SPEAKER_01
buyers still want to talk to a person. They don't want to buy from an agent, a Jack Altman avatar that shows up to a call that is not really Jack. So there's no higher ROI on my time than spending time with customers. Sam, what a delight to be here. I'm really excited to do this with you.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Thank you for having me. Awesome to be here. I've been a fan of this for a really long time, so it's cool to be in this chair. I'm going to try to live up to the hype of that. So I actually first learned about you by reading Jason Lemkin's Sastra blog back when I was starting at Lives, trying to learn about sales. And I remember in there, it was Jason talking about my best sales rep at EchoSign and he did all of this. Then I obviously knew about you through Parker, who we both know from Zenefits and Rippling. So I've known about you for a long time. Obviously, I've gotten to know you well over the last couple of years, but I actually want to start by talking about your sales journey. So can you talk through maybe a quick summary of how you came up through sales, a bit about these companies and maybe some of the things that you learned in each of those chapters? Yeah. We'll talk about looking into some incredible company. So Jason and Parker, both of which you alluded to, two of the greatest people, but also most influential people on the career that I've had and amazing advocates and close friends and all that stuff. So shout out to those guys. And so let's see, I grew up in Kansas City and went to University of Missouri. When I graduated, I was really fortunate that my older brother, Brian, was in San Francisco doing tech sales. I don't think I ever would have ended up out here but for that. So then at 22, I moved to San Francisco, got into tech sales. I was at EchoSign and I appropriately said I lucked into the relationship with Jason. I was just using a recruiter that was introducing me to early stage startups. One of them was EchoSign and I had a job offer and I took the job. And so I started as an SDR as many folks do in early sales go to market in tech startups. I was there for something like six years. The company did relatively well and afforded me the opportunity to move up into more senior sales roles within the organization. Then Jason introduced me to Parker, went to Zenefits. I was VP of sales there for a few years. Crazy years there, which we can get into. But what a growth trajectory that was. Yeah, it was awesome. You know, I was there for a little under two and a half years. For two of those almost two and a half years, it was incredible. And then towards the end, there was a left turn into lots of lessons and we can go deeper or not as you want there. Yeah. And then prior to doing Founders Fund and ultimately Monaco, most recently in the sales career, I was CRO at Brex. And again, same idea, just joined a company that was really exceptional from a very early stage. And so I think three times I've benefited from the experience of joining when companies are relatively unknown and near zero dollars of revenue and then being able to leave when they were much, much larger and lots of revenue.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. So we can spend the least time on this because it's reaching far back into the past. But what did you take away from EchoSign? Obviously, those were formative years for you as you thought about what good sales looks like and what a good go to market machine looks like. But that's probably where you got a lot of your early ideas about how this stuff should work. So what were your takeaways there? Yeah. Well, I think there were some. Were you guys up against DocuSign? Yeah, that's right. So DocuSign was a competitor. I think I was private for three or four of the years that I was there. And then Adobe acquired us. EchoSign became Adobe Sign after the acquisition. We were actually beating DocuSign when Adobe acquired us. And DocuSign is maybe the more familiar name now because EchoSign evolved into Adobe Sign. And so let's see, a couple of things stand out. First and foremost, and again, I genuinely lucked into this. I think there's nothing more influential early in one's sales career than the company that you joined. And you control a little bit of the success of that business. You know, I was an SDR and then I was a sales rep and I was one of, let's call it 10 growing into 40 sales people. There's only so much that I can attribute EchoSign's overall success to me. It's funny. I put this in the true but hard to convince people of bucket of things where it's with somebody early in their career, you've got compensation, title and quality of company. And it is very hard sometimes to convince people that quality of company is more important than those other things. It's arguably the only thing that matters, especially if you are joining as it is starting to take off. The way that I think about these things, a lot of it is the risk reward. And the earlier you join almost definitionally, there is more risk. But if you can join right at an inflection point, when there is some signal that this company is really about to take off, but you also join in a very early stage where you are the first, the second, the third, the fourth hire in the role or function that you are joining in.
SPEAKER_01
Yes. And then the path dependency on the career from there just is so, so strong. That's exactly right. So Echo Sign, there was this thing that was largely outside of my control. That was the overall success of the business. Market fit was just good. That influenced my personal success as much as anything. I think there is a different variable here. I sort of lucked into or found a career path that is a good fit for me. Yeah. I enjoy this a lot and I'm pretty good at it in ways that had I tried something different, I would have probably been less good and enjoyed it less.
SPEAKER_00
Okay. I want to go to Zenefits. Parker, obviously one of the great founders of the last decade. And obviously Zenefits in some ways, he basically rebuilt Zenefits and figured out the product things that need to happen for this to be a super durable company, but there was really strong product market fit there. But I think equally notable, the go-to-market machine and apparatus that early Zenefits had was remarkable. And so yes, in the end, some product things weren't there, but [SPEAKER_01] I would have probably been less good and enjoyed it less.
SPEAKER_01
Okay. I want to go to Zenefits. Parker, obviously one of the great founders of the last decade. And Zenefits in some ways, he basically rebuilt Zenefits and figured out what product things need to happen for this to be a super durable company, but there was really strong product market fit there. But I think equally notable, the go-to-market machine and apparatus that early Zenefits had was remarkable. And so yes, in the end, some product things weren't there, but can you talk about that early scaling? [SPEAKER_00] Cause I think it was maybe 2013, 14, that it was scaling something like that.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] I joined in December of 2013 and then Parker and I both left around the same day in February of 2016. [SPEAKER_00] Can you talk about what building that go-to-market machine looked like in those early days?
SPEAKER_00
Yes. So we've talked about Parker a little bit, an inspiration in a couple of ways, just in terms of learning so much on how he is a founder and CEO and runs a business.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] There's a lot of lessons there that you organically learn from. What's one that you come back to a lot? There was a thought exercise in March of 2014 that we had when I signed up for Zenefits. We had a revenue target of going from effectively zero, maybe a few hundred K when I joined in December of 2013. So we were creating our 2014 plan. We wanted to go from effectively zero to $10 million of ARR by the end of 2014, in 12 months. Which by the way, in 2014, that was unheard of. And Parker, as he should, has very ambitious, dream big aspirations and expectations. And so zero to 10 million was something there weren't a lot of other startups doing. And early in the year of 2014, we were trending towards more than that. And so he sat me and Matt Epstein down, who was leading marketing, and said, let's go through a thought exercise of instead of finishing the year at 10 million ARR, which is our stretch goal or however you want to frame it. What does it look like if we finish at 20? And we want to back into what are the headcount implications of doing this? What are the lead implications? How many leads would we need? What would the marketing spend look like? And you do a whiteboard session, I don't know, Monday night or whatever. And you end at 1 AM and we look around the room and Parker's like, well, we're not going to tell the board yet, but we're going to do this.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] And three days later, he told the board the new goal is 20 million in ARR. So there's a takeaway that you can apply that process to all sorts of aspects of the business. And is that basically just people rise to the level of expectations you set and pushing the boundaries of what great could be sparks more achievement? Is that it?
SPEAKER_00
I think there's something there. I also think there's something around manufacturing urgency and having really audacious goals. And there's probably several takeaways, but that specific process is one that I try and apply. And it can be something like a revenue target. It can also be something like how long is something going to take. Yeah. [SPEAKER_01] What would it take if we needed to do this in a shorter amount of time? And what would be the trade offs in those sorts of things? And so it's just operating rhythm of the business, something like that.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Okay. So you have these ambitious goals for the year. So what goes into that? When you said, okay, what does need to be true to go to 20 instead of 10? What is that conversation?
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Well, I think one of the things that we benefited from is quite strong product market fit at Zenefits. We benefited from the same at EchoSign at Brex, now at Monaco. And so I think that's worth highlighting. I do think there's something that we were pretty deliberate about at Zenefits that I took with me to both Brex and now Monaco, which is being very intentional about creating what I would describe as a demand rich environment. And I think that many founders, sales leaders, startups broadly sort of misdiagnose the opportunity to acquire customers and grow revenue more quickly as something related to conversion rates. So we have these opportunities that we're tracking. We're in July of 2026. If we look back to June of 2026 and we maybe missed our revenue target. The reason that we missed that is because this one deal that we really thought was going to come in, the sales rep said it was going to come in, it pushed. And so had it come in, we would have hit our revenue target. And my diagnosis in many of those instances is actually you should have had five deals. And if three of them close, you finish way over target. Yes. And if that one deal closes, you actually hit your target, but in a lot of ways, you could have done better. I can't remember who it was. It was either you, Parker, or Matt Epstein, but one of the three of you told me at some point when I was trying to get go to market advice for Lattice. It was like, look, you can improve your conversion rate by this much. You can improve your first deal to close or whatever, but the thing that you can change by 10X is your top of funnel.
SPEAKER_00
That's right. And I think that was always deep in this group's psychology: you can improve all these things a little bit, but you can improve the top of funnel. If you have a company worth building, there's a hundred times more customers that you could be talking to than you're talking to. I think this is very underrated. It's a red pill once you see it. It's something that we have lived by and I think benefited from. And just to reinforce what you just said. If you have 10% conversion rates, improving those conversion rates to 20%, which sounds like you're improving your conversion rates by 10%, but you're actually doubling conversion.
SPEAKER_00
You can improve all these things a little bit, but you can improve the top of funnel. If you have a company worth building, there's a hundred times more customers that you could be talking to than you're talking to. I think this is a very underrated thing. And it's something that we have lived by and I think benefited from, and just to reinforce the thing that you just said. If you have 10% conversion rates, improving those conversion rates to 20%, which sounds like you're improving your conversion rates by 10%, but you're actually doubling conversion rates. It's really hard. And especially if you have a sales organization, you have to train the salespeople. If you're a founder, you have to get far better at pitching and closing and all of these things. If you have a large enough addressable market.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] And so this doesn't totally work if you have 50 potential customers that you can sell into, but for companies like Monaco and many other startups out there, it is far easier to double your leads or opportunities. And so that is where I would put a disproportionate amount of intention. And if you do so actually at the expense of either conversion rates or efficiency, that is a worthwhile trade-off. And so if you feel like as long as on a per rep basis, they're still closing enough per person per year, as long as your growth trajectory is dramatically increasing month over month, if you want the efficiency per rep, do you care about that? Or is that something that doesn't matter till later on?
SPEAKER_00
Yes, but you can apply the same logic that we just did at the company level to the rep level also. So I would rather deliver two times the number of leads or opportunities to a rep and actually have their conversion rates come down slightly, then give them less leads and increase their conversion. Just focus on the throughput, the outcome. Yes. How much revenue did we close as a business this month? How much revenue did each sales rep close this month?
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Yes. There aren't, what's my dad say in golf? There aren't pictures on the scorecard or something like that. And so if a rep closes a couple hundred thousand dollars a month, it's not like there's an asterisk. There aren't points for what your close rate was. Yeah. It's not like you forgot to email this customer that otherwise could have closed $200,000 of ARR. Close this month. [SPEAKER_01] That is the thing that you see. And so of course you want to focus, the details matter. And of course you want to be constantly improving and giving feedback on all of those things, but solve for the outcome.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Yeah, that's good. So what did you take then when you went to Brex? So you had the Zenefits experience, it was both amazing and difficult in all these ways, which are well documented. But then Brex was this amazing run. So you've had the Ecosign experience. You've gotten the chance to be the leader from basically the get go at this next company. And now you're doing it again with the lead seat and the experience. So now what happens at Brex?
SPEAKER_01
Well, I'll touch on the two things that I think, actually the three things that influenced Brex's outcomes while I was there as much as anything. Two of which were true at Zenefits, one of which was actually a learning from Zenefits that we started far later than we otherwise should have, that we were able to capitalize on early at Brex. Then we can do the same thing if it's interesting for Monaco, because it's a different world today than it was in 2018. The three things, the first is recruiting and building the team. At Zenefits, my first two hires were the top two sales reps at Ecosign, brought them with me. Their names are Matt Plank and Jamison Young. Matt Plank is now the CRO at Rippling. Jamison Young was CRO at Gong. He's now SVP of something important at Rippling in their sales organization. So these are two of the people that have actually influenced my personal success as much as anything. And then you can just imagine that cascading from there. And so both Zenefits and Brex now at Monaco, we just have an incredible NFL level of players in a sales organization. And I think you can attribute so much of the success of the go-to-market organizations of these companies to the people that exist within the go-to-market organizations. The second thing, we touched on it, so we don't have to go much deeper. If you think about early days of Brex, one thing that we did a very effective job of was going out of stealth to everyone knowing and talking about Brex very quickly. We did things like huge billboard campaigns and gifting campaigns and fundraise announcements and so much of the stuff that hopefully Monaco is known a little bit. But you got really loud.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] I remember that. Really loud.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. And I think the idea was we want as close, I don't know if we were as intentional as we are at Monaco today about this, but the idea is that we wanted close to 100% of our target market to have heard of Brex. And so then when we reach out to founder, finance leader, controller from Brex, you know who we are. And hopefully you have some positive brand association with that. So we were very deliberate about that. And I think the concept of creating this demand rich environment was something that we were very deliberate about early on at Brex. The third thing that I think we did, over time the grade improves, but at Brex we get something like a D plus from early stage, is the influence of what would be considered today as revenue operations. And it's just being very thoughtful about, well, here's maybe the easiest illustration of this. Not all leads are created equal. And revenue operations is far more complex than this specific example, but I think this specific example helps highlight the influences it can have. Not all leads are created equal and there's going to be influence both on,
SPEAKER_01
that we were very deliberate about early on at Brex. The third thing that I think we did, over time, the grade improves, but it's benefits. We get something like a D plus from an early stage is the influence of what would be considered today as revenue operations. [SPEAKER_00] And it's just being very thoughtful about, well, here's maybe the easiest illustration of this. Not all leads are created equal.
