The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast interviews well-known tech executive, VC, and founders - the expert operators in the trenches who have ‘been there, done that’ to build some of the fastest-growing software companies. Every week, a guest joins Sophie Buonassisi to dissect their stories, revealing expert insights around what worked, what didn’t, and how things actually went down.
This podcast is produced by GTMnow, the media brand of GTMfund - sharing insight on go-to-market from working with hundreds of portfolio companies backed by over 350 of the best go-to-market executives. GTMfund is an early-stage VC fund focused on investing in the most exciting, up-and-coming B2B SaaS companies across the world. The LP network consists of VP and C-level Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success leaders from companies like DocuSign, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Snowflake, Okta, Zoom, and many more.
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The GTMnow Podcast
How AI Killed the Discovery Call | Sam Senior, Founder & CEO of TestBox
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
AI isn't just changing how we sell. It's changing how buyers make decisions before they ever talk to you.
Sam, Founder and CEO of TestBox, joins Sophie on GTMnow to break down exactly what's happening to the B2B software buying process right now, and what go-to-market leaders need to do about it immediately.
If you're a founder, CRO, or AE wondering why your pipeline feels different, this conversation will give you a clear framework for what's happening and what to do next.
What we cover:
- Why 70-80% of purchase decisions are already made before the first call (and it's accelerating)
- The shift from discovery calls to validation calls, and how to prepare
- CEO (AI-version of SEO): how LLMs are shaping what buyers believe about your product
- The "day one shortlist" shrinking from 3-4 vendors to 1-2 vendors
- Agent-to-agent procurement: Sam's timeline for when AI agents fully take over buying
- Why the mid-funnel is actually getting longer, not shorter
- The "Fake Nothing, Prove Everything" campaign that went viral post-Series A
- How TestBox runs 15 AI experiments per week across the entire company
- Using Google Vertex video analysis to read prospect body language on sales calls
- How to build an AI-first culture without burning out your team
- Books: The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, No Ego, Courageous Marketing, Good to Great
Timestamps:
0:00 - Cold open
1:09 - What TestBox does
2:43 - How buying has changed
5:48 - What founders/CROs should do now
7:05 - GEO: AI version of SEO
9:02 - Why mid-funnel is expanding
21:17 - Agent-to-agent procurement
26:02 - All procurement by agents in 3-5 years
29:09 - How vendors differentiate beyond product
33:30 - The croissant campaign breakdown
45:50 - 15 AI experiments per week
47:10 - Analyzing prospects via video AI
48:29 - Building AI culture in your team
52:39 - Book recommendations
Guest: Sam Senior, Founder and CEO TestBox
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuelsenior/
TestBox: https://www.testbox.com
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP Marketing at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
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The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.
The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.
The way that people buy software has changed dramatically very quickly.
SPEAKER_01Founder of a CEO of test box. But if you were a different founder, what are some of the kind of actions you would take to feel best prepared for right now?
SPEAKER_00I think the first thing I would do is go to one of these agents like call code or chat GPT or whatever you feel most comfortable with and ask it, what are my buyers researching at the moment? How am I turning off in those results? So the concept of test box is it's got a market infrastructure where you can prove the real value of your product. And so the concept was take nothing, prove everything. I don't have an iPhone, which I get a lot of crap calls. I don't know how many test box expectations that everyone is automating and it's in the job of everyone.
SPEAKER_01How far off do you think we are to get into that end? Sam, welcome to GTM Now.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Sophie. Excited to be here.
SPEAKER_01Super happy to have you here, Sam. And AI is changing so much about products fundamentally, but it's also really changing how we buy and how we sell software products. And you've got such a unique vantage point as the founder and CEO of test box. So would love to start with that and maybe just ground in what are you seeing in the space and to give us a little bit of context about what you're seeing, a little bit more on what you're building at test box and what you're seeing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, sure. So fundamentally we think of ourselves as go-to-market infrastructure. So for all the sellers, CROs out there, essentially helping them with their mid-funnel, making it as easy as possible for them to communicate the value of their product, build trust and confidence with their buyers, and then close them as quickly as they can without needing significant amounts of product engineering or frankly sales engineering support to be able to do that, even on those lower, smaller deals. And so what that means for us is I am talking to go to market leaders every single day about everything that's changing. So whether that might be that outbound has completely dried up and they're trying to figure out how to work with their inbound pipeline, how they move up to larger enterprise deals potentially, how they're thinking about their SE AE coverage ratios, like all these different types of topics. And fundamentally, one of the biggest issues they're having at the moment is communicating the value of all these new AI solutions that they're building in a way that actually builds trust and confidence. Because I think it's very hard to get people not excited, that's easy, but for them to believe that it's going to work inside their business in a way that's simple. And so I'm spending all day, every day talking about that with people.
SPEAKER_01And it has the conversation changed now and evolved? Because you're selling two sellers, which is a really kind of fun phenomenon.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think about 12 months ago, everyone was very wary of what is going on and they and they didn't really know what to do. Uh, no one was really using clawed code, no one was experimenting with lovable and replit. They were only just starting to come out. And so it still really was the domain of engineers. And now we're talking to these software companies and they're saying, like, well, this part of our stack we're building internally. We're actually trying to reduce our tool stack in these ways. We're trying to spend more time building these things ourselves. And we're seeing that from our prospects too, as in they're selling out to these companies and they're saying, like, this part of our product that's previously really valuable for them is no longer as useful and relevant. And so they're seeing their product needing to change really quickly, and also their entire sales methodology has to as well, because they need to be able to adapt on the fly to a build versus buy conversation that didn't exist previously for them. And additionally, they're looking at all across their channels of different ways to attract business. Email is really struggling at the moment, LinkedIn is becoming highly saturated, people are looking back at the phones again, they're thinking about actually is brand the thing that matters above all else. So we're kind of going through this recycle of all the things that we've done for the past few years and realizing some of that just doesn't work anymore. And so there's just so much change happening right now.
SPEAKER_01Tremendous, tremendous change. And so if you were a founder or a CRO, I mean you are a founder, but if you're a different founder, what are some of the kind of actions you would take to feel best prepared for right now? Yeah. Based on what you're seeing?
