Rebranding the Bridge: The Thread Podcast Launch

In this episode of the Thread Podcast, host Justin Vandehey introduces his co-founders Jeremy Vandehey and Samuel Kenney as they discuss their journey in building Thread, a company focused on enhancing the go-to-market strategy for sales teams. The conversation explores the challenges of acquiring the first customer, aligning sales operations, and the importance of technology in sales. They delve into the future of sales technology, the role of AI in augmenting seller efficiency, and the competitive landscape of the sales industry. The episode concludes with insights on lessons learned from their experiences and the official launch of Thread.

Takeaways

• The consistent challenge for founders is acquiring the first customer.
• Empathy for the seller's experience is crucial in product development.
• Sales is a critical function for every startup, not just a separate department.
• Technology is rapidly changing the sales landscape, making it essential to innovate.
• AI can significantly enhance seller efficiency and effectiveness.
• Understanding the competitive landscape is vital for product positioning.
• Building a product that meets the needs of sellers is key to success.
• The rate of technology adoption is increasing, requiring quick adaptation.
• Founders must navigate noise and chaos in the current market environment.
• Feedback from users is essential for continuous improvement of the product.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Thread Podcast and Founders' Journey
05:36 The Importance of Sales Operations and Customer Understanding
08:24 Innovating in the Go-to-Market Space
11:07 Building a Product for Sellers
14:00 Challenges and Rewards of Founding Thread
16:47 The Future of Sales Technology and AI
19:45 Augmenting Seller Efficiency with Technology
22:41 Navigating the Competitive Landscape
24:41 Lessons Learned from Building Thread
27:15 Closing Thoughts and Call to Action
35:51 Introduction and Excitement for the Journey
36:48 Invitation to Join and Future Guests
37:17 Gratitude and Encouragement for Listeners

Transcript

Justin (00:01)
Coming up on this show, I have a very special announcement. I've spent the last three years talking to more than 200 founders and one consistent theme I've heard over and over again is how challenging it is to take a company from zero to one, but more specifically, how difficult it is to grow and scale revenue operations within a company. So to help support founders, CROs, go-to-market executives with that goal, I am excited to announce that today.

The Bridge Round, formerly known as the Bridge Podcast, is now officially the Thread Podcast. We'll still be interviewing awesome founders. We'll be looking at how they operate, more specifically narrowing in on what seasoned operators and growth experts are doing to grow their companies. It's going to be a lot of fun. So to kick off this series, I invited both of my co-founders, Sam Kenney and my brother, Jeremy Vandehey

to talk about a couple things on this ⁓ very special episode. First, the challenges that we've observed founders face in building and growing their companies in an era where AI is truly transforming how things are taken to market. So we look at how founders and revenue builders can navigate a lot of the noise and the chaos in the current market environment. And then we zoom out and we look at why CROs and rev ops need to focus on seller execution. What does that mean?

And why is that so crucial to how every function within a company truly operates? And then lastly, look at, selfishly, we look at our company thread. We talk about my baby, the new thing that we're working on, what we've learned building our new company thread and how we plan to support sellers in that mission. So if you're a founder, a CRO, a go-to-market professional that wants to 10X how well your sales teams perform, make them more effective, make them more efficient and grow faster.

I encourage you to try thread. It is an awesome product. If you visit thread.app, you can get started for free for the first 15 companies that sign up. You are going to receive a significant lifetime discount. You'll save tens of thousands of dollars on what you'd invest in a basic note taking application or call intelligence platform and get a better solution that doesn't just enable your sales team. They're going to start executing. So check out thread.app get started today.

All right, without further ado, I couldn't be more excited to get into this show with two of my best buds and co-founders. Let's get after it. Giddy up.

Justin (02:35)
What's going on everybody? It is your host, Justin Vandehey here at the Thread Podcast. That's right. You heard it here. Alluded to this earlier. We are rebranding the bridge excited to announce this coinciding with the launch of our new company Thread, where we will talk about all things go to market related.

