The GTMnow Podcast
- Épisodes
- 662
- Parution
- hebdomadaire
- Dernier épisode
- 11 Nov 2026
À propos du podcast
The GTMnow Podcast interviews well-known tech executive, VC, and founders - the expert operators in the trenches who have ‘been there, done that’ to build some of the fastest-growing software companies. Every week, a guest joins Sophie Buonassisi to dissect their stories, revealing expert insights around what worked, what didn’t, and how things actually went down.
This podcast is produced by GTMnow, the media brand of GTMfund - sharing insight on go-to-market from working with hundreds of portfolio companies backed by over 350 of the best go-to-market executives. GTMfund is an early-stage VC fund focused on investing in the most exciting, up-and-coming B2B SaaS companies across the world. The LP network consists of VP and C-level Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success leaders from companies like DocuSign, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Snowflake, Okta, Zoom, and many more.
Visit gtmnow.com for more details and to sign up for our newsletter and other content resources.
Épisodes 662
How Sierra Went From $0 to $400M ARR in 2.5 Years | Reggie Marable (Chief Customer Officer, Sierra)
Sierra just passed $400M in ARR, adding $150M in Q3 alone - they went 0 to $400M in 2.5 years. When it came out of stealth in February 2024, it had zero long-term contracts. It hit $20M by October, doubled from …
Notes de l’épisode
Sierra just passed $400M in ARR, adding $150M in Q3 alone - they went 0 to $400M in 2.5 years. When it came out of stealth in February 2024, it had zero long-term contracts. It hit $20M by October, doubled from $100M to $200M in six months, then doubled again to $400M in five. Reggie Marable, Sierra's Chief Customer Officer and first sales hire (employee 23), joins GTMnow to break down exactly how.
Reggie joined in January 2024 after leadership roles at Salesforce and Slack, a month before Sierra came out of stealth. He walks through the whole run: taking a big pay cut to bet on founders Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, the outcome-based pricing model where Sierra only gets paid when its AI agents actually resolve an issue, the paid proof-of-concept plus forward-deployed engineering motion, how he hired his “Elite Eight” first sellers, why every single person at Sierra is in sales, and his counterintuitive advice for founders making their first sales hire.
Brought to you by:
Zero - replaces your CRM with AI agents that help teams close 2x more business. GTMnow listeners get 30 days free at https://zero.inc/gtmnow
Transcript:
Full interview transcripts can be found by episode at https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
Reggie Marable:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reggiemarable/
Sophie Buonassisi, Partner at GTMfund
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
About the guest: Reggie Marable is the Chief Customer Officer at Sierra, the AI agents company founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor. He joined in January 2024 as employee 23 and its first sales hire, built and led the sales organization, and recently moved into the Chief Customer Officer role. Before Sierra he held leadership roles at Salesforce and Slack.
About GTMnow: The media brand, GTMnow, shares how the best companies get built, told from every perspective: founders, operators and investors, at every stage of company building. GTMnow is owned and operated by VC firm, GTMfund.
Visit us: https://gtmnow.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
X: https://x.com/GTMnow_
IG: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_nowThe GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.Chapitres
Chargement des chapitres…
Lambda: From Convincing Buyers to Use GPUs to an 11-Figure Deal | Robert Brooks, CCO
Robert Brooks has been selling compute at Lambda since 2018, back when he had to convince buyers to use GPUs at all. Today he’s Lambda’s Chief Commercial Officer and closes 11-figure contracts. He’s also a …
Notes de l’épisode
Robert Brooks has been selling compute at Lambda since 2018, back when he had to convince buyers to use GPUs at all. Today he’s Lambda’s Chief Commercial Officer and closes 11-figure contracts. He’s also a GTMfund LP.
In this live conversation from the GTMfund AGM, Robert shares a close-up view of where AI infrastructure demand is going. He covers who’s buying compute now, why 5,000 new companies sign up for Lambda every month, how his team picks customers the way a VC picks deals, and why he thinks GTM skills are about to become more valuable than ever.
GTMnow is owned and operated by GTMfund, a venture capital firm.
Brought to you by:
Nooks - just announced $500M in growth capital from General Catalyst! Discover how revenue agents can transform your GTM at https://nooks.ai/gtmfund
Transcript: Full interview transcripts can be found by episode at https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
What you’ll learn:- Who’s buying compute now that wasn’t a year ago, and what they’re asking for
- How the buyer persona shifted from machine learning engineers to founders and “heads of compute”
- Why selling compute now feels like a venture bet: selecting the right customer to scale with
- What Lambda’s deal flow (5,000 new signups a month) says about where demand is heading
- Why agents, AI platforms, and even agent-driven CPUs are the verticals taking off
- Robert’s advice to go-to-market operators: “if anyone can build anything, who’s going to sell it?”
- His favorite personal agent use case: getting up to speed on any industry in ~45 seconds before a meeting
- The office robot story, and how small automations change a 50-person office
Connect with Robert Brooks:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boborado/
Sophie Buonassisi, Partner at GTMfund
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
About the guest: Robert Brooks is the Chief Commercial Officer at Lambda, a compute provider powering AI workloads, where he leads the commercial organization. He joined in 2018, and is also a GTMfund LP.
About GTMnow: The media brand, GTMnow, shares how the best companies get built, told from every perspective: founders, operators and investors, at every stage of company building. GTMnow is owned and operated by VC firm, GTMfund.
Visit us: https://gtmnow.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
X: https://x.com/GTMnow_
IG: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_nowThe GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.Chapitres
Chargement des chapitres…
Inside Exa’s Run to $100M ARR: Building Google for AI Agents | Marcus Holm (CRO, Exa)
Exa just passed $100M ARR, growing nearly 10x per year for almost three years. Marcus Holm, Chief Revenue Officer there after serving as President at LaunchDarkly, breaks down how a company building “what …
Notes de l’épisode
Exa just passed $100M ARR, growing nearly 10x per year for almost three years. Marcus Holm, Chief Revenue Officer there after serving as President at LaunchDarkly, breaks down how a company building “what Google is for humans, but for AI agents” scaled that fast.
Marcus explains why he describes Exa as search for AI agents, why co-founder Will’s prediction (that 2026 would be the year agents search more than humans) came true, and what that shift means for SEO, ads, and the role of the salesperson. He gets tactical on selling to developers who don’t want to be sold to, building a consumption-based comp plan where “the sales cycle never stops,” why executive-buyer alignment and multithreading decide most deals, and how he hires and ramps reps in a market where go-to-market talent is harder to find than engineers.
Transcript: Full interview transcripts can be found by episode at https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
What you’ll learn:
- Why Marcus joined Exa: the criteria he uses (market size, likelihood of winning it, culture, voice of the customer)
- Why over half of web traffic is now agents and bots, and what that does to SEO and ads
- What Exa is in one line: “what Google is for humans, Exa is for AI agents”
- How the salesperson’s role shifts in a bottoms-up, consumption world (from selling to being a “jungle guide”)
- Who the real customer is when agents search: the human, the agent, and the company paying the bill
- How to structure comp in a consumption model, where “you’re always on trial”
- The secret to selling to developers: curiosity, credibility, and earning the right before pitching
- The three attributes Exa hires for (humility, urgency, agency), and why he watches the first 1-2 weeks
- His favorite interview question: “share a time you overcame the odds”
- Why executive alignment and multithreading are the biggest unlocks in enterprise deals
- Why go-to-market now out-hires engineering at the top AI companies, and the AI tools his team actually uses (Devin, role-play avatars)
Marcus Holm, CRO at Exa:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcus-holm-49019ab/
Exa: https://exa.ai/
Exa’s Career Page: https://exa.ai/careers
Sophie Buonassisi, Partner at GTMfund
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
About the guest: Marcus Holm leads go-to-market at Exa, a search engine built for AI agents (described in the episode as “what Google is for humans, Exa is for AI agents”). He was previously President at LaunchDarkly and has held go-to-market roles across infrastructure and dev-tooling companies, including Cloudera. Exa recently passed $100M ARR after raising a Series C.
