The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 165 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Blond: AI Will Make Software Development 5x Faster Within Three Years
“We can build software today. Let's call it five X faster than we could three years ago before all of the coding assistance. Well, if that's true faster, yeah, maybe more than probably more, it's reasonable to believe that in three years from now we can build f…”
Sam Blond Predicts AI Will Fully Automate Transactional Sales
“Transactional sort of commodity like sales will be disrupted in ways that support has been disrupted, where more and more revenue will be generated from just pure models, converting website visitors to revenue without the sales touch. And I think that will con…”
Outbound sales drives the majority of Rippling's revenue attribution
“We're going to focus more specifically on outbound, which makes up the majority of Rippling's revenue from an attribution standpoint.”
Blond: Founders Fund avoided AI, health tech, and ed tech deals
“You mentioned AI founders fund didn't really do AI. So even if you were dot AI the last 18 months, it was like a no-go regardless of the success of the business. We didn't love the categories of like health tech and ed tech.”
Blond: A $1B exit no longer moves the needle for large VC funds
“What you're describing is as Peter described the power law venture, where there can be a series, a, an exceptional company that is raising money at 30 to forty million dollars, which I think is probably the Middle of the road series a right now and a billion d…”
Sam Blond: Spreadsheet-based sales hiring caused productivity to regress dramatically
“We made decisions based on a spreadsheet. We had a historical data on rep effectiveness in 20, 20 and 20, 21 in finance plugged the number going from 10 reps to 14 reps into the spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet said this was what was going to happen when we go…”
Demand-constrained SaaS companies close more revenue by firing underperforming reps
“You will close more revenue with fewer salespeople when you are in an environment that is demand constrained.”
Brex tracked customer spending on Amex by snooping linked bank accounts
“We could sort of cheat at Brex in that we could see the payments that were flowing to other cards. We linked to folks' bank accounts and we could see how much they were paying us and we could see how much they were paying American Express.”
Blond: Zenefits generated less total revenue after massively overhiring sales reps
“And so the actual result of hiring a bunch more SDRs and AEs wasn't that we had incrementally more revenue, but sort of less efficient revenue on a per rep basis. We actually had less revenue. We closed less revenue by hiring all of these people because it was…”
Blond: Cutting Underperforming AEs Increases Total Revenue in Lead Shortages
“If you cut the bottom performing whatever percent of the AE team, what that means is you will give the limited number of opportunities that you do have to performers that have a higher conversion rate and actually convert more revenue or more sales with fewer …”
Blond: Startups should not prioritize domain experience when hiring sales leaders
“There are only so many really amazing sales leaders that exist to begin with. And if you limit your candidate population to a very small domain, like let's just say property tech or something like that, how many unbelievable property tech sales leaders are the…”
Blond: Zenefits Erred by Branding Around Fast Growth Rather Than Product
“Embracing this identity around sort of like fast growing tech company raised a bunch of money. That was a mistake. And I think the right thing to do or what to try and do is associate your company with what you do. Had we been known as, you know, the best heal…”
Blond: Brex framed Divvy's advanced budgeting features as unnecessary complexity
“Divi had a sophisticated budgeting tool. There was a feature that Rex did not have. And we actually positioned that as a negative. We said, you're a, you know, 50 person company. You don't want to have a lot of sophistication around rules around where cards ca…”
Blond: 2022 SaaS slowdown not driven by budget cuts on new sales
“I am not seeing much influence on a company's ability to sell their product, to acquire new customers. And I am not hearing, you know, one of the biggest Problems today in our business is that potential customers are cutting budget, and they're not able to buy…”
Blond: Sales Revenue Targets Should Be Set With 90% Confidence
“I set the target with 90% confidence that we're able to hit it.”
Blond: Brex biases hiring away from Tier 1 cities for cost savings
“We have a bias towards new hires that actually aren't in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles. What we categorize as tier one cities because there's cost savings associated with hiring people in lower cost locations.”