I've met with over 120 founders recorded a ton of episodes. The one theme that is consistent that everybody's trying to figure out is how to go from zero to one, but how to get that first customer and beyond and how to get your operations, your sales operations, your sales team aligned to hit your revenue goals to grow and build a really meaningful company. So in honor of that, this first episode, I wanted to pull in.

Couple of fellas who I consider big dogs in the bigger scheme of things. Jeremy Vandehey and Samuel Kenney they look somewhat alike, you see, but they both have an incredible tool set and incredible skills. And I wanted to talk with them both as my co-founders in Thread around what we're going after the opportunity ahead of us and why we chose to build this company together.

So fellas, welcome into the Thread Podcast.

Jeremy Vandehey (04:04)
Thanks for having us.

Samuel Kenney (04:05)
Hey, thanks for being here. This is really going to be here. Can you play a intro again and talk about the skills I have? If you could.

Justin (04:12)
What kind of skills? Let's see.

Samuel Kenney (04:14)
Name

the skills, list them.

Justin (04:17)
I know you're a good biker. I know you're above average golfer. There's a lot of things I know you can do and you are good with computers. uh, anyway, uh, we're just, I don't know if I anything for Jeremy there. Um, but fellas, I, I guess what I'll start with, cause I don't want to make this overly formal, but I do want to cover some relevant subject matter here as we talk about the future of go to market.

Jeremy Vandehey (04:23)
and say nice things about me now.

Samuel Kenney (04:27)
years.

Justin (04:44)
and where we see a lot of this stuff going and why we started this business together. But I think it, you know, it ultimately starts with, I mean, when Jeremy and I co-founded Disco together, which all of a lot of our listeners know, was in the HR tech category where admittedly, I loved our customer. I loved the product we were building, but I knew nothing about HR. And I'm not going to pretend I know everything about sales, but

I think one thing I recognized was I just had a different level of empathy for the person that we were building this thing for. you know, prior to co-founding Disco, just observed firsthand as a person that carried a bag, how painful it was to do a lot of the administrative stuff that wasn't related to providing customer value. so when, yeah, when Jeremy and Sam and I came together on this, were like, man, wouldn't it be...

awesome if we could combine the knowledge that you guys have building products that have been literally used by millions of people with a sales bro that understands how to sell products and build something that could help the next generation of sellers be more effective and efficient. so I'm excited to share Thread with the world. You'll see on this show too, just to give listeners context, we're going to make it a point of having not only

folks that are experts in where rev ops is going, but also direct sellers and sales leaders that are sharing their observations in terms of what they're seeing in the market. It's just a really exciting time to not only be building product, but also to think around what, to be able to innovate and think about how to grow those companies. I wanted to start, fellas, I'm gonna kick it over to you actually both.

I wanted to start Jeremy maybe with you on, it's always been funny cause you've been like the product guy, alongside my sales. Manship. and basically having to do all of the, do all of the task or a content creation and building a lot of the things to enable me as we were scaling and selling disco. So.

Maybe we just built this to shut me up and stop asking you for stuff. I think maybe that was kind of like what the whole goal was, but I'd love to hear your take on like this space, what excites you about it, and then hear from Sam as well.

Jeremy Vandehey (07:03)
Yeah, I think I'm so I'm honored to be here. I've long time listener first time caller. But yeah, I just I well my my respect and understanding of sales has matured a lot like my lens into sales. Up until starting disco with you was complete and utter disrespect of just like debauchers people like, you know, selling stuff golfing.

Justin (07:09)
you

Jeremy Vandehey (07:29)
And then like I got that firsthand exposure when you start a company like everybody's in sales. And I was like, if I could just get the product and talk about the product and show them the product, like, it'll be awesome. And I think I had like three or four deals that I owned that were just like, Yeah, we're interested. We're close. And like, they just never closed. So I'm like, Okay, there's like, there's a method to this madness. And it like piqued my interest of like,

Samuel Kenney (07:49)
Thank

Jeremy Vandehey (07:57)
How do you become good at sales? How do you scale an effective sales organization? And a little bit of like, I just got to get Justin off my ass creating content, collateral, all these things. yeah, it's especially like building an HR. Like you said, I loved the category, but it's really tough to sell into because they don't, are often seen as like not generating revenue. So to be at this

point in time where companies are expected to do a lot more with a lot less. I think this is a function that's gonna change really quickly and I'm excited to have your expertise, excited to have Sam's technical expertise and kind of innovate on the category.

