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 64 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.”
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: 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: 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: 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…”
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: 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: 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: Growth-stage venture investing is nearly nonexistent in late 2022
“On the growth stage side many of the best companies raised a lot of money last year, and given what's happened in the public markets, it's difficult to justify, certainly an up round and maybe even the valuations at which, Those businesses raised, and many of …”
Blond: Switching Brex sales incentives to revenue drove massive per-rep growth
“And at Brex, we started with things like activations. So like number of logo customers that we signed up, you know, there are a lot of like SDR incentives that were around like meetings, that sort of thing. The moment that we switched reps and then eventually …”
Sam Blond Predicts Unified Platforms Will Consolidate AI Sales Tools
“I think there will be a sort of like unified platform that comes together that takes all of these sort of disparate piecemeal processes and basically combines them. So you can effectively say like, this is my TAM. I want meetings. And the output can be, these …”
Blonde: Brex AE-sourced outbound generated exponentially higher ACVs than SDR-sourced pipeline
“The AE sourced opportunities converted at a significantly higher rate to customers, and they generated far more revenue. So the ACV of AE sourced outbound opportunities was significantly, almost exponentially higher than the SDR sourced opportunities.”
Blond: Automation Tools Increased Rather Than Decreased SDR Headcount by 2020
“The size of the SDR teams in 20, 20, many years after these products were introduced was significantly greater than the sort of like size or investment made in SDR in 2012 when they first came to market, something like that.”
Blond: 80% of Brex's revenue came from outbound sales
“About 80% of Brex's revenue came from sales outbound.”
Sam Blond: Brex paired SF billboards with champagne to drive outbound
“The outbound one Brex sort of famously did a champagne campaign where we were sending bottles of champagne as part of outbound crazy high reply rates with that. When most folks were going paid online advertising, Brex did paid offline advertising. We had a geo…”
Most SaaS businesses missed their H1 2023 revenue targets
“We missed the revenue targets that we projected in like Q four of last year, where we thought we would perform in 20, 23. I think that's probably more common than not for SAS businesses in the first half of this year.”
Rippling gifts $25 to high-NPS users who post on LinkedIn
“And what they do is they give an NPS survey At the end of that onboarding. So when I joined Founder's Fund, I onboarded to Rippling. And the NPS survey, I mark it, whatever I mark it, based off of my experience onboarding, I probably marked it a 10. And then I…”
Brex's SF billboards significantly boosted outbound email reply rates
“That was really effective, and it was also really helpful with our outbound, because when we sent an outbound email to somebody whose headquarters was in downtown San Francisco, the probability of them replying was significantly greater, because they had seen …”
Blond: Brex boosted revenue by tying SDR compensation to revenue generated
“At Brex when we shifted the comp plan for SDR from like opportunities created to revenue generated, and the output of that was a lot more revenue”
Blond: Modern Health has surpassed $100M in ARR
“Today, Modern Health is north of a hundred million dollars in ARR.”
Blond: Startups are seeking sales leaders despite early 2023 macro layoffs
“And one thing that is counterintuitive in this environment of layoffs and slow to hiring is that I'm actually seeing more companies looking for a sales leader.”
Blond: Zenefits started 2014 at $500K ARR targeting $10M
“Four months into Zenefits we were in 2014, our target was ten million in ARR. We started 20 14 about 500,000 of ARR.”
Zenefits doubled its 2014 revenue target to $20M ARR and hit it
“We changed the revenue target to twenty million. Like two days later, Parker couldn't keep the secret and we hit it.”
Blond: Brex and Divvy were fierce corporate card competitors from 2018–2020
“Brex, where I was most recently CRO, and Divi, where Sterling is currently CRO, were bitter competitors from the time that I joined at least, which was mid 2018, at least through sort of like early 20 20, we were the primary two players in the corporate card, …”
Blond: Many companies that raised in 2021 cannot raise again
“I think because of that, there will be a lot of companies that were able to raise money last year that aren't forward, aren't able to raise going forward.”
