Stephanie is the host of the panel, a go to market leader who has fifteen years experience in b two b sales and is currently the VP of sales at Bill. So, Stephanie, you get to lead it. 

Yeah. Thanks. Hello, everybody. How are we doing? Are energy still there? Yeah. We're not falling asleep. We got it shaken off. We're ready. Awesome. Perfect. Well, I am sitting here with three unbelievable leaders with a plethora of experience, and, um, I'm gonna go ahead and start with introductions for them. So, Michelle, if you wanna just introduce yourself, um, what firm you're with, and then maybe give us I'm putting you guys on the spot. Maybe give us fun facts. 

Okay. Alright. Alright. Hey, everybody. Excited to be here. Uh, Michelle Benfer. I'm an operating partner for go to market, uh, with Francisco Partners Consulting. We are a tech forward private equity firm, and we specialize in investing in cyber, in EdTech, in FinTech, in, uh, all other sorts of forms of tech. But, um, but but I've been there just since December, so this operating partner role is new for me. Prior to that, Stephanie and I actually worked together at bill.com where I ran revenue. And prior to that, I was at HubSpot for almost six years where I ran revenue for The Americas. Oh, fun fact. Uh, I've run three marathons, and I'm not a runner. 

That's pretty amazing. Awesome. John. 

John Coleman from here in Atlanta. For those of you who are local, um, co CEO of a firm called Sovereigns Capital. It's what we call a faith driven investment firm, meaning most of our limited partners are Christian institutions or families. And so we try and invest a way that's reflective of those values, creating human flourishing in the companies in which we invest. We do that across private equity, real estate, venture capital, fund to funds, public equities, and entertainment. Um, I've been there about four and a half years previously working for Invesco, a larger asset manager here in Atlanta. Uh, fun fact, we were just talking about the entertainment part of what we do, uh, has been like a new focus for us over the last couple of years. So we just released our first TV show, which was called House of David on Amazon Prime, uh, which was really cool. We had 22,000,000 viewers in the first seventeen days. And then our new production deal is with a guy named Bear Grylls, who's like an outdoor adventure star. And if I hit my fundraising target on the fund, I get to jump out of a helicopter with Bear. And so I'm hoping to fall about $5 short of our fundraising target. Nice to 

be here. Pablo. 

Awesome. We're sponsoring Mission Impossible, the final sequence. No. We have we we have nothing that cool. Um, Pablo Dominguez with Insight Partners. Uh, Firm based in New York, thirty years of software investing. We only do software. We do everything software from except seed and pre seed, but everything from a million in ARR to billions, so minority, majority buyouts, etcetera. Excited that we invested in the best incentive compensation platform, QuotaPath, in case you've heard of them. I spent my entire career in go to market. I run the advisory team at Insight. So I'm not an investor. I don't pretend to be an investor. I run the team of about 50 people that are responsible for helping our company scale once they become part of the portfolio. So former heads of product, marketing, engineering, sales, CS, uh, finance, legal, you name it. That's sort of what we do. Fun fact, uh, I love to smoke meat. I am an avid smoker of barbecue ribs, that sort of stuff. So happy to be in Atlanta, which has a lot of barbecue. 

Awesome. So good. So we have two huge topics today. Um, both, from my perspective, really tackle the challenge of when you think about growing an organization, you're really focused on how do I, uh, propel our growth at the top, but also how do I do that efficiently. And so of our first topic of conversation today is going to be about the role of AI and go to market. Big surprise, AI is on the topic of conversation. So first question for our panelists, um, where are you seeing AI actually move the needle today in go to market within your portfolio of customers? Whoever wants to start is okay with me. 

Yeah. I'm happy to start. Um, I was actually working on, uh, slides about this right before I got here. It's one of the portfolio companies that I'm coaching. Um, so one of the things we're trying to do is, um, with each of our companies focus on what are the growth, uh, metrics that you're focused on, and also what are the efficiency metrics. And, um, this is actually something for those of you who follow Yamini Rangan at at HubSpot, you know, they've been putting out a lot of great content, um, on AI, but particularly measuring the effectiveness of AI. So I think, like, to start, it's really where are you seeing that there are material efficiencies gained. Uh, an example for that that we're using is revenue per per go to market employee and or revenue per employee. So that's kind of the North Star that we're looking at. And then we break that down into each of the teams. Um, and as a part of that, we look at, okay, what is where do we want it to go, and what are ways in which we can get there? Some of it might be tools. Some of it might be from resource reallocation. For example, maybe we don't need as many marketers in content because of some of the advances that we're getting in content generation, but maybe the product team actually could really use an opportunity to move forward and get ahead from a roadmap perspective. So I think the first stage is really, um, measuring and knowing what the measurements are going to be, and then building out the strategy from there. Um, and then from a from a background is making sure that the data layer is really clean, uh, so that these teams have the ability to utilize, um, all the functionality of the potential tools that are out there, uh, to drive their go to market strategy. Wonderful. 