SPEAKER_00I think fundamentally the way that people buy software has changed dramatically very quickly. I think we all know the stats that people are spending, you know, 70 to 80% of their decision has already been made before they even speak to you. I think that's ramping up even further, where now they're constantly talking to Claude, trying to shortlist things. And there was this data that came out about 18 months, two years ago now, that basically said that 90 plus percent of purchase decisions end up with the companies that were on your day one list. So day one list is basically, and this actually was research done by my previous company, Bain. They basically came out and said, if you're not on the day one list, it's incredibly difficult for you to buy. Typically, that day one list is only three to four vendors. That has now started to shift. It's now one, two, at most three vendors that you're even having a conversation with now. Because rather than you trying to determine does this product work for me or not, is there value here? You're actually moving from the question of does it work to validating it on that first call very quickly because you've been able to do so much deep research previously. And so fundamentally, that first call has shifted from being a discovery call in many ways for both the customer and the seller to now really only being discovery for the seller for the buyer, it's almost like a midway through the sales cycle conversation now. And we have to be able to match them with that energy. Otherwise, they get frustrated and they get concerned and they feel like you're not speaking their language. That needs to change quite quickly. So to answer your question, which was if I was CRO or a founder doing this, I think the first thing I would do is go to one of these agents like Core Code or ChatGPT or whatever you feel most comfortable with and ask it, what are my buyers researching at the moment? How am I turning up in those results? And then reading it really carefully and saying, what are the things that I want to confirm are true about what they're reading from these LLMs? And what do I want to dispel is actually incorrect? And how do I do that extremely early in the conversation with them? Because otherwise, they're going to continue believing what they heard and they saw from the LLMs. And so the first thing is go have that conversation and identify the gap between what people are seeing and what you are saying. Yeah. Secondly, then run the sales cycle yourself as if you're essentially secret shopping, your account executives. Because if you've done all that research, you're going to come in and you're going to have a very different perspective. How are they talking about the product? How are they talking about the rest of the sales cycle? I think like you need to be in a place where you're preempting the buyer's questions more so than ever before because you can. We know what they're asking these LLMs. So we should be able to answer those questions before they even ask them to us in conversation. So go validate that your buying process is actually the way you want it to be. And if it's not, go make change really, really fast.
SPEAKER_01Fantastic advice. And probably the same thing goes for dispelling objections that people haven't even raised, I can imagine, coming from LLMs too, because these pre-conceived notions people now have entering the process. And like you said, it's just it's further down the funnel now.
SPEAKER_00Totally. And people are thinking about this term AEO, which is basically the AI version of SEO, right? I can get an LLM to say almost anything that I want if I run a good AEO program internally at Testbox. Currently haven't been doing that in the sense of like creating rumors or about competitors or anything like that.
SPEAKER_01That was my next question. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_00There's some moral questions there. I'm not doing any of it, but you absolutely can. So you could go and poison the data that the AI is uh using. And so your competitors might be saying something that's misaligned with what you truly are and how you turn up. And the buyer might be seeing that and believing it. And so you really need to do diligence on what these LLMs are saying because it's very easy to get them to say anything you want to if you put enough content out into the world. It's a little nefarious if you want it to be.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it absolutely could be. And now there's this middle layer in terms of people are just trusting LLMs as that middle layer versus going to the kind of end result or the intermediary for communication. But it feels like the opposite is happening. People are more trusting, even though there's a layer versus beforehand. Are you finding that? Are you seeing that?
SPEAKER_00I think that's true. And I think that's why the the first conversation people are having is a validation conversation of what the LLM said rather than a discovery conversation.
SPEAKER_01So maybe that's the progression or shift, discovery to validation conversation as that first call.
SPEAKER_00You need to be prepared for that because that's the way your buyers are coming into the conversation.
SPEAKER_01And are you seeing the buying cycle changing considerably, other than it moving up, but like how many calls it's taking, the actual sales cycle duration because people are doing so much research ahead of time. It's almost like the sales cycle starts before people are even aware. So maybe for tracking purposes, we're missing a little bit.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think it's shortening up front, but it might actually be expanding in the middle. And why do I say that? Because it's very easy to get your hands on a lot of these AI tools quite quickly and start working with them. But often for them, it takes maybe a month, two months of training and working with them to get them to output the results you actually want them to. Um, and so as a result of that, your buyers are expecting to be able to test these things earlier themselves to so that they can build their own trust and confidence in it, particularly when they're now using ChatGPT or Anthropic or whatever, and they're getting, let's say you're an outbound tool, you write outbound email messaging. You can use those tools and get really good results, or you can use Chat GPT or Anthropic and get something that's probably 70, 80% as good. And as the buyer, you think, oh, well, that was super easy. Like your thing must be exponentially better. When actually the difficult part is going from 70 to 80%, getting all the way up to 100. Like that's the value of the vendor doing it on top. But as the buyer, your expectations are so high coming straight into that conversation because you've had this experience by yourself that you thought was super fast and easy that took you 30 seconds. Right. And so as a result of that, the trust and confidence gap that you are meaningfully more valuable than just what you can get out of an LLM is really high. You got to cross that bar somehow. And so I think that mid-funnel is actually increasing because people need to prove out that it really bridges the gap of the 70% solution to the 100% solution.
SPEAKER_01What's been one adjustment that you've made to your sales process given all these changes that has been super fruitful and helpful? A quick pause. If you run GoToMarket, you will recognize us all too well. Sales relying on manual works, ditching together Frankenstein stacks, and jumping between a dozen tabs just to lock a single call. But Revo is breaking that model. It's a vertically integrated AI-native revenue operating system that replaces the fragmented maze into one workspace. It captures 100% of your first party data from emails to meeting recordings to help reps find high-intent buyers and automate admin work and generate outreach that actually sounds human in this AI world. No more wasting time on data entry or disconnected tools, just one unified engine for the entire revenue cycle. So go stackless at revo.ai. That's R-E-E-V O.ai. It'll be in the show notes. Back to the episode. We if you want to disclose your setup.
SPEAKER_00So a few changes we made. First thing was as much of our sales cycle that we talked about and showed, we decided let's try and get that in the customers' hands and actually made some of our products that was previously a sales-led motion, now a product-led motion that people could try out for themselves. We actually, so a couple of weeks ago, we launched this new product, our synthetic data generator basically helps build out these stories that speak specifically to your prospects for both your demos, POCs, and other places within your business. And we previously did that through our sales cycle for our customers to help them understand it, but it was still a bit too ambiguous and nebulous for them to really understand like how they would use it day to day. So I thought, you know what, let's go put this as a PLG type experience. Initially, my hypothesis was, oh, we're gonna see a bunch of demand for this. We know there's demand for this data generator. What ended up actually happening, there was less demand for the PLG experience, but there was way more demand for the sales-led experience now because people got a taste of it through our PLG model. Like they're not signing up for it and then using it extensively. They're signing up for it, testing it and going, oh, this is really good. I now want to book a demo with you and talk about what the whole platform experience could be. And so the the reason I bring that up is that's been a big change for us. Something that I thought was actually gonna drive a bunch of demand in a PLG ongoing experience has actually ended up being essentially a lead magnet.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And so I'm thinking about how else I can enable my product to be a lead magnet and an on-ramp into our platform. And so we have a couple of other things that we're gonna be launching over the next couple of months as PLG type experiences because we know there'll be an on-ramp into our platform. Super interesting.