About GTMnow: The media brand, GTMnow, shares how the best companies get built, told from every perspective: founders, operators and investors, at every stage of company building. GTMnow is owned and operated by VC firm, GTMfund.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.Chapitres
Chargement des chapitres…
How Datarails Grew 30x in 5 Years (90% Outbound → 90% Inbound) | Aviv Canaani (CRO & CMO)
Today marks Aviv Canaani’s 5-year anniversary at Datarails! When he first joined Datarails five years ago, the company was 90% outbound, with analysts emailing inbound leads to SDRs once a week. Today it’s 90% …
Notes de l’épisode
Today marks Aviv Canaani’s 5-year anniversary at Datarails! When he first joined Datarails five years ago, the company was 90% outbound, with analysts emailing inbound leads to SDRs once a week. Today it’s 90% inbound, 30x bigger, $70M Series C, and The Information named it the #1 startup of the year.
Transcript:
Full interview transcripts can be found by episode at https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
What you’ll learn:
- How Datarails flipped from 90% outbound to 90% inbound, and why they doubled down on inbound after the 2022 crash
- The Gong-inspired brand playbook: why “98% of marketing is noise” and how to be the 1% people care about
- Why niche memes for 0.1% of the market work (FP&A vs. accounting in-jokes)
- How to prove brand ROI: the four-way attribution model (HubSpot, open-form website question, SDR ask, Gong calls)
- Why his VP of Brand is the only report with no revenue KPIs, and how he measures brand instead (engagement from the ICP)
- The marketer-to-CRO path, and why he thinks one person owning the whole funnel is the future
- The “revenue architecture” waterfall model: working backward from a number to channels, meetings, and cost
- Why they killed their own category and relaunched as a “Finance OS,” and how to pull off category creation
- How he hires: the “biggest accomplishment” question, and screening for ownership over blame
- Why he automates everything in sales so reps only show up, follow up, and sell
Aviv Canaani, CRO, Datarails
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/avivcanaani
Datarails' website: https://www.datarails.com/
Datarails' career page: https://www.datarails.com/company/careers/
Sophie Buonassisi, Partner at GTMfund
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
About the guest: Aviv Canaani is the CRO and CMO of Datarails, an FP&A platform the company now positions as a “Finance OS.” He joined roughly five years ago as its first marketing leader (VP of Marketing), later took over sales, and was promoted to CRO, overseeing the full revenue funnel across marketing, sales, growth, and partnerships. Under his tenure Datarails grew about 30x and was named a top startup of the year by The Information.
About GTMnow: The media brand, GTMnow, shares how the best companies get built, told from every perspective: founders, operators and investors, at every stage of company building. GTMnow is owned and operated by VC firm, GTMfund.
Visit us: https://gtmnow.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
X: https://x.com/GTMnow_
IG: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_nowThe GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.Chapitres
Chargement des chapitres…
The ex-engineer who says sales beats product | George Kurdin (CEO, Monk)
George was a professional poker player, then CEO of a company that sold to Logitech for around $100M, and now he’s the CEO of Monk, an AI company automating accounts receivable. Monk is an API company solving …
Notes de l’épisode
George was a professional poker player, then CEO of a company that sold to Logitech for around $100M, and now he’s the CEO of Monk, an AI company automating accounts receivable.
Monk is an API company solving the other side of the ledger from Ramp: getting B2B invoices paid. George gets candid about the go-to-market mistakes he made (“50 more than I expected”), why vertical companies win on in-person workshops, the proprietary “harness” that he argues is the real moat in applied AI, the extreme-accountability culture he runs with 16 people and almost no meetings, and his sharpest tactical advice on fundraising, websites, and co-founder relationships.
Brought to you by:
Nooks - discover how revenue agents can transform your GTM at https://nooks.ai/gtmfund
Transcript:
Full interview transcripts can be found by episode at https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
What you’ll learn:
- Why sales and marketing is “tier zero,” and why he used to believe the opposite (“if you build it, they will come” is wrong)
- Two lessons from pro poker that transfer to building: stay disciplined through variance, and adapt or get destroyed
- Why go-to-market has never been more nuanced, and why vertical companies are winning with in-person workshops and lunch-and-learns over cold email
- The pre-seed website bet: why spending big on a cohesive visual identity early lifted one company’s close rate ~50%
- The “harness” thesis: why owning your own evals, guardrails, and tests (not just calling the models) is the moat in applied AI
- How to run extreme accountability: everything in Slack, blameless retros, almost no meetings, 16 people
- Why they reverse-engineered into a huge-TAM problem on purpose (recruiting, and not getting disrupted by the frontier labs)
- Why hard ROI (dollars in your pocket) now beats “time savings” as an AI value prop
- Fundraising: compress the process to create FOMO, and why how you run the raise signals how you run the company
- Why the co-founder relationship matters more than the idea, and how to invest in it like a marriage
George, Co-Founder and CEO at Monk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgekurdin
Monk: https://monk.com/
Sophie Buonassisi:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
About the guest: George is the co-founder and CEO of Monk, an API company that automates accounts receivable (collections and cash application) for B2B businesses using AI. He was previously CEO of Streamlabs, which sold to Logitech (reported around $100M) in 2019, and before his operating career he was a professional poker player for about five years. Monk is based in New York and has raised roughly $28M, including a Series A. His co-founder is Joe.
About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.
Visit us: https://gtmnow.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
X: https://x.com/GTMnow_
IG: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_nowThe GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.Chapitres
Chargement des chapitres…
Legora's CRO: $3.5M to $200M+ ARR, the Fastest Direct Sales Motion | Patrick Forquer
Legora went from $3.5M to over $100M in revenue in about a year, the fastest any company has ever scaled a direct-sales motion from zero to $100M. Then, they doubled revenue in less than 6 months and hit $200M …
Notes de l’épisode
Legora went from $3.5M to over $100M in revenue in about a year, the fastest any company has ever scaled a direct-sales motion from zero to $100M. Then, they doubled revenue in less than 6 months and hit $200M ARR.
Patrick spent seven years at Braze, from the early days through IPO, before joining Legora (a vertical legal-AI company founded by Max, backed by Benchmark and Redpoint) at $3.5M in revenue. He shares the scaling journey. He also gets tactical on the three things he looks for before joining a company, why speed-to-value is the number-one leading indicator of revenue performance, the pilot that lets customers keep everything they build even if they walk, how he structures forward-deploy across legal engineers and traditional FDEs, the Jude Law and Aaron Judge campaigns and whether they paid off, the "8 Mile" objection-handling play, and the shift to consumption pricing.