SPEAKER_01
And revenue operations is far more complex than this specific example, but I think this specific example helps highlight the influences it can have. Not all leads are created equal and there's going to be influence both on the type of company that the lead or opportunity that you are potentially selling to. There's also going to be influence at the persona level. So who is the person that we are meeting with? One thing that we did at Zenefits, it was a mistake. We treated all leads or opportunities, two sides of the same coin as being equal. And so we had things like opportunity goals that fed into what is the ultimate outcome of revenue that was wrong because what we started doing was getting more lower quality opportunities that converted at lower rates that led to less revenue.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] And so over this year of 2015, which was a more challenging year for Zenefits than certainly the 2014 year, I attribute a lot of that to the diminishing quality of leads and opportunities. And so the thing that we invested in early at Brex was really understanding what are the trends in the business and trying to pattern match to what are the companies and people that are most likely to convert, and applying that learning back to the top of funnel and where are we pointing our missiles at targeting and acquiring these opportunities.
SPEAKER_01
And so then you get the best of all the worlds. You get a leadership environment with the right type of people and companies that you're trying to sell to. Yes. One of the things that I'm curious about is for Brex, obviously you had, and this is true at all these companies, but Brex, there was this known highly competitive market with Ramp. And I'm curious about, and I would say today more than ever, every founder is operating in an extremely competitive environment. I think it's felt this way for a long time, but it really feels that way. All good ideas have many contenders going at once. What did you learn about competition through these and how did you go to market through highly competitive markets?
SPEAKER_01
It's interesting. Echosign was certainly competitive with DocuSign. And so I think lots of learnings in terms of how to compete through that experience. Brex evolved into being hyper competitive with Ramp. But it started wide open. Interestingly, it was actually pretty greenfield. When, for the majority of my time there, my years at Brex were 2018 through beginning of 2022, 2018, 2019, even 2020, it was mostly a one horse race—a company called Divvy that was acquired by Bill.com a little later. So there were other players in the space, but Brex was always the market leader. And then I think dynamics of the market evolved starting in, let's call it 2021 and then certainly beyond. And I actually was not with the business for much of that period of time.
SPEAKER_01
Peter Thiel has a saying that's fairly famous, and I think is oftentimes, to your point, hard to apply to enterprise software that is seemingly inherently competitive. Competition is for losers. And gosh, he's right because he's always right. But experiencing Brex in what I would describe—I said this term previously—as a greenfield environment, pretty smooth sailing.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Monaco today, we think of it as pretty greenfield. And so we are displacing incumbents, but aren't competing today with many new entrants into the space. We should just assume that environment won't last forever, but we want to take as much advantage of it as fast as we possibly can to get as close to a monopoly as we can. And then evolve from there. And I think there probably are learnings from the time at Brex just in terms of focus and how quickly you want to move into different markets and segments and those sorts of things.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] And I want to come to that before we do. After this journey through sales, before Monaco, you did spend time at Founders Fund and you have a new chapter to your life that was not about startup sales. Can you talk about what that was, that experience, what you learned, why you came back to what you're doing now?
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Well, look, I and you have both talked about Jason and Parker. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention something about the learnings from Pedro Enrique Michael, who is CEO and now CEO at a company called Figure. And so equal parts inspiration and gratitude for the influence that they've had on my career. And again, every single time I have been so fortunate in surrounding myself with the greatest people on earth. You go from Jason to Parker to Pedro Enrique Michael, and then we get to Founders Fund. And it's many of the folks on the show. We're talking about Brian, prior to starting the recording, but gosh, Peter, Brian, Trey, everyone is just exceptional there.
SPEAKER_01
So I think I can get a little bit personal on my mindset after Brex. This is late 2021, early 2022. I'm reaching my four year tenure at Brex. COVID. It is COVID. I'm in Miami. And you know, I just felt like for the first time in my career, I felt satisfied, which sounds positive. It's actually bad. I felt satisfied.
SPEAKER_01
There. So let's see, I think I can get a little bit personal on my mindset after Rex. Yeah. So this is late 21, early 22. I'm reaching like my four year tenure at Brex. COVID. It is COVID. I'm in Miami. Yeah. So I've moved to Miami at this point. And I just felt like for the first time in my career, I felt satisfied, which sounds positive. It's actually bad. I felt satisfied with what I had accomplished in this category or world of technology sales. And I could have, let's make the assumption that I was leaving Brex. I could have done something like go either early stage and maybe a more strategic title or something, but I would effectively lead go-to-market at a company. Yeah. Just like definitionally the probability of joining an earlier stage company that has a Brex-like outcome. We were a 12 and a half billion dollar company when I left, which is definitionally low. And even if you did, it was the same with just a bigger number. I wasn't motivated to do it. I wanted a new challenge. I alluded to my brother, Brian very early on in this career arc that Brian was out in San Francisco doing technology sales. And I moved out here. Brian at the time had transitioned. He was a CRO at a bunch of really incredible businesses. And then he was a VC at Sutter Hill. So I had seen him make this transition as a former sales leader. And I was in Miami. I got to know Keith and Founders Fund had a Miami office and I made the decision that I wanted to get into venture. And gosh, if I had the opportunity to join one of the greatest venture capital firms in the history of the world, I'd be silly to not take advantage of that. And so mid-late 2022, I joined Founders Fund. And I couldn't be more grateful for the experience and the people in the firm are truly exceptional. No surprise to anybody that's potentially listening to this. We weren't deploying a lot of capital at the time. This is 22, 23. Yeah. And I'm at the time Miami-based VC. It was a little fish out of water. And so I talked about what I did at EchoSign and then beyond that I could just tell this is a good fit. Yeah. I don't know, certainly being in Miami, but I don't know that being in VC felt like the right fit. One of the things that Founders Fund has a track record of doing that I gravitated towards is incubating companies. And certainly like Peter, the most famous of them with Palantir and then Trey with Andurl. And there's a bunch of folks that have, Scott with General Matter and Valiant with Bard and more. And my brother who I alluded to at Sutter Hill, he took this model to human capital. We decided to co-incubate a company that evolved into Monaco. And through that process, I was gravitating far more towards what is the right fit. Building Monaco and not being Miami-based VC. I asked you the other day about, I don't even remember why, but it was about interests outside of work. And you were saying like, well, to be honest, I don't really have hobbies right now. I'm just working a lot. But you're like, I did have them in Miami. Was that, it feels to me almost like you had this very busy career. It almost feels like you took a breather and then you're going back into the coal mines. Potentially unintentionally.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Meaning the take a breather. I think what you said is exactly correct. And this may be received negatively, meaning today I don't have many hobbies. And if I'm not literally in the office, I'm thinking about Monaco and doing something related to the business. I think it's very lucky to be so immersed in something that you don't have any hobbies. I think that's a blessing. Yeah, it was certainly a deliberate decision. I knew that this was what I was signing up for when I made the decision. And to your point, yeah, when I was in Miami, I was in really good shape. And maybe that's correlated both with the place and the flexibility of the job or something like that. I was on the water a lot. There were plenty of hobbies that existed. And when I went all in on Monaco, I moved back to San Francisco, I live right by the office. It is a high contrast chapter to chapter. It is 180, fairly stark contrast. And again, it was deliberate and thus far I'm very happy with the decision. I'm loving this. It's awesome. Okay. So let's talk about Monaco. So I guess, why did you start this? Why this company? Why was this the one that you're thinking, this is what I'm going to do? It wasn't part of the plan. I had joined Founders Fund to be a VC. I didn't join Founders Fund thinking I was going to start a company, move to San Francisco, and become co-founder CEO of Founders Fund. Right. And it just was pulling me, and felt very much like this is so obviously what I should be doing in my calling. So I think part of it was the fit for me. And I think maybe the best way of articulating that is something like, there's only one type of technology company I'm qualified to be the founder of, and it is a sales or go-to-market technology company. There is this other thing that is highly influential and that is timing. And we are in the sort of early—
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] actually become co-founder, CEO of the Founders Fund. Right. And so, started this company.
SPEAKER_01
It was just pulling me, and felt very much like this is so obviously what I should be doing in my calling. So I think part of it was just the fit for me. And I think maybe the best way of articulating that is something like, there's only one type of technology company I'm qualified to be the founder of, and it is a sales or go-to-market technology company. There is this other thing that is highly influential and that is timing. And we are in the early innings of this platform shift that is AI. And I do think that there will be a new market leader that emerges in the category that we are building in, which is go-to-market or sales technology. Yeah. It's like this paradigm, in some ways seems to be, I guess, going back to cloud, it was, I guess we, neither of us were really working at the beginning of that shift, but maybe we're students of history or something. And it's like, you can see that there are all these on-prem companies.
SPEAKER_01
Yes. And if you started a cloud company at the right time, it was just really hard for those old companies to turn the boats quick enough to come do what you were doing. And it was just a genuinely better offering for customers. And so it just dominated and in category after category, the cloud version just won and the old companies couldn't get there and the customers just preferred it and bam. And it seems like in AI, there's a version of this happening now where it's going from selling tools to selling the work and it's just dominant to customers and the old companies can't seem to catch up. I think you articulated it perfectly. These platform shifts rhyme where Siebel, that was maybe the incumbent or market leader in this category that Monaco is building in, which is go-to-market or sales, was the market leader. There was nothing inherently wrong with the business. In fact, one of the most incredible businesses at the time in history. The same thing is true with the market leader today, which is Salesforce. Just incredible business. And I think that they are, any market leader, and you can pattern match to other functions within enterprise software, they're faced with an innovator's dilemma where they have an existing set of customers on a platform that was architected pre-AI. And so they can either continue serving the needs of those customers and focusing on where they are generating revenue and building on top of this existing platform, or they can disrupt themselves. And seemingly every time businesses are faced with this innovator's dilemma during a platform shift, they gravitate towards the former, which I think for us equates to opportunity, where we can... And by the way, I think what Salesforce and what other companies are doing, they are overlaying AI on top of a pre-AI system architected platform, which is better than no AI, but less good than being truly AI native, which is what a company like Monaco is.
SPEAKER_01
Yes. And so for us, we can go after a narrow segment of the market today, which is startups.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] And if you think about Salesforce's revenue, how much of Salesforce's revenue is concentrated in tech or early stage technology startups? Less than 1%. Certainly less than 1%. And so we can go after that market, we can build a better platform, we can build a platform that's truly AI native, we can get close to our monopoly market share there. Yeah. And then we start to move up market and we start to organically expand outside of startups and hopefully eventually evolve into the market leader. But whether it's us or somebody else, it seems a foregone conclusion that the category leader, the platform of record in sales in let's call it five years will be a platform that is architected with AI in mind and not one that was architected 20 years prior. You had a choice to make, which was a choice. Obviously what you're selling is work and outcomes and you're selling revenue in some sense. You chose to also be a system of record. You didn't have to do that, but you made that deliberate choice. I think to the extent that you won't integrate with the system of record, even though you obviously could, you can imagine a world where you chose to do that.
SPEAKER_01
Most still. Many other companies, right. Because it's easier to say, look, I'm not going to try to be your HubSpot, but I'm going to give you these tools that let you get more revenue and set up all these meetings and do all the accoutrements around the CRM. You've chosen to say, do you want to work with Monaco? We're the CRM. Why did you choose that?
SPEAKER_01
That's right. Well, several reasons. I think there are two categories of companies that are sales products. There are system of record companies. Today, that is a CRM. We actually believe that forward looking, this concept or category of a CRM will evolve into something of the past. We are more orienting around outcomes. And so we think that what today is this system of record that manifests as a database CRM eventually becomes a revenue automation platform that's actually oriented around outcomes and not things like storing data. So we believe that there is a new type of company that emerges from this that is a system of record, but doesn't look like the existing systems of record. What does it mean to be the system of record if not just a database?
SPEAKER_01
What is it? It is, well, look, HubSpot is appropriately named. It is the hub. Everything orchestrates from the system of record. Yes, because it's the source of truth of data.