Codeium reached a $1B valuation while scaling from 30 to 150 employees
“Codium, most recently valued at over a billion dollars. When Graham joined around this time last year, the company was 30 employees. Fast forward to today, we're at a 150.”
Gabrisko joined Databricks as CRO at under $1M in ARR
“Ron joined Databricks as CRO when there was less than a million dollars of ARR.”
Blonde: Brex predicted long-term renewals and revenue from 30-day card spend
“We could actually predict things like expansion renewals for Brex. It was card spend. So how much revenue a customer would generate? By their, the actions that they took very early on as a customer. And for us, it was like the first 30 days.”
Rippling reached a $14B valuation with hundreds of millions in ARR
“Rippling is a 14 plus billion dollar, many thousands of employees, I think 1500 folks in the revenue organization, several hundred million dollars of ARR, and Matt grew that organization and that revenue number from making cold calls in Parker's basement just …”
Blond: Using a Presumptive Close Tripled Conversion Rates at Brex
“But the presumptive close, I think probably increased conversion rates by something like two to three X.”
Blond: Brex Tied LTV and Churn Directly to First 30 Days
“Customer happiness, like NPS, lifetime value, the likelihood of churn. We were able to tie all of these things back to the experience that they had in the first 30 days that they were a customer.”
Brex scaled from $2M to over $300M ARR during Kelly's tenure
“Where she was able to scale the business from about two million in ARR is where Ashley joined and left it like three hundred million plus in ARR.”
Blond: Rippling currently generates several hundred million in ARR
“Rippling today is several hundred million dollars in AR.”
Sam Blond: In-person customer visits tripled Brex deal conversion rates
“When we measured conversion rates at Brex by whether or not we visited the customer in person. And I think we had like 15 to 20% conversion rates. There was sort of the norm where we didn't visit a customer. And when we visited a customer, they three X. So the…”
Blond: Early Brex close rates were significantly higher in SF than NYC
“And by really targeting a specific geo where you talked about this flywheel of customers that can start to engage with other customers the likelihood that we were gonna close a deal when we created an opportunity in San Francisco compared to even New York, whi…”
Owner.com's growth bottleneck is customer onboarding, not demand generation
“Owner.com. Jason introduced me to the company. Jason's an investor. Their bottleneck is implementation. They have a lot of demand. They have a lot of customers that are signing up. And right now it's just taking too long to onboard those folks that are raising…”
Brex's first dedicated expansion rep outperformed new customer acquisition reps
“What we did was we took one sales rep, and this was when we were something like eight Folks on the sales team. And we moved him or her to being dedicated to expansion in the base. And he looked at, you know, these reports exactly as I just described, where is …”
Blonde: Zenefits targeted growing from $500k to $10M ARR in 2014
“When Zenefits was very young and immature, we had a goal of going from like 500,000 dollars in ARR to ten million in ARR in one year. This was 2014.”
Blond: Brex acquired most of its Y Combinator batch before launch
“We restricted the outbound to the YC batch that they were in into prior YC batches also. And we acquired most of their YC batch and dozens of companies from prior YC batches also.”
Blond: EchoSign's Aetna case study closed United, Cigna, and BCBS
“I closed Aetna when we were at Echosign and we did a press release with Aetna or convinced them to do a press release with us. Around how much paper they were saving by going green and doing electronic signature. And it was, you know, millions of pieces of pap…”
Blond: Rippling CEO Parker Conrad rarely angel invests, but backed Omni
“And Parker spends near zero time angel investing and doesn't really angel invest. And he was like, he said that and he was like, but I did angel invest in this company. And you have to meet Colin from Omni.”
Blond: Brex CEO Enrique Dubugras filled calendar with customer calls developing Empower
“There was a period of time at Brex where our founders spent less time customer facing and then very quickly realized that that was a mistake. And I've talked a couple of times on this podcast about Enrique having just his calendar full of customer calls as we …”