SPEAKER_01And I mean, one that you work extensively into, just around showing the product and being able to surface that kind of go-to-market infrastructure around products too.
SPEAKER_00I think what we're gonna see is they're gonna be a lot of unbundling of these platforms.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And those really critical features and capabilities that people love, if you can get them in the customer's hands early, that will lead to more pipeline for you that'll turn into much bigger enterprise deals or whatever later on. So you just need to give them that value as quickly as you can before they even talk to you. As we said, 80% of the research is done before they even speak to you. And then the LMs are now going to know that you have this PLG type experience. And they could be like, oh, I recommend that you try this out. So it's another way for you to get on the day one list.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Brilliant, brilliant. And I mean, you work across so many different companies and customers too at test box. Are there any kind of macro shifts that you're seeing across that are different than the ones you've rolled out?
SPEAKER_00One thing that we're hearing, we haven't seen a lot of people do it yet, but we're hearing interest is how do we have AI-enabled solutions engineers or account executives that are essentially available 24-7. So I human or agentic? Agentic.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00So I want to buy X piece of software, maybe it's HubSpot, maybe it's Gong, Salesforce, whatever it is. And it's, you know, 3 a.m. on the East Coast where I am in the world. And it's just not an hour when I can talk to anyone easily. And today you might be lucky if you get a video, you might be lucky if you get like an interactive product tour that you can kind of click through. But it's not the same as being out to have a conversation with someone and one where you can dive really quite deeply into it, both at a sales rep level, but then also at a technical solutions engineer type level. And a few of our customers are talking about how do we just scale our teams for those times where either it's an SMB type offering, the volume and the velocity of that doesn't match our account reps quota and things like that, or where you are just trying to scale so massively and you're not trying to add headcount to the team that people are looking at those AI-enabled uh product experiences much earlier in their cycle. Part of the reason why is I know I'm just keep throwing all these data points at you. No, it's great. But about, and again, I'm gonna lean on my previous employer, Bane. Uh, about three or four months ago, they released a piece of research showing that for the first time, pretty much ever, there has been a slowdown in account executive hiring. Significant slowdown where it actually has gone negative for some segments.
SPEAKER_01That's so interesting.
SPEAKER_00So people are actually saying we need to grow faster than ever, and the expectations are to grow faster than ever. You know, we have these companies going to 100 million ARR in two years, right? Sierra's done that recently. Yeah. And so they're obviously scaling their account executive team, but I bet if you went to them and asked them what their quotas are, it's substantially higher than anywhere else. And so across pretty much all of enterprise software, when Bain did this work, they found that already in the last 12, 24 months or so, quotas are up 1.2 to 1.7x of what they were. And so you're expecting all of this fast revenue growth and all of these major outcomes, but with far fewer people doing it. And so I think that's a major change that we're seeing, hence why people are talking about these 24-7 on capabilities.
SPEAKER_01Mm-hmm. That's so interesting because I feel like there's still AE roles that I'm seeing a ton of hiring around, but it's such a small percentage compared to what it used to be. It's just more in comparison to others. I'm seeing a big slowdown across marketing, customer success, a big kind of push around solutions engineering, other kind of areas.
SPEAKER_00But I think that AE role is fundamentally really different in the last six months than it was 12 months ago. Any AE that I am hiring, I now expect them to be avid users of Claude Code. I expect them to be using Cursor. I expect them to be building all of their prep materials for any conversation that they have automatically using these tools. I expect them to have a bunch of the SE toolkit now in theirs as well because, you know, they no longer need to struggle to build this POC that they're sharing with someone. They can now either they're working with us as a customer or they're like working with their own product directly with some of these tools. And so what we're seeing is the AE role is expanding into other functions and they're expected to be like go-to-market engineers now. And that's I think the go-to market engineer role is going to go away, which is maybe a hot take. It's like a pretty hot take. Yeah. So it's like it's on the rise massively right now. And I think it's still gonna rise really hot for 12, maybe 24 months. And I think we're gonna see an extremely fast fall-off on the other side because the reason we created this go-to-market engineer role was because the people in RevOps weren't able to do it and the people as an account executive or SE weren't able to do it. But the toolkit for either of those functions is being brought to them extremely fast. And I think they're just gonna converge again. And all the people who are go-to-market engineers right now are gonna have to evolve again into probably being sellers, but they're gonna have the AI toolkit behind them. The go-to market engineer fundamentally is the group of people who have taken on board all these agentic workflows faster than anyone else in a sales slash revenue um perspective.
SPEAKER_01Do you think though that just with the speed at which we're moving with AI, there will be continuous progressions that are impossible for AEs to still keep up with and thus far, and therefore we'll have this role that's just designed to continuously push kind of the boundaries?
SPEAKER_00I don't think it's a boundary on your skill set soon, in terms of like your technical skill set. It really is a boundary on your own personal creativity and your ability to problem solve. Everyone can have open claw and it can do almost all the things that your go to market engineer is going to be doing today if you know how to talk to it, you know how to ask questions, you know how to push it. That is the fundamental skill that every single person should be investing in, bar none. If I am, you know, sometimes people's parents will ask me, oh, I have, you know, a 17-year-old uh that I'm thinking about college, what should they be studying, et cetera, et cetera. And and fundamentally, I'm typically telling them get some exposure to these things, but ultimately the thing you're trying to learn is how to push your thinking, how to be resilient, how to be creative in the way you solve a problem and bring all of that into all of your interactions with AI.
SPEAKER_01And that brings me to a really important part that is something that a lot of operators are really interested in, but also struggling with. Same with founders, and that's hiring. So you mentioned you now look for AEs and presumably other functions, but that are just are able to understand and grasp AI and move quickly and evolve quickly. How are you gauging those skill sets as you're hiring?
SPEAKER_00We have to give them a project and we have to tell them you can use as much AI as you need to. Here's token usage, et cetera. Ensure that their access to tooling is a limiting factor in their ability to showcase things to you. So that is absolutely critical. I can't have people just say they're working with Claude or they're working with ChatGPT. Like just being someone who's chatting with those systems means that you're already way behind. Which to a lot of people is like, oh, I'm not even doing that today. You need to be building agentic experiences yourself directly. I want to be able to ask you, what have you automated in your job in the last month? What about in the last six months? At Testbox, the expectation is that everyone is automating 10% of their job every month, if not more. So that in about 10 months, less than 12 months, your um entire job is fundamentally different and you're not doing the things you were doing before unless they're explicitly core to the role.
SPEAKER_01Has that been challenging from a management perspective? Because people are evolving and adapting their usage of AI at different paces?
