Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
Full method →
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 5 5.00
Q You use Windsor for an example, but use that to tell the story of- Of KP? Of, yeah.
A When I joined six years ago, my charter was kind of twofold at KP. Number one was, hey, we have this group of CIOs and customer networks. Can you help us manage it? Right. Number two was, Hey, our founders need a lot of help on sales and distribution where you can, can you help them there? That was like the core charter, right? Then I realized that in order to help founders with go to market, like we needed to help them hire. So that was the excuse for the podcast, right? It was like, all right, I need an excuse to get to know these people so I can help these founders hire great CROs. Uh, then That all started to work, and we were like, great, let's double down on helping founders with sales. So we hired somebody on my team, Liam. Then we were like, great. Let's double down on helping folks like Varun get access to world-class customers. So we doubled down on that and hired, uh, hired somebody else. And we're like, great. Let's help founders with building their demand gen funnels and a bunch of stuff on the marketing side.
AI assessment note: “When I joined six years ago, my charter was kind of twofold at KP.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q like your, like, how do you hire a sales team like this? Like we have founders listening, they're building interesting ad products. They don't really know how to go to market. Do you have to offer an arm and a leg to hire your first sales leader? Do you have to only work with Kleiner to do that? Like, what is the actual principle that you advise founders to follow?
A Uh, I'll give you some anti-patterns. The first is do not just go on their LinkedIn and look at all the fancy logos that they have gone and worked at and immediately assume that because they were at Snowflake or because they were at Databricks, they must be good for your AI company. It just doesn't work that way. In fact, in many cases, it's the inverse is true, where if you had to sell the number three product in a market, and you had to fight tooth and nail, and you were still successful there, You're probably, like, if you go to a great company, gonna have a much higher proclivity to do well, right? Whereas if you were, I don't know, if you joined Snowflake at a hundred million of ARR, and you join, like, their enterprise team in the Bay Area, it's like, yeah, I get it, but, like, that's not that impressive. No offense to anybody that joined Snowflake at that time, there were some diamonds in the rough. So I think that's, that's one.
AI assessment note: “do not just go on their LinkedIn and look at all the fancy logos”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q Yeah. I noticed, you know, you, you also did the thing to me where you just start the conversation, right? You don't have a, well, here's the intro. Here's your birth story. Here's your origin story. Uh, which I try to do sequentially a little bit, but that's one of your tricks, right?
A Well, I would say I go through An extreme level of detail to make sure that the guest feels very comfortable when they sit down. So one example of that is, you know, how you're greeted at the door, water, all those things. The second is recording just starts. There is no like, okay, are you ready? Because the minute that somebody says like, okay, are you ready? Go. You claim up. You're like, okay, I'm going to be the guest that I want to be. It's like, you know, when you're sleeping at night before you go into a podcast, you're like, okay, how am I going to sound? What am I going to say? That's going to make me feel smart. You know what I mean? Make me sound smart. And so you start to build this like idealized version of yourself that you want to project to the world, which is like not real. And so start talking as soon as you sit down the temperature of the room. Like I like the temperature to be cold. I don't want people to feel like they're sweating or hot. It feels like kind of cool in here, right? Uh, the way that the lights are, you'll notice the lights are all up, not down. Like I, I think it bounces off. Yeah. I think it's important to not make it feel spotlighty. Yeah. If that makes sense.
AI assessment note: “The second is recording just starts. There is no like, okay, are you ready?”
Answered raw tape
D 3 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 3 3.55
Q Yeah. Do you re-architecture or do you wait?
A Okay. So that, that happened. Then I come to find out, okay, uh, in this case, Salesforce, which is like the gorilla in the room, they have like 95% market share. They have end of life, their CPQ solution, and they're making everybody move to a new product. Okay. So they are trying to do this. That product does not exist yet. If it does, it's incredibly flimsy. We've talked to some of the people that are trying it right now. And so we basically have a two year window where we have to beat them to the punch. And we love, we love that. And the reason we love that is like, boy, would I rather compete with like whatever a 100,000 person sales force that I don't even know what kind of engineers may or may not still be there versus like Open AI. You know? Like, that's just like, that's who we want to out sprint. Then I started asking myself, well, like, why hasn't anybody done this yet? And the short answer is one, I don't think the technology was there. And the second, going back to your earlier question, Swix, is this is a very complicated go to market and distribution question. It is up market. The problem is more up market because that's where the complexity is. And, um, and in order to like do something elegantly up market, you need to like know what you're doing in the enterprise. Right. Uh, and It just so happens that you need early believers like Glean had with rubric that ar…
AI assessment note: “we basically have a two year window where we have to beat them to the punch”