Brought to you by:
Nooks - discover how revenue agents can transform your GTM at https://nooks.ai/gtmfund
Transcript:
Full interview transcripts can be found by episode at https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
What you'll learn:- The 3 criteria Patrick uses before joining any company (founder, product, investors)
- Why speed and quality of implementation is the #1 leading indicator of revenue, and why teams over-index on sales and under-index on onboarding
- The pilot design that hands customers the IP, integrations, and workflows to keep (even if they don't buy)
- How to structure forward-deploy: legal engineers for use-case design, FDEs for enterprise integration
- Why he hires roughly 2 post-sale people for every 1 pre-sale
- The Jude Law and Aaron Judge brand campaigns: the real ROI case for B2B brand spend
- The "8 Mile" framework: disarming competitive objections by naming the competitor's move first
- How he screens for real AI fluency in interviews (and why "I summarized my Gong calls" fails)
- Moving the top product to consumption pricing, and what it did to the metrics
- Advice for operators on the fence about joining an AI-native company: bet on yourself, the window won't last
Connect with Patrick Forquer:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-forquer-1419a5a
Connect with Host, Sophie Buonassisi:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
About the guest: Patrick Forquer is the CRO of Legora. He joined at roughly $3.5M in revenue and helped scale it past $100M in about a year, the fastest any company has taken a direct-sales motion from zero to $100M. Now, they’ve hit $200M ARR. Before Legora he spent seven years at Braze, from the early days through its path to IPO.
About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.
Visit us: https://gtmnow.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
X: https://x.com/GTMnow_
IG: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_nowThe GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.Chapitres
Chargement des chapitres…
Lessons from building 113 AI agents and reinventing a GTM function with AI | Meagan (CMO, Samsara)
The CMO of Samsara joins GTMnow to walk through exactly how she ran an AI transformation inside a public company, from a 2.5 week boot camp to 113 agents in production, all while keeping headcount flat and …
Notes de l’épisode
The CMO of Samsara joins GTMnow to walk through exactly how she ran an AI transformation inside a public company, from a 2.5 week boot camp to 113 agents in production, all while keeping headcount flat and pushing pipeline and revenue up.
Meagan has led teams through platform shifts before (PLG, social, Covid) at MongoDB, DocuSign, Nieman, and now Samsara, and she argues AI is categorically different: not a new channel, but a production shift that changes how the work itself gets done. She gets tactical on the change-management sequence (learn by doing before you cap anything), how agents live in Slack for every function, the ABM pages that went from 2-3 weeks to under 30 minutes, the KPIs she tracks, how she interviews for AI fluency, and her message to anxious operators: this is a chance to leapfrog, not a threat.
What you'll learn:- Why AI is a production shift, not just a new channel, and what that changes about running a team
- The change-management order that works: let people learn and play before you put cost caps on
- Inside the 2.5-week AI boot camp (vibe-coded LMS, hands-on agent build, present-back) that trained half the org
- Why she democratized agent-building into every function instead of centralizing an AI team
- How 113 agents run in Slack across events, sales, ADR support, and creative
- The rebrand that hit the market in 3.5 weeks instead of six months
- ABM landing pages from 2-3 weeks to under 30 minutes, and content from weekly to 10 a day
- How she keeps headcount flat: backfill differently, raise the bar on output
- How she interviews for AI fluency, and why you can't earn a top calibration score without building agents
- Her advice to anxious operators: build agents to leapfrog leadership, don't wait
Connect with Meagan:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meageneisenberg
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
Thank you to our sponsor:
@NooksHQ - discover how revenue agents can transform your GTM at nooks.ai/gtmfundAbout the guest: Meagan is the Chief Marketing Officer of Samsara, a public company on the NYSE. She has led marketing through major platform shifts at MongoDB, DocuSign, and Nieman, and has a background in MIS and computer science, starting her career as an IT engineer before moving into marketing.
About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.
Visit us: https://gtmnow.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
X: https://x.com/GTMnow_
IG: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_nowThe GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.Chapitres
Chargement des chapitres…
Inside LinkedIn: buyer behavior, how to social sell, why warm intros get 3x the response, why only 45% of sellers are seen as trustworthy and the 4 behaviors that separate top sellers | Catherine Flynn (LinkedIn Sales Navigator)
Information has never been more abundant, and trust has never been harder to earn. That's the tension at the heart of LinkedIn's new research, "The Trust Advantage," and Catherine, who leads marketing …
Notes de l’épisode
Information has never been more abundant, and trust has never been harder to earn. That's the tension at the heart of LinkedIn's new research, "The Trust Advantage," and Catherine, who leads marketing for LinkedIn's Sales Solutions business (Sales Navigator), joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to unpack it. The headline gap: 86% of B2B buyers say expertise is what builds trust, but only 45% describe the sellers they meet as trustworthy.
Catherine has spent 25+ years in marketing, including 13 at Meta, and now runs a global team out of Singapore. She argues AI has made "spray and pray" easier than ever, which is exactly why the winning move is doing less, more relevant outreach. She breaks down the four behaviors that separate top sellers, why warm introductions convert so much better, what a seller's LinkedIn profile should actually say, and how putting your expertise out publicly now helps both you and your company rank in AI search.
What you'll learn:
- The trust gap: why 86% of buyers want expertise but only 45% find sellers trustworthy, and how to close it
- Why expertise in a first conversation means leading with their problem, not your product
- The case for less outreach: more signal means you can be far more selective
- The four top-seller behaviors: signal-based selling, early multithreading, timely engagement (hours not weeks), and genuinely personalized outreach
- Why warm intros win: ~3x higher email response and ~2x higher connection-acceptance than cold
- The most underrated entry point: executive sponsors and former customers who moved companies
- What a seller's LinkedIn profile should be (a point of view, not a resume), and why profile views are a top buying signal
- The algorithm and discoverability: how posting even once a week, and engaging on others' posts, compounds
- Why LinkedIn is now the most-cited domain for professional queries in AI search, and what that means for you
- Hiring in the AI era: adaptability and generalists over specialists, and "throw your hat over the wall"Connect with Catherine:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherineflynn/
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
About the guest: Catherine leads marketing for LinkedIn's Sales Solutions business, home of Sales Navigator. She has 25+ years in marketing, including consumer and agency roots and roughly 13 years at Meta/Facebook, and is based in Singapore, where much of the Sales Solutions business is being built across APAC.
About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.Chapitres
Chargement des chapitres…
Why More AI Won't Grow Your Revenue (and What Will) | Loreal Lynch (CMO, Nooks)
The CMO of Nooks (and former CMO of Jasper) joins GTMnow to explain why buying more agents won't grow revenue unless you rebuild the process underneath, and what the human-plus-agent revenue team truly …
Notes de l’épisode
The CMO of Nooks (and former CMO of Jasper) joins GTMnow to explain why buying more agents won't grow revenue unless you rebuild the process underneath, and what the human-plus-agent revenue team truly looks like.
Loreal has had a front-row seat to two AI waves: first at Jasper, where AI reshaped marketing content, and now at Nooks, building toward what she calls the revenue agents category. She breaks down why the tools in today's GTM stack were built for humans to click through, not for agents to execute; why the org chart and the process both have to be rethought from the ground up; and why the real shift isn't reps prompting AI, but AI prompting reps. She also gets into the misconception that agents are easy to build, the CMO-CRO alignment model she runs with her counterpart Hannah, and why the marketing pendulum is swinging back from pure performance to brand.