SPEAKER_00I think about 60 to 70% of my org is in that model at the moment, and other people are still catching up. Um, and so that's a conversation we're we're just going through our performance reviews at the moment, and that is part of the rubric is what's your use of these agentic tools? Let's talk about some examples of that. What does your inference usage look like? What are things that you're doing that we perceive as manual that could be done in a more automated fashion? Like that is a core part of any performance rubric. And yeah, people are getting feedback on here's how we need to evolve. Otherwise, not just at test box isn't about working at test boxes, this is about having a career over the next 10, 20 years. It's it and I've been talking about this message for probably about six months now with my team of this is your career. Nothing to do with me, nothing to do with this business. It's agnostic of all of that. You need to do these things for your lifetime.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I know that I always feel that way whenever people are like, oh, well, when do I carve it out in my day? Like, you don't. You do it on your weekend, you do it in your spare time. Cause like it is your career, it's not your job, it's your career.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But so now we're talking about a lot of agent use cases. A big one that people talk about is the buying experience.
SPEAKER_02Yep.
SPEAKER_01Right now, we still have oftentimes, not always, humans actually going through the demo process. Yep. What does that look like if it evolves when agents are actually taking demos for humans?
SPEAKER_00It's 100% gonna happen. And it is a conversation we're having in our board meetings quite regularly as a board. The world is very clearly going towards more agent-to-agent interaction. There are moments of it currently, but it will happen. And software is a fantastic place to deploy an agent against if you're trying to evaluate something. Today, our buying experience is very human, it's very visual. There's a lot of relationship based components to it. It's highly emotional, right? Because you're thinking about keeping your job if you buy the wrong software or like the opportunity to be promoted, whatever it is, right? It's highly emotional. And so today, everything is about trust and confidence, both on the product, but also are you going to support us successfully? Are you not going Have security issues, like it's all these other things, right? All of that second bracket is going to be really important in the future, but the first piece of the relationship is going to be important, but is going to slowly subside, where agents will be able to evaluate things in a very cold-hearted rubric style way in the future. Let's set up an example. Today I'm a VP of sales. I've got 50 account executives. I am moving up to a new CRM, maybe new outbound platform. I talk to five or six vendors. I do five or six sets of first sales calls. I ask them to fill out some RFPs. I some of them take me out for dinner, others send me a gift. Like all of these sorts of things are happening. It's all very human-to-human. The first step that's going to happen, we're on level one of this process already, which is we reach out to ChatGPT and Claude and say, like, is this actually a good system for me? The second thing is I'm going to open up a trial environment potentially of that product and say, hey, Claude, go read all of the API documents associated with this. Here are some screenshots of the product, maybe using Claude Cowork. Tell me if it's going to meet this rubric that we have internally. That's going to be the second step. The third step is going to be when these products start to expose themselves more in an agentic type fashion, which is to say, I can now give my procurement agent, because there is going to be a procurement agent, a link to your software agent. So let's say it's HubSpot or Outreach or whatever it is. And they are going to go talk to each other. And that procurement agent is going to ask, don't just tell me about all the APIs that you have publicly available, but tell me about all the workflows that are in the product. Tell me about how this thing works. I'm going to test out the reliability on this. I want to see if I can do it what the load testing is. Like it's going to go bare bones like an engineer would when they're evaluating something. And it's going to automate all of that. And so that's going to respond back with okay, against our rubric, it's got an A plus here, got an F grade here. And you're actually going to get this very black or white answer to a lot of things quite quickly. And then you, as the human in this version, are going to discern, well, am I okay with those trade-offs? Am I not okay with those trade-offs? The next level is going to be all of those things, plus the ability to look at the rest of my software stack as it exists today. And can that new thing talk to everything in the way that I want it to? What if I'm transferring data from this CRM to this other platform? And are they all going to be able to talk to each other effectively or not? And so you can just see, and I can keep going. Like you just see how this continues to level up where it's no longer about how we are interacting with it. It's more about how the agents will be able to interact with it. It's more about the actual true capabilities and less about do I feel great when I'm talking to these people during the sales cycle.
SPEAKER_01Interesting. Interesting. How far off do you think we are to getting to that end state? A quick pause. If you run outbound sales, this is big news. Most reps are bouncing between five different tools just to send one email. But there's a better way. Nooks is the AI agent workspace built for intelligent outbound, where AI agents and your reps work together in one place. Nooks' AI sequencing handles the busy work of finding prospects, writing outreach, knowing who to contact and when, so your team can focus on actual conversations. If you're evaluating your outbound stack or renewing legacy tools, check out Nooks.ai forward slash GTM fund. That's n-o-k-s dot AI forward slash GTM F-U-N-D.
SPEAKER_00Level one, we're already at today. Level two, I think, which is the ability to take some screenshots, maybe point out the API docs or whatever. I'm doing that today. So I suspect, you know, we're 12, 18 months out from that being a common thing that people are doing.
SPEAKER_01You're doing that when you're evaluating.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, if I'm evaluating anything today, I will plug in Claude Cowork or, you know, our internal. This is a very test box specific thing called our product graph. I'll tell our product graph to go talk to this product and tell me about it. So we're we're gonna eventually turn this into a solution. But so that's like 12 to 18 months away, I think, until people are regularly doing this. The agent to agents all talking to each other. I think we're could be only 24 months from now, could be 36, somewhere in that period. And then within the next three to five years, all procurement will be done almost exclusively by agents, including the negotiation.
SPEAKER_01Do you think when you say including the negotiation, there will still be an edge to a human-to-human negotiation?
SPEAKER_00Look, there's always gonna be human here because I need to trust you regardless. Even if my agent says that you're great, like chat GPD or Claude, I can get them to say what I want them to say, right? That's probably going to continue for some time here. But I need to trust you that when something breaks at 3 a.m. in the morning, I'm gonna have someone that I can call that can go get their resolve for me immediately. That, like, you know, that that's a really important thing that I look across all of their security things and I feel confident about them and the team and the way that they're building. Like, I want to believe that I'm buying a product that's going to continue to evolve really fast for a long time. And so there's these other softer factors that are still going to be really important. But I think the the percentage is going to dramatically reduce over time that the human is doing. It sounds very like, oh my gosh, the whole world's gonna collapse, all these roles are disappearing. And I don't think that's the case. I think they're just gonna evolve dramatically. This is why I'm saying I think the go-to-market engineer stuff is gonna be reabsorbed back into account executives and maybe some of the RevOps team. I think the account executive in the SE role is going to merge and we'll have more technical people. Like all of these things will still be relevant, and you'll see some of the stuff I was talking about before very common in SMB, less common in enterprise for a while. So there's a lot to be figured out here. It's all really murky. I can't tell the future. I'm kind of guessing roughly the vector that it's going in. There's still going to be a lot of I need to trust you as a person behind it all still.
SPEAKER_01What does that AE role look like then? Say procurements predominantly handled by agents.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_01Where does the AE come into play?