Justin (08:40)
Sam, let's talk about some of your skills with computers.

Samuel Kenney (08:44)
It's so funny because like as the non-Vandehey brother of this mix really the rose between the thorns if you would I think the one thing that's interesting is like I am equidistant in personality from both of the poles exist in and I was thinking about this the other day like anything that you like about me reminds me of your brother and anything you hate about me just reminds me of yourself

Justin (08:57)
you

Samuel Kenney (09:07)
So like, it's just like the balancing piece in between. I thought about it.

Justin (09:12)
That's good.

Samuel Kenney (09:13)
Yes,

was cooking that one up for a little bit. I the hammer.

Jeremy Vandehey (09:17)
I'm picturing you

crossing out the line of the rose between the thorns, like, okay, I finally got that in somehow.

Samuel Kenney (09:19)
Not gonna work.

Done. Got a couple more up my sleeve. All right, Justin, what do you want to know? What do you want to know about my skills?

Justin (09:28)
No, so okay, one thing that I having, you know, gone through a number of the fundraising conversations with you and just one thing I've just had a lot of just mutual, I don't know, there's just a ton of respect for you and how you've just been on the cutting.

as a cutting edge, like just ahead of where the puck is going and really pushing our team to think that way. one analogy I love you use, I don't know if it's like the Henry Ford quote. It's like, are not, what's the expression that you use? I Yeah, we're not trying to find faster horses. We're redefining the car. I'd love maybe for you just to get your take on what excites you about this movement, maybe from like a tech.

Samuel Kenney (10:02)
We are faster versus, right?

Justin (10:16)
from a models or technology perspective, like what is the vehicle, right? Like where are we going from a horse and buggy model to faster cars?

Samuel Kenney (10:26)
But yeah, down with fast or worse is we're building the car right now. Yeah, I it's an amazing question. I think a lot of it came from the discussions that we were doing with the VCs during the funding round, was it's the sales go to market space, so it's extremely busy. And there's so many different players in the space. They're all trying to solve it from different positions, both from a technical moat, but then also just a distribution. And so a lot of times, people would also just talk about

the major players in the space, like the gongs of the world that have been around for almost 10 years at this point. And so the thing that we kept coming back to is, I remember building models for...

intelligence engines before there was GPT-3 even on the scene, right? And this is back with healthcare when you had to customize the model specifically for a colonoscopy document as opposed to when actually GPT-3 comes on the scene and its ability to pull structured data out of unstructured documents is way better than what your ML team was able to do, right? So just the barrier of entry for intelligence for teams is just dropping to zero, right? And so when, you know,

these VCs would be asking us about, well, how do you see yourself playing against the current incumbents, right? The thing that we always would keep coming back to is, well, are we going to be able to build a solopreneur billion dollar company? If I could build a tool for a seller that would be able to actually use the agented workflows to be able to handle all of the craft of their day, what are the things that I would actually be building within the product that would allow them to do that?

So as the cost of intelligence is dropping to zero, then the value of data and distribution and pulling all of those pieces in, then skyrockets. And so for us, the real question became, great, one day we'll go after enterprise. One day we'll go after building specifically for the rev ops teams. But if I was to build a tool that would allow a single person to be able to scale a company to 10 million in revenue, what's the thing that I would want to build?

And where intelligence is right now, I think can even get us there where threat is currently. But when you talk about like skating to where the puck is going, Sort of the edges of the product where threat is at is pretty much commoditized at this point with intelligence. Like the prepping for a call and summarizing like this is the thing you need to care about and sort of off boarding you from the call and you know, this is what happened to the call. Here are some action items effectively are just commoditized at this point. You everyone and their mom is publishing a

slash me, you know, and it listens and it summarizes everything for you, right? You don't need to spend any money on a bot recorder at this point. No one cares about that. The piece that where we see the puck going is actually in the live call experience, These voice models are able to get faster, that you're able to respond with more relevant contextual content in the moment, and then use that as part of the presentation layer for a seller.