What you'll learn:
- Why bolting AI tools onto pre-AI processes fails, and what a real revenue operating system requires
- The iceberg model of human vs. agent work, and why the waterline keeps rising
- Why the future flips: AI stops waiting for prompts and starts prompting the rep
- Augmentation over replacement: if an agent makes a rep 10x, you hire more reps, not fewer
- The results some teams see: ~3x meetings booked and ~2x pipeline on the same headcount
- Why "agents are easy to build" is a trap once you need shared data, governance, and calling/email infrastructure at scale
- What stays human: judgment, narrative, and reading the room (the surf-small-talk story)
- The CMO-CRO alignment model: shared pipeline goals instead of fighting over sourced-lead credit
- Why marketing's pendulum is swinging back from performance to brand in the AI era
- Why starting with a wedge (the dialer) and its conversational data beats selling a broad platform
Chapters:
00:00 Cold open: augmentation not replacement, and AI that prompts the rep
01:14 Welcome, and why she left Jasper's AI wave for Nooks
03:26 Seeing AI from every side: customer, board, now operator
04:27 The iceberg: human work above the water, agent work below
05:13 What humans do best vs. what agents do best
07:14 The real question isn't how many agents, it's who prompts whom
07:31 Augmentation over replacement: make a rep 10x, hire more
08:37 The results some teams see, and what's next
09:56 Why bolting AI onto old processes fails|12:06 The misconception that agents are easy to build
13:58 Going AI-native inside her own marketing org
15:10 The framework for what goes to headcount vs. agents
16:19 What stays human: judgment, context, and the naming story
17:32 CMO-CRO alignment: shared systems and shared metrics
19:43 How she and her CRO run pipeline without sourced-lead targets
21:40 What's changed, and what still works: the pendulum back to brand
23:42 What she's excited to build at Nooks
25:10 Who's winning with Nooks: the AI-native early adopters
27:06 Rapid fire: leadership, impact over activity, no time for bad wine
28:25 Who Nooks is hiring, and where to find Loreal
Connect with Loreal Lynch:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorealesque/
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
About the guest: Loreal Lynch is the Chief Marketing Officer of Nooks, a revenue agents platform that started with an AI dialer and expanded across the sales engagement stack. She was previously CMO of Jasper, and earlier held marketing leadership roles at Salesforce, Tableau, and Stripe. Nooks' customers include Cursor, Replicate, Deel, and HubSpot.
About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.Building an AI-Era Sales Machine | Chris McDonough (VP Sales, Campfire)
Chris McDonough has joined four companies right before they exploded. At the first, Motive, he was employee 40 and watched revenue go from $800K to $30M in about 100 days. The VP of Sales at Campfire joins …
Notes de l’épisode
Chris McDonough has joined four companies right before they exploded. At the first, Motive, he was employee 40 and watched revenue go from $800K to $30M in about 100 days. The VP of Sales at Campfire joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to break down what he learned riding hypergrowth over and over, and why he thinks AI is about to split the sales profession in two.
Chris gets tactical on the whole arc: how a two-week decision to sign a lease and move to SF changed his trajectory, what a federal mandate taught him about compelling events, why your career growth is tied directly to how fast your company grows, and how he now builds an AI-native sales org from scratch at Campfire (an AI-native ERP taking on the legacy giants). He also makes the contrarian case that AI won't replace reps but will widen the gap between them, why AI outbound is mostly spam for complex B2B, and why a strong SDR bench is existential.
What you'll learn:
- The $800K-to-$30M-in-100-days story, and what a compelling event really looks like
- Why your career trajectory is tied to your company's growth rate ("you can't be a VP if there's no one to be VP of")
- The contrarian AI take: not labor replacement, but a top 30% worth triple and a bottom 20% that's hard to employ
- What he hires for now: not just skill, but whether you can self-learn from AI on day one
- How to build an AI-native sales org with no tech debt (the deal dashboard that grades every call against every win and loss)
- Why AI outbound mostly becomes a spam tool in complex B2B, and why the SDR bench matters more
- Why he leaves once a company is big enough to run Workday, and goes back downmarket
- How to sell into the "real economy," where nobody cares about your hot VC and references are hyper-local
- Regrettable churn: the retention metric behind Samsara's run, and why top reps compound
- One-way vs. two-way doors: how to make fast decisions at 70-80% of the data
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:17 Welcome, and a career of joining companies right before they explode
01:51 Employee 40 at Motive, and the two-week decision that changed everything
04:19 The federal mandate, and the hiring class that got promoted in 30 days
05:33 Why career growth is tied to company growth rate
07:12 The mandate story: from selling nothing to 70 demos a week
10:19 Was it the wrong decision? Believing through the objection
10:56 What 800-900 demos in 3 months does to a seller
12:11 Samsara: scaling an office 0 to 100, and 250 interviews in 90 days
13:42 The contrarian hiring philosophy: the 10x seller and the widening gap
15:59 Why he left Verkada for Campfire, and the "Workday rule"
18:41 Building an AI-native sales org with no tech debt
21:14 What Campfire is: AI-native ERP and one of software's last moats
25:25 Expanding the TAM and the recession-proof case
26:12 Selling into the real economy: hyper-local references, not hot logos
28:26 His honest take on AI outbound and AI SDRs
30:49 The SDR org as your existential talent bench
31:56 The metric he obsesses over: regrettable churn
33:45 Who Campfire is hiring, and "will Claude kill this company?"
35:33 Rapid fire: leadership, execution over competitors, one-way vs. two-way doors
40:19 Where to find Chris, and how to actually DM your way into a job
Connect with Chris McDonough:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-mcdonough-94546626/Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuonaAbout the guest: Chris McDonough is VP of Sales at Campfire, an AI-native ERP company competing with legacy incumbents like NetSuite. He was previously at Verkada, and earlier helped scale Motive (formerly KeepTruckin) from $800K to roughly $100M in revenue and Samsara through hyperscale, opening new-market offices in Nashville and Atlanta.
About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.
Visit us: https://gtmnow.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
X: https://x.com/GTMnow_
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_nowThe GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.Inside Electric's AI Relaunch, from a 3X Founder | Ryan Denehy (Founder & CEO, Electric)
The founder and CEO of Electric, Ryan Denehy joins GTMnow to explain why and how he rebuilt Electric as an AI-native software company.Ryan gets specific on why he split the business in half, how the pivot …
Notes de l’épisode
The founder and CEO of Electric, Ryan Denehy joins GTMnow to explain why and how he rebuilt Electric as an AI-native software company.
Ryan gets specific on why he split the business in half, how the pivot forced a total change in distribution (from direct sales to embedded channel partnerships with payroll platforms), and why a new product doesn't just need a new channel, it can unlock ones that were impossible before.
He also shares the ADP partnership that put Electric behind 1,700 reps, the near-death moments (including the night he almost wired his seed round back to investors), how to actually get acquired by a public company, and the cold-outreach framework he's used since making extreme-sports videos at 17.
