The Ledger, every show

“It is not hard to imagine that the front end of the web disappears. Like the idea of having a database of the content and a website, and then rendering that PHP into HTML, and then having a browser interpret the HTML, and then having a human read like the, thi…”

“I believe we're going to a webless world. I believe GPT is going to be like a quarter to a third of the traffic and nine months from now, right?”

“The SDR role is going away. The people will become closers or will evolve into something else. What's that? Something else? Probably sales ops. They will handle the orchestration, the workflows.”

“Monetization comes first, open source for acquisition comes second. Other way around is, like, super hard, my opinion, huh?”

“Even the people I love and care about, you think of, like, something like a ramp, I love them to death. Amazing company. Do you think there's PRG? Do you think CFOs randomly invite other CFOs to use Ramp? Hell no. It doesn't happen like that. It doesn't work l…”

“Have you tried not sending a welcome email? Not sending, you know, the first three, four, five emails to get people to use the products. And of course they haven't. And I tell them, try it. Take 2030, whatever it takes to be statistically significant and don't…”

“They're, like, of the one 20, a third is, like, semi-retired in VC and other things. A third is in, like, great walls, like Luke, and you're not gonna poach Luke from, like, Shopify, right? And there's a third, like me, who's, like, doing, like consultancy and…”

“There's really two broad categories, things that are AI proof, right? The AI resilience. So that's going to be like social proof and influencers is going to be like some of the UGC stuff. A lot of that, the webinars, the in-person, the events, the dinners, all…”

“I'm seeing more and more companies build hidden websites, completely hidden to the humans. It's an entire other index, an entire other, like, web tree, right, for the purpose for AI agents to scrape.”

“And I'm now encouraging CMOs to like have much leaner content teams, and just a few people that can run content workflows at scale, because the output is just as good, if not better.”

“Who is spending 25% of the budget and headcount on, like, LM appearance? No one raised their hand. And that doesn't make sense, because that's where we're heading 12 months from now, there is no question.”

“I'll ask the same question one year from now. My bet is that we're going to see at least 30% of the people when you have a reduced headcount or less hires.”

“We have done this in less than two months, and as of yesterday, I looked up the numbers. We've beaten the SDR team that's been working on that for, like, a couple of years, and there's 200 people.”

“It means marketing has won! That's what it means, right? It means, like, Outbound is now owned by growth and marketing teams, ok? Just embrace it. Like, that war is over, ok?”

“They got 3.5 million clicks. Like, how insane is that? So what are we seeing here? We're seeing they have one person to build a workflow, and Marcel told me, took him, like, about a thousand hours. Sure. Ok. And then one human who's there ongoing for, like, co…”

“The learning is, as of six months ago, that has changed, and it is working absolutely. It's making the job seamless. Like, the LLMs now, inside Google Ads, are making targeting better, ok? They're better at showing the right creative. They're better at showing…”

“We're gonna see, like, the certified real human, which can be the new, like Parmigiano-Reggiano of, like, sales. Well, like, hey, like, this is a stamp. This is, like, actually a meat bag that's talking to you, and some people are gonna like that. Some people …”

“Overall, email is at risk, because we saw the charts with, like, the cost going down, right? That only means one thing. Everyone here in this room and elsewhere is going after, like, outbound AI-based email. Volumes are gonna go up. People will be desensitized…”

“And so, there's actually a better way of, like, building product-led sign-up motions with separate products to get people engaged, and then push that into a sales motion. And that is a much easier transition than, like, shifting your entire product from an ent…”

“And I also don't think it's going to last super long. There's going to be a reversion to the mean in the next couple quarters as people become desensitized. And so there is a time window to do this right now. There's a significant Benefit, if your competitors …”

“It's companies that are enterprise first with the entire, like, cost structure and product structure of an enterprise software, and then want to open a PLG and go, hey, let's let people, like, sign up on their own. And like nothing works. Like the acquisition …”

“In most successful startups that grow fairly well, The CAC will rise faster than the brand can compensate for that rise.”

“That is an example of something that is very replicable in almost any SaaS business. It's very easy to implement and will drive your user retention up.”

“So it's very likely that we'll start ignoring messages from real humans at a much higher rate, because the quality of AI will be better than the quality of humans.”