Great. 

Um, so we have 548 companies. So we we get to see a lot in it. I'd say it varies. Yeah. There are companies that are doing nothing except maybe using Chat GbT or perplexity to do some search stuff, and then there are companies that are very AI forward. I'd say the the two use cases that we see a lot that are working the most are on customer support, where you've got massive ticket volumes and you've got a lot of people that could be streamlined. Um, and then in inbound BDRs, I have yet to see outbound BDRs proven effectively. I don't know if we'll ever get there. Uh, but inbound BDRs, there's a lot of opportunity to make their lives easier or potentially not hire an additional one if you can make the ones you have much more effective. I will share because this is, like, my third panel in the last two weeks. Um, I've yet to walk away with, like, wow. Somebody is doing something revolutionary, and that's okay. I think I think we're in the first inning of AI, and first inning could still be people are doing awesome stuff. But I don't think we have enough data point yet to say, like, hey. I've figured it out. I'm doing something awesome, and that's okay. But my recommendation is you should be doing something at least to test and iterate and see if it works for you. 

Yeah. I would say my observation just from the companies we work with. So on the venture capital side, it's all seed and series a, which is really early, but then we have a private equity portfolio, which are typically more main street businesses that are using enablement technology. My observation is go to market has actually become much more difficult because of artificial intelligence right now. Like, I think the low hanging fruit that people saw was outbound marketing, email marketing, chatbots, uh, voice calls, all those sorts of things. And I think the, uh, and they create a lot of information. Right? People can use the chatbots and things like that to write materials, which means people are just, like, flooded right now. You've probably experienced this. And so the signal to noise ratio has gone totally out of control. And so I think the outbound go to market right now has actually become substantially more difficult because of artificial intelligence, at least in the near term. And one of my observations is when I think about artificial intelligence technologies that we invest in across the board, you're really thinking about two basic categories. One is like human replacement. Right? Which is where we can just take out people because of artificial intelligence. So, like, my Tesla drove me here this morning. It drives better than me. Due to regulation, I have to sit in the front seat. It will replace me as a driver in the next, like, eighteen months, and I'll be very happy about that. You see that in legal and finance and accounting and a lot of different areas where you're just gonna take out people, uh, because of artificial intelligence. And then you see enhancement, right, of people as the other use case rather than replacement. I think a lot of people try to approach AI as replacement, uh, with all the email marketing and drafting stuff and creating content, which the last speaker touched on. And I really think it's more an enhancement tool. So I I definitely think in the near term, the best use cases we've seen so far have been about customer service, taking care of customers in a more efficient way, understanding those customers, and enhancing your representative's ability to deal with them. Uh, probably the best case I saw was actually a private equity company, which was a series of HVAC, uh, companies where they had much more detailed records on service history of their different customers and even on alternative suppliers of that HVAC technology. And then they could trigger their sales reps to reach out in a more bespoke way as equipment age, as they knew things about the sales cycle with those, but it was still a person calling. It was just that person was able to comb through data in a way that was, uh, much more advanced, uh, than they would have if they were trying to do it on their own. So I think those types of applications are really good right now. I think a lot of the outbound stuff has actually gotten much more difficult because of AI. 

Yeah. I couldn't agree more. You know, I ran a CRO roundtable this morning where we were talking about this very topic, um, and what we came out with was you need to be trying AI, but it's much more on the efficiency side than it is in the automation side. And so what I'll say from, like and I'll I'll bounce the question back to you all. Um, can we talk about risk a little bit? Right? What is the risk of auto, um, like, too much automation within go to market, and where are you seeing it today? 

Yeah. I so one of the themes that and I I believe it was in Chick fil A and, um, the, uh, the Ritz Carlton conversation, it's the importance of personalization. And an interesting part of the role of AI and go to market is I actually think we are seeing the impact of being humans, uh, delivering bigger results. So you and I talked about this, but companies are doing return to work. There are a lot of sales reps that are now going back from being inside sales to having more of a field approach. They're testing outfield, um, approaches across the board. Outbound is an area. Um, I ran a panel with, uh, revenue leaders from Gong and Shopify and ZoomInfo, um, and HubSpot just recently, and that outbound piece still hasn't been cracked. And I think one of the the benefits of AI is actually, um, moving us towards precision targeting. How do you get the persona right? How do you get the message to the persona right? How do you get to know the verticals better? How do you speak the language of the person that you are prospecting? The good news is the research, uh, part of using tools like, uh, ChatGPT, that's really helpful with the personalization. But, um, the automation on steroids that AI could deliver, to your point, the noise is is becoming so intense that the personalization, the hand to hand combat conferences are coming back in a really big way. And a lot of the companies I'm working with, we're seeing the highest conversion rates of, um, marketing dollars spent when it comes to, um, face to face engagement. So that's been an interesting, uh, benefit rate, you know, it's doing to actually improving, um, some of the ways in which we operate, you know, face to face. 