SPEAKER_01
And that's right. And you asked a question like, why did you make this decision? Well, if we probably bucket these company types or products into two categories, there's system of record and there's point solutions. Point solutions are layers on top of what today is a CRM system of record. If we think about the outcomes of those types of businesses backward looking, we have market leaders like Salesforce that today are 120 plus billion dollar companies just a few months ago are significantly larger than that. And then several others that are actually quite large businesses. If we think about the category of point solutions that integrate to these systems of record, there are some that experience some early revenue growth and early marks of low to mid single digit billion dollar valuations. But none of them historically speaking have realized generational technology company outcomes. We're not motivated by being a point solution. We're not motivated by an outcome, which again, a really exciting outcome for those that experience. We want a shot. We want a shot at being a market leader in one of the largest categories of enterprise software that we think will actually evolve from here. If you think about Salesforce and maybe enterprise software companies today broadly, their market caps are predicated on IT budget. We are disrupting labor. Yeah, that's right. And so
SPEAKER_01
that experience some early revenue growth and early maybe marks of low to mid single digit billion dollar valuations. But none of them historically speaking have realized generational technology company outcomes. We're not motivated by being a point solution. We're not motivated by an outcome, which again, a really exciting outcome for those that experience. We want a shot. We want a shot at being a market leader in one of the largest categories of enterprise software that we think will actually evolve from here. If you think about Salesforce and maybe enterprise software companies today broadly, their market caps are predicated on IT budget. We are disrupting labor. Yeah, that's right. And so the future market leader has both that IT budget, but it also has the labor budget. Monaco is way more expensive than that sort of legacy system of record products because we are doing the labor on behalf of our customers. Which by the way is the story of all the AI native companies. It's true. It's both dramatically more expensive in some sense and it's also dramatically cheaper in another sense than what you would be doing alternatively to get the same outcome. That's exactly right. And people, not only are customers willing to pay, this is what they want. The other, you asked a question that maybe I want to touch on because I think it could be insightful or maybe helpful for other founders that are starting businesses today. There's an application of AI in Monaco-like products that is seemingly obvious, which is we are AI native. We just talked about it. It's the labor disruption. We are using agents and compute to replace workflows that founders and salespeople would otherwise be doing themselves. And it is more expensive when a human does it. And it actually produces worse outcomes when a human does it. The thing that I think is less obvious in terms of an application of AI that we've been very deliberate about, certainly intentional from the very early days, the cost of building software is trending to zero. And so we want to take on as much scope as we possibly can, starting with the system of record, but also displacing all of these point solutions that we believe are actually features of a broader platform and not independent product lines or independent businesses in many cases.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] By the way, this extreme breadth focus was obviously Parker was one of the early canonical examples of what a software business really is at the end of the day: these customer relationships that allow you to extremely efficiently build and sell more products to them. And the customer just gets a straight up better experience because the data is tied together. It ends up being cheaper for them in summation. You don't have to have all these different vendors, all these things. It seems like now with AI, you should actually take that to an extreme degree.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] The compound startup, maybe phrase or terminology that I think Parker made famous. Yes. And now it's like that should go exponentially far.
SPEAKER_00
Well, and I think Parker to his credit was probably ahead of his time on this, right? Because Parker started Rippling in something like 2016. Zenefits was maybe less of a compound startup than Rippling was, and Rippling is more of a compound startup. I think that today, I don't know the exact math equation here, but we can build software something like 10 times faster than we could just a few years ago. If that is true today, that is going to be true a few years from now where we can build software 10 times faster than we can today. And so we want to go after as much breadth of what we can do in the platform with the assumption that AI is going to enable us to build a product far faster. And that is what customers want. Customers want to come to one platform. The outcomes are actually better because you don't have data in a bunch of different silos. The system of record, the thing that does your call recording, the thing that does your outbound, the thing that builds your database is far more difficult to overlay an agent on top of this arbitrary set of tools with data silos than it is a single platform and source of truth that both has all of your data, but also takes all of your actions inside of the same tool. Totally. So when you think about what you're selling to customers in some sense, I guess you're selling well-wrapped tokens that can do all these different things, but you're selling intelligence to the customer at the end of the day. So have you thought about how, or I know you have, what this means in terms of the way you price the long term of what your cost structure is going to be and what that all looks like from an economics perspective? Because it's obviously very different than build software and sell it for per user per month.
SPEAKER_00
For sure. Yeah. Well, two things come to mind. One is Monaco and we at Monaco are very opinionated. I think that there are certain applications of AI and maybe applied to different functions where it's largely ones and zeros. And what I mean by that is support is close to this, where you're driving towards an outcome, which is a resolution to somebody's support ticket. Right. It's even more pronounced, I think in the world of finance and accounting, where there's an actual number that is a real one, zero type number that is the calculation of everything that comes before it. I think sales is like we start with finance, we move to support, we progress to sales. There's far more subjectivity that goes into sales than there is this sort of black and white binary outcome that is true in the world of finance. And so we are very opinionated in things like how do we determine which types of companies to reach out to and when to reach out to these companies? And what are the signals that we're leveraging and how does that be incorporated into messaging and these things that many of our customers today just don't have experience doing right. And so that is the first thing that comes to mind is the opinionated nature of the product.
SPEAKER_01
Yes. And then meaning that you're helping, it's funny, because as you were saying that, I was like, I didn't know what you're talking about. You're talking about both. It's both about who you're reaching out to, but it's also then, you know, implied is who your customers ought to be reaching out to and all of that, everything you're talking about is that kind of what you're selling to the customers. Yeah. Well, we're certainly running on Monaco and yes, I think customers hopefully benefit from the opinionated nature of the platform itself in ways that if you think about our customer, most of them are startup seed.
SPEAKER_01
Yes. And then meaning that you're helping, it's funny, cause as you were saying that, I was like, I didn't know what you're talking about. You're talking about both. It's both about who you're reaching out to, but it's also then implied is who your customers ought to be reaching out to and all of that, everything you're talking about is that kind [SPEAKER_00] of what you're selling to the customers. Yeah. Well, we're certainly running on
SPEAKER_00
Monaco and yes, I think customers, hopefully benefit from the opinionated nature of the
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] platform itself in ways that, if you think about our customer, most of them are startup seed, [SPEAKER_00] series A. They don't as founders oftentimes have deep go to market experience. [SPEAKER_00] And so we can take much of the decisions and strategy, [SPEAKER_00] which is a word that I don't hate, but I don't like, but I can't think of a better [SPEAKER_00] one right now, off of their plate. And then we enable them to do the things that [SPEAKER_00] are super high leverage on their time. Things like meeting with customers, coming up with [SPEAKER_00] creative campaigns that today AI is less good at. But if you think about the workflows
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] that I just described, building a database, overlaying signals, finding buyers, coming up [SPEAKER_01] with messaging, these are things that Monaco is certainly better than me at, and arguably better [SPEAKER_01] than just humans. And so then you can sort of outsource this thing to free up your time, [SPEAKER_01] to do the highest ROI use of your time in a world of go to market, which is like [SPEAKER_01] customer facing. And then you asked a question on pricing. We are, our pricing is correlated [SPEAKER_01] towards outcomes. Outcomes are relatively objective when it comes to Monaco. Now the ultimate
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] outcome, excuse me, outcomes are relatively objective when it comes to the category of go to market or
SPEAKER_01
sales. It's revenue. How much revenue are you generating? Yep. There are some inputs. These are things like meetings and conversion rates. And so we rigorously track towards the ultimate outcome of revenue, the inputs of, are we generating meetings? Are we improving
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] conversion rates? And our pricing is aligned with how much a customer is using the platform. And
SPEAKER_01
that should be highly correlated with the impact or benefit that a customer is receiving from the platform. That is fairly easily measurable. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So I would love to unpack the go to market strategy you've had so far. You launched like February. So you just called it four or five months ago. And we talked about this with Brex, but definitely you flipped a bit and everything was loud. So what I'm curious about is, can you sort of share what was [SPEAKER_00] in your head when you were like, okay, it's time to launch. We're going to be loud. Here's the things we're going to do to sort of get this whole brand going. Yes. I think I'll describe
SPEAKER_01
our approach. It was the right approach for us. I'll also sort of caveat with a couple things that I think are worth calling out that maybe like advantages that we have as a business that don't necessarily apply to every startup. We wanted to take the approach of operating in stealth through this design customer phase, and then have a big sort of shotgun style launch, which we did back in February, where we went from almost a definitionally unknown company. Nobody had searched Monaco up on LinkedIn, our website said coming soon or some
SPEAKER_01
version of that. We certainly spent $0 on marketing up until the day that we launched. And the reason that we wanted to take that approach is, I again, I haven't come up with a better analogy for it than this, which is the boiling frog thing where you can imagine if you are the frog and you're in the pot and the water is heating up and you don't totally notice it. Well, we can apply that to, if you do marketing campaigns over a two year period, and as a consumer, you may see bits and pieces of somebody's
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] marketing campaign here and there. And yeah, I've maybe heard of this company, but I heard [SPEAKER_01] about them a long time ago and they did this thing. You can imagine the sort of [SPEAKER_01] psychological impact of that relative to dropping the frog in the boiling water, [SPEAKER_01] which is, oh my gosh, we are seeing Monaco everywhere. All of a sudden, I see the plane [SPEAKER_01] and I see the billboards and I see the poker tournaments. And you're your plan and your billboard gave no explanation of what Monaco was. It just said Monaco. And then the billboards had a big dollar sign, which I thought was hilarious. And I loved it,
SPEAKER_01
but you didn't say, you know, new AI sales platform, you know, you just were like Monaco. Yeah. We benefit from having a geographically concentrated target market. So we're selling to startups. You and I are sitting here in San Francisco. Many of our customers are also in San Francisco. So if we were selling to HVAC companies, we shouldn't be flying planes [SPEAKER_00] around San Francisco or putting billboards up around San Francisco, because they're [SPEAKER_00] fairly well distributed and not highly concentrated. So there are maybe two aspects that we were deliberate about solving for. One is brand awareness. That's the plane,
SPEAKER_01
that's the billboards, and more. When we do think that there may be two
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] impacts of brand awareness. The first is we do a lot of outbound. Monaco does our outbound for us. [SPEAKER_01] When we reach out to a company that is graduating YC, reach out to the founder, [SPEAKER_01] they receive the message from me. They have heard of Monaco because they've seen the plane, [SPEAKER_01] whatever, the thing is the likelihood that they respond to that outbound message is
SPEAKER_01
exponentially higher than if they didn't know me, if they didn't know the business. So the brand awareness is something that we're very deliberate about. There's a second application of that, which is when they take the meeting, they are far more likely to convert because there
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] is comfort in knowing and understanding a brand, like the one that we are hopefully creating
SPEAKER_01
around ourselves in ways that maybe other folks aren't deliberate about and haven't created for themselves. The other type of marketing that we're deliberate about is demand gen. This is very targeted. This is sending people the poker sets that we send to founders when they graduate YC or something like this, and hosting the poker tournaments and inviting specific founders to that poker tournament with the expectation that that specific
SPEAKER_01
of that, which is when they take the meeting, they are far more likely to convert because there is comfort in knowing and understanding a brand, like the one that we are hopefully creating around ourselves in ways that maybe other folks aren't deliberate about and haven't created for themselves. The other type of marketing that we're delivered about is demand gen. This is very targeted. This is sending people the poker sets that we send to founders when they graduate YC or something like this, and hosting the poker tournaments and inviting specific founders to that poker tournament with the expectation that that specific founder is going to be somebody that we convert. So we solve for both. I can talk about maybe a couple of marketing principles that are things that we apply to marketing, but yeah, I love that. Cause one of the things I often think—I don't think this applies to every startup, obviously, or I know it doesn't apply to every startup—but I think there are many startups that could be investing much harder in their brand that don't. And it's hard because it's like, well, if I do this demand gen campaign, it turns into revenue. And if I do this brand thing, or I spend this money on these brand campaigns, it's not going to show up. So it's hard to, but it just seems like a missed opportunity for so many people.
SPEAKER_01
Yes. I think everyone should do this in their own specific approach. What Monaco is doing isn't relevant to most startups. We can do it because we sell to startups, the geographic concentration, again, most startups don't sell to it. But there's a version of it for almost everybody. I think there's a process that every company should follow. And then I can talk about maybe a couple of principles in case they're helpful. There is a process which most companies do not follow. You've got to try stuff. You just have to do stuff. And you can't be afraid to fail. And I do think that most companies here, they just don't really do anything. I do think that on this point, it's a lot of people are afraid of the embarrassment of a brand campaign that failed or some marketing or sales effort that just looked stupid and didn't land. And that's actually psychologically harder than just building product or doing other things that are not publicly embarrassing.
SPEAKER_01
I think there are two things. There's one thing that is like, I'm not good at this. So I'm an engineer, not me personally. I'm saying like putting myself in the founder, I'm an engineer. I build product. I'm going to index on the thing that I'm very good at. I don't know how to do a marketing campaign, which is funny. Our CTO, my co-founder Eric at Lattice came up with by far our best billboard, which was like investing your people, not crypto during 2022, and that just landed super hard and that engineer. Yeah. So I'm not—I'm bad at this. So I'm not experienced this or whatever.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] I don't want to spend the money. I'm worried about lighting the money on fire or something like that. I think those are the two variables that probably lead more towards stagnation or just lack of effort in this category. The reality is no one starts being an expert at this stuff. You just have to try stuff and learn. And I actually spend a lot of time with our customers doing exactly this. Like my time I spend customer facing all day. Let's come up with some cool campaigns that we can run for your business. Yeah. And just ideating on this. And I think that's hopefully a high ROI to our customers.