SPEAKER_00I think they will to some degree. I don't know for sure here. So let me let me take a guess. I want to know that the company I'm speaking to is reputable. As a human race, we tend to find ourselves quite nationalistic. So I notice I get a different reaction to someone when they are based in the US than if they're based somewhere else in the world and I feel the same. And I know that might sound very odd, and maybe there's like some racism or xenophobia and all of that. It is just part of being human. You think like people who look, sound like me, are close to me physically, have similar morals or beliefs or whatever, I'm gonna just trust them much faster. Um, and so I think there's gonna be a component of that humanness to it all, regardless of what happens from an agent perspective. I don't know if that feels a bit either kind of crazy or woo-woo of me, but I just think that like as humans, we still crave that connection. And behind that connection is a desire to trust the other person. And if you can do that, I think that's gonna continue to improve. It'll be the critical layer combined with any of these agentic buying experiences.
SPEAKER_01That's super interesting. You know, one thing I've been thinking about a lot lately is from the investor perspective, it's always value add. Capital is commoditized for the best founders. So, what is the value add that you create? And I see that mirroring back in the buying experience. I don't know if you see this similarly, but now what back can vendors provide? Because as customer success increases, as all of you know the capabilities are kind of like getting that check mark, what is the differentiator for a vendor? A lot of the time it's a value add that they can add to a network-driven approach for their growth, distribution, other areas. And so kind of seeing that taken from the investor lens that we see and now extrapolated against SaaS companies. I don't know if you've seen something similar or different.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, two thoughts. One is it in the investor lens, one of the things I always hear from VCs is we want to make sure that you know we really want to work with you.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Right. I think that still matters in the buying software process as well. I remember 12, 18 months ago, there was a there's a customer that we've now had for multiple years, multiple expansions, who told us one of the core reasons they worked with us is we were just clearly hungrier to work with them, had more of a desire, were willing to put in that extra effort, which went from, you know, me getting up at 2 a.m. in the morning because I was in a different part of the world on a vacation on like a semi-vacation to be able to talk to them. Clearly showed we were hungry. Second was like I built all the decks for them internally for their executive selling and made sure it was crafted to their branding and like all of these sorts of things. So you need to continue showing that you really want to work with these people. I think that's part one. Second part is there are, as you were saying, all these other value add ways to support people. So we recently went with a new software and as we announced our most recent fundraise and some new product launches, actually reached out to some of our vendors and said, like, hey, we did this, and your support would be appreciated. And a couple of them actively went out of their way. They posted about not just a like on my thing, not just a comment, a repost, and shared it with their organization. And it wasn't just the founder, but it was multiple people on their team. And so immediately, regardless of my software experience with them over the next 12 months, I immediately have some more trust in them and more desire to work with them because they're thinking not just about me as a customer of their product, but me as a customer of our and relationship creator between the two of us or us, our organization and their organization. So if there's any way you can, as a software provider, be able to provide value that is outside of your software, you will build immense amounts of trust and confidence.
SPEAKER_01A hundred percent. And that's where I always think it's not about providing the best product, it's about making somebody successful in their career. Not even their job, their career. And if it it all comes down and boils down to trust, like you said. And that's why I think there's still gonna be a fundamental human aspect in some regard. Because how will somebody know that Sam's gonna stay wake up at 2 a.m. if there isn't?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And if they're relying on a rubric.
SPEAKER_00I think agents are gonna be acting almost like as a fact sheet. So I have a rubric and it's, you know, yes or no, very binary, or it's gonna be it can do it 50% of the time, 80% of the time, some score out of 10, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00That is going to absolutely be true. But if you almost look at a people are talking about how taste is gonna be one of the most important things in the future, and you think of like function over form, which is a design systems, or if you're a creative person, that's a common concept, right? And I think the agent is gonna look at things at the functionality of it all, and the human will still have the form or the taste aspect to it, which will be how do I feel when I use this? Is this providing value in the way that I want it to? And all of the other bits of like, hey, is there someone I can pick up the phone with at 2 a.m. in the morning or like whatever it is as well.
SPEAKER_01Mm-hmm. Yeah, a very layered process by taking it off the functionality.
SPEAKER_00There's gonna be there's an emotional part to all of this. As much as we all would love this not to be emotional, it's unbelievably emotional to make a software purchase.
SPEAKER_01100%. Yeah, we can't get away from it as humans. Yep. And you recently announced your series A.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01Congratulations, along with three product launches.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we we've been extremely busy.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, you can say that again. Yeah. Just pushing out a ton of incredible product launches. And then alongside this announcement, one of the pieces of content that you actually pushed out was super creative. And it was this campaign around showing that go-to-market leaders don't want fake aspects of things. So sending, for example, off a croissant to a CRO and then him opening it and seeing his reaction. And then they would call and you would actually show up with real croissants. But I want to dive into this, Sam, because I heard about this campaign a couple days before it went live, before you started it. And so, really, you created and ran this entire campaign within a few days. You jumped on a plane, you hand-delivered croissants and other items to people. How did you pull off this campaign?
SPEAKER_00I absolutely should not take credit for this. I uh I think I am the person who was in front of the camera, but I had two people who did a ton of work behind the scenes. So, one of them our head of customer, Kat. She has been a fantastic addition to our team. And then the second person is actually my wife, Amy, uh, has helped massively, not just on this, but on so many things. So I'll recap what the campaign was really quickly and then explain how we got there. So the concept of test box is this go-to-market infrastructure where you can prove the real value of your product. And so the concept was fake nothing, prove everything. And so we're trying to play on this idea of how maybe when you're buying a piece of software, you feel like you get a lot of smoke and mirrors, and it's not exactly the way you expect it to be. And test box can solve that problem. It's the real thing. You're gonna build trust and confidence with your buyer, right? That's what we're we were trying to aim at. It was uh hilariously 10 days before we were going live with our launch, and it was 7 p.m. on a Friday night in the office. My wife would come in to pick me up to do something. Kat was still in the office. I went and sat down on the couch and I basically was like, I feel like the video is helpful. It's great, it's gonna get attention, but how do we capture interest in a different way that will break through the noise? Right. Because all the marketing tactics today are very similar. They're not breaking through in a way that people go, oh, I remember that. And so we play with these ideas and we thought about oh, you can sleep easy when you use test box. One of my favorite gifts ever that I got off after a podcast was like this Nod Pod. It was amazing. I sleep really well with it. Like this eye mask thing is fantastic. Giving us ideas here. It's really good. You should totally get it. Um, we thought of that, uh, we thought of a whole bunch of things. Then we played with this idea of, well, if our campaign's around fakes, so what are what are fake things? Like fake Rolexes. Turns out fake Rolexes are extremely expensive. Yeah, yeah. You can't get a particularly when you're trying to do anything at scale. When I say extremely, like a fake Rolex is going for like 300 bucks still, right? And we're not gonna buy real ones to give to people as much as I would love to. And so we're playing with all these different ideas and we came up with this fake food thing because we were trying to do something that felt personal, that wasn't just a gift that was like, oh, something I might wear or something I might just throw out afterwards. But I wanted it to be very personal. So we thought, let's reach out to a bunch of revenue leaders, ask them what their favorite food in San Francisco is. Because I was thinking about this idea. I was on listening to a podcast that were talking about how in Japan there's a lot of fake food made out of wax and things like this. Very realistic. You look at in the windows of ramen shops, etc., you can see all this sort of stuff. Anyway, so we're like playing with this idea and we said, why don't we just buy a bunch of fake food and we'll personalize the real thing for them? And so I first started reaching out to people that I knew directly who I thought might think this was really fun. I reached out to you, I reached out to a few others just to get some names and say who'd be willing to do this. I sat on the idea because I wasn't entirely sure how we're gonna pull it off. I then spoke to Udi, go to market fund, Udi, Gong Udi, that lots of people would know. And he basically looked at me and went, You're insane. There's no way you can do this in the three days you have to pull this off. I think I had presented that I was doing a lot of the work. That was incorrect. Clearly, there are two other people who are massively doing a lot of the stuff here. But he did advise us to scale it down a little bit. And so basically we went and we surveyed these leaders, we made sure that we could get them a whole bunch of food, get them whatever they wanted. We had to express deliver a whole bunch of stuff for this, and then we spent time making these beautiful boxes that we could send them a fake ice cream, wooden block ice cream in the mail, which I sent to Nate Nizrella in Denver. And then I flew to Colorado. I was, I did happen to be going there anyway. Um, but I flew to Colorado. It was like an extra three or four hours out of my work.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's still it was still great.