What you'll learn:
- Why he rebuilt a working company AI-native, and the five-step playbook for a "total reinvention"
- Why product-market fit is as much about distribution as the product, and the Sirius XM lesson behind it
- How going AI-native collapsed his unit price and made channel-led growth possible for the first time
- Why the winner-take-all gap between AI companies is so much wider than in classic SaaS
- The embedded-partnership motion behind ADP, Justworks, and TriNet deals (300+ customers onboarded in a day)
- How to actually get acquired by a public company (hint: people buy companies, corp dev doesn't)
- Why the quietest near-death threat is a splashy senior mis-hire, not a market crash
- The cold-outreach framework he's run since cold-emailing pro athletes at 17
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:04 A 3x founder who sold two companies to public acquirers
01:33 What Electric is, and why "AI" was in the name in 2016
04:40 What a "wholesale rewrite" meant
06:38 Why go AI-native
08:12 The reinvention playbook
13:08 Why they blew the whole thing up
13:48 Distribution as product-market fit: the Sirius XM lesson
15:37 How AI collapsed the price and unlocked channel sales
18:19 The winner-take-all gap between AI companies
20:35 From direct sales to channel
23:00 The three-year channel payoff
25:17 Rebuilding the product and signing the payroll platforms
26:27 The new-category pitch
29:29 Behind the scenes for ADP, Justworks, and TriNet
30:02 Almost wiring the seed money back
32:00 The day everything changed at once
33:52 The quiet damage of a senior mis-hire
35:48 Two prior companies: go-to-market above all
38:18 How to get acquired by a public company
42:55 Extreme-sports videos at 17, and the outreach framework
44:47 Where to find Ryan and Electric
Connect with Ryan Denehy:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryandenehy/
X: https://x.com/DenehyXXL
Electric: https://electric.ai
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
About the guest: Ryan Denehy is the founder and CEO of Electric, an AI-native IT management platform now embedded in payroll and HR products including ADP Team Management, Justworks, and TriNet. A three-time founder, he previously built and sold companies to USA Today and Groupon. Electric is backed by investors including Notable Capital and Slack.
About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.What the Top 1% of Sellers Do Differently | Ross Rich (CEO, Accord)
Ross Rich is the co-founder and CEO of Accord and spent five years leading go-to-market and partnerships at Stripe. He talks to hundreds of CROs and serves thousands of reps, so he has an unusually clear view …
Notes de l’épisode
Ross Rich is the co-founder and CEO of Accord and spent five years leading go-to-market and partnerships at Stripe. He talks to hundreds of CROs and serves thousands of reps, so he has an unusually clear view of what the top performers actually do differently.
His starting point: roughly the top 20%, often closer to 10%, of any sales team drives most of the revenue. Every leader says they want to move the middle 60%, and Ross doesn't think AI is doing it. Tools like Claude and Codex make the people who already have the taste and judgment far more efficient, and the gap widens from there. What closes it is unglamorous and human: a leader with a point of view, a shared language simple enough to stick, a field-friendly process, and only then the technology to reinforce it.
Ross gets specific on what "best" means for a seller (trust and EQ first, then frameworks learned so cold they run subconsciously), the disconnect between what CROs think they're buying and what reps actually receive, the "no-ask note" for multithreading into a CRO, why he sells through his own executives instead of around them, and the biggest lesson of his founder journey: market beats product.
What you'll learn:
- What separates the top 10% of reps from everyone else, and why AI is widening that gap instead of closing it
- The two ingredients of a great seller: the "give a shit factor" you can't fake, then plays run so subconsciously you can get creative
- The waiter analogy that explains great salesmanship in one sentence
- Why the people, process, technology order is the one most teams get backwards in the AI rush
- The disconnect between a CRO's multimillion-dollar investment in the field and what reps actually receive: a 76-page laminate, more Salesforce fields, none of it touching the customer
- Why the best methodology is simply the one that gets used, and why debating how many Ps are in MEDDPICC is optimizing the fringes
- "Unavoidable excellence": how to take what your top performers do organically and make it standard across the team
- The "no-ask note" for multithreading into a CRO by showing respect instead of asking for time
- Why CROs own revenue and not tools, and how to sell through their rev-ops and enablement leaders
- "Show, don't tell": leading with peer references at stage two when everyone can sound the same and ship a surface-level solution
- The founder-led sales handoff mistake Ross has made twice, and the curse of knowledge behind it
- Why market beats product, via April Dunford's positioning and the surfer, surfboard, wave framing
Connect with Ross Rich:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rossrich/
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
About the guest: Ross Rich is the founder and CEO of Accord, a platform that operationalizes value selling (quantified business cases, mutual action plans, stakeholder mapping, account planning) in a field-friendly way. Before founding Accord, he spent over five years at Stripe leading go-to-market and partnerships. Accord's customers include Freshworks and Samsara.
About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing how the best in tech build, scale and invest.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.Will Salesforce Win the AI Era Like It Won Cloud? | Kris Billmaier
Is Salesforce the dominant player in the AI platform shift, or the incumbent about to be disrupted? Kris Billmaier, EVP and GM of Agentforce Sales and Growth Products, sat down with Sophie Buonassisi at …
Notes de l’épisode
Is Salesforce the dominant player in the AI platform shift, or the incumbent about to be disrupted? Kris Billmaier, EVP and GM of Agentforce Sales and Growth Products, sat down with Sophie Buonassisi at Salesforce Tower to answer that directly.
Kris runs the business behind Sales Cloud's 26-year run and its rebrand into Agentforce Sales. He makes the case that CRM is becoming "agentic revenue orchestration," that the category needs a new name, and that the future is headless. For Salesforce, that means surfaced inside Slack, ChatGPT, Gemini, and wherever sellers actually work. He also shares the internal numbers, including an engagement agent that worked the leads Salesforce had always ignored and generated over $100M in pipeline in eight months.
What you'll learn:
- Why 60% of a seller's time goes to non-selling work, and which agents remove it
- The case for renaming the category from CRM to agentic revenue orchestration
- What "headless CRM" means, and why Salesforce integrated with ChatGPT and Gemini
- How one leader manages 100 reps plus the equivalent of 400 agents
- Why the Momentum acquisition matters: "memory fragments" that cut an 8,000-word meeting to the 800 words that count
- Why Salesforce is hiring more sellers, not fewer
- How hiring shifted from "what did you do" to "how do you build" (and why a PowerPoint is now a red flag)
- Pricing in the agent era: seats, flex credits, and a coming leads-worked outcome metric
- Why Kris says we're not in a SaaSpocalypse, and how a 70,000-person company still ships weekly
Thank you to our sponsor:
Primer unlocks B2C ad channels for B2B marketers with precision targeting and next-gen measurement. GTMnow Network exclusive offer: Extended 45 day trial and 15% off with code GTM15 - just apply the code when you go to upgrade from the free trial. See who’s really in your funnel: sayprimer.com
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:12 Welcome, and the Salesforce platform-shift question
02:25 How Salesforce adapted across cloud, mobile, social, and AI
03:32 Why Sales Cloud became Agentforce Sales
05:17 Renaming the category: from CRM to agentic revenue orchestration
06:56 Will anyone log into a CRM again?