SPEAKER_00
Um, and you can do inexpensive campaigns. Like one, you don't have to be an expert at this too. There are campaigns that are inexpensive. I'll give an example. These poker sets that we send to founders that say Monaco casino, they're on brand that are prefab because Monaco has a casino. They're like $110. You can do a test, send this to 50 people. You're spending $5,000. It's like, no, like if you were truly bootstrapped and have no dollars to spend it. Sure. You can't do the $5,000. But you can still do stuff. There's always stuff you can do. And you don't have to break the bank to do it. So you run a process. Here's what we do internally in case it's helpful for others. We run a process at least once a month where we want to have a big, splashy marketing campaign that we are trying. Get a handful of people in the company, define them as the marketing committee or whatever it is. They don't have to be marketing folks. It can just be you and your co-founder. If you're just two people, come up with a few ideas, put them on the whiteboard and just do it. Just jump, don't be afraid to fail. Try something. If it doesn't work, chalk it up as a win because you learned and you're going to try something new that is going to be more effective or something like that.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] But you do want to have a bit of process around this where every single month you're trying at least one or two different things that are in this category of marketing, brand awareness, demand gen, however we want to frame it. And I think we really want to be contrarian—maybe that's not the right application of that word—but we do want to be creative, new stuff, new stuff. Like your plane. The plane was awesome. Can you talk about the plane? Yes. I feel like there might be one flying right now. We, um—
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] There isn't. We took it down. We'll put it back up at some point. I think we probably reached diminishing returns or something over time, but it was, yeah, anyway, go ahead. Yeah. We were at SaaSStr, which is Jason Lemkin's conference, it's an awesome conference. And we knew that there would be a large contingency or concentration of people at this event down in San Mateo. And so we, we didn't think this was that creative. In fact, it wasn't that creative in that there was at least one, maybe two other planes flying at the same event. And so we had the banner trailing the Monaco plane at this conference. I don't know what we
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] I think probably reached diminishing returns over time, but it was yeah, anyway, go ahead. Yeah. We were at SaaStr, which is Jason Lemkin's conference, it's an awesome conference. And we knew that there would be a large contingency or concentration of people at this event down in San Mateo. And so we didn't think this was that creative. In fact, it wasn't that creative in that there was at least one, maybe two other planes flying at the same event. And so we had the banner trailing the Monaco plane at this conference. I don't know what we paid. Let's call it a couple thousand bucks to make the banner. Yeah. And then I was surprised at how relatively inexpensive putting this plane in the air for many hours during the conference was, which is 6,000 bucks a day. And we do it for two or three days at the conference. And I was just thinking we already have the banner. We already know the cost of flying this thing. Yeah. Do you guys like, I haven't really seen these in San Francisco proper. Do you guys, can you guys fly over the city? And part of my assumption was there are air restrictions that you couldn't fly in and around the city or whatever. And they were like, yeah, we can totally do it. And so I was starting to do the math on this thing. And it was 6,000 bucks a day, pay for 10 days, 60 grand. We have a lot of billboards. Some of our billboards are significantly more expensive than 60 grand. This is one of those that's like, it's a $60,000 learning. The worst case scenario, we fly this thing around. It doesn't totally work. We learn from it and we don't do it again. It worked. So we both got messages on my phone, people posting on LinkedIn and Twitter and everywhere else. It was everywhere. And so we kept it up for a little bit longer. And so it was one of those things that was just an evolution of something that we had tried at the conference. Let's try it in the city. It worked in the city. We learned from it. We'll put it up again when we do a big announcement that we have coming up. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
You know, it's interesting, right. I'm sure you've read Behind the Cloud, the Mark Benioff book, the early Salesforce book. And one of the things that struck me was early Salesforce did a lot of really creative marketing. They did really creative. And some of it was that the message was created, the no software thing. It's interesting. There was a lot there and just the way they even did customer dinners, I think was creative. And it all became tried at some point, but being the first to do a good go to market idea is worth a lot. It seems like. I think the one that I understand as much as any was the protest, maybe at a big Siebel or Oracle conference where it was the no software, which I think was really smart. Yeah. So when you're thinking about this, are you thinking I'm going to do new activities and then I'm going to put them on some back burner or are you thinking I just have to always be doing these things? Do they stack and build over time? Or are you thinking I've got to always have a new thing? There are two things that I am thinking about, which maybe go back to some marketing principles that we try and apply that I think my guidance to any customer that I'm working with is you should try and apply the same logic as well. The first is if you think about marketing spend as a category, you can separate it into two buckets for the purposes of this first illustration. The first is like third party advertisers. The second is like creativity. The first is lower friction to do. It's mostly paid online advertising. I think if we looked at maybe series C plus technology startups, where most of their marketing spend is going is likely going to third party advertisers. I surmise that at the top of that list is probably the Googles, Metas, and LinkedIns of the world where it's paid online advertising. Maybe they're doing some offline out of home type stuff. This is easy, low friction marketing spend and it is easy to do. It's not creative. Everyone is doing it. It works. It's also the lowest ROI. It's a fairly efficient market at this point. Yes. You want to be spending, especially at the early stage, more of your marketing dollars on creative campaigns that aren't going to third party advertisers, that are things we can do that are different than anybody else is doing. The categories here are going to be things like gifting and events. And I'd even put the plane in that category. It's the things that no one else is doing and you want to try. They often require more operational complexity than the efficient market paid advertising marketing spend where most of our marketing dollars collectively are going. So that's maybe a principle: be creative, try new things, allocate some percentage of our spend towards that category. Yep. The second one, and I don't know that either is more influential or important, but they're sort of related. The second one is the vast majority of marketing dollars go to third party advertisers that in no way benefit the person or company that we are targeting to try and acquire as a customer. So these go to, and we do this too, by the way. So these go to the billboard companies, the Clear Channels and Out Fronts of the world that we are paying to put ads up around San Francisco. These go to, as I referenced, the Googles, the Metas, the LinkedIns, those sorts of things that are online paid advertising.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Very little marketing spend directly benefits the person that we are targeting to try and acquire as a customer. Early on, I would try and bucket a hundred percent of the marketing spend to something that benefits the person that we are targeting. And if you put yourself in the shoes of a prospective customer, you are a well, let's take Monaco as an example. You are a YC founder. Would you rather have Monaco or any company that is trying to acquire you as a customer spend money on LinkedIn ads that follow me around that message something to me that I
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Those sorts of things that are online paid advertising. Very little marketing spend directly benefits the person that we are targeting to try and acquire as a customer. Early on, I would try and bucket a hundred percent of the marketing spend actually to something that benefits the person that we are targeting. And if you put yourself in the shoes of a prospective customer, you are a, well, let's take Monaco as an example. You are a YC founder. Yep. Would you rather have Monaco or any company that is trying to acquire you as a customer spend money on LinkedIn ads that follow me around that message something to me that I scroll past and then billboards and whatever else the spend is going towards. Yeah. Or would you rather have Monaco send me a poker set for me? Some heavy clay poker chips. Totally. Exactly. That I founders play poker that we can use for our poker night as a company. Would you rather throw a poker tournament? We had, we give away a hundred thousand dollars, the Monaco Invitational. You were there. Number. Yeah. The final table gets all of it. Let's say there are a hundred people that start playing. We end with nine at the final table, eight of the nine finalists that received wires from Monaco were Monaco customers. Would you rather have Monaco as a customer of Monaco or somebody who you might be using Monaco? Would you rather have us throw this poker tournament that you come to have a hopefully a blast, make a bunch of money at the final table or again, pay Google for SEM, whatever stuff that's following me around when I go to different websites or Google searches. So use that as a thought exercise, allocate your marketing dollars. Otherwise be going towards very expensive and inefficient markets around this paid advertising. Do things that benefit the customer directly. We take it a step further. We spend a lot of money on customer marketing. And so what we want to create is a bit of a Monaco community through our customer base, but the most effective marketing spend that we have. And when I approve this going out, it is my favorite bill to approve of literally any bill that I approve at the company is the customer referral. It is the customer referral where we are paying somebody $2,000 because they told their friend that they love Monaco. That friend should check us out. That friend signs up and look, if we're doing a couple of grand a month, we're paying people like $10,000 to send us customers. It's the highest ROI use of what is effectively a marketing spend. Right. That is a customer acquisition cost. That's right. Yeah. That's awesome. So when we, so I mean, this is the air cover and then the other half of early startup go to market is the ground game. And maybe just to wrap this conversation, can you talk about your sitting, that was a very good illustration to me of if I'm a Monaco customer and I'm meeting with you, I can now immediately imagine how I'm going and thinking about doing that ground game side where I'm okay, now I also need to do the sales calls and build the early machine. And I'm a Series A or late seed stage founder with early go to market, but I've got a handful of reps or two reps or 10 reps or whatever. What are the principles you're teaching me or talking to me about as a sales org builder?
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. Well, first maybe it, a more, we've already used this word in a different context and more meta level. I think that there's something that is worth maybe touching on. It is how should we be applying AI to go to market? And then what does that give us leverage to focus our actual time and energy on, which is the thing that you just talked about, backward looking. I think most labor in the category of startup go to market was on what I would describe as workflows that today AI is actually better at doing. This is building your TAM, scoring your accounts, overlaying signals, finding buyers, writing messaging, all of this, fully online workflow or orchestration that agents are just better than any human in the world at. And so it is true that that is what Monaco does for you, all of this sort of non-customer facing sales related activities, building your database, scoring your accounts, finding leads, engaging with buyers after you finish a meeting, updating your pipeline, reminding you who you need to reach out to, all of these things. And what that does, whether it's Monaco or not, it allows you to spend your time on higher ROI, higher leverage activities. I think there are two categories. One is, and this is the thing that I spend all of my time doing, but it is meeting with customers. Um, today, especially if you were in B2B, buyers still want to talk to a person. They don't want to buy from an agent, a Jack Altman avatar that shows up to a call that is not really Jack. So there's no higher ROI on my time, maybe on, I would suspect our customers' time, then spending time with customers. And a lot of the things that we're able to leverage with AI allow us to spend far more of our time, whether you're a founder or a salesperson, on that human connection, developing relationships, customer facing. I think the second thing is this category of creative operationally complex campaigns. We've talked about a bunch of them. You could do a ChatGPT conversation where you're like, can you come up with some marketing ideas for me? I think it would be hard for that to result in the plane. As an example. I think that today AI will pattern match to things that have already been done because that is what AI is trained on. And so if you were trying to do something truly creative and innovative, I think it is more likely to surface inside the four walls of your company by doing the sort of ideation that I talked about, which is, let's come up with two ideas, each person multiply by four. That's eight ideas, put them on a whiteboard, talk through each of them, pick the two or three best ones that we're going to do. And Monaco and AI actually give us the ability to spend our time doing those things. That is how I spend my time with customers. It is less about the sort of how should you be meeting with customers. I do, how should you sell those
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] I think it is more likely to surface inside the four walls of your company by doing the ideation that I talked about, which is, let's come up with two ideas, each person multiply by four. That's eight ideas, put them on a whiteboard, talk through each of them, pick the two or three best ones that we're going to do. And Monaco and AI actually give us the ability to spend our time doing those things. That is how I spend my time with customers. It is less about how should you be meeting with customers? I do like, how should you sell those sorts of things, but it's coming up with creative campaign ideas. Count me in as one of the people that comes up with the ideas that we put on the whiteboard. Yeah. That's awesome. And then on that last piece, is there anything worth talking about in terms of how to actually sell or the practice of the time with the customers itself?
SPEAKER_00
I think there are two things that stand out, and then there's a laundry list below it. Right. But this is maybe the broader generic advice that I would have to certainly founders that are starting to sell their product and don't have a lot of go-to-market experience that I think have more impact than any other below these two.
SPEAKER_01
The first is, I would be fairly prescriptive about how to effectively buy your product. Because if you aren't educating the buyer on how to onboard, receive value and ultimately buy your product, the customer doesn't know how to buy your product. And so I would come in with a combination of agenda and opinion on here is the happy path from where we sit today. And if this resonates with you and is something that you think you can receive value around to where we are when you are fully onboarded and receiving value from the product, we can roadmap together here the different steps. Now, Mr. Customer, is there anything that I have left out of this process that is important to you that we should incorporate, whether it's security checks that you may need to go through or procurement that we want to introduce or legal review that I haven't included? We start with, at meeting two, we come with our prebuilt custom environment to show you exactly what it would look like on our product. If that resonates with you, we put you in a two week free trial of the product. During that trial, here are the outcomes that we're going to be driving towards. If we deliver on these outcomes, we onboard the rest of the team. Let's schedule meetings that align to these different steps. Then you and the customer aren't flying blind. I think the thing that happens more often than anything when I meet with founders is we have so many of these opportunities that are in purgatory where it's like, we pitched them. They said they liked it. We ended the call. I've followed up three times. They aren't really responding. And if they do respond, it's like, give me a week and I'll get back to you. A week passes, they don't get back to me. And it's because we haven't aligned on the happy path to receiving value from the product that we're selling. So I'll pause there. That's one of the two things.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Yeah. What's the other?
SPEAKER_01
The second thing is a little bit of an urgency driver where if you can create some form of FOMO, for lack of a better word, I think that much of sales is psychology. And so for many customers, what I'm about to articulate is true. We certainly never want to say anything that is untrue or misleading. But if we have a goal to onboard three customers to pilots in the month of July, what we articulate to a customer as part of maybe the first call when we are receiving feedback, like, yeah, this is actually really cool. I'd love to try it. What we say is something like we are onboarding three customers into our pilot program this month. Two of those spots are already spoken for. There is much interest in the third spot. If you would like to move forward with a pilot, if you could let me know, that would be really appreciated on my end. But also, I can't guarantee the spot if you don't speak for it today.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. And I think that's true because you can only onboard so many of the states.