Yeah. I completely agree, uh, with that. I think the enhancement part of artificial intelligence and how you make people more able to interface with clients, free them up to do the things that are most useful for them rather than managing data, etcetera, and create personalization is a huge opportunity. I'll go a different direction with the risk, and I think especially for founders and for entrenched companies, um, anytime technology is moving this quickly, I think there's a major risk in, uh, striking the balance between either missing the trend, acting too late, so not adapting artificial intelligence when your competitors are and they're reducing their cost structure, they're making themselves more effective. On the other hand, I think you do run a risk with any rapidly advancing technology of building up fixed costs that will become rapidly obsolete that you're not equipped to compete in. Right? Like, one error we see some of the start up companies that we interface with now or even some of the more mature companies is trying to be really bespoke about building their own, uh, systems for artificial intelligence. They don't adequately leverage off some of the more competitive platforms. And if I think about the speed of innovation within artificial intelligence versus the other technological trends that I've seen, this is, like, markedly different than anything we've ever encountered. Uh, I I tend to think this is the most revolutionary technology at least of all of our lives, maybe since the invention of nuclear energy. And I think the average company's ability to keep pace with original development of proprietary, uh, artificial intelligence systems is gonna be really challenged. And so every tech enabled company is having to make this decision now about how can I quickly adapt this or or adopt this technology in a way that enables me to keep pace with my competitors and keep my costs low? But how can I do so with a as variable a cost structure as possible, leveraging, uh, the most advanced tools as much as possible so that I'm not building up a huge fixed cost that will become obsolete, uh, in in a really rapid period of time? And I think, um, every company that I encounter is kind of struggling to strike a balance between those two things. 

Agree. Um, I think there's two major risks. One is companies don't understand the change in the buyer journey. So prior to 1999, the buyer had 10% of all the information they needed when they showed up to purchase something from someone. And then by 02/2010, uh, CEB came out with their statistics in the Challenger Sale that, hey. The buyer is now more informed. They have 57% of all the information they need. So you need to be prepared to sell on value, stop selling on features, etcetera. I think we all remember that. Um, already selected your buyers, have 81% of the information they need. They've already selected three people to purchase from, and they have a preference. So by the time they're reading your marketing material or talking to a seller, if you have not changed your selling habits to adjust their buying behavior, we are behind. So that's risk number one. Mhmm. Risk number two is there's this belief that I'll just plug in an agent, plug in AI, and it's just gonna automate things for me. It's gonna work perfectly because that's what agents do. And I think we forget we need to reevaluate the process that you're looking to automate. And instead of automating a shitty process, which is exactly what the agent's gonna do, you need to spend time redoing the process, mapping it out, streamlining it, make it more efficient, and maybe you can get some help from AI to do that and then automate it. So don't just automate for the sake of automating. You've gotta revisit your processes. So I think I I see companies jumping the gun a little bit, not focusing on the buyer journey or, uh, fixing processes before jumping to automation. 

Yeah. I'll just add real quickly because, uh, you started with the importance of companies just, uh, innovating and trying and experimenting, and and I would say yes. And Yeah. That full mapping, the full journey mapping and going, like, slow, uh, with what is the process, what should the process be, why doesn't it work right now, and making sure you really are taking the full life cycle of how this can improve. You need to make the investments in whether it's the subject matter expert in house and or a project manager and someone who can really drive the role of AI transformation within go to market. Um, otherwise, you're just gonna have all of these small little micro experiments that you hope you get that little measurement bump from. But if it really isn't a strategic play, um, you're gonna dig yourself into a hole, and your competitors, if they're doing it better than you, they're gonna drive ahead. 