08:09 Agentforce in one line, and the seller's Monday morning
09:08 Build vs. buy, vibe coding, and the context moat
11:01 The Momentum acquisition and memory fragments
13:04 Sellers managing teams of agents, and the $100M pipeline story
15:03 The agent stack: prospecting, engagement, pipeline, quoting
16:27 Efficiency, accuracy, and auto-generated forecasts
18:03 Why Salesforce is hiring more sellers
19:16 What the modern sales role looks like
20:08 Sponsor: Primer
21:34 How AI changed hiring: from "what" to "how"
23:48 The window: shipping weekly, not on three annual releases
25:13 What product-market fit means now
26:05 Software vs. services, and the $10T question
28:10 The complexity problem: easy by default, advanced by choice
30:07 Go-to-market evolution and consolidating the stack
32:07 Leading as a player-coach
33:16 Being "chief repetition officer" and educating the field
35:00 How a 70,000-person company stays agile
36:48 The biggest lesson from Marc Benioff
37:57 Pricing: seats, flex credits, and outcome-based metrics
40:53 Are we in a SaaSpocalypse? The full answer
42:08 Where Kris gets his learnings
43:07 World Cup picks
Kris Billmaier (EVP and GM of Agentforce Sales, Salesforce)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisbillmaier/
Salesforce Agentforce: https://www.salesforce.com/agentforce
Sophie Buonassisi (Host, SVP at GTMnow/GTMfund)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
About Kris Billmaier:
Kris Billmaier is EVP and GM of Agentforce Sales and Growth Products at Salesforce, where he leads the business formerly known as Sales Cloud. He oversees the company's agentic sales portfolio, including its prospecting, engagement, pipeline, and quoting agents, and the Momentum acquisition that powers its conversational data layer.
About GTMnow:
GTMnow shares how the best in tech build, scale and invest. The media brand is owned and operated by venture firm, GTMfund.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.Inside Deel's $1M → $1.5B Sales Machine | Chris Lee
Chris Lee joined Deel at $1M in revenue. Now, it just hit $1.5B. He joined GTMnow to walk through the pivotal decisions behind that run, including the ones he's never discussed publicly.Chris (Head of …
Notes de l’épisode
Chris Lee joined Deel at $1M in revenue. Now, it just hit $1.5B. He joined GTMnow to walk through the pivotal decisions behind that run, including the ones he's never discussed publicly.
Chris (Head of Sales, Americas at Deel) breaks down the "five-star sales experience" framework he built by studying luxury hotels, why speed itself became a reason customers bought, how he's had zero regrettable director-level attrition in 5.5 years, and why they hire people with the job title "Ghostbuster" to keep a 7,000-person company moving like a 30-person startup.
What you'll learn:
- The five-star sales experience framework, and how to map your own process from three-star to five
- Why every new sales leader at Deel spends their first 30 days taking inbound and selling
- How speed became the reason Coinbase chose Deel over a legacy vendor with no references to show
- The hire-slow, fire-fast principle behind zero regrettable director attrition in 5.5 years
- Why "tell me about a time" interview questions optimize for the best liar, and the scenario-based alternative
- What a "Ghostbuster" is, and how the role fights operational decay as you scale
- Leading a sales team through public crisis: cry, quit, or fight
- The trillion-dollar thesis: why 95% of the world's workers sit outside the US market
- Why Chris went back to first-principles systems thinking instead of fiddling with AI tools
Thank you to our sponsor:
Primer unlocks B2C ad channels for B2B marketers with precision targeting and next-gen measurement. GTMnow Network exclusive offer: Extended 45 day trial and 15% off with code GTM15 - just apply the code when you go to upgrade from the free trial. See who’s really in your funnel: sayprimer.com
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:58 Welcome to GTMnow
01:33 From Granular (agtech, employee #11) to a DuPont acquisition
05:30 The failed recruiting startup he launched in January 2020
07:17 How he found Deel, and applying to the wrong role on purpose
09:48 The first-30-days lesson from CEO Alex Bouazizi: go sell
11:44 What Deel actually does today
13:14 Scaling a distributed sales org remotely
15:41 Building rapport on a global remote team
17:35 From transactional SMB to multi-product enterprise
20:16 Sales-led, not product-led, and why consolidation wins
22:45 "Deel speed," and why speed is a reason people buy
25:31 Sponsor: Primer
26:57 Frank Slootman, Amp It Up, and outpacing competitors
29:12 How he got Slootman to open the sales kickoff
30:28 Zero director attrition in 5.5 years, and hire slow, fire fast
33:54 Why "tell me about a time" fails, and the scenario-based alternative
37:46 The five-star sales experience framework
41:54 Bringing enterprise-grade experience to SMB with AI
45:49 The trillion-dollar thesis: 95% of workers are outside the US
47:22 Building 60+ payroll engines: the Amazon Prime parallel
53:02 First-principles systems thinking for sales
59:38 The problem-framing framework he gives his team
01:01:09 The "Ghostbuster" role and fighting operational decay
01:05:25 Where to find Chris
Chris Lee (Head of Sales, Americas at Deel):
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/techcontrarian/
X: https://x.com/TechContrarian
Sophie Buonassisi (Host, SVP at GTMnow/GTMfund):
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
About Chris Lee:
Chris Lee is Head of Sales, Americas at Deel, which he joined as one of its first sales hires at $1M in revenue and helped scale to $1.5B. Previously he was employee number 11 at Granular, an agricultural tech company acquired by DuPont for $300M.
About GTMnow:
GTMnow shares how the best in tech build, scale and invest. The media brand is owned and operated by venture firm, GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.Inside Merge: The $75M Bet on Open Source AI (Powering OpenAI, Netflix & Uber) | Shensi Ding, CEO
The Co-Founder & CEO of Merge joins GTMnow to break down how she built a company that now powers integrations for OpenAI, Perplexity, Netflix, Uber, Mistral, and enterprise logos like Mastercard, JP Morgan, and …
Notes de l’épisode
The Co-Founder & CEO of Merge joins GTMnow to break down how she built a company that now powers integrations for OpenAI, Perplexity, Netflix, Uber, Mistral, and enterprise logos like Mastercard, JP Morgan, and Amex, backed by $75M from Accel and NEA.
Shensi gets tactical on the GTM decisions behind that growth: why she went enterprise-first into greenfield, why she's now layering a self-serve motion back on top (20,000+ self-serve orgs, 400+ enterprise customers), how forward-deployed engineers turned a 1% edge case into 5 to 10x usage growth, and why she rebuilt marketing to run like an engineering team. She also gets candid on founder-led sales, the mercenaries-versus-missionaries hiring trap, the open-source model shift and the China question, and why every founder who started pre-AI should build one product 0-to-1 themselves.
What you'll learn:
- Why she reversed the standard GTM playbook (enterprise first, then PLG) and how to run both motions at once
- How forward-deployed engineers close the 1% edge case that unlocks 5 to 10x enterprise usage
- Why marketing now runs like an engineering function at Merge, and how it took her from 1 to 2 dinners a quarter to 3 to 5 a month
- Why product got fast and go-to-market became the new bottleneck
- How to know when to hire your first salesperson (hint: you should be "dying" first)
- The mercenaries-vs-missionaries test, and the "anti-sell" she uses in hiring
- The 2026 shift away from "token-maxing," and how model routing cuts AI spend
- The truth about open-source (often Chinese) models: where they're built vs. where your data actually lives
- Why founders who started pre-AI should build one product 0-to-1 to understand what's now possible
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:14 What Merge does: products, workforce, and three core offerings
02:05 Agent Handler, Gateway, and the new Embedded Routing Stack
04:52 The 2026 shift away from "token-maxing"
07:29 Open-source models, the China question, and where data really lives
10:14 How Merge works with open-source model providers
12:00 What she's learned as a first-time founder: get over your ego
13:22 Reversing the GTM playbook: enterprise-first, then PLG
15:50 Running both motions: 20,000+ self-serve, 400+ enterprise
17:31 Why buyer behavior moved to Twitter and brand
19:06 Founder-led sales, and what a real sales process taught her
22:27 When to hire your first salesperson
23:49 Forward-deployed engineers and 5 to 10x usage growth
27:00 Keeping go-to-market up to speed with product
28:33 Rebuilding marketing as an engineering function
30:45 The dinner agent: 1 to 2 a quarter to 3 to 5 a month
31:24 How AI buying reshaped the marketing org
33:54 Maintaining agents: prompts over legacy builders
35:02 Mercenaries vs. missionaries, and the "anti-sell"
40:25 The market view: from hostility to collaboration
42:06 Is a valuation reckoning coming?