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: 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…”
Blond: Doubling sales pipeline is far easier than doubling conversion rates
“The lowest hanging fruit to influence growth is generating more pipeline. The idea that if you are able, if you think about Splunk at this point is a much more mature business, but for many earlier stage startups, if you just do the math on this, if you're abl…”
Blond: In-person sales visits tripled customer conversion rates at Brex
“When we actually measured At Brex, when we did a customer onsite, and the conversion rates of customers that received an onsite versus customers that we tried to close inside, and it was three x. The customers that we met in person had three x the conversion r…”
Start outbound sales using existing networks, not cold email tools
“You do not want to start with purchasing a sequencing tool, purchasing a system that gives you contact information and blasting your ICP. I've talked about this before, but you really want to start with who you are targeting being in your own network.”
Always hire two SDRs initially to accelerate learning and benchmarking
“When you do hire your first SDR, hire two because they will be able to share learnings with one another and really accelerate the time to effectiveness because they're trying and failing, they're trying and succeeding, and then they can share both the failures…”
Blond: Rapidly scaling SDRs at Zenefits tanked performance of existing reps
“When we added all of these new SDRs into the mix, not only were they less effective than the more tenured existing reps, they actually made the existing reps far less successful because we had to tap into this TAM base that people were less likely to convert.”
Sam Blond: Boom-era tech workers made double working half as hard
“Where people were people in sales specifically, but I think more broadly within the company were able to make twice as much money and work half as hard.”
Sam Blond: Rippling pays promoters $25 to post onboarding on LinkedIn
“Rippling does this really creative strategy where when you are onboarded by one of their customers, so part of their product is onboarding, and when a new hire goes through this onboarding process, Rippling sends them an NPS survey. Anybody that marks that sur…”
Sam Blond: Brex SDR ACV tripled after tying quota to revenue
“The average the ACV of an SDR generated customer went three X about 30 days after we made the change.”
Blond: In-person sales visits tripled early Brex conversion rates
“One thing that we did in the early days of Brex was we measured conversion rates based off of whether a potential client received an onsite visit or not. And those that a sales rep went on site and met the customer, they closed it like a three X rate. You know…”
Brex achieved a 75% demo-to-close rate on its champagne outbound campaign
“And then like, 75% demo to close rate. Now like Brex is like free in a way. We made money on interchange, and so 75% conversion rate is extremely high. We weren't asking for a check.”
Account executives must source their own revenue to stay busy
“For most companies, AEs really should be sourcing their own revenue. There's almost never going to be this perfect equilibrium where you have exactly the number of demos and opportunities that you're working. That mean that as an AE, you're filling eight hours…”
Blond: Brex's champagne outbound campaign saw a 75% reply rate
“The champagne campaign where we sent bottles of Vuv Cliqueau along with handwritten notes from Enrique, and we automated that handwritten note process. Just saying congratulations on your recent fundraise. We're a fellow early stage startup located in the Bay …”
Blond: Brex saw a 3x deal size jump from automated lead scoring
“I think the like biggest data point that we could point to was something like a three X increase in the average opportunity size, because people were going after the opportunities that generated the most, most revenue for the business in a very automated way.”
Blond: Early startups shouldn't overspecialize post-sales customer roles
“Initially you have somebody focused on serving the customer. That includes both mitigating churn, making them successful, and also increasing the revenue because especially at an early stage as a startup, having this like concept of over specialization where y…”
Blond: Investors who do not help portfolio companies recruit are failing
“And if your investors aren't helping recruit for you, I don't think they're doing their job.”
Blond: Companies almost certainly overpay their worst employees and underpay their best
“Just this concept of like, you're almost certainly overpaying your worst employee and underpaying your best employee.”
Blond: Hiring promoted leaders from hypergrowth startups yields zero hiring misses
“I'm not aware of a single miss I, I've seen tons of misses on, we hired from a big company. I haven't seen a single miss where we hired from the hottest tech startup of the sort of last generation. We hired somebody that grew their career there to come in and …”