And I'll I'll say one final comment that touches on what they brought up. I think a lot of companies that are in the sales business ask the wrong question with artificial intelligence, which is how can we make our lives easier? And the right first question is how can I use this to make my customers' life easier? And if you ask yourself, how can I make my life easier? You end up sending 10 times the number of emails with half the quality of content. And if you and you build a chatbot that goes nowhere, like, every chatbot I enter like, Delta still I'm sorry, Delta is here. But, like, their chatbot is awful and you waste ten minutes on it. Nothing gets solved. I want diamonds, so I have to call the diamond line. Like, you wanna introduce stuff, uh, that makes your customer's life better. And if you don't meet that criteria, if the customer is not as good or better off because of the adoption of the technology, then even if you make your life easier, you're gonna lose. Right? We we have to make sure we keep the customer at the center of the use case. Otherwise, um, you're missing the entire point of go to market. 

Love it. So many good nuggets in that conversation from the transformation of go to market over the last twenty years to what our buyers need and how to test AI, not fall behind, but not replace your humans. So that's my summary of what we just talked about here. I'd love to go ahead and move on to, um, navigating market uncertainty. I think everyone in this room, for the most part, has been through some sort of this in their career. And so as we start to transition over to how you think about it as you're all in managing some sort of fund from PE to VC, Um, I'd like to go ahead and start out with the question of, in today's market uncertainty, reshaping go to market strategy, um, like, how are you reshaping go to market strategy? What are you thinking about? What are the priorities, um, that come to mind for you when you're looking at your portfolio? 

Speaker 4:
So I'm not an economist, and we don't have economists. So, like, we can't predict the future, but we've shifted from growth at all costs. Right? The the mess that we all collectively created, but I think the people up here were you know, we pushed companies probably in the wrong way. Um, and for us, rule of 40 is super critical. Right? So rule of 40 is the sum of your growth and your free cash flow margin or EBITDA depending on how people calculate it. And there's been a lot of focus on driving efficiency. Now profitability is awesome. Right? It's obviously a larger play if you're under private equity, but growth is probably the most critical thing in terms of that formula. Right? Growth cures all ills ultimately above profitability. Um, but if you look at the valuations of public companies, those companies that can balance both growth and profitability, um, get higher valuations compared to the median by factors of 10. Right? So if you look at the top companies, they're they're balancing both growth and profitability. Now if you break out, well, where should I focus? And inside did a bunch of analysis because there's 30 metrics that you could tie to growth. There's 30 metrics you could tie to profitability. The single most important metric that drives the highest correlation to EV within those is high GRR. Right? So why GRR? Because the retention of your customers ultimately is the only way you're gonna grow. Right? For those of you that are earlier stage, everything's a new dollar. You don't have really you don't have retention yet per se. But as soon as you start to hit a hundred million billion plus, you know, less than 10% of your revenue is gonna come from new customers. So everything's coming from the base. So maintaining the base and growing from the base is super critical. In uncertain times, it is easier to focus on maintaining your base and making sure they don't and also sell into that base and potentially landing a new customer. Not to say that you should not focus on new, but in uncertain times, it is even more critical to really focus on not losing that customer because it's gonna be that much more impactful and painful for losing a customer that you then have to go and spend more money on to retain. So our focus has been on continued driving profitability, continued driving growth, but really make sure you're taking care of your core customers to accelerate growth. And that doesn't have to be with AI. Right? Obviously, AI is helping you, but there's a lot of things you can do to actually maintain that base effectively. 

I love that. Do you have something? No, please. 

Well, I was gonna say, you know, I think it depends a little bit right now whether you're an established company or a start up. Right? In either case, you've got a particular challenge or an opportunity. If I were to think about the challenge for a large company right now and the opportunity, right, um, the opportunity is if you're a large company, you have an installed base of customers and you have a lot of cash, Right? Potentially, especially some of the big technology companies. And I think the, uh, potential error you could make right now is underinvestment or declining to self cannibalize parts of your business if those parts of the business are moving away in the midst of this uncertainty. Uh, in market uncertainty, you tend to hoard cash and under invest, and you tend to be very slow to adapt your model. And I think that's when a lot of larger companies get disrupted. Like, I'm gonna be super interested to see how Alphabet handles decline in search when Gemini is obviously a very good tool right now. And whether they aggressively invest in that and are willing to take on their cash cow search business, I think will determine a lot of the future of the company. If you're a start up, your challenge is you have no money. Right? And your investors are, like, very aggressive about you being frugal. Your opportunity is you have no installed base. Right? And if you're a pretty agile founder or a smaller company, you can switch and build aggressively in a way a larger company can't. And so what we look for in start up investors today is we for the last few years, you've needed to be pretty frugal and watch your costs so that you have the cash runway to exist, uh, for a period of time, probably longer than you would have wanted in 2021. But you've gotta have an instinct for where the market opening is and a willingness to follow that. Right? That's why some of the founders out of big companies have a a hard time because they're so used to the way their big company did it and that importing the old model to a new company just doesn't work that well anymore. You want a founder who has an instinct for where this uncertainty is creating a new opportunity and is able and willing to move faster than some of the entrenched competitors. And so I think there are challenges and opportunities on both sides that the market opportunity or the market uncertainty tends to amplify. 

