The Ledger, every show

“I, you know, I strongly dislike the CEO of Databricks, but I think Mike, cause he's a dick and he's a liar, but you know, I look, I think at the end of the day, if I, if I'm honest about it, I think the two companies as a combined entity, that would be a amazi…”

“Yes. Get rid of them. Build a professional service organization. Hire more SEs who can do it. Customer success. Look, people think that's blasphemy. I get it. I don't believe in it. I inherited our customer success when Frank came in and he gave it to me. I go…”

“Salesforce. Terrible. Terrible. Because they have no idea how to sell. They, they're order takers. To your point earlier is they don't, if you go to a place that's just an order taker, they'd have no idea how to do it. They have no idea how to sell.”

“The forward deployed engineer is a glorified professional services person. If you're a really good engineer, you do not want to be a forward deployed engineer. You want to work on the core product.”

“These companies all, pretty much everyone's a passenger, because there is no accountability. You're not learning anything from a sales, you know, perspective. Eventually that will come to bite you in the, in your butt, in your career.”

“99% of them are not. They're, I mean. Because they've never been operators. So like, they're just regurgitating, you know, something they heard in another board meeting that they think might be.”

“It's better to be a CRO of a startup than it is a CRO of a publicly traded company. You'll get paid more.”

“I mean, like the Lacework sales team was a world-class sales team, just a crap product.”

“Cause God, what a terrible product that is. It is awful.”

“There are companies that I've spoken to that I'm like blown away that they don't even believe in traditional sales and they're idiots. They're literally idiots. They drive me crazy because like, oh, we're different. And I'm like, no, you're not different. Some…”

“I would just would have hired more salespeople and focused on new logo acquisition and pounded on product to give me a notebook and a spark connector, and we would have kicked the shit out of Databricks and they would be dead.”

“And in a technical product, if they're customer success, they need to be implementation people. They should not be like these like crappy salespeople that don't know how to sell and do just do renewals. I hate that function.”

“Ali at Databricks, he shouts pretty loud and he's done a good job, and I don't necessarily agree about how he goes about doing things, but It's worked for Databricks.”

“So I actually have an affinity of not hiring. People out of the security space.”

“Look, I mean, I had the fortunate, you know experience of working for some pretty ruthless guys, in particular Frank Slootman.”

“We, and I mean, we said it earlier and I said on your last podcast, we should have kept hiring. We slowed down. Because we optimized to be public. And that was a mistake, my opinion. And by the way, I, I'm, I w my hand was on that wheel.”

“Yeah, I think they're going to have to, like, every SaaS company that, that is a per seat is having the conversation right now of how do they introduce Some sort of consumption into their pricing model, because there's risk that, you know, companies have less …”

“I think, like we said earlier, there is a bubble to this thing. But I also think it's, it is, like, it is life changing. Mean AI is changing the way that you can interact with technology. So I do think it's important that you build for speed and you go fast. B…”

“You know, I'm thinking about, like, all these questions around, you know, people are saying the sales person will be dead, or SDRs will be dead. I just, I don't buy it”

“What I learned there is true for any startup is that you have to recruit great people. You have to develop those people and then ultimately drive revenue as your third thing. If you recruit those great people and they know how to sell the product, then they'll…”

“I'm sure someone will break it this year because there's companies that have much more revenue than we did, but the largest IPO software IPO ever and enterprise software IPO ever.”

“CRM is Salesforce is water to the sales team. That's not selling. You don't know how to sell. You know how to do a deal. It's order taking. And so that's what the LLMs are doing right now. They're order taking. At some point, if you build a world-class organiz…”

“Why do I want pessimistic? Because I don't want someone with happy ears. If you're happy ears and you're nice and everyone's nice and you like everyone, well, guess what? There are gonna be a bunch of deals that you're not gonna get because people are gonna li…”

“Towards the end of Bob's tenure, there were a couple execs that were empire builders. They just, they cared more about what the size of their organization, the type of their title, that kind of stuff, than actually doing their job.”

“Frank has this thing where it says, when there's doubt, there's no doubt.”

“The ultimate measuring stick for a head of sales is can you hire great people and make them productive? And to me, productive means within six months, can a sales rep get onboarded Understand how to sell the product, generate their own pipeline, and then close…”

“But people who say outbound is dead, I, no, I don't want you as my sales leader.”

“I'm like, that's the most idiotic thing I've ever heard in my entire life, because who gives a crap about your brand when you're fifty million dollars in revenue?”

“When I'm talking to founders, like when they're looking for heads of sales, what I say is go find that someone, A, who's, who's been a second line manager or B, a head of sales at a crappy software company. And that's been successful. That's hit their numbers.…”

“If you've never done sales and you come into a startup, you're not learning anything. There's no one teaching. The founder doesn't know how to do sales”

“And so we took our eye off the ball for, I want to say, like two years on new logo acquisition, and that hurt us.”

“Look at Databricks. Their sales team is, they're less revenue than Snowflake. Their sales team is twice the size of Snowflake. Their engineering team is twice the size of the engineering team.”

“They buy companies that Snowflake Has had term sheets on for three times or two times the amount of money that Snowflake is offering to buy the companies for, because there's no consequence.”

“They're a pretty dominant, in terms of the data estate, Snowflake and Databricks own the data estate together. And they're complementary for the most part, not, not really competitive.”

“So we have fired managers last year. I went through a certification of second line managers and we fired people because they couldn't sell the product.”

“And so I got rid of customer success. Now, customer success is a responsibility of the entire company.”

“And so, to me, whether you call it customer success or professional services, you have to show that they can at least be breakeven, those people. If they're a cost of sale, then I think they're, it's not worthwhile.”

“Yeah, I think that's dead. I think consumption is, is the future for sure.”

“Worse. Because I don't want to do the hard things. When I say the hard things for a CRO is when you're five hundred million dollars, billion dollars in revenue, getting on a plane and traveling around the world, going on two week trips away from your family.”

“So PLG is great, but if you want to sell to the enterprise is hyper-political, and you have to have a sales process to do that. And at some point, The PLG motion will fail you, or it won't get you to that, that large enterprise. And if you aspire to sell the l…”

“Well, it certainly looks like open AI has won the consumer. And I think it's like, Not even debatable.”

“I think there will be like telemarketers, like that will get replaced, you know, for sure. You know, like when, if I'm getting a call from my cable provider on upselling me on a new, you know, wireless plan or something like that. I think that those types of t…”

“No one's really your friend. You have a job to do, and you have an obligation to shareholders.”

“I think it's a mistake for a founder to hire a chief revenue officer right away, because the getting rid of a chief revenue officer is going to be more painful versus, Hey, you have a VP of sales and you can hire over them and you can make that VP of sales a H…”

“Those large enterprises, especially in an early stage startup, they will suck the life out of that startup because they will say, I need these hundred features.”

“Founders love product marketers. They understand the product and they're going to build this marketing literature and stuff like that. That's a waste of time. The marketing team needs to generate pipeline.”

“If you do not go on eight sales calls a week, if you do not become a student of what you sell, you will fail. You might be a really nice person, but if you don't do those two things, you're going to fail.”

“A hundred percent. Like that's a good lesson is like, A single person should not be the litmus test because you don't know if they're doing the things that you do. As the sales leader, you should be a leading from the front sales leader. You should understand …”