“And I have never seen a companies I've worked with, neither at Segment or at Drift, Gorgias, or Ram, and not in one of the companies I engage with, where we were able to get to fifty million on one channel. Not one.”

“If the incentive of the team is to drive signups and engagement, the problem is they will optimize for that, not for the long-term viability of the business. That's a huge risk. I'm French. I know how to cheat 10 times out of 10, right? You give me anything as…”

“All, almost all people that like my level of experience in the US, right? There's like, there's less than 200, there's a 120 people, okay?”

“ColdCard was dead from like, 20, 12, 2013 to 20, 22, and with LLMs now, and tools like Orum, ColdCard is back big time.”

“Building bundles. Like bundles are a terrible idea. When you start bundling different features, different products together into one, the size of the audience that cares about the entire bundle is smaller and smaller as the bundle increases.”

“The fact that we're now capable of doing faster and better quality, example, we can scrape websites, we can scrape random content for extremely cheap and feed that back into AI prompts for outbound or for SEO drives An extremely low CAC on those channels, whic…”

“The key learning out of this is sequences are dead. If you think that the best way to engage customers is to have a series of pre-written, templated emails that are gonna fire until somebody responses, like, you are in, like, the 2015, 20 18 era. You're, like,…”

“Critically, last line here on the slide, the workflows with AIs Currently produce better content than autonomous agents and better content than humans alone. Unless you're ready to pay, like, 10,000 dollars per post.”

“In the tests that we've done the more you handcuff the system and restrict the AI, the fewer optimizations it can make on your behalf and the worse off you will be.”

“For example, like all of the YC companies that are doing like AI agents that does the entire SDR for you, like the output of that is like, eh, it's not great. It's okay, but it's not great, ok? What we're seeing working, however, is like very specialized LLMs …”

“Are we seeing AI be efficient in enterprise deals? And the answer is not yet. Okay. Enterprise deals are complex. They are long. There's lots of potential buyers, lots of information and AI just isn't efficient there for now. There's just too much context, too…”

“What you have here is the difference between the average cost per contact email between the automated outbound team and the SDR team. So you have a two and a 2.4 X difference. And then the Marginal cost. That's very important, because As Excel was pointing out…”

“The question is who's doing the qualification? Who's bearing the cost? And then in the PLG outbound model, the user is bearing the cost, right? And in the sales that model, like you, the company is bearing the cost, which is why we're all seeing this shift fro…”

“Honestly, you should start somewhere, not on both sides, is my opinion. And so PLG four cells led, PLG two cells led, is probably the new thing we're seeing right now. I think that's the major shift we're seeing right now with AI empowered outbound.”

“Hiring to senior. They tell me, yes, I'm excited going back early stage and getting my hands dirty. That has never came out to be true.”

“That's what we found at Segment. Really crazy attribution logic, where we found engineers across jobs by, and that's the unique lesson, keying not on the link, not on the email, because the email changes, domain changes, not on the name, that's not relevant, o…”

“I have one example. Zapier did that for very, very long. I talked to the Zapier founders. I talked to Mike when I was at Segment, and I wanted enterprise features, and he said, gee, we love you, but I'm sorry. We're not going to build those features. I'm like,…”

“The response rate here is 12 to 15%.”

“I recommend companies to two X the budget every week until it's that lines. Just do it for like Four weeks, six weeks, it's not gonna, like, burn your budget, your entire, like, capital, right? But just, two x on week two, two x on week three, two x on week fo…”

“Take a sample. Take a sample of, take a randomized sample of the audience. If you can't do that, it means your target market is too small and you should be doing ABM. You're not doing like high skill stuff.”

“Reject any KPI that is vanity. You don't care about traffic. You don't care about any of those KPIs. The only thing you care about is weight adjusted pipeline dollars.”

“If a marketing candidate that you're looking to hire does not own a pipeline figure, that is the wrong candidate, my friend.”

“If you haven't think of, like, the lead score, it means you haven't thought of your ICP. If you haven't thought of who's a good customer for you just stop everything. Stop everything and just go define who are the good customers and what are their attributes.”

“After a couple of million revenue. Like once you, once you've handled the early adopters, you've scaled at least one channel that works well, and you're starting to think of optimization Testing, aggressively building a growth team, then you should have enough…”