43:07 Why she stayed hands-on building Agent Handler and Gateway
45:18 What's next: training your own models off open-source
46:52 Where to find Shensi and Merge
Connect with Shensi Ding:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shensiding/
X: https://x.com/shensi
Merge: https://merge.dev
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
About the guest: Shensi Ding is the co-founder and CEO of Merge, a unified API platform that now spans product integrations, agent tooling, and LLM routing/governance. Merge powers companies including OpenAI, Perplexity, Netflix, Uber, and Mistral, and enterprise customers like Mastercard, JP Morgan, and Amex. The company has raised $75M from Accel and NEA.Thank you to our sponsor:
Primer unlocks B2C ad channels for B2B marketers with precision targeting and next-gen measurement. GTMnow Network exclusive offer: Extended 45 day trial and 15% off with code GTM15 - just apply the code when you go to upgrade from the free trial.
See who’s really in your funnel: sayprimer.com
About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.The Blueprint for a High-Performing Sales Team | Brian Le, Notion
Are your sales compensation plans driving the right behaviors or causing your best reps to quit? In this episode of GTMnow, Brian Le (Global Sales Compensation Partner at Notion) breaks down how to build a …
Notes de l’épisode
Are your sales compensation plans driving the right behaviors or causing your best reps to quit? In this episode of GTMnow, Brian Le (Global Sales Compensation Partner at Notion) breaks down how to build a scalable sales comp operating system.
Brian shares his firsthand experience scaling Notion's sales comp from 80 to over 400 employees and explains why trust is the ultimate currency in revenue operations. If you are a founder, revenue leader, or sales professional, this breakdown covers everything from structuring pay mix to identifying the earliest signs of comp plan degradation. You will even hear what it takes for top AEs to pull in upwards of $1 million in a single quarter.
In this episode, we cover:
00:00 Intro
01:15 Brian Le's journey through Salesforce, Carta, and Notion
04:33 Why sales comp is the operating system for go-to-market
07:07 Phase 1: Building a scalable comp foundation at Notion
13:50 Transitioning from seat-based to usage-based pricing models
18:15 The 3 core pillars of a successful sales commission plan
22:09 Early warning signs your quota and comp structures are breaking
31:41 The real cost of losing sales reps over bad commission payouts
39:35 How to structure compensation for your first early-stage sales hires
42:39 Will AI agents replace SDRs and sales compensation?
Connect with Brian Le, :
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianhoangle/
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.VC: How a 2-Person Fund Runs Like a Startup (Memos, KPIs, R&D) | Vanessa Larco, Premise (ex-NEA)
"Investing in companies that OpenAI won't kill." That's Vanessa Larco's thesis, and in this VC bonus episode of GTMnow she breaks down exactly how she decides what survives. Vanessa, founder and …
Notes de l’épisode
"Investing in companies that OpenAI won't kill." That's Vanessa Larco's thesis, and in this VC bonus episode of GTMnow she breaks down exactly how she decides what survives. Vanessa, founder and GP at Premise (formerly a longtime partner at NEA, where she backed Robinhood from seed to IPO), joins Max to get into the nitty gritty of how AI is rewriting venture, distribution, and the entire go-to-market playbook.
She makes the case for why "it's just a wrapper" got a lot of VCs in trouble, why she only backs technical founding teams, and why the old GTM playbook is breaking fastest exactly where you'd least expect it. She also opens up about leaving a big platform to build a two-person fund from a blank canvas, and why she treats the fund itself like a startup.
What you'll learn:
- The "OpenAI won't kill it" framework for spotting durable AI companies (and why not everything OpenAI ships actually wins)
- Why the "it's just a wrapper" dismissal cost VCs real deals, and the kayak/AWS parallels that explain why
- Why Premise only backs technical founding teams, and the shipping speed that becomes the real early moat
- How the old go-to-market playbook is breaking, especially in DevTools, and what replaces it
- Why someone on the founding team has to "nerd out" on distribution, and why no-playbook moments are where you growth hack
- How to run a conviction-based investment committee, and why big funds drift toward consensus whether they like it or not
- Why running a fund is just running a startup: fundraising, product, and customer success by another name
- The unanswered question Vanessa keeps circling: how to give experienced GTM talent space to rewrite the playbook
Chapters:
00:00 Intro & OpenAI Moats
01:12 GTMnow Intro
01:51 Technical vs. Non-Technical AI Founders
04:37 The Bottleneck of Hiring AI Talent
05:15 Do Old Moats Still Exist?
06:36 Cloud Era Lessons vs. Today's AI Layer
09:18 The Shift to the Distribution Era
11:38 Interview: Vanessa Larco (Premise VC)
12:40 Companies OpenAI Won't Kill
13:37 Consumer Habits vs. Enterprise AI
15:05 Moving Beyond the "Wrapper" Stigma
17:39 Thesis Building vs. Founder Curiosities
20:11 Sourcing & The "Surreal" Community
22:26 Learnings From NEA & Lightspeed
24:06 Rethinking the Investment Memo
26:43 Consensus vs. Conviction Investing
31:26 Running a VC Fund Like a Startup
35:04 Building Internal Automation Tools
37:35 Distribution Moats & DevTools
39:38 Sourcing New GTM Playbooks
41:12 Parallel to the AWS Boom
43:55 Human Psychology vs. AI Tools
47:06 SF's Best Cookie Spots
48:32 Outro
Connect with Vanessa Larco:
About the guest: Vanessa Larco is the founder and GP at Premise. Previously a partner at NEA, she backed consumer and fintech companies including Robinhood from seed through IPO. She started her career in product and engineering, was a computer science undergrad, and founded and sold her own startup before moving into venture.
Connect with Max:
https://x.com/hackitmax
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxaltschuler/
Connect with Vanessa:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessalarco/
https://x.com/veelarco
About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market. This is the VC bonus series, where we host VCs and get into the VC ecosystem.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.Why a $1.2B exit felt like his biggest failure, and the customer-obsession thesis behind Agency
A $1.2 billion exit is the dream. Elias Torres calls it his biggest failure. The Drift co-founder joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to unpack why the headline number felt hollow, what he learned in the quiet …
Notes de l’épisode
A $1.2 billion exit is the dream. Elias Torres calls it his biggest failure. The Drift co-founder joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to unpack why the headline number felt hollow, what he learned in the quiet stretch afterward, and why he jumped straight back in to build Agency, an AI company that runs your entire customer organization.