Wonderful. Michelle, anything to add? 

Yeah. I I would say maybe more tactically, like, you know, rolling my sleeves up and dealing with this with some of the, uh, portfolio companies I'm working with. It's really assessing the risk. Like, there's one company that, um, they didn't even know, but a lot of their customers were, um, uh, received funding from USAID. And so it's just how quickly can we assess, is there risk not just right now in this acute moment, but how does this translate for the next twelve months potentially? And to your point, where do we find these, you know, growth opportunities? How do we double down on those, whether it's through our, you know, marketing campaign, sales messaging, or BDR, um, uh, outbound strategy? How do we really double down on the growth? How do we shore up our renewals and our retention for the customers that we know we really need to get us through? And making sure we have a a really good projection on potential risk, um, and doing that, you know, across the portfolio, across anyone's customer base, um, and then putting together your go to market place in order to, you know, solve for that gap. 

Yeah. Are you are you seeing across, um, the portfolio that you have, the focus has been on net new acquisition for a very long time. Pablo, to your point, we're starting to focus on our customer base in times of uncertainty. Do they know how to do that? Like, is that a common motion, and what modifications do you see those teams happening or making, right, within those structures to be able to hit the growth goals within the customer base today? 

Yeah. So I'll add something. I don't I think the companies sometimes struggle. And to your point around startups, right, if you're a startup, you're like, well, hey. I don't have a hundred or a thousand customers to worry about GRR. No. But if you're not focused religiously on, am I selling to the right customer, right, is the right that right or wrong ICP will kill you down the road. Right? So for those of you that are in start ups not spending time on the ICP, the persona, again, they're 81% ready already to purchase from you when they talk to you. So are you prepared to make sure you land the right person so that they are buying from you two, three years down the road and they don't attract? That is super critical in terms of what you can do. So it's it's teaching that refocus on ICP persona, segmentation. Are you going after the right customers? Are you trying to do everything at once? Right? Everybody has a vision that early, like, I've gotta go enterprise. Well, you don't always have to go enterprise that early on. Right? Like, go where your core is, what you're good at, where's your product market fit, and then start to go. I think the mistake we see people, you know, do a lot is they try to do everything at once without mastering something first and getting momentum. And there's this belief, well, if I don't go do enterprise, then I'm gonna be left behind. And Yeah. You're probably gonna be left behind because you're trying to do too much stuff. Right? So 

Yeah. Totally fair. Anyone else wanna add anything to that? Okay. Alright. So if there is one thing that you could tell a go to market leader to stop doing right now given where the market is, what would it be? 

Emailing 

me. Anywhere throughout the funnel, it could 

be I just went, so it's yours' turn. 

Yeah. Uh, stop doing right now. Uh, you know, it's interesting. The the chat right before us, um, I'm the recipient to a lot of those podcast asks, which are we're we're really trying to sell you, but we're gonna have you on our podcast. So so that that's one that's been an interesting change. Yeah. I mean, I would say I would say the email is probably a big one. The other one I would say is, um, asking for more money. And, you know, there is whether it's rep headcount, if it's marketing headcount, um, you know, even at public companies, you have to go through the exercise of assume you're not going to get incremental investment, and how do you make magic's and continue the growth rate, improve the growth rate with fewer resources, the same resources. Um, and, you know, others have said this in the, uh, LinkedIn conversation, but less headcount is the new flex. Right? If you can actually get higher yield, um, more productivity with fewer people, like, that is just the new flex. And so I think, you know, any of the people on your teams, and this is what I'm trying to espouse with some of the people with whom I work, um, how do you really pinpoint what are those productivity numbers that make you look kick ass, um, and just show that you were getting more with less because you were using doing things with a better process, because you're making customer, you know, buying more efficient and, um, frictionless. So I think really kinda having that, um, less is more mentality is one of the things I'd recommend. Yeah. Great. I would say with all the one of the things I'd recommend. 

Yeah? Great. 