SPEAKER_01
That's exactly right. But it does sort of force a decision and potentially drive some urgency. There is a psychological aspect to this where it's like, oh gosh, two thirds of the spots are already spoken for. I better speak up to get this thing that a lot of folks are already incredibly interested in. I assume also important in all of this is sort of just having a willingness to disqualify when you genuinely think that the product is not going to help the customer. And I think people can feel that. If you're like, hey, my goal here is not to sell you something that you don't need or want. My goal is to sell something that's going to be useful to you for years. And so if I don't think that that's going to be the case, I'm going to stop selling it to you.
SPEAKER_01
Man, when you say that it's interesting where my mind goes, which is something different than what you just said. But I think it is true that growth solves a lot of problems. I think an input to that is something like demand solves a lot of problems. And what you just articulated, I think is a symptom of not enough demand, which is where founders and salespeople are hanging on for dear life to the one guy that I pitched over the last couple days because they kind of seemed interested. But if you're like, I've got four more calls I should get to. And I think this is going to be painful. And by the way, I get paid also on you retaining. And so I don't think I want to sell this to you anymore. You can, Parker, I stole this from him. You can sort of swipe left. I've never been on one of the dating apps, but I think Tinder, you sort of swipe right if you like them and swipe left if you don't. And so an abundant pipeline allows you to only try to sell the product to people who need it.
SPEAKER_01
That's exactly right. And it's not, when I say that, it's not disrespectful to the customer or being inefficient about not following up. It's actually that you are focusing your resources on the people that are truly interested that will receive the most value from the product and not on the person that took a call that was like, said a lot of niceties. You can swipe left. I've never been on one of the dating apps, but I think Tinder, you swipe right if you like them and swipe left if you don't. And so an abundant pipeline allows you to only try to sell the product to people who need it.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] That's exactly right. And it's not, when I say that, it's not disrespectful to the customer or being inefficient about not following up. It's actually that you are focusing your resources on the people that are truly interested that will receive the most value from the product and not on the person that took a call that said a lot of niceties.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Yeah, but actually probably isn't interested. [SPEAKER_00] And by the way, a lot of it is not now, but let's come back to this. If you're like we have so many customers, if it's somebody who's like, I am just getting started. I don't really have product market fit yet. I don't have any reps. I'm interested. You might be like, sure if you want to buy it now, but it might be better if you bought this in six months once you're going a little bit.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] We're four months in, four or five months in, launched in February. And Monaco does an awesome job of continuing to engage with older customers on our behalf. But I cannot tell you, well, I can tell you the amount of times where I'm sitting there and resurrected from what effectively is the dead, a company that we demoed back in February that Monaco re-engages with on my behalf. Yeah. Response comes in. I see the response and it's like, I'm ready to go. And again, all of this stems from more demos in February. Right. And so I think lots of anecdotes of what a demand rich environment evolves to.
SPEAKER_01
Sam, this was awesome. I learned a bunch every time we talk. Thank you for doing this with me.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] You are the best. Thank you so much for partnering with me on Monaco. And it's an absolute pleasure to come on the show. So thanks for having me. like an asterisk. There aren't points for what your close rate was. Yeah. It's like, but you forgot to
SPEAKER_01
email this customer that otherwise could have closed, like $200,000 of ARR close this month. Like that, that is the thing that you see. Uh, and so like, of course you want to focus, the details matter. And of course you want to be constantly improving and giving feedback on all of those things, but solve for the outcome. Yeah, that's good. So what did you take then when you went to Brex? So like you had the Zenefits experience, it was both amazing and, you know, difficult in all these ways, which, you know, are, are well documented in the end. But, um, then Brex was like this amazing run.
SPEAKER_01
So you've now had the Ecosign experience. You've gotten the chance to be the leader from, you know, basically the get go at this next company. And now you're doing it again, you know, with, uh, the, the lead seat and the experience. So now, now what, what happens at Brex? Well, I'll, I'll, I'll touch on the, the two things that I think, um, actually the, the three things that influenced Brex's outcomes while I was there as much as anything. Um, two of which were true at Zenefits, one of which was actually a learning from Zenefits that we started far, um, later than we otherwise should have, that we were able to capitalize on early at, uh, Brex.
SPEAKER_01
Then we can kind of do the same thing if it's interesting for Monaco, because it's a different world today than it was in 2018. Uh, the three things, the first is like, um, recruiting and building the team, uh, at Zenefits, my first two hires were the top two sales reps at Ecosign, brought them with me. Their names are Matt Plank and Jamison Young. Matt Plank is now the CRO at Rippling. Jamison Young was CRO at Gong. He's now, uh, SVP of something important at Rippling in their sales organization. So these are like, um, two of the people that have actually influenced my, my personal
SPEAKER_01
success as much as anything. And then you can just imagine that sort of cascading from there. Uh, and so it, um, both Zenefits and Brex now at Monaco, like we just have an incredible sort of like NFL, uh, level of, of, uh, players in a sales organization. And I think, um, you know, we can attribute so much of the success of, uh, the go-to-market organizations of these companies to the people that exist within the go-to-market organizations. Um, I think the second thing, uh, we, we touched on it, so we don't have to go much deeper. Um, if you think about early days of Brex, one thing that we
SPEAKER_00
did, I think a very effective job of was going out of stealth to like everyone knowing and talking about Brex very, very quickly. Uh, and we did things like huge billboard campaigns and gifting campaigns and, um, fundraise announcements and so much of the stuff that like, maybe hopefully like Monaco is known
SPEAKER_01
a little bit. But you got really loud. I remember that. Really loud. Yeah. Um, and I think the idea was like we want as close, I don't know if we were as intentional as we are at Monaco today about this, but the idea is that like, we wanted close to 100% of our target market to have heard of Brex. Uh, and so then when we reach out to founder, finance leader, controller from Brex, you, you know who we are. Um, and hopefully you have like some positive brand association with that. Um, so we were very deliberate about that. And I think again, like the, the concept of creating this demand rich environment was something
SPEAKER_01
that we were very deliberate about early on at Brex. The third thing that I think, um, we did, gosh, over time, um, the, the like grade improves, but it's benefits. We get something like a D plus, um, from, from an early stage is like the influence of what would be considered today as revenue
SPEAKER_00
operations. Um, and it's just being very, uh, thoughtful about, um, well, here's maybe the easiest,
SPEAKER_01
uh, uh, illustration of this. Not all leads are created equal. Um, and revenue operations is like far more complex than this specific example, but I think this specific example helps highlight the influences it can have. Not all leads are created equal and there's going to be influence both on, um, like the type of company that the lead or opportunity that you are, uh, potentially selling to. There's also going to be influence at like the persona level. So who is the person that we are meeting with? One thing that we did at Zenefits, it was a mistake. Is we treated all leads or
SPEAKER_00
opportunities, two sides of the same coin as being equal. And so we had things like opportunity goals that was sort of the thing that like fed into what is the ultimate outcome of revenue that was wrong because what we started doing was getting more lower quality opportunities that converted at lower rates that led to less revenue. Um, and so over this like year of 2015, which was a more challenging year for, um, Zenefits than certainly the 2014 year. Um, I attribute a lot of that to the, like diminishing quality of leads and opportunities. Uh, and so the thing that we invested in early at
SPEAKER_00
Brex was really understanding like, what are the trends in the business and trying to pattern match
SPEAKER_01
to what are the companies and people that are most likely to convert, um, and applying that learning back to the sort of top of funnel and where are we pointing our missiles at targeting and acquiring these opportunities. Uh, and so then you get the best of all the worlds. You get a leadership environment with the right type of, uh, people and companies that you're trying to sell to. Yes. One of the things, um, that I'm curious about is for Brex, obviously you had, and this is true at all these companies, but Brex, there was this known highly competitive market with ramp. And I'm curious about, and I would say today more than ever, basically every founder is operating in
SPEAKER_01
an extremely competitive environment. Like I think it's felt this way for a long time, but like, it really feels that way, you know, like all good ideas have many, you know, you know, many contenders going at once. What did you learn about competition through these and like, how did you go to market through highly competitive markets? You know, it's interesting. Um, Echosign was certainly competitive with DocuSign. And so I think lots of learnings in terms of, uh, how to compete through that experience. Brex evolved into being hyper competitive with ramp. Yeah. But it started wide
SPEAKER_01
open. Interestingly, it was actually pretty greenfield. Yeah. Uh, when, when, for the majority of my time there, so my years at Brex were 2018 through like beginning of 2022. Uh, so 2018, 2019, even 2020, um, it was, um, mostly a one horse racers, a company called Divi that was acquired by build.com a little later. So there were other players in the space, but Brex was always like, um, the market leader. Um, and then I think dynamics of the market evolved, you know, starting in, let's call it 21, 21 and then certainly, uh, beyond. And I actually, what was, um, uh, not with the business, um, for, for much of that period of time. Uh, and then, um,
SPEAKER_01
uh, Peter has this, uh, uh, saying that's like fairly, Peter Thiel has a saying that's like fairly famous, um, that I think like is oftentimes to your point, hard to apply to enterprise software that is seemingly like inherently competitive. This competition is for, competition is for losers and, um, gosh, like, uh, uh, he, he's so of course he's right because he's always right. But,
SPEAKER_00
um, you know, experiencing, uh, Brex in what I would describe, you know, I said, I said this, uh, term, uh, previously as, as Greenfield environment, um, pretty smooth sailing. Yeah. Uh, Monaco today, we think of it as pretty Greenfield. Um, and so we are displacing incumbents, but aren't competitive today with many new entrants into the space. Um, we should just sort of like assume that that environment won't last forever, but we want to take as much advantage of it as fast as we possibly can to get like as close to a monopoly as we can. Um, and then evolve from there. And I think there
SPEAKER_00
probably are learnings from the time at Brex just in terms of, uh, focus and, and how quickly you want to move into different markets and segments and those sorts of things. Yep. Okay. And I want to come to that before we do after, so, you know, this like obviously extremely sort of like, um, this rich journey through sales after that. And before Monaco, you did spend time at Founders Fund and you have like a new, like a chapter to your life that was not about startup sales. So like, can you talk about what that was, that experience, what you learned, why'd you come back to what you're, you know, a new
SPEAKER_00
version of what you've been doing? Yeah. Well, look, um, I, I've, I, you and I have both talked about, um, Jason and Parker. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention something about like the learnings from Pedro Enrique Michael, who is CEO and now CEO at a company called Figure. Um, and so like equal sort of
SPEAKER_01
parts inspiration and then, um, uh, let's see gratitude for, for the influence that they've had on my career as well. And again, just like every single time I have been so fortunate in surrounding myself with the greatest people on earth, you know, like you go from Jason to Parker to, uh, uh, Pedro Enrique Michael, and then we get to, uh, Founders Fund, right. And it's like, you've had folks on this, uh, many of the folks on the show, we're talking about Brian, uh, prior to, to starting the recording, but gosh, um, Peter, Brian, Trey, everyone is just like exceptional there. So let's see, I think, um, I, I can get a little bit personal on, on like my mindset after,
SPEAKER_01
uh, Rex. Yeah. Um, so this is late 21, early 22. Um, I'm reaching like my four year, uh, uh, sort of tenure at Brex. COVID. It is COVID. I'm in Miami. Yeah. Uh, so I, I, I've moved to Miami at this point. And, um, you know, I, I just felt like for the first time in my career, um, I, I felt satisfied, which is very, um, it sounds positive. It's actually bad. Um, I, I felt like sort of satisfied with what I had accomplished in this like category or world of technology sales. And, you know, I could have, let's make the assumption that I was leaving Brex. Uh, I could have done something like go, um,
SPEAKER_01
either early stage and maybe like a more strategic title or something, but I would effectively lead, go to market at a company. Yeah. Just like definitionally the probability of joining an earlier stage company that has a Brex like outcome. You know, we were a 12 and a half billion dollar company when I left, which is like definitionally low. And it's like, even if you did, it's like, it was kind of the same with just a bigger number. I was, I wasn't motivated to, to do it. Um, like I wanted a new challenge. Um, you know, I alluded to, uh, my brother, Brian very early on in this sort of like career arc that, uh, Brian was out in,
SPEAKER_00
in San Francisco doing technology sales. And I moved out here. Brian at the time had transitioned. He was a CRO at a bunch of, really incredible businesses. And then he was a VC at Sutter Hill. I mean, so I, I had seen him make
SPEAKER_01
this transition as, you know, like former sales leader. And, um, I was in Miami. Uh, I got to know
SPEAKER_00
Keith and Founders Fund had a Miami office and, and I made the decision that I wanted to get into venture. And gosh, if I had like the opportunity to join, uh, one of the greatest venture capital firms in the history of the world, I'd sort of be silly to not like take advantage of that. And so,
SPEAKER_01
uh, mid late 2022, I joined Founders Fund. Um, and, uh, like couldn't be more grateful for the experience and the people in the firm are just like truly exceptional. No surprise to, to anybody that's potentially listening to this. Um, we weren't deploying a lot of capital at the time. This is like 22, 23. Yeah. Um, and I, I think like I'm at the time I'm Miami based VC. Um, it was a little fish out of water. Uh, and so I don't know, you know, I talked about like,
SPEAKER_00
um, I did this thing at EchoSign and then beyond that I could just tell, like, this is a good fit. Yeah. Um, I don't know, certainly being in Miami, but I don't know that like being in VC,
SPEAKER_01
it felt like the right fit. Um, one of the things that Founders Fund has a track record of doing that I gravitated towards is incubating companies. Uh, and so certainly like Peter, the most famous of them with Palantir and then Trey with Andurl. And, um, there's a bunch of folks that have, uh, Scott with General Matter and Valiant with Bard and more. Um, and so, uh, uh, my brother who I alluded to at Sutter Hill, he took this model to human capital. We decided to co-incubate a company that evolved into Monaco. Um, and, uh, through that process, I was sort of gravitating far more towards like, what is the right fit? Um, it's building Monaco and not being Miami based VC.