Elias gets honest about identity after the exit, the difference between chasing a title and building something enduring, and the operating thesis behind Agency: a billion-dollar company with fewer than 100 people, where 80 to 90% of the team are engineers and everyone talks to customers. He also gets into distribution as the hardest problem in the AI era, why he only takes money from investors who lead with value (Pat Grady and Brian Halligan back the company), and the two decades he's spent building alongside David Cancel.
What you'll learn:
- Why a $1.2B exit can still feel like a failure, and what "enduring" actually means
- How to rebuild your identity when the title goes away
- The Agency thesis: $1B with under 100 people, and how AI agents make it possible
- Why Elias runs the whole company on Agency itself, with no CRM
- Why sales may be the last role AI eliminates, and what that means for GTM
- How to spot investors who lead with value instead of a pitch deck
- Why distribution, not product, is the hardest problem in the AI era
- What 20+ years building with David Cancel (Performable, HubSpot, Drift) taught him about partnership
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
02:25 Time off, slowing down, and losing the title
04:00 The inflection point and what comes after a big exit
07:00 What Agency is and the problem it solves
11:00 Why he brought people he's known for years
11:40 Investors who lead with value (Pat Grady and Brian Halligan)
17:30 Building with David Cancel for 20+ years
23:00 The bold claim: $1B with under 100 people
26:00 The go-to-market motion behind it
28:30 "Sales is the last role AI will eliminate"
36:00 High-agency people and how Agency runs itself
42:00 Building distribution in the AI era
51:00 Where to find Elias and Agency
About the guest: Elias Torres is the founder and CEO of Agency, an AI company that provides agents to run a company's customer organization. He previously co-founded Drift (acquired in a $1.2B deal) and held senior roles at HubSpot and Performable, building alongside David Cancel for over two decades. Agency is backed by Pat Grady (Sequoia) and Brian Halligan.
Connect with Elias Torres:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliast/
X: https://x.com/eliast
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.From DeepMind to 200 Customers in 20 Countries: Building the Execution Layer for Sales | Adam Liska, CEO of Airspeed
The single most expensive sentence in sales is "I'll follow up on that." Adam Liska joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to break down the "execution gap," the space between knowing what to do in a deal and …
Notes de l’épisode
The single most expensive sentence in sales is "I'll follow up on that." Adam Liska joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to break down the "execution gap," the space between knowing what to do in a deal and actually doing it, and why that gap is where most pipeline quietly dies.
Adam left DeepMind's Gemini team in 2022, pre-ChatGPT, to build a native revenue execution platform now serving 200 customers across 20 countries (recently rebranded and fresh off a $20M Series A). In this conversation, he gets specific on what is actually changing in the sales role, what should be automated, and why he thinks this is about to be the golden age for sales reps.
What you'll learn:
- Why "I'll follow up on that" is the most expensive promise in revenue, and how the execution gap compounds from rep to manager to CRO
- What parts of the rep workflow to automate now (research, CRM updates, business cases, follow-ups) and what stays human
- Why AI is squeezing middle management, not reps, and flattening GTM orgs
- How per-rep coaching changes when every call is recorded, shared, and analyzed for patterns
- The "corrective action" approach to coaching deals on the job, in real time
- How to sell globally when borders disappear but local-language talent still matters
- Why in-person events drove 70% of early pipeline, and how that compounds with cold calling
- How to keep your team at the AI frontier by never locking into a single model
- Adam's #1 piece of advice for first-time founders (hint: it starts with your co-founder)
Chapters:
00:00 Why AI won't replace sales reps
00:22 Leaving DeepMind's Gemini team pre-ChatGPT
01:18 What airspeed does and the "execution gap"
02:07 "I'll follow up on that": the most expensive promise in sales
03:28 The $20M Series A and the rebrand from Glyphic
05:30 Why walk away from frontier AI research at DeepMind
07:17 Leading when the frontier models keep changing
08:39 Buy vs. build, and keeping customers at the AI frontier
11:03 Landing the first 200 customers across 20 countries
12:41 Advice for first-time founders
14:04 Selling globally and what AI changes about language
17:07 What the sales rep role looks like in an AI-first world
19:24 How reps and leaders should start automating today
20:51 The channels driving results right now
22:41 How AI makes per-rep coaching actually work
25:14 Building an execution-first culture
27:10 The DeepMind departure story
28:51 Building in London vs. selling in the US
30:43 Adam's favorite AI use case as a busy CEO
31:26 The biggest misconception about AI in sales
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
Guest: Adam Liska, Co-founder and CEO at Airspeed
X: https://x.com/adliska
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adliska/
About the guest: Adam is the co-founder and CEO of Airspeed (formerly glyph), a native revenue execution platform that closes the gap between knowing what to do in a deal and executing on it. Before founding the company, he worked at DeepMind on the team that became Gemini.
About GTMnow:
GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.VC: How Benchmark Picks AI Winners - Max 10 Bets a Year, 5 Partners | Chetan Puttagunta (GP)
Benchmark's Chetan breaks down why the path from $0 to $100M has collapsed from five years to under two, and the one thing that is actually getting harder in the AI era: reaching your first million in …
Notes de l’épisode
Benchmark's Chetan breaks down why the path from $0 to $100M has collapsed from five years to under two, and the one thing that is actually getting harder in the AI era: reaching your first million in revenue. In this VC bonus edition of the GTM Now Podcast, he sits down with Sophie Buonassisi to unpack how AI native companies are compressing 180 day sales cycles into 30 days, why direct sales is here to stay, and how value is shifting away from code toward the last mile of customer service.
Using Legora (legal AI) and Manus as case studies, Chetan explains how Benchmark builds conviction fast, why the marginal cost of code trending to zero changes everything, and what separates the founders who win this window from the ones who miss it.
What you'll learn:
- Why the first $1M now takes longer than the next $99M in the AI era
- How top AI startups compress a 180 day sales cycle into 30 days
- The "trusted vendor" playbook for breaking incumbent distribution advantages
- Why Legora embedded inside a law firm for a year before launching
- How a magical demo plus a tightly scoped pilot collapses six month deals
- Why value is moving from the product build to the service and outcome
- What Benchmark actually looks for: technical insight that creates demand pull
- Why direct sales and forward deployed engineers are exploding in AI
- How buying one AI app triggers an enterprise to buy 100 more
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:13 Why Max + Paul were furious taking notes on this one
02:10 Benchmark's $2B growth fund and the changing strategy
04:57 POC to trial and the power of direct sales in AI
11:33 Meeting Max early: $0 to $100M in 18 months
15:05 Manus: 0 to $100M in eight months through PLG
17:10 Will the AI native window close?
19:09 Sizing the window: $40B software vs $1T services in legal
21:50 How Benchmark picks the winners
25:31 Turning a 180 day sales cycle into 30 days
30:45 The Legora deep dive: research, pilots, legal engineers
41:46 Why $0 to $100M keeps getting faster
42:29 The harder problem: getting to your first $1M
44:04 When code goes to zero, what do customers pay for?
48:46 Sales led vs PLG in the AI era
51:49 How to spot the right founder
55:18 What company Chetan wishes someone would build
56:48 Investors founders should follow
57:40 Working with Jack Altman at Benchmark
Connect with Chetan Puttagunta:
General Partner at Benchmark
Twitter/X: https://x.com/chetanp
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chetanputtagunta/
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
Follow Sophie: https://x.com/sophiebuona
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
About the GTMnow Podcast:
GTMnow is the media brand of GTMfund, sharing the tactics and strategies behind how