That's where we see the puck going. And I, intelligence I think is getting there, it's almost there, but it's definitely where we're gonna build to. know, Sam Altman has this incredible quote which is around that if you build where intelligence is going, you're gonna be on the right side of history almost, right? Which is you're gonna build your infrastructure, build your product to where intelligence is going to be six to eight months from now, and you're gonna be proven right, or something along those lines. I don't know, Justin, did I, that was a long and winding road, baby.

Justin (13:59)
It

Samuel Kenney (14:00)
You had a lot of points.

Justin (14:00)
was good. I think you landed the plane. Yeah, you should.

Samuel Kenney (14:04)
I should more of these.

Jeremy Vandehey (14:07)
we're gonna have

to cut this in post, but I thought about making a joke of once you said AI colonoscopies, that's how you guys met, right? It was like, I've never actually seen a scan like this. I need to know who this person is.

Samuel Kenney (14:14)
Hi!

Whoever

this is needs help now.

Jeremy Vandehey (14:22)
Like more than

what my skills can provide. Sorry. Where do you want to go from there, Justin?

Justin (14:28)
On that

note, we did it.

Samuel Kenney (14:29)
I know, didn't you land the plane there? Did we land the plane there?

I felt like had a ton of different things. You guys felt that?

Jeremy Vandehey (14:35)
Yeah.

Justin (14:35)
Totally.

I did. I did.

Jeremy Vandehey (14:37)
I did. Do

you want to talk about what thread is or do you want to not sell it too much in the podcast, Justin?

Justin (14:43)
No, think

it's, I, I think Sam alluded to a lot of what it, what thread is, is capable of doing. I, mean, maybe we go a little bit further there, Jerry's the product guy. Like if you want to just up level a little bit to talk about what, like what we've learned about the seller experience and how we've sort of thought about building products to support each of those stages of pre, during and post.

Jeremy Vandehey (14:52)
Yeah.

Justin (15:12)
⁓ And then maybe, you know, what are you most excited about given some of the early user feedback that we've gotten and sort of what you're seeing with where this goes from here?

Jeremy Vandehey (15:23)
Yeah, I think and you guys feel free to chime in because like the benefit of working on a sales product is like every sales conversation is user feedback. So I feel like there's just so much shared learning and discovery happening. But at its core, like Thread is a desktop co-pilot that you download. It auto joins all your meetings. actually, even before I get into that, we think about it in two streams. There's kind of like the seller stream and the sales leadership stream.

and they stack on top of each other. like the sales leadership stream is only as valuable as how much utility we build for sellers. And we have a lot of empathy for what a seller experiences during the day. Like ideally, they're spending eight hours or however long a day is 10 hours jam packed with customer prospect calls. But the reality is there's just, as Sam said, so much cruft in the middle of all of those meetings, whether it's meeting prep and like customizing slides or

trying to think back, like, what did I say I was going to do with this prospect? And with Thread, all that goes away. It joins every conversation. It knows the history of previous conversations. So those in-call meetings go better. do real-time suggestions, objection handling, content recommendations, personalizing content, because we own the presentation layer and we're specializing there. But because we know how the meeting went, we know what you should do next. we've built out this agentic protocol to...

make, you know, sending followups, booking next meetings, syncing CRM notes, like all that just happens. And like you save a ton of time with Thread and you can spend more time, more deeper time with, with customers. So we're going to invest heavily there over the next couple of years. I think that's just an evergreen field. Like we're just going to keep making sales sellers lives better. And that affords us the opportunity to give some visibility up to sales leadership on.

What are people doing that's working? How can I scale that to more of my early sellers or people who are still ramping and give them better visibility on what's the quarter going to look like based on voice of customer? So I think there's a lot of really valuable ramps we can explore entering or exiting. But at its core, we're just building utility tools for sellers. And we think that opens up a lot of value down there.

down the pipe.