I would say with all the trends we're talking about, one thing that strikes me is in all sales processes are different, so I'm oversimplifying, but I think we're moving from a, uh, push to a pull world for sales. Right? In high signal to noise, everybody's pushing out a ton of information and AI is really good about that, which we just talked about. I think that's getting less and less effective. And so how do you create pull for your services by adding value in other ways to your clients, right, or to your potential clients, uh, to complement, like, rep partners. A conference like Southbound is an awesome pull mechanism. Right? Because you all are getting value being here. You're hearing from experts. You're getting to meet one another, um, and you're experiencing what that company is like, how it treats customers, how it interacts with others. And this conference, hopefully, for them, will be much more effective than a push campaign where they're just trying to force products and services on you. And so I think the more you can use, uh, these types of tools, I think some of our speakers have have talked about the reputation you can build, value who can add for customers when they're still prospects, uh, that they don't have to look for you for, a brand that you can build, and pull them in so that they're finding you, whether that's through search tools, uh, or through word-of-mouth. I think trying to shift from push to pull, uh, in most sales environments is probably where we're gonna live for some time now. 

Love it. Alright. Pablo, what do you think? 

Stop thinking that AI is not gonna transform how you do your job and stop hiring people that don't embody the change. One of the things we're trying religiously to do is that as we're hiring executives into our portfolio companies, are they AI first thinkers? Like, are they coming with ideas on how to be more efficient and, uh, do things differently, or do they not even know how to spell AI. Right? We got all the concerns. So I think there's and, unfortunately, like, we joke about it, but, like, I think there's people who are just like, oh, whatever. I'm good. I don't need to do that. Um, and then there's those that are really seeing the opportunity. And, again, we're early innings. Right? But stop pretending like this thing is not happening. 

Yeah. I think we've talked a lot up here about, um, like, the ever changing market. Right? Is there a go to market playbook that you're seeing that is still working in the market we're in today, or it is is it all new innovation? 

Uh, I I would go back to the HubSpot flywheel. Mhmm. Um, you know, I just think referrals and getting your people network and humans, you know, thinking about your brand, knowing your brand, liking your product, liking the way they interact with you, enjoying a seamless buying experience. And, um, when the the gentleman from, um, Ritz Carlton was chatting, he had mentioned the importance of that first contact. It was a first contact and that they actually, um, analyzed, you know, the complaint rate. If they had a positive first contact, they didn't complain. If they didn't have a positive first contact, they complained. And just the importance of that human connection and, um, and I think just carrying that through. So, you know, I think the personalization, um, really knowing the way in which you wanna interact with your customers, the importance of that customer referral network, uh, I think that's tried and true. Love it. Anything else to add, guys? 

Yeah. I think more is the same than is different. Yeah. What you just talked about, that's the classic thing. Create an awesome product that solves a problem for people and figure out a way to make that awesome product available to them so that they know about it. And then once they buy it, make the experience of buying it and using 

it 

really good. Right? Like, we own a fire truck company, a used fire truck company, the largest used fire truck company in America. They build their relationships by going municipality to municipality and talking with these small and medium sized towns and convincing them, which they do, that they love firefighters, they love the fire industry, and they have the integrity to be a good partner to these institutions. Uh, technology can enable that. They have a CRM, etcetera, but nothing replaces delivering on that product promise so that everybody talks about it to the other municipalities and then getting in and just loving the customer, being where they are, embracing their values. They hire people from within the industry. And I think that is the same, right, if you cut through the noise, and you risk losing that if you think too much is changing right now. 

Yeah. I agree. And I think we risk, uh, I was I was talking with a colleague this morning, Travis, who runs our late stage team, and nothing's changed. Right? I love what you said. Like, a company exists to build a product that solves a somebody's problem. Right? And the purpose of marketing and sales is to convince you that that product or solution you should purchase because it solves your problem more than somebody else's, and I give you value. That's it. I don't I don't think that ever changes. Right? That's the whole essence of product and sales and marketing. AI is just simply enabling us to do it much more efficiently, but the fundamentals, I don't think necessarily will ever change. So I think the good playbooks that people have will continue to be used. They're just gonna be streamlined and made much more efficient, and that's, you know, the job of everybody here. Even pre AI, you should have been trying to do things more efficiently. Right? AI just accelerates that. So, yeah, my answer is similar. Like, the fundamentals are always gonna be 

Great. I love it. I'm still hearing the trend of kinda old school needs to be the new school, back to basics, inform your customer, understand their pain points. And in my opinion, one of the things that I've seen is in that era of a lot of inbound, right, and marketing demand, sales had become a facilitator, and And so there's almost a gap in the sales, uh, AEs of the world today on how to do that. 

Uh, it's funny to say because, like, Michelle, you mentioned this earlier. We're back to live events and small events. Right? Like, we're full circle. Right? So, I mean, that's what works. People wanna talk to people and, like, they wanna network with people and they wanna have discussions with humans. 