SPEAKER_00I brought, I brought in my favorite ice cream in in Boulder called Sweet Cow, and his his daughter was so happy. His daughter was like, Oh my god, ice cream. And then she saw that we also brought her like fake ice cream for her like kitchen set that she has. She's like super young, she's a couple, maybe two years old. She was so happy. What we found is all these leaders were just so excited to be part of something that felt personal to them. So a few of them had us called croissants, we had sweet cow ice cream, we had Bob's donuts. If you're in San Francisco or been to San Francisco, these are like the things that people buy a lot and are very well known. And it's just a beautiful way to connect with these leaders where we sent them this kind of dodgy, weird thing. Like we didn't tell them what was going on. We said, you're gonna get a weird package in the morning, open it up.
SPEAKER_01And for everybody's context, it was a fake version of whatever they requested. So if it was croissants, it was like a plastic croissant.
SPEAKER_00And then Carl Norton thought that it was like a stress ball because it was like it was a rubber croissant, basically. And so we delivered those all in the morning with couriers, and then I spent the day uh with Amy, my wife, going around the city, delivering these packages to people with like handwritten notes of like, hey, you deserve the real thing and things like that, kind of mimicking the sales cycle. And then basically that night we had all this content. Amy and I looked at each other and we were like, oh, we were not prepared for all this content. We have so much to do it, like to edit this and cut it together, particularly when we're launching the next day. And then she was an absolute trooper and made something amazing out of nothing. Like felt like nothing to me when I was looking at, I was like, there's no way we're gonna be able to pull this off. Uti was right. And she proved Uti wrong, which was really cool. They keep you proud of her.
SPEAKER_01Amy. Shout out to Amy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, massive shout out to Amy. And yeah, I think it was a great campaign. People are still I'm still getting comments about it to this day. Um, and it was just a lot of fun. It was just fun. And I think that's the thing that is gonna be so important over the next few years is just how do you have fun with your business in a way that other people want to have fun with it as well. I think we've tried to make all of this stuff way too serious.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And we have all these white papers and we have these webinars and we have all these sign-up forms, and I'm just like, gang, we're all scrolling TikTok, we're all on Reddit, we're all on Instagram, we're all watching these like silly things on YouTube. We're all humans doing our lives normally. We want fun there. Why the hell don't we get fun at work as well? So let's really lean into the fun. And so, you know, we've got a few more videos coming out by the time this podcast comes out. We might have launched one or two of them that are just weird and fun, but they're adjacent to what we're talking about. I think people will be like, oh, I get that. That feels right to me. So yeah, I just deeply encourage any founder or any executive, just say, like, how do you have fun with anything you're doing at work and then translate that into every customer experience that you can have as well. This is a new thing for me. I'm testing it out, but because I'm enjoying it more, I'm more aligned with it. I think the prospect, the customer, the person in my community feels the same. And so we just need to keep doing more of that.
SPEAKER_01I mean, super, super great advice just to have fun. At the end of the day, we're all humans, and like you said, it's an emotional buying process. But I think a big lesson two out of your campaign that I think is interesting for everyone as they think about their campaigns too, is that it was so human-driven because now with AI, you can easily create launch videos online, but you can't replicate that experience at all.
SPEAKER_00You can't replicate going to any Moad's house when he's in the middle of a construction site and you can hear all the construction out there. He pops his head out of his top floor window, is like, I'll be there in two minutes, running down in his kids being like, or his kids saying, I thought these were real croissants, what the hell? And then delivering the real thing, giving a big high five. And like that was just such a cool interaction, or like obviously Nate with his daughter in the ice cream. It's beautiful. I will now remember all the interactions that I had that day, probably for the rest of my life in some form or another.
SPEAKER_01And likewise will they.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Which is so cool.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so cool. Oh, I think we'll see more creativity out of this too. 100% because people want to have fun or need to have fun, like you said. And then also AI is just making videos so much easier to produce. So more human interactions, more creativity. You sat, it was a Friday at 7 p.m. when you came up with this idea, and you were sitting on a couch, you know. This came from you and came from your team. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I really don't want to take credit for it.
SPEAKER_00It was really the three of us working on it. I'm very important, it's very important to me. Shout out to the team. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I I think because it it becomes so much easier, yeah. We will fall down to the lowest common denominator in terms of just trying to pump out mass amounts of stuff. And there's a time and place for that. There is time and place where it makes sense to do that, but you really need to lean in the human element.
SPEAKER_01Mm-hmm. Definitely. And AI is a big part of your organization. Like you talk about how are you personally learning about AI and staying up to date? It's a big question.