SPEAKER_01
I, I asked you, um, the other day, just like, uh, about like, you know, I don't even remember why, but it was about like, you know, interest outside of work. And you were kind of saying like, well, to be honest, I don't really have hobbies right now. I'm just working a lot. But you're like, you know, I did have them in Miami and, um, yeah. Was that like, uh, it, it feels to me almost like
SPEAKER_00
you had this like very busy career. It almost feels like you took a breather and then you're like,
SPEAKER_01
I'm going back into the coal mines. Potentially unintentionally. I mean, meaning the take a breather. Uh, I think, um, uh, what you said is, is exactly correct. Uh, and, um, this, this may be like, it could be received negatively, meaning, uh, today I don't
SPEAKER_00
have many hobbies. And, um, if I'm not literally in the office, I'm thinking about Monaco and doing
SPEAKER_01
something sort of related to the business. I think it's very lucky to be so immersed in something that you don't have any hobbies. I think that's like a blessing. Yeah, no, it was, it was, it was certainly a deliberate decision. Like, like I knew that, that this was what I was signing up for when I made the decision. Uh, and to your point, yeah, when I was in Miami, uh, gosh, I was in really good shape. Uh,
SPEAKER_00
and maybe that's like correlated both with the place and, uh, the, the like flexibility of the job or something like that. Um, I was on the water a lot. Uh, there, there were plenty of hobbies, um, that existed. And when I went all in on Monaco, you know, I moved back to San Francisco, I live right by the office. It is, um, a high contrast chapter to chapter though. It is, it is, um, uh, uh, 180, like, like, um, fairly stark contrast. Uh, and again, it was deliberate and thus far I'm like very happy with the decision. I'm loving this. It's awesome. Okay. So let's talk about Monaco. So I guess, um, so this is why you started,
SPEAKER_00
like, why this company, like, why, why was this the one that you're like, I mean, I guess it's a little self-evident, but like what was in your head where you're just like, you know, this, this is gonna be what I'm gonna do. Uh, it wasn't part of the plan. Um, meaning I had joined Founders Fund to be AVC. I didn't join Founders Fund thinking I was gonna start a company, move to San Francisco, actually become co-founder, CEO of the Founders Fund. Right. Um, and so, uh, uh, started this company.
SPEAKER_01
It like was just pulling me, um, and felt very much like this, this is so obviously what I should be doing in my calling. Um, so I think part of it was, uh, uh, just the fit for me. And I think maybe the best way of articulating that is something like, um, there's only one type of, uh, technology company I'm qualified to be the founder of, and it is a sales or go-to-market technology company. There is this other thing that is highly influential and that is timing. Uh, and we are in the sort of early innings of this platform shift, um, that is AI. Um, and I do think that there will be a new market
SPEAKER_01
leader that emerges in the category that we are building in, which is go-to-market or sales technology. Yeah. It's like this, um, this paradigm, you know, in some ways seems to be like, I guess, going back to cloud, it was like, you know, I guess we, neither of us were really working at the beginning of that shift, but it was maybe we're, we're students of history though, or something. And it's like, you can see that basically it's like, there are all these on-prem companies. Yes. And if you started a cloud company at the right time, it was just really hard for those old companies to turn the boats quick enough to come do what you were doing. And it was just a genuinely
SPEAKER_01
better offering for customers. And so it just dominated and in just like category after category, like the cloud version just won and the old companies couldn't get there and the customers just preferred it and bam. And it seems like in AI, there's a version of this happening now where it's going from selling tools to selling the work and it's just dominant to customers and the old companies can't seem to catch up. I think you articulated it perfectly. These platform shifts rhyme where Siebel, that was maybe the incumbent or market leader in this category that Monaco is building in,
SPEAKER_01
which is go-to-market or sales, was the market leader. There was nothing inherently wrong with the business. In fact, like one of the most incredible businesses at the time in history. The same thing is true with the market leader today, which is Salesforce. Just incredible business. And I think that they are, any market leader, and you can pattern match to other functions within enterprise software, they're faced with an innovator's dilemma where they have an existing set of customers customers on a platform that was architected pre-AI. And so they can either continue serving the needs of
SPEAKER_01
those customers and focusing on where they are generating revenue and building on top of this existing platform, or they can disrupt themselves. And seemingly every time businesses are faced with this innovator's dilemma during a platform shift, they gravitate towards the former, which I think for us equates to opportunity, where we can... And by the way, I think like what Salesforce and what other companies are doing, they are overlaying AI on top of a pre-AI system architected platform, which is better than no AI, but less good than being truly AI native, which is what a company like Monaco is.
SPEAKER_01
Yes. And so for us, we can go after a sort of narrow segment of the market today, which is startups.
SPEAKER_00
And if you think about Salesforce's revenue, how much of Salesforce's revenue is concentrated in tech or early stage technology startups? Less than 1%. Certainly less than 1%. And so we can go after that market, we can build a better platform, we can build a platform that's truly AI native, we can get, you know,
SPEAKER_01
close to our monopoly market share there. Yeah. And then we start to move up market and we start to organically expand outside of startups and hopefully eventually evolve into the market leader. But whether it's us or somebody else, it seems a foregone conclusion that the category leader, the platform of record in sales in let's call it five years will be a platform that is architected with AI in mind and not one that was architected 20 years prior. You had a choice to make, which was a choice. Obviously what you're selling is like work and outcomes and you're selling sort of like revenue in some sense. You chose to also be a system of record. You didn't have to do that,
SPEAKER_01
but you made that deliberate choice. I think to the extent that you won't integrate with the system of record, even though you obviously could, you know, you can imagine a world where you chose to do that. Most still. Many other companies, right. Because it's easier to say, look, I'm not going to try to, you know, be your HubSpot, but I'm going to give you these tools that let you get more revenue and set up all these meetings and do all the, you know, accoutrements around the CRM. You've chosen to say, do you want to work with Monaco? We're the CRM. Why did you choose that? That's right. Well, several reasons. I think there are two categories of companies that are
SPEAKER_01
sales products. There are system of record companies. Today, that is a CRM. We actually believe that forward looking, this like concept or category of a CRM will evolve into something of the past. We are more orienting around outcomes. And so we think that what today is this like system of record that manifests as a database CRM eventually becomes a revenue automation platform that's actually oriented around outcomes and not things like storing data. So we believe that there is like a new type of company that emerges from this that is a system of record, but doesn't look like the
SPEAKER_01
existing systems of record. What does it mean to be the system of record? If not just like a database? What is it? It is, well, look, HubSpot is appropriately named. It is the hub. Everything orchestrates from the system of record. Yes, because it's the source of truth of data. And that's right. And you asked a question like, why did you make this decision? Well, if we, if we probably, if we bucket these company types or products into two categories, there's system of record and there's point solutions. Point solutions are layers on top of what today is a CRM system of record.
SPEAKER_01
If we think about the outcomes of those types of businesses backward looking, we have market leaders like Salesforce that today are 120 plus billion dollar companies just a few months ago are significantly larger than that. And then several others that are actually like quite large businesses. If we think about the category of point solutions that integrate to these systems of record, there are some that that experience some early revenue growth and early maybe marks of low to mid single digit billion dollar valuations. But none of them historically speaking have realized generational technology company outcomes.
SPEAKER_01
We're not motivated by being a point solution. We're not motivated by an outcome, which again, like a a really exciting outcome for those that experience. We want a shot. We want a shot at being a market leader in the one of the largest categories of enterprise software that we think will actually evolve from here. If you think about Salesforce and maybe enterprise software companies today broadly, their market caps are predicated on IT budget. We are disrupting labor. Yeah, that's right. And so the future market leader has both that IT budget, but it also has the labor budget. Monaco is way more
SPEAKER_01
expensive than that sort of legacy system of record products because we are doing the labor on behalf of our customers. Which by the way is the story of all the AI native companies is it's true. It's both dramatically more expensive in some sense and it's also dramatically cheaper in another sense than what you would be doing alternatively to get the same outcome. That's exactly right. And people, not only are customers willing to pay, this is what they want. The other, you asked a question that maybe I want to touch on because I think it could be insightful or maybe helpful for other founders
SPEAKER_01
that are starting businesses today. There's an application of AI in Monaco-like products that is seemingly obvious, which is we are AI native. We just talked about it. It's the labor disruption. We are using agents and compute to replace workflows that founders and salespeople would otherwise be doing themselves. And it is more expensive when a human does it. And it actually produces worse
SPEAKER_00
outcomes when a human does it. The thing that I think is like less obvious in terms of an application of AI that we've been very deliberate about, certainly intentional from the very early days, the cost of building software is trending to zero. And so we want to take on as much scope as we possibly can, starting with the system of record, but also displacing all of these point solutions that we believe are actually features of a broader platform and not independent product lines or independent businesses in many cases. And so, By the way, this extreme breadth focus was obviously sort of, you know, like Parker was kind of like one of the
SPEAKER_00
like early canonical examples of like the, what a software business really is at the end of the day is like these customer relationships that allow you to extremely efficiently build and sell more products to
SPEAKER_01
them. And you, you know, the customer just gets a straight up better experience because the data is tied together. It ends up being cheaper for them in summation. You don't have to have all these different vendors, like all these things. It seems like now with AI, you should actually take that to an extreme degree. The compound startup, maybe phrase or terminology that I think Parker made famous. Yes. And now it's like that should go like exponentially far.
SPEAKER_00
Well, and I think Parker to his credit was probably ahead of his time on this, right? Because Parker started uh, uh, rippling in something like 2016. Um, Zinefits was maybe less of a compound startup, uh, than rippling was in, in rippling is more of a compound startup. I think that, um, today, and, and
SPEAKER_01
I don't know like the, the exact sort of, uh, uh, math equation here, but we can build, uh, software. It's something like 10 times faster than we could just a few years ago. If that is true today, that is going to be true a few years from now where we can build software 10 times faster than we can today. And so we want to go after as much sort of breadth of what we can do in the platform with the assumption that AI is going to enable us to build a product far faster. Uh, and, and that is what customers want. Customers want to come to one platform. The outcomes are actually better because
SPEAKER_01
you don't have data in a bunch of different silos, um, the system of record, the thing that does your call recording, the thing that does your outbound, the thing that builds your database is far more difficult to overlay an agent on top of this arbitrary set of tools with data silos than it is a single platform and source of truth that both has all of your data, but also takes all of your actions inside of the same tool. Totally. So when you think about, um, what you're selling to customers in some sense, I guess you're kind of selling well-wrapped tokens that can do all these different
SPEAKER_01
things, but you're kind of selling intelligence to the customer at the end of the day. So have you thought about like, you know, how, or I know you have, how, how have you thought about what this means in terms of the way you price the longterm of what your cost structure is going to be and like what that all looks like from an economics perspective? Cause it's obviously very different than build software and, you know, sell it for, you know, per user per month kind of situation.
SPEAKER_00
For sure. Yeah. Well, um, two things come to mind. Uh, one is Monaco and we at Monaco are very opinionated.