That's right. So Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. Okay. We only have nine minutes left. I'm gonna give you one more question panel, and then we'll go to q and a. If you could make one go to market investment, team, tech, or tactic, what would it be? 

The question is if you could 

Make one go to market investment. 

Oh, team. K. 

Oh, what were the options again? Sorry. I was thinking of companies. 

I was 

like, oh. 

I mean, you can share that if you want, but team, tech, or tactic? 

Team. Team. Team. 

Barbecue. No. I I agree. Team. Team Team. Yeah. Team anytime. 

Yeah. I 

love it. Yeah. Awesome. Um, since we do have a minute, what is your favorite meat to smoke? 

Brisket. 

Love it. This Dallas girl right here was proud of that answer. Awesome. Alright. We can go ahead and go to the audience for some open q and a. Um, awesome. Perfect. Yeah. 

First one right here. 

Love the answer of team. I'm gonna push and ask, what are you wanting that team to do? 

Great follow-up. 

Yeah. So so my, uh, knee jerk on choosing team is, ideally, you have super bright people who know how to implement the the tech the right tech and the right tactics. So I don't think you can do the others well without having the right team in place. So that was why I selected it. 

Yeah. When we look at a team, this is kind of like an obvious answer, but maybe not the one you would expect. But given our thesis, it's obvious. Um, the number one thing we look at is character and values. Um, especially I mean, how many of you are actually startup entrepreneurs right now? It's like wicked hard. Right? It's a really hard life. It's hard on your families. It's hard on you. It's hard on your teams. We think that great cultures outperform poor cultures. That's why we had Dan, Kathy, and Horace on stage today. We think that getting great colleagues in place is the secret to adapting in uncertain times. And we think that people of character and integrity are able to navigate those periods much more transparently, much more reliably. They attract great talent. They treat people well. And so we obviously wanna look at a variety of other things. We want some expertise there. We want someone who's agile and can adapt. Uh, we want people invest in repeat founders because you wanna see evidence of resilience through difficult times because everybody who's ever started a company, it's like the hardest thing in the world. It's really hard. Um, but if that's not all anchored in a core set of values and in a core commitment to loving people and treating them well, uh, throughout that process and behaving with integrity, that's where things blow up in dramatic ways. Right? And so we only wanna do business with folks that we feel are really committed to that and really do love the people that they work with and are anchored in a set of values that guide their actions during these intense times. 

Awesome. 

There's a re Awesome. Will process tools, not tools, process people. I mean 

Love it. Awesome. 

Yeah. Hello. I read this awesome book about what a unicorn knows, uh, about three, four years ago. It seems like things have changed quite a bit since then, signed by someone on the stage, by the way. Uh, so these days, what is a unicorn? What do they know in this space? 

Oh, I love that. 

So, uh, that's a book that came out two years ago from us for, uh, and it's actually I talked about the reason why I mentioned before, like, process is super critical, especially in the time of AI. I think the concepts of, you know, what you the people that will get to unicorn status and scale most effectively will still focus on what we talked about before, the fundamentals, um, and making sure that they get their processes correct so that it can be automated correctly. We talk also a lot about strategic speed. Right? The companies that have gotten and scaled most effectively knew exactly where to go. They made the right decisions. They picked the right ICP. They also experimented. Right? We talked a lot about experimentation, um, versus trying to do everything with AI. So I think the principles there still apply even now in the age of AI. I think AI is just, uh, focusing on a lot of the process stuff more effectively. 

Come here. I'll come here next week. 

Okay. Quick question. Um, John, I saw you recently were hiring someone in person in or one of your partner firms were in person here in Georgia. So my question is, what is your investment footprint in remote first companies? And then there's an AI question. What role does quantum intelligence play as you look forward? 

Gosh. I don't think there's a one size fits all to the remote first mindset because I think companies are quite different. I will make an observation that I think as we've oscillated between this, everybody's gotta be in person in the same place, everybody can be remote at their lake house or whatever. Um, I think there has to I'm not comfortable with everybody can be remote at their lake house, uh, model. And I think one of the key things that's missing there, there are two key things that I think are get missing. I think it's incredibly difficult to build a culture amongst people in a fast growing organization if they don't regularly have in person interaction. And so if you're gonna be dominantly remote or if you're gonna have multiple offices, you've gotta over invest in getting people together because forming new relationships remotely is quite difficult, and those relationships matter quite a lot to the fabric of a company. The other thing is I think it's a dramatic disservice to junior people on teams. Uh, so even some of the early research would show that people do their job really well remotely, but then they get promoted more slowly. They don't learn the jobs above them because you lose the apprenticeship model in remote first. Um, not universally applicable. They're younger people. That's not the case, but I think dominantly. And so I think it's a dramatic disservice to younger people in companies, mid level employees in companies when they don't have in office in person time where they're being apprenticed by leaders, and that will lead to a more dysfunctional company. And so I tend to be pretty averse to remote only, uh, companies, and I would prefer to see people at least with some, um, period of time where they're together in person and where there's apprenticeship taking place amongst the different people within that company. 