Justin (17:42)
Yeah, it's really good, man. think something that I have, I feel like I've come closer to the product side with a very obviously like sales bias. But I think what's so interesting about the approach that we've taken is

And an general observation is like sellers are stitching together a lot of these things independently on their own. And it's always a good signal when you can kind of see like, okay, these are how these different workflows connect to really build for how someone does their job and work. And I think we did a lot of that with Disco where the big insight was meet people where they are to make giving feedback easier. Here, it's like, how do you meet sellers in the spaces where their customers are and then deliver value by not only

making them more efficient. But I think the other side of this that I actually get a lot of excitement around is how do you make this really personalized and a better experience for the buyer as well? Because I feel like

The other side of that coin is buyers have so many different channels and means to be able to engage with your company. And there's just so much information readily available to be able to try to do business with multiple people. So it's like, I feel like the bar is being raised as far as who buyers choose to do business with and those that can communicate value and deliver something that feels personalized so that they feel understood and heard is like a big thing. And to your earlier point, it's hard to listen when you've got all this other shit going on in the background.

and you're thinking about CRM documentation and hygiene and, you know, showing up to enablement sessions. It's like, how do we allow sellers to be more efficient? And Sam, this is another thing too that you've brought up is to ping pong back is sort of like the role that we look at a product like cursor, right? Or tools that have been available to help technologists that have made them efficient in their jobs. Just, I'd love to hear your take on sort of like.

Samuel Kenney (19:37)
yeah,

I was ready for this. Because as soon as you were talking about stitching it together, I was like, and you're so good at this, Justin, just the way you pass around. no, as soon as we start talking about the workflows of sellers getting stitched together, I think the one key insight and unlock for us was that we were watching a lot of our early beta customers and their workflow with HubSpot, with Salesforce, they're prepped for the call, creating emails and the like, and then doing

Justin (19:45)
smash that smash it.

Samuel Kenney (20:05)
questions within the context of a call of like, wait, what did we talk about? What was the last thing that I talked about with this person and how do I answer this question? Let me quickly do a knowledge-based search to just get the answers question within two and a half seconds or less. What we found was that they were all using ChatGPT and other tools to just ask those questions and upload their knowledge base specifically to it and then ask questions against it.

And as I was watching these sellers do it and go through their stitching together workflows, I was like, you know what? This looks identical to what engineers were doing 18 months ago. I mean, almost identical workflow of, well, I don't know. The answer is something rather than going to Google and searching on Stack Overflow. Let me go and ask ChatGPT and let me upload some of my own internal docs or code and figure it out. And that was like 2022 when GPT first is coming on the scene. And the ways that engineers were using the new tooling

is identical to the way that sellers are using tooling right now to make themselves faster and more efficient. So your best sellers right now are all using those tools to make themselves better. And so as we sort of mold on it and stewed on it little bit, we're like, well, what if sellers are actually just 18 to 24 months behind where engineers are in terms of using and adopting this tooling? So you've got your get a co-pilot, your cursor is your winter, so the world, even Claude Code, where you're actually just providing guidelines more to our persona to get work done as opposed to our rigid workflow.

to do something for you. And so we said, well, what if we were actually able to have more of that agentic experience for a seller where we're not trying to replace the seller with some agent that just does your job for you, but actually provide augmentation so that you're 10x, 20x faster using these tools as opposed to...

just getting completely replaced, right? And the same with an engineer, it's like, sure, there's an argument to be made that we're all gonna get replaced and at some point have a bunch of agents run in the background. But for now, at least, you can hire a lot less people, you can run a linear team because you actually have these tools that are augmenting people, not replacing them. There's gonna be a major shift and pendulum swing back to this idea of an AI agent augmenting human behavior as opposed to replacing a human at this point, right?

know, Chamath had this incredible comment about how, you 2025 was supposed to be the year of agents, right? And it's actually been the year of letdowns, right? Because people actually aren't seeing the return on what ages were supposed to be, right? It was because it was promising way too much for the ability to totally replace human behavior. just, there in some cases and some that crushes and in other places we're not.

