without CRO Input Fail to Capture True Demand
“Well, who designs the product roadmap? Oh, the product organization does. You got problems, right? Because product organization is going to go build what they think the customer wants to buy. The person that knows what the customer wants to buy is the person t…”
Snowflake Scaled Without Having a Dedicated Customer Success Department
“They don't have a customer success organization at Snowflake, or at least they didn't. Maybe they've created one now, but they didn't. The feeling was everybody's in customer success.”
Customer Success Should Not Handle Account Expansion Because Expansion Is Sales
“What I don't agree with is the rep does the land deal and walks away, and they, the customer success rep is responsible for expansion. Expansion is sales.”
Managers Unable to Decide on Hiring Within Two Hours Are the Problem
“If you can't make a decision on whether or not to hire somebody after two hours with him, you're the problem. Not the candidate, it's you.”
90% Gross Retention Indicates Strong Product Fit; 70% Signals Failure
“Gross retention tells me if people like my product, right? Like I understand if my gross retention is 90%, I probably have a pretty good product, right? If my gross retention slips down to 70%, I have a product problem.”
Early-Stage Startups Should Take Negative-Margin Deals for Referenceable Logos
“Early stage company, look, we do, you'll do negative margin deals, right? Like we're going to do this deal, but we're going to lose money on the deal. But we need the referenceable account, and we'll make up for it later.”
Great sales ability is innate and cannot be taught
“A hundred percent. You can't teach, someone's either, someone either can sell, or they can't. I can, you can teach someone to be better, but if they don't have the innate ability to sell, some people are petrified of the phone, right?”
Single-vertical focus severely caps startup TAM and company size
“If you're going to sell, A product that only goes to one vertical, you're seriously limiting the size that the company can be, right? Just think about the TAM. Like, if I'm gonna sell into healthcare, that's all I can sell into. That's, you better crush health…”