Great. 

Over here. Sorry. I would stand up, but I don't wanna give feedback. Just to to bring back point to focus to being on team, uh, earlier. I've noticed a shift, uh, predominantly this year that there has been a shift to where companies are instead of spending the investment and risk and time investing in, uh, bringing on and also the market in the new presidency, and, like, everything, like, the uncertainty has tied into this as well. But bringing instead of bringing on new full time hires onto a team, I've noticed a shift where there's more outsourcing to short term contracts, to, uh, freelancers, to, uh, uh, even working with, uh, agencies abroad. How does that for me, it's good for me because it provides me more work, frankly. But for you all as an investor, what is how does that look from your perspective when you're looking at the team aspect? 

I mean, um, I think I think the question has to be, is the service critical to the core function of the company? Right? I tend to think there are services that you should outsource. You should use best in class providers. That might be a communications firm if that's not core to the op especially as a start up. You can't do everything internally. You can't be vertically integrated with everything. Uh, so maybe graphic design. It may be marketing. There may be different things that you can outsource that make a lot of sense because you can get better expertise from people who can work across multiple companies than you can internally. Maybe that's even a fractional CFO or something. So I don't actually have any problem, especially in younger companies with outsourcing, uh, different items. I think when you start to replace full time employees with contractors for core business for reasons of flexibility rather than reasons of function, you get into trouble. And, again, that's because of a lot of my belief is building the culture and the team is what you need to be the heartbeat of an organization that's growing. And so if you're not creating buy in and if you're not creating a missional orientation against the core people who are gonna be on the boat with you for the next decade or two decades of the growth of this company, and if you're cutting costs by kind of fractionalizing people instead of investing in building that culture, I get super nervous about it. Right? If it's if it's kind of like a cost cutting thing rather than an expertise borrowing thing, I get really nervous about it. Because I think to be successful as a start up company, you gotta be on mission. And if people are not all the way in the boat with you, it's very difficult for them to be on mission with you. And so there's no one precise answer to that, but I think founders have to be very careful, um, that they're leveraging expertise in the places that make sense, but really building the heartbeat of their organization with full time, uh, committed people, uh, for the core of their their product. 

Great. He's been raising his more. Are we all done? One more? Tech This guy's been raising his hand for a long time. We gotta 

get this guy in the middle. We can 

do one more of that. 

Where where are we? Where am I going? 

Uh, Pablo, you talked about rule of 40, and, uh, yeah, it's a great classic metric. And I'm curious, though, as we think about pivoting our business models to invest in AI, which is driving cogs up. Right? AWS used to be a fixed cost. Now we're not sure how much AI is gonna cost. Customer success is perhaps, uh, we wanna because we care so much about net retention, we may wanna invest more in customer success. And now we need to move pivot towards consumption business models in some cases versus subscription. So are we are are are you flexing a little bit? Are you forgiving folks as they pivot business models on rule of 40, or how are you thinking about that? 

Yeah. No. It's a it's a great question. And rule of 40, if you're super early, doesn't matter. Right? Like, rule of 40 is more for once you start getting established past 30, 40 million. But I mentioned it because it's what you should be aspiring to because that's what investors are measuring against. Right? Are you are you are you growth and profitable? I'll answer the question, but the rule of 40 is probably gonna go up because there's an assumption that AI will make things more efficient. So, technically, rule of 50, rule of 60 should be the new rule of 40. Um, I think it's up to you all to tell that story. And I just had breakfast with, um, the head of AI at Salesforce, the head of the president and CRO at Salesforce on Monday, and other PEVC firms, and we have this discussion. Like, are investors gonna forgive a company that's gonna test out consumption based or unit based pricing, which might cause a dip for two quarters. Right? And I think it's incumbent on you or founders to communicate that in your board meetings to say, look. We're trying something different. We're gonna test this here. We expect a dip. There's nothing that spooks investors more than uncertainty and lack of communication. So if you don't know why something happened, that's worse than just being upfront and saying, look. It's gonna be a dip in this, but we expect it to yield out, and here's why. So, again, I'm not an investor, but as someone who's on a board and works with the investors, I think communication on what you expect to see is always super critical. So 

Awesome. Well, we are overtime. Thank you so much for, uh, being with us today, and thank