SPEAKER_01
Um, I think that there are, um, certain applications of, uh, AI and maybe applied to different functions where it's largely like ones and zeros. And what I mean by that is like, um, support is close to this, where you're like driving towards an outcome, which is a resolution to somebody's support ticket. Right. Um, it's even more pronounced, I think in the world of like finance and accounting, where there's like an actual number that there is like a real one, zero type number that is the calculation of everything that, um, comes before it. I think sales is like, we start with finance,
SPEAKER_01
we move to support, we, um, uh, progress to sales. Um, there's like far more subjectivity that goes into sales. Um, then there is this sort of like, um, uh, black and white binary outcome that is true in the world of finance. And so we are very opinionated in things like, uh, how do we determine which types of companies to reach out to and when to reach out to these companies? And what are the signals that we're leveraging and how does that be incorporated into messaging and these things that, um, many of our customers today, um, just don't have experience doing right. Um, and so
SPEAKER_01
then, uh, that is the first thing that comes to mind is like the opinionated nature of the product. Yes. Um, and then meaning that you're helping, it's funny, cause as you were saying that, I was like, I didn't know what you're talking about. You're talking about both. It's both about who you're reaching out to, but it's also then, you know, implied is who your customers ought to be
SPEAKER_00
reaching out to and all of that, you know, everything you're talking about is that kind of like what you're selling to the customers. Yeah. Well, we, we're certainly running on Monaco and yes, I think customers, um, hopefully benefit from the opinionated nature, uh, of the platform itself in ways that, um, if you think about our customer, most of them are startup seed, series A. Um, they, they don't as founders oftentimes have sort of deep go to market experience. Um, and so we can take much of the, the sort of like, uh, decisions and strategy, which is a word that I don't hate, but I, I don't like, but I, I, um, can't think of a better
SPEAKER_00
one right now, um, sort of off of their plate. Uh, and then we enable them to do the things that are super high leverage on their time. Things like meeting with customers, coming up with creative campaigns that today AI is less good at. Um, but if you think about the workflows
SPEAKER_01
that I just described, building a database, overlaying signals, finding buyers, coming up with messaging, these are things that Monaco is certainly better than me at, um, and arguably better than, um, just humans. Uh, and so then you can sort of outsource this thing to free up your time, to do the, the highest ROI use of your time in a sort of like world of go to market, which is like customer facing. Uh, and then you asked a question on pricing. Uh, we are, our pricing is correlated towards outcomes. Outcomes are relatively objective when it comes to, uh, Monaco. Now like the ultimate
SPEAKER_01
outcome or, excuse me, outcomes are relatively objective when it comes to the category of like go to market or sales. It's revenue. How much revenue are you generating? Yep. There are some inputs. These are things like meetings and conversion rates. Um, and so we, we rigorously track towards the ultimate outcome of revenue, the inputs of, are we generating meetings? Are we improving conversion rates? And our pricing is aligned with how much a customer is using the platform. Um, and that should be highly correlated with the impact or benefit that a customer is receiving from the
SPEAKER_01
platform. Um, that is like fairly easily measurable. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So I would love to unpack kind of the go to market strategy you've had so far you launched like February. So you just call it four or five months ago. And we talked about this with Brex, but definitely you like you flipped a bit and like everything, everything was loud. So like, what I'm curious about is, can you sort of, um, share what was
SPEAKER_00
in your head when you were like, okay, it's time to launch. We're going to be loud. Here's the things
SPEAKER_01
we're going to do to sort of like get this whole brand going. Yes. Uh, I think, um, I'll describe our approach. Um, it was the right approach for us. Um, I'll also sort of caveat with a couple things that, uh, I think are worth calling out that, um, maybe like advantages that we have as a business that don't necessarily apply to every startup. Um, we wanted to take the approach of operating in stealth, um, through this like design customer phase, uh, and then have a big sort of shotgun style launch, which we did back in February, um, where we went from almost a definitionally
SPEAKER_01
unknown company. Nobody had, uh, like LinkedIn Monaco up, um, our website said coming soon or some version of that. Um, we certainly spent $0 on marketing up until the day that we launched. Uh, and the, the, the, like reason that we wanted to take that approach is, um, I, again, I haven't come up with a better analogy for it than this, which is like the boiling frog thing where you can imagine if you are the frog and like the, you're in the pot and like the water is heating up and you like, don't totally notice it. Well, we, we can apply that to like, if you do marketing campaigns over
SPEAKER_01
a two year period, um, and you like, as a consumer, you may see like bits and pieces of somebody's marketing campaign here and there. And like, yeah, I've maybe heard of this company, but like, I heard about them a long time ago and they like did this thing. Um, you can imagine the sort of like, um, psychological impact of that relative to, um, like dropping the frog in the boiling water, which is like, Oh my gosh, we are seeing Monaco everywhere. All of a sudden, like I see the plane and I see the billboards and I see the poker tournaments. And you're, you're, you're, uh, your plan and your billboard gave no explanation of what Monaco was like. It just said Monaco. And
SPEAKER_00
then like the billboards had like a big dollar sign, which I thought was hilarious. And I loved it,
SPEAKER_01
but like, you didn't say, you know, new AI sales platform, you know, you, you just were like Monaco. Yeah. We benefit from having a geographically concentrated target market. Uh, so we're selling to startups. You and I are sitting here in San Francisco. Many of our customers are also in San Francisco. So if we were selling to HVAC companies, um, we shouldn't be flying planes
SPEAKER_00
around San Francisco or putting billboards up around San Francisco, because they're like, um, fairly well distributed and not highly concentrated. So, um, uh, there are like maybe
SPEAKER_01
two aspects that, um, we were deliberate about solving for, um, one is brand awareness. That's the plane, that's the billboards, uh, and, and more. Um, when we do think that there may be like two impacts of brand awareness. The first is we do a lot of outbound. Monaco does our up on for us. When we reach out to a company that is graduating YC, reach out to the founder, they receive the message from me. Um, they have heard of Monaco because they've seen the plan, whatever, like the thing is the likelihood that they respond to that, uh, outbound message is exponentially higher than if they didn't know me, if they didn't know the business. So, um,
SPEAKER_01
like the brand awareness is something that we're very deliberate about. There's a second application of that, which is, um, when they take the meeting, they are far more likely to convert because there is comfort in, um, like knowing and understanding a brand, like the one that we are hopefully creating around ourselves in ways that, uh, maybe other folks, um, aren't deliberate about and haven't, uh, uh, created for themselves. The other type of marketing that we're delivered about is like demand gen. This is very targeted. This is, um, sending people, the poker sets that, uh, we send
SPEAKER_01
to founders when they graduate YC or something like this, uh, and hosting the poker tournaments and inviting specific founders to that poker tournament with the expectation that that specific founder is going to be somebody that we convert. So we solve for both. Um, uh, I, I can talk about maybe like a couple of marketing principles that are, uh, things that we apply to marketing, but yeah, I love that. Cause you know, like one of the things I often think, I don't think this applies to every startup, obviously, or I know it doesn't apply to every startup, but I think there are many
SPEAKER_01
startups that could be investing much harder in their brand that, uh, that don't. And it's hard because it's like, well, if I do this demand gen campaign, it turns into revenue. And if I do this brand thing, or, you know, I spend this money on these sort of like brand campaigns, it's like not going to show up. So it's hard to, but it just seems like a missed opportunity for so many people. Yes. I, um, I think everyone should do this in their own, um, specific approach. Uh, what Monaco is doing isn't relevant to most startups. We can do it because we sell to startups, the geographic
SPEAKER_01
concentration, again, most startups don't sell to it. But there's a version of it for almost everybody. I think there's a process that every company should follow. Um, and, and then I can talk about like maybe, maybe a couple of principles in case they're helpful. Uh, there is a process which like most companies do not follow. You've got to try stuff. Like, like you just have to, um, just do stuff. Um, and you can't be afraid to fail. Um, and I do think that most companies here, they, they just don't really do anything. Um, I, I, I do think that on this point, it's, um, a lot of people
SPEAKER_01
are afraid of the embarrassment of, you know, a brand campaign that failed or some marketing or
SPEAKER_00
sales effort that just like looked stupid and didn't land. And that's actually, that is a mo that's
SPEAKER_01
psychologically harder than just like building product or doing other things that are not publicly embarrassing. I think there are two things. I think there's one thing that is like, I'm not good at this. So I'm an engine, not me personally. I'm saying like putting myself in the founder, I'm an engineer. I build product. Um, I like, I'm going to index on the thing that I'm very good at. I don't know how to do like a marketing campaign, which is funny. You know, our CTO at my co-founder, Eric at Lattice came up with by far our best billboard, which was like investing your people,
SPEAKER_01
not crypto during 20, and that just like landed super hard and that engineer. Yeah. Uh, so I'm not, I'm bad at this. So I'm not experienced this or whatever. Yes. I don't want to spend the money. I'm worried about like, you know, lighting the money on fire or something like that. I think those are the two variables that probably lead more towards, um, uh, stagnation or just like lack of, uh, effort in this category. The reality is like, um, no one starts being an expert at this stuff. You just got to like try stuff and learn. Um, and I actually spend a lot of time with our customers doing exactly this. Like my time I spend
SPEAKER_01
customer facing all day. Let's come up with some cool campaigns that we can run for your business. Yeah. Uh, and just ideating on this. And I think that's hopefully a high ROI to our customers.
SPEAKER_00
Um, and you can do inexpensive campaigns. Uh, like one, you don't have to be an expert at this too. Um, there are campaigns that are inexpensive. I'll give an example. These like poker sets that we send to founders that say Monaco casino, they're on brand that are prefab because Monaco has a casino. They're like 110 bucks. Um, you can do a test, send this to 50 people. You're spending $5,000. It's like, um, no, no, like if you were truly bootstrapped, uh, and have like, you know, no dollars to spend it. Sure. You, you can't do the like $5,000. Um, but you can still do stuff.
SPEAKER_00
There's always stuff. There's always stuff you can do. Uh, and, um, you don't have to break the bank to do it. So, um, you run a process. Here's what we do internally in case it's helpful for others. Um, we run a process, um, at least once a month, we want to have like a big, splashy marketing campaign that we are trying, get a handful of people in the company, uh, define them as like the marketing committee or whatever it is. They don't have to be marketing folks. It can
SPEAKER_01
just be you and your co-founder. If you're just two people come up with a few ideas, put them on the whiteboard and just do it. Um, just like, uh, jump, don't be afraid to fail. Try something. If it doesn't work, chalk it up as a win because you learned and you're going to try something new that, um, is going to be more effective or something like that. But you do want to have like a bit of process around this where every single month you're trying at least one or two different things that, um, are in this like category of marketing,
SPEAKER_00
brand awareness, demand gen, however we want to frame it. Uh, and I think we really want to be, um, contrarian is, is maybe like not the right application of that word, but we do want to be creative, new stuff, new stuff. Like your plane. The plane was awesome. Can you talk about the plane? Yes. I feel like there might be one flying right, right now. We, um,
SPEAKER_01
there, there, there isn't, we took it down. We'll put it back up at some point. Uh, I think like probably reached diminishing returns or something over time, but it was like, yeah, anyway, go ahead. Yeah. We, we were at SASTR, which is, um, Jason Lemkin's conference, it's awesome conference. Uh, and we knew that there would be like a large contingency or concentration of people at this event down in San Mateo. And so, um, we, we, we didn't think this was like that creative. In fact, it wasn't that creative in that there was at least one, maybe two other planes flying at the same event.
SPEAKER_01
Um, and so we had the banner trailing the Monaco plane at this conference. I don't know what we paid. Let's call it like a couple thousand bucks to make the banner. Yeah. And then, um, I was surprised at how relatively inexpensive putting this plane in the air for many hours during the conference was, which is like 6,000 bucks a day. And you know, we do it for two or three days at the conference. Um, and I was just sort of thinking like, we already have the banner. Um, we already know like the cost of flying this thing. Yeah. Uh, do you guys like, I haven't really seen these in like San
SPEAKER_01
Francisco proper. Do you guys, can you guys fly over the city? And part of my assumption was like,
SPEAKER_00
there are air restrictions that like you couldn't fly in and around the city or whatever. And they were
SPEAKER_01
like, yeah, we can totally do it. And so I was like, you know, starting to do the math on this thing. And it was like 6,000 bucks a day, pay for 10 days, 60 grand. We have a lot of billboards. Some of our billboards are significantly more expensive than 60 grand. This is one of those that's like, it's a $60,000 learning. Like, like the worst case scenario, we fly this thing around.