SPEAKER_00It's kind of crazy. It's so many different things. I'm gonna start with I hired a human to help me. Okay.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so a human to help you learn AI.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, in a roundabout way.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00I had been feeling for a few months that I had all these ideas and these concepts, things I wanted to try out that I wanted in our product and in our roadmap. But I knew that I was distracting the team when it was literally every day. That I was like, what about this thing and this thing and this thing and this thing and this thing? And it's incredibly hard for them to prioritize when I'm doing that, right? And it feels like a lot of pressure. And so I thought, I want to hire someone who is just going to do all of those ideas and test things and help me learn more around what is and what isn't possible. And so I was at a, I think it was an event with like OpenAI and Vercel and a few of these other companies. And we had stickers on, and I wrote on here, um, Sam, founder of Test Box, uh, I'm hiring. And then this young guy in his early 20s, just finished his master's degree, had a sticker that said, I need a job, basically. And he walked up to me and he said, I think I can solve your problem, and I think you can solve mine. And I was like, wait, what do you mean? And then he was like, Well, and he we pointed at each other, he pointed at my sticker and pointed back at his and learned that he's basically an AI engineer, he's super young, and it's really difficult to get an entry-level role right now in engineering. Everyone knows this is happening, it's happening across all these different functions. And so he was like, I've been doing all these hackathons. I'm like, this is what I live and breathe. I was like, Great. He's wearing like a cap that's got like the GitHub plus minus PR stuff on it. Like it's he's fully in the world here, right? It's awesome. So I brought him into the office. We did a two to three hour hackathon together on this thing I've been thinking of. I just drew it up on the whiteboard and I hired him at the end of the hackathon. Because basically, we went from I had this nebulous idea that I would love to have got someone to build and put on the roadmap. And it was just out of my reach at the time to be able to do it using claw code or anything like that. And there's always gonna be stuff that is just out of my reach.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And that engineers are just gonna know. But I'll know conceptually what I'm trying to do. So now he sits next to me, literally sits next to me in the office, and we just talk about this stuff all day, every day. And he's like showing me new stuff. He's like, here's what open claw can do for this thing, and like, here's this other like open source library that I'm trying for here, or like, hey, can you help me get the one million context token limit new Opus 4.6? A And like, and so we're just going back and forth all the time, and it's pretty remarkable. So hilariously, I hired a human to help teach me AI more effectively. I was already kind of on the edge, but he really helps me stay on the edge and allows us to keep experimenting. So that's a really big thing for me. Second thing, big shout out to my Google Newsfeed. I don't have an iPhone, which I get a lot of crap for. I'm the wrong colored bubble, apparently.
SPEAKER_01I don't know how we made it here. I did it.
SPEAKER_00Seriously. Um, but I'm happy with it because my Google News feed is just this it's X posts or Twitter posts, it's Reddit, it's open source libraries, it's like all of this sort of stuff. We have an AI productivity hacks channel in in our Slack at work, and people are just constantly throwing things in there. It's probably our busiest channel in the company. And it might be here's a video of something that I just did, or here's my Claude skill that I just built for this, or here's my prompt to do X, or like here's this open source library that we should be using. And so that's how I'm staying up to date is I'm a network of people in my domain and my and my work are helping me massively. And then I just read voraciously all of this stuff.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absorption at scale. That's fantastic. And then I want to dive a little bit more into you hired a human to help you learn AI.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Experimentation was a word you mentioned there. And I think that's one that probably doesn't actually get enough focus for companies right now as they're implementing AI because experimentation is such a big thing of like how do you build that velocity, that speed? Experimenting helps you. Have you seen that across your kind of is it your personal AI use case that they're specifically working on, or just the product overall or the company?
SPEAKER_00Like personal product, company. The way it started for us is we put it into our weekly metrics meeting. Okay. Is what is the number of AI-related experiments we run on a weekly basis and we have a goal for it.
SPEAKER_01What's the goal?
SPEAKER_0015. It's high.
SPEAKER_01That is really high. A week.
SPEAKER_00That's pretty high. So you've got to be in incredible velocity.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And that is not just in engineering, that's within go to market, that's within marketing, whatever it is. I have two people in my go-to market team regularly show up in the top 10 token users in my business. Love that. Because they are now pointing, you know, we gave them read-only access to our GitHub repos. And so maybe they're building the customer support knowledge base. You can just ask for the true, like ground level truth rather than something that you think is what happens in the product. You can now query the code base to build that for you. And it's actually exactly what will happen in the product, for example. Or we're writing blog content and we're not going to use AI to write the content, but we're going to use AI where we'll point cursor or clawed code at our code base and say, what's the most novel thing that we've done from an engineering perspective that might be interesting to share with the world? We haven't released any of this stuff yet, but we've got it all in our back pocket from when we are going to over the next couple of weeks and couple of months. And, you know, I'm prepping for a call with this customer. What are all the things that I am thinking already that I missed out on from the previous call that I need to do a better job at next time, or we'll take a call recording. At the moment, Gemini, they're on their vertex cloud, is the best platform for this, but they can actually take my call recording with the video. I can upload it there and it will now do analysis on video. This isn't possible on Anthropic or OpenAI's models, but I do this in vertex. Okay. And basically I query it and say, when did the prospect look away? When did they check their phone? What was I talking about? What was my team talking about? And so it's not just looking at what I say, which isn't getting out of gong calls and things like that, but what is the reaction they are doing? When did they lean forward? When did their eyes open? Like crazy stuff that you can do now. So when I say we're doing like 15 experiments a week, like it is organitive stuff that we're trying at all times. Like when I prepped for this conversation, I have a 10-page novel basically of like all the things that I should be thinking about to address and like all this sort of stuff. Or yeah, it's it's just all across the board. I could keep going for weeks talking about this stuff.
SPEAKER_01Well, I I think it's probably one I may need to pick your brain a little further on offline because it's one that we get seriously get so many questions about. Yeah. People are struggling, whether it's from a prioritization, a technical ability, or a time capacity standpoint to be able to run at the velocity that you're running as an organization with AI.
SPEAKER_00It has changed dramatically. Six months ago, this is not how we were.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00It really December.
SPEAKER_01Because you hired somebody. What was the like for anyone wanting to do this? How do they get that momentum?