And so I think that as we started to build, saw within engineering, you see product managers and engineers just coalescing into this idea of a builder. You have a little bit of coding knowledge you're able to go build, and you've got these great tools that Replit it, where lot of PMs are able to build incredible applications. And the same is true on the seller side and the rev-up side, which is we're seeing this coalescing of actually, there isn't distinct.

breakdown or compartmentalization of roles, it's actually just becoming a seller as opposed to individual roles that are supporting different functions because you can be augmented and be that much more efficient.

Justin (23:20)
Yeah, dude, that's so good. think there's, I mean, a lot in there around not only stitching together, like you said, these workflows, but I think for, I mean, just some of the parallels, like you mentioned to the builder, the consolidation of roles around the role of the builder and then that of the seller where.

we're starting to see, I mean, revops is one of those enabling functions. Enablement is a true function that is truly, potentially could be consolidated down or could be seen as a way to augment those two, that single seller. So some really amazing insight there, bud.

Samuel Kenney (24:00)
Thank you. Thank you. I can do this all day, baby. I uploaded. More locks uploaded.

Justin (24:06)
I've spent the last three years.

building a podcast that talks about founder challenges. And I've always, it's always been, like, it's been a really, I feel like a really valuable question I ask every single group of founders is like, what's one mistake that you've made or what's one thing that you've learned that you would share with a first time founder? I'd love to hear that specifically for Thread.

you know, what do you guys, I'd to hear from each of you, you know, has been the hardest, like what have been some of the hardest earlier moments building throughout it, and then what's been the most rewarding from both of you guys?

Jeremy, you first.

Samuel Kenney (24:40)
you first hear me.

Jeremy Vandehey (24:41)
putting me on the spot. That's okay. I'll riff. I mean, I think the honest answer. Do you want the honest answer?

Justin (24:51)
No, dude. Yes.

Jeremy Vandehey (24:52)
No,

the sales answer. I'll give you the answer that sells baby. I think I don't know this is just being a second time founder. I felt like with disco and this kills me to say this because we had an investor who would say this every board meeting was like, you a feature or product? And when you're in it, of course you're a product you you're building a product but you got to look at it from

kind of the landscape of how you go to market and how your buyer perceives you in the landscape of everything that you connect with in that space. And I just don't think we were thinking big enough. And I spent a lot of time reflecting on that. I still think about it with thread. And I hope that we're not like swinging too far the other way where it's like we're, it's.

amazing how much we've been able to build and how many problems we've been able to solve and like how they all fit together. But I don't even know if I'm answering your question now.

Justin (25:50)
This is challenges and concerns, but it's also you're signaling. There's some optimism in there. So that's good.

Jeremy Vandehey (25:51)
I'm not.

Okay, no, I think it's just not wanting to go too broad where you're in a changing landscape. Basically, how do you innovate and how do you resonate with what your buyer wants and understands, I think is always an interesting founder challenge of you want to be before the chasm, but you can't have the chasm be so great if you're familiar with the innovator's dilemma.

that you'll never reach mainstream, basically. And I think one thing that we're seeing is like the rate of adoption of new technology is only picking up. So you need to be able to cross that chasm very quickly. So I don't think we nailed it at Disco and I do think we're nailing it. We will nail it at Thread.

Justin (26:42)
Do you, that's interesting, cause I don't know, the old PM methodology of going broad to go narrow, feel like now speed and feature density are just so commonly talked about where.

It's, yeah, I mean, I want to hear Sam's perspective on this too, I, Jeremy, I really, I do really appreciate the, uh, your candor and just honesty about that. And I, I feel a lot of what you are expressing. Uh, Sam, love to hear your take as well.

Samuel Kenney (27:15)
I think that the worst part about building right now is, well, maybe it's two things, right? The first off, no one actually knows what's going to happen in the next 12 months, and there's so much noise and chaos. And Venture doesn't know. think product people are making bets somewhere they think it's going to go. I think that we've spent enough time with actual people where the puck is going is just based in real life exp-

and having sellers use it and tell us where it's going. But I think that a lot of people just have no idea where the technology is gonna go and how good it's gonna get. But the other thing is people's technical moat is getting evaporated overnight. people post all these memes about like, open AI killed my startup and all this stuff. I think that's more for effect than totally in truth. But there is a certain sense here too of that because the barrier to build product is dropping so quickly.

so rapidly that you can pack as many features into your product as quick as possible, right? Like, a lot of people's...