SPEAKER_00
It doesn't totally work. We like learn from it and we don't do it again. Um, it worked. So, uh, we, you know, both like messages on my phone, people posting on LinkedIn and Twitter and everywhere else. Uh, it was, it was, it was sort of everywhere. And so we kept it up for a little bit longer. Uh, and so it was one of those things that was like just an evolution of something that we had tried at the conference. Let's like, try it in the city. It worked in the city. We learned from it. We'll put it up again when we do a big like announcement that we have coming up. Yeah. You know, it's interesting, like history kind of, right. I'm sure you've read Behind the Cloud,
SPEAKER_01
the mark, you know, the, the early Salesforce book from Benioff. And like, one of the things that like, uh, struck me was like early Salesforce did a lot of really creative marketing. They did. Like really creative. And like, some of it was that the message was created, like the no software thing. It's like, well, you know, that's interesting. You know, there was a lot there and just like the way they even did like customer dinners, you know, I think was like kind of creative and, you know, it's like all became sort of like tried at some point, but like being the first to do
SPEAKER_01
a good go to market idea is worth a lot. It seems like. I think they're, um, the one that I understand as much as any was like the, the protest. It may be like a big Siebel or Oracle conference where it was like the no software, um, which I think was, uh, really smart. Yeah. So like when you're thinking about this, are you, are you like, I'm going to do new activities and then I'm going to put them on some back burner or are you like, I just have to always be like, do these things stack and build over time? Or are you just like, I gotta always have a new thing. There are two things that I am thinking
SPEAKER_01
about, which maybe like go back to, I said, maybe some marketing principles that we try and apply that I think, um, my guidance to any customer that I'm working with is like, you should try and apply the same logic as well. Um, the, the first is if you think about marketing spend as a category, you can sort of separate it into, um, two buckets for the purposes of this first illustration, then we'll do it, um, separately for the second illustration. The first is like third party advertisers. Um, in the first is like, in the second is like creativity. Uh, the first is like, it's oftentimes,
SPEAKER_00
um, lower friction to do. Um, it's mostly paid online advertising. I think if we looked at maybe like series C plus technology startups, where is most of their marketing spend going is likely going to third party advertisers. And I, I surmise like at the top of that list is probably like the Google's Meta's LinkedIn's of the world where it's paid online advertising. Maybe they're doing some like offline out of home type stuff. This is like easy, low friction marketing spend and it is easy to do. It's not creative. Everyone is doing it. Um, it works. It's also like the lowest ROI. It's like a
SPEAKER_00
fairly efficient market at this point. Yes. You want to be spending, especially at the early stage, you want to be spending more of your marketing dollars on creative campaigns that aren't going to third party advertisers that are these like, what can we do that are different than anybody else is doing? The categories here are going to be things like gifting and events. And you know, I'd even put the plane in that category. Um, it's the things that like no one else is doing and you want to try. They oftentimes require more operational complexity than do the like efficient market paid advertising,
SPEAKER_00
marketing spend where most of our marketing dollars collectively are going. So that's like, maybe a principle, be creative, try new things, allocate some percentage of our spend towards that category. Yep. The second one, and I don't know that like either, uh, is more influential or important, but, um, they're sort of related. The second one is like the vast majority of marketing dollars go to
SPEAKER_01
third party advertisers that in no way benefit the, um, person or company that we are targeting to try and acquire as a customer. So these go to, and we do this too, by the way. So, um, these go to the billboard, uh, companies, the, the clear channels and out fronts of the world that we are paying to put ads, uh, up around San Francisco. These go to, as I, I referenced the Googles, the Metas, the LinkedIns, um, those sorts of things that are online paid advertising. Very little marketing spend directly benefits the person that we are targeting to try and acquire as a customer. Um, early on, I would try and bucket like a hundred percent of the marketing spend
SPEAKER_01
actually to something that benefits the person that we are targeting. And if you put yourself in the shoes of a prospective customer, you are a, um, well, let's take Monaco as an example. You are a YC founder. Yep. Would you rather have Monaco or any company that is trying to acquire you as a customer spend money on like LinkedIn ads that follow me around that like message something to me that I sort of scroll past and then billboards and whatever else the spend is going towards. Yeah. Or would you rather have Monaco send me a like poker set for me to... Some like heavy clay poker chips.
SPEAKER_01
Totally. Exactly. Like that I founders play poker that like we can use for our poker night as a company. Would you rather throw like a poker tournament? Um, we had, we give away a hundred thousand dollars, the Monaco Invitational. You were there. Number. Yeah. Um, the final table gets all of it. Yeah. Let's say there are a hundred people that start playing. We, we end with nine at the final table, eight of the nine, um, uh, finalists that received wires from Monaco were Monaco customers. Would you rather have Monaco as a customer of Monaco or somebody who you might, who might be using
SPEAKER_01
Monaco? Would you rather have us throw this poker tournament that you come to have a, hopefully a blast, make like a bunch of money at the final table or again, like pay Google for like the SEM, whatever stuff that's like following me around when I go to different, uh, either websites or Google searches. So, um, uh, use that as like a bit of a thought exercise, allocate your marketing dollars. Do it. Otherwise be going towards very expensive and efficient markets around this paid advertising. Do things that benefit the customer directly. We take it a step further. We spend a lot of money on
SPEAKER_01
customer marketing. Um, and so what we want to create, um, is like a bit of a Monaco community, um, through our customer base, but the, the, like the most effective, um, marketing spend that we have. And when I like approve this going out, it is like my favorite bill to approve of literally any bill that I approve at the company is the like referral. It is the like customer referral where we are paying somebody $2,000 because they told their friend that they love Monaco. That friend should check us out. That friend signs up and look, if we're doing a couple of grand a month, um, we're paying people
SPEAKER_01
like $10,000 to send us customers. It's like the, the highest ROI use of what is effectively a marketing spend. Right. That is a customer acquisition cost. That's right. Yeah. That's awesome. So, um, when we, uh, so, I mean, I guess this is the like kind of air cover and then the other half, I guess, of early startup go to market is like the ground game. And, uh, maybe just to wrap, uh, you know, uh, this conversation, can you talk about your sitting, like, that was like a very good illustration to me of like, if I'm like a Monaco customer, like, and I'm meeting with you, like,
SPEAKER_01
I can now like immediately imagine how I'm going and thinking about doing, doing that the ground game
SPEAKER_00
side where I'm like, okay, now I also need to do the sales calls and build the early machine. And I'm like a series a or late seed stage founder with early go to market, but I've got like, you know, a handful of reps or two reps or 10 reps or whatever. What are like the principles you're teaching me or talking to me about as, you know, uh, you know, a sales org, you know, builder? Yeah. Well, first maybe, um, it, it, a more, we, we've already used this word in a different context and more like meta level. Um, uh, I, I think that there's, there's something that, um, is worth maybe
SPEAKER_00
touching on. It is like, how should we be applying AI to go to market? And then what does that give us leverage to like focus our actual time and energy on, which is the thing that you just talked about, um, backward looking, uh, I think most labor, um, in the sort of like category of startup go to market was on what I would describe as workflows that today AI is actually better at doing. This is like building your TAM, scoring your accounts, overlaying signals, finding buyers, writing messaging, all of this, like fully online workflow or orchestration that agents are just better than
SPEAKER_00
any human in the world at. And so it is, it is true that that is like what Monaco does for you, all of this sort of like, um, non customer facing sales related activities, building your database, scoring your accounts, um, finding leads, engaging with buyers after you finish a meeting, updating your pipeline, reminding you who you need to reach out to all of these things. And what that does, whether it's Monaco or not, it allows you to spend your time on higher ROI, higher leverage activities. I think there are two categories. One is, and this is the thing that I spend all of my time doing,
SPEAKER_00
but it is, um, meeting with customers. Um, today, uh, especially if you were in like B2B,
SPEAKER_01
buyers still want to talk to a person. They don't want to, um, buy from an agent, a like, you know, Jack Altman avatar that shows up to a call that is like, not really Jack. Um, so, uh, uh, there's no higher ROI on my time, maybe on, uh, I would suspect our customers time, then, um, spending time with customers. And a lot of the things that we're able to leverage with AI, um, allow us to spend far more of our time, whether you're a founder or a salesperson on that, um, human connection, developing relationships, customer facing. I think the second thing is this category of, um, creative operationally complex campaigns. Um, we've talked about a bunch of them.
SPEAKER_01
You could do like a chat GPT conversation where you're like, can you come up with some marketing ideas for me? I think it would be hard for that to result in the plane. As an example. Um, I, I think that today AI will sort of pattern match to things that have already been done because that is what AI is trained on. And so if you were trying to do something like truly creative, in a one innovative, I think it is more likely to, um, surface inside the four walls of your company by doing the sort of like ideation that I talked about, which is, um, let's come up with two ideas, each person multiply by
SPEAKER_01
four. That's eight ideas, put them on a whiteboard, talk through each of them, pick the two or three, the
SPEAKER_00
best ones that we're going to do. And, and Monaco and AI actually give us the like ability to spend
SPEAKER_01
our time doing those things. That is how I spend my time with customers. It is, is the less about
SPEAKER_00
the sort of like, how should you be meeting with customers? I do like, how should you sell those
SPEAKER_01
sorts of things, but it's coming up with like creative campaign ideas. Count me in as like one of the people that comes up with the ideas that we put on the whiteboard. Yeah. That's awesome. Um, and then I guess like on that last piece, is there anything, um, worth talking about in terms of like how to actually sell or like the, the practice of, you know, the, the time with the customers itself?
SPEAKER_00
I think there are two things that, um, stand out as the, cause, cause that, and then there's like a
SPEAKER_01
laundry list below it. Right. Um, but this is maybe the like broader generic advice that I would have to, certainly founders that are, are starting to sell their, um, product and don't have a lot of go-to-market experience that I think have maybe, um, more impact than any other, you know, below these two. The first is, um, I would be fairly prescriptive about how to effectively buy your product. Um, because if, if, if you aren't educating the buyer on how to onboard, receive value and ultimately buy your product, um, the customer like doesn't know how to buy your product. And so I would come in
SPEAKER_01
with like a bit of a, um, combination of like agenda and opinion on here is the like happy path from where we sit today. Um, and if this resonates with you and is something that you think you can receive value, um, around to like where we are, when you are fully onboarded and receiving value from the product, and we can just sort of roadmap together here, the different steps. Now, like Mr. Customer, is there anything that I have left out of this process that is important to you that we should incorporate, whether it's like security checks that you may need to go through or procurement
SPEAKER_01
that we want to introduce or legal review that I haven't included, but we sort of start with, um, and this is very abstract. We sort of start with like, um, we, you know, meeting two, we come with like our, um, prebuilt custom environment to show you exactly what it would look like on our product. Um, if that resonates with you, we sit, we put you in like a, a two week free trial of the product. During that trial, like here are the outcomes that we're going to be driving towards. If we deliver on these outcomes, we like onboard the rest of the team. Let's like schedule meetings that sort of align to these different steps. And so then you and the customer are flying blind.
SPEAKER_01
I think the thing that happens more often than anything, when I meet with founders, it's sort of like we have so many of these opportunities that are in like purgatory where it's like, we pitched them. They said they liked it. We ended the call. I've followed up three times. They aren't really responding. And if they do respond, it's like, give me a week and I'll get back to you. A week passes, they don't get back to me. And it's because we haven't like aligned on the like happy path to receiving value from the product that we're selling. So I'll pause there. That's like one of the two
SPEAKER_00
things. Yeah. What's the other? The second thing is like a little bit of an urgency driver where
SPEAKER_01
if you can create some form of FOMO for lack of a better word, I think that much of sales is psychology. And so for many customers, what I'm about to articulate is true. We certainly never want to say anything that is untrue or misleading. But if we have, you know, we're in the month of July, if we have a goal to onboard three customers to pilots in the month of July, what we articulate to a customer as part of the maybe like first call when we are receiving feedback, like, yeah, this is
SPEAKER_00
actually really cool. I'd love to try it. What we say is something like we are onboarding three customers into our pilot program this month. Two of those spots are already spoken for. There is much interest in the third spot. If you would like to move forward with a pilot, if you could let me know, that would be like really appreciated on my end. But also like, I can't guarantee the spot if you don't speak for it today.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. And I think that's true because you can only onboard so many of the states. That's exactly right. But it does sort of force a decision and potentially drive some urgency. There is like a psychological aspect to this where it's like, oh gosh, two, two thirds of the spots are already spoken for. Like, I better speak up to like, you know, get this thing that a lot of folks are already incredibly interested in. I assume also important in all of this is sort of just like having like a a willingness to disqualify when you genuinely think that the product is not going to help the
SPEAKER_01
customer. And I think people can feel that like if you're like, hey, my goal here is not to sell you something that you don't need or want. My goal is to say something that's gonna be useful to you for years. And so if I don't think that that's going to be the case, I'm going to stop selling it to you. Man, when you say that it's interesting where my mind goes, which is something different than what you just said. But like, I think it is true that like growth solves a lot of problems. I think like an input to that is something like demand solves a lot of problems. And what you just articulated,
SPEAKER_01
I think is a symptom of not enough demand, which is where founders and salespeople are like hanging on for dear life to the like one guy that I pitched over the last couple days because like they kind of seemed interested. But if you're like, I've got like four more calls I should get to. And like, I think this is going to be painful. And by the way, I get paid also on you retaining. And so like, I don't think I want to sell this to you anymore. You can, Parker, I stole this from him. You can sort of swipe left. I've never been on one of the dating apps, but I think Tinder, you sort of like swipe right if you like them and swipe left if you don't. And so
SPEAKER_01
An abundant pipeline allows you to only try to sell the product to people who need it. That's exactly right. And it's not, when I say that, it's not like disrespectful to the customer or being inefficient about not following up. It's actually that like you are focusing your resources
SPEAKER_00
on the people that are truly interested that will receive the most value from the product and not on the like person that took a call that was like, said a lot of niceties. Yeah. But like actually probably isn't actually interested. And by the way, a lot of it is like a not now, but you know, let's come back to this. If you're like, we have so many customers. If it's somebody who's like, you know, I am just getting started. I don't really have product market fit yet. I don't have any reps. You know, I'm interested. You might be like, if you bet like sure if you want to buy it now, but like it might be better if you bought this in six months once you're going a little bit.
SPEAKER_00
We're four months in, four or five months in, launched in February. And Monaco does an awesome job of continuing to engage with older customers on our behalf. But I cannot tell you, well, I can tell you the amount of times where I'm just sitting there and resurrected from what effectively is the dead, a company that we demoed back in February that Monaco sort of re-engages with on my behalf.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Response comes in. I see the response and it's like, I'm ready to go. And again, all of this stems from more demos in February. Right. And so I think lots of sort of
SPEAKER_00
anecdotes of what a demand rich environment evolves to.
SPEAKER_01
Sam, this was awesome. I learned a bunch every time we talk. Thank you for doing this with me. You are the best. Thank you so much for partnering with me on Monaco. And it's just an absolute pleasure to come on the show. So thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_01
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