SPEAKER_00It's a great, it's a great question. First was I shared operating model document with the team. I wrote like a 20-odd page document about half of it was on um product strategy. And then the other half was on here's how I want us to all operate as a business. And if this doesn't work for you, that's okay. So I talked about that with the team. That was step one. Second step was I went to the team, and this is obviously irresponsible of me to some degree, but I said, I would rather we're each spending$30,000 a month on token usage than$20 a month on token usage. Just I was being purposefully hypocryphal, really exaggerated in every way that I can, but trying to get them to really recognize how much I want them to lean into this. Second thing, the so the third thing was I said, I'm also giving you all budget, spend on your personal projects whatever you want. This isn't just about work. Again, this is about career, this is about your life. So how do I enable that? Because ultimately it's gonna help the business massively. And so the team was like, great, I'm gonna build a local LLM and I'm gonna put it on this like small Arduino chip that I have. Like, oh, these are what my engineers are doing. Like they're doing all of these sorts of things, and then they're bringing that back into work, that skill and knowledge. And then one of the other fourth things we do is it's in our rubric now for performance, like how are we tracking? And we're regularly like for a little while there, I was sharing in our all hands. Here is the token usage across the team by person. And and it wasn't like, oh, we all need to be using max tokens, because you know, we we had an underperformer who was using a lot of tokens, but they were underperforming, right? Right. But generally, when you looked at the group that was using the most tokens, they also typically were our highest performers. And so it wasn't a case of like, you know, you should all be using as much token usage as them, but it was what are the behaviors that they are doing? What do they know that you don't know that you need to go learn from them? How do we teach you and train to think like these people who are working, like one of our engineers is on average twice as productive as pretty much anyone else in the team because he is just so deep in this stuff and has really been over the last four months. And so we obviously use him as a mechanism to say, like, here's how else we can do this. And um, the last thing is we have a every two weeks meeting we call sneaks and snacks. Basically, it is what are some sneak previews of things that you've built that maybe aren't released, aren't used in production, aren't with customers or whatever it is, that might be just something you've been experimenting. So it's another way where we showcase our experiments. And so we have it's a company-wide meeting, everyone's expected to be there. About six or seven pre-people present every week, and it might be someone from go to market, it might be an engineer, it might be a marketing person, might be whoever. I will pretty much always show something that I'm building just so that they know like it's all the way through the organization.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And everyone is doing it all the time.
SPEAKER_01That is truly incredible and what a lot of companies are striving to create right now.
SPEAKER_00It's a lot. And and it's overwhelming for some people, and you got to figure out can you coach them to help them be part of that change, or are they resisting it and it's not gonna work out for them? And you need to be able to have that conversation and say, this is changing. Do you want to be with the change? Do you not want to be the change? If you don't, all good. We're gonna support you. Here's a recruiter we're gonna help you with, find your next role, here's how we're gonna support you on the other side of the business, and but we'll part ways. And that has been a conversation I've had to have a couple of times over the last few months.
SPEAKER_01Wow. Well, thank you for sharing that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's it's pretty rough when you like the people a lot.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, 100%.
SPEAKER_00And a lot of them, like people I've worked with for multiple years, think they're fantastic people, really like them on a human level, but we are just seeing everyone, you know, my goal isn't to lay off a bunch of my people on my team. Um, we're seeing other companies have to do that because they're having to, they're just finding that they don't have the talent that they need in the business. We're small enough that we can coach and upgrade, not the people, but it the um the skill sets and how they use these things by just immersing everyone in it all the time. And so you got to take people on that journey so that you don't end up in a place where you just have to lay a lot of people off because they're not the right people for the future. You have to give people the chance and you have to give them all the tools, not just say you have to learn AI and be amazing at it, also need to give them things that they can do to enable them to get better and give them access to whatever tooling is needed.
SPEAKER_01Are there any particular books that have been impactful throughout your career or as a founder?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Shout out to Godard, the CEO and founder of G2.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Uh so he introduced me to this concept of conscious leadership. And the book associated with that is the 15 commitments of conscious leadership. The TLDR on all of that is basically in any situation, no matter what has happened, no matter how I might feel, someone else is at fault or whatever, I have to reflect on what was my contribution to this situation? How did I allow this to happen? And how am I unconsciously committed to this thing continuing to happen? So let's say the example of pretend I have a team member who is struggling to get up the curve on using AI. I could be consciously uncommitted to that continuing to happen by not having the one-on-one conversation with them and saying, like, hey, you're behind. I could continue to be unconsciously committed to that by not talking about it in their performance review, not sending them Slack messages about it, not forwarding them articles, not saying, hey, if you don't figure this out by X time, it's not gonna work, right? Right. And so I kind of look at that and say, what am I unconsciously committed to because this behavior or this pattern continues to happen? And how can I change that? Because any of those situations are a reflection of me and my contributions to it. And so that actually brings a lot of ownership and a lot of responsibility as an individual. And you can't go there and like point fingers at people. You have to remember you're the driver of a lot of this stuff. And this isn't just for a leader, this is for anyone in any relationship. It takes, there's the the old saying, takes two to tango. There's a reason for that. Like some situation wouldn't have happened if you weren't in the room and it was just that person living their lives by themselves, is the two of you combined to create something or the group or whatever it is. And so that's a lot of what conscious leadership has helped me with. It's where Godard introduced me to her. Now I have a coach in in this world as well, and that's been pretty fundamental for me. So there's been a really cool book. The other book, similar lines, book called No Ego. The story for this one is basically the premise you're in a hospital is the example that they give. Okay. They survey the employees, they they know kind of like how people are ranking on a performance level, and then they survey the team, the doctors, the nurses, whoever it is, and they say, What's the one thing that we could do to improve your job or improve your experience here? A cohort of people respond with things like, Well, we need oat milk, not just, you know, full fat cream milk. We need it's it's too long to get from the employee car park to the office. You know, it's all of these sorts of complaints. And then there's another group of people who say, Well, the printer on level six jams all the time. It means that it's really hard for me to spend sufficient time with each of my patients. Can you please fix that? Or, you know, the shift rotation that we have at the moment means that I am not seeing this patient frequently enough. Is there anything you can do to help support that? They then correlate that against the performance benchmarks. And they basically found very quickly, it's pretty obvious where this is going, but they did the quantitative analysis to prove it out, that there is such a disparate level in performance and level of accountability based on how you look at those answers. Basically said, you know, unsurprisingly, people are talking about car parks and milk are typically your lower performers. Whereas the people who are saying, like, help me do the best that I can in my job, help me do the best that I can for my customer, my patient, my whoever, they're the ones who tend to be your best performers. They're the ones who are the most accountable. And so it's another reminder that they talk about how you then want to really listen to those people. If those people are complaining about something, pretty much drop what you're doing and do whatever they're asking. If it's the other group, you need to go talk to them and say, like, hey, maybe this isn't the right business for you, or or make some change there. Um, and that was pretty eye-opening for me, and and now I can I can see it as well. So that's been big. I do want to shout out to Udi again, uh, actually, for his courageous marketing book. That's been great as a recent read to help with some of these more human-to-human things, whereas like, you know, he was talking about doing a Super Bowl ad, but making it just to SF Bay area and the way he like made that successful, or he was like, Hey, you should throw up a billboard in Times Square. I was like, That seems crazy expensive. He was like, it might cost you less than$500. It cost me$100 plus$300 of a photographer's time. Like it was more expensive to get someone to take a picture. Um, so like some of the ways he was thinking about boldness and doing things different are really fantastic as well. I think there's a whole list like Good to Great by Jim Collins, how the how you think about that as a leader. But yeah, they're they're some of the top ones for me most recently.
SPEAKER_01Incredible. That's a great reading list. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00Great.
SPEAKER_01And thank you for this conversation, Sam. It's been fantastic. Thanks so much. Appreciate you.