Products are just getting copied and just getting carbon copied and just created in another context. And so I mentioned the bot recorder being one of those things that's been commoditized at this point. And a lot of these companies don't have a technical moat anymore with which to provide some barrier of, yeah, we're going to buy them because they've cracked something that no one else has cracked yet. And so you're seeing so many different companies that are just trying to package as much as possible and then distribute that.

And then your packaging and distribution become your main problem. It's almost not even that the technical pieces have become your main problem. Now, I think thread is differentiated in that, which is we do all the commoditized things because it's commoditized and we want to delight our users. But I think that that's where the puck is going is actually with the packaging and distribution of.

like the actual live call and being able to take that to the next technical level as opposed to just packaging the things that have already been commoditized at this point. And so I think that's actually been the worst part of it is, you know, building something that you think is totally kick ass and that no one else has thought of yet. And then someone says, yeah, no, we bolted that on because it took two engineers six hours to build, right? I think that there is gonna become a reckoning probably, I would say six to eight months now.

where all the things that people quickly bolted on because they built it at a hackathon actually won't scale. And I think that that's actually going to be ⁓ a real reckoning at some point. I do think that there is still a of a chasm between the building it in a hackathon over a weekend and then actually being productized at scale. That is still a huge gap that I think people are realizing at this point that not all the tools are able to do. But yeah, I think that that's been the hardest part is there's so much noise.

I don't think the three of us have seen this much noise and honestly just blood in the water when it comes to these companies having their moat just totally evaporated because one of the foundational frontier model companies came out with a thing that they do, that they do really well. that's been really.

Jeremy Vandehey (30:18)
So don't want

to, I don't want to plug through too hard either, but I think that resonates with the seller's pain too of like, it's so easy now to ship features. And even for early founders, like how do I talk about this thing that's constantly changing? And if you multiply that across, however large your sales team is, how easy it is not just to ship features, but content and collateral. like, it's ever changing. So you're just trying to like find an island that you can sell, you know? So.

Samuel Kenney (30:45)
think

about how much garbage is going to get generated in the next five years. There's a lot of garbage and crap. And I'm not talking code, right? Like, I've written plenty of garbage code without the help of AI doing it. I'm only reading garbage code, honestly. But you think about that with the collateral and the slide decks, right? Like, there's just the barrier to be able to create a pretty good slide deck that would be better than something I could do on my own is dropping rapidly.

Jeremy Vandehey (30:49)
Yeah.

I've only written garbage code.

Samuel Kenney (31:14)
And you've got great products like Gamma that are doing incredible jobs at creating presentations. But the flip side of that is that you make the wrong thing the easy thing, which is you can create a lot of different things that just get totally lost when it goes out into the ether. And you don't actually have any control over what's getting created and what's getting shown. And so I think it's a double-edged sword for sure.

Justin (31:36)
All right. Thread heads, feature thread heads. I've enjoyed having my co-founders on the show. I wanted to, guess, just in rounding this out, we're, like I said, we're, very excited about what we've built, ⁓ what we're taking to market. Excited to announce that thread is generally available for usage and download.

as of this morning, you to thread.app to download the application to get access and use it early. Subscribers are going to get a, a special treat, a little discount

But if you're a sales leader or founder trying to scale founder-led sales, you're early on in rev-apps, the company that is trying to scale and take an AI native company to the next level to make yourself more efficient. Again, we want to talk to you. So reach out, Justin, at thread.app.

any point

Samuel Kenney (32:28)
I kind of want to riff on the announcement. Can I just do a little... my goodness. All right, here we go. I think I got this locked and loaded. This is good. Feel it. Okay. The best part about Thread right now, hands down, is that because we built it for sellers, right? The entire time, all we were thinking about is like, how is this going to make a seller's life better? And honestly, for the first few months, it was just, how do we make Justin totally kick ass in what he does?

Justin (32:31)
Yeah, do a riff.

Do it.

Samuel Kenney (32:56)
All we were doing in the very beginning was just building things that Justin was needing as he was selling. And we're like, this guy needs this thing. Let's just go build this thing. And then we realized that actually that same problem that Justin has as a seller, other sellers have the problem with as well. And so I think that's the best part is that you can just go to the website and download it. It's not like you need to sign up or you need to go talk to sales or contact sales. And you fill out a little form that goes into our queue of

Are they qualified or not? You can just use the thing. You connect your calendar, the bot starts to join, you upload a playlist, and then you can start presenting. Honestly, we built this for sellers. All I care about is getting feedback from sellers of, we making your life better? Do you feel augmented? Do you feel like you're able to get more out of your day? Are you able to just load your day with meetings as opposed to leaving little windows at the beginning or end so that you can then do all of the manual work that is required of you?

to make sure that your pipeline stays updated. So also at the same time, we feel like this is going to be kick-ass for sellers, but we also want people to use it and tell us what's missing. What is a part of your day that you feel like being automated by a sales agent for you would actually make your life better? It's our love letter to sellers. Don't add that. Don't add that. Don't add that.

Justin (34:12)
It is

Dude, that was beautifully put. Well, I'm just gonna close this out here.

I just, I want to say how, uh, just first proud I am of like, not just of what we've built, but just our collective team. And it is truly an honor to be able to work with now three fellas who are just incredibly talented and just genuinely freaking awesome people. So it is all about how you do this, uh, who you do this with. So.

It's how you do it, but it's also who you do it with. Both of those things are very critical. ⁓ But yeah, man, I'm excited to go on this journey with you guys. ⁓ I'm just incredibly grateful for you both. So we are going to definitely do more of this because I feel like we're going to have a lot to share as we go on this journey together.

Samuel Kenney (34:50)
It's a little bit of both.

Over here.

Justin (35:04)
So.

Samuel Kenney (35:05)
I'm super excited for people to roast me in the comments. Please, please, please listen to everything I said and I want you to, I need to know why I'm wrong. Like I don't know why I'm wrong. I need to know why I'm wrong. Justin is this will never end. He's like, that's.

Justin (35:09)
Please, please make it a point to people, so I can comment.

Yeah, that's

All right, I'm

going let you get back. be sure to visit thread.app, use the tool, download the app. It's amazing. And if you get a chance, we'd reviews on the Apple app store. Let's, and if you've got great ideas for guests also that you respect from a go-to-market and sales perspective, have them reach out because we'd love to feature them on the show. So again, appreciate you, man.

Samuel Kenney (35:48)
Appreciate you guys, you guys are the best.

Justin (35:51)
I do.

Justin (35:52)
All right, that's a wrap. We made it. Shout out to two of my closest friends and co-founders, Sam and Jeremy. I can't tell you how excited I am for the journey that's ahead of us and the opportunity that we have to truly help sellers and companies grow every single day. It's gonna be a lot of fun. To become a Threadhead and truly unlock the potential of your sales teams, visit thread.app to download the app, get started for free.

The first 15 teams that sign up are going to receive a lifetime discount after your trial period. So that's very exciting. So again, get in early and help us shape where we take this thing and get a really kick ass product. Uh, on our next episode, we're going to have the head of revenue operations at one of the fastest growing software companies in market today. You're not going to want to miss that. There's so many great tactical things that we talk about in this interview. Um, if there are other guests that you want to hear from, email me justin at thread.app.

We'll get them on the show. We'd love to have them on. ⁓ In the meantime, I truly appreciate everyone that took the time to listen to the interview ⁓ and just has been along on this journey with me for the last three years as I've worked with founders and met so many incredible people. It's truly an honor to be able to work very closely with not only close friends of mine, but have them on the show and just help them tell their stories. And now excited to give back in the form of building something that I think is truly going to help the market. So appreciate you all.

tuning in every week. And you know the drill. Keep hustling, keep grinding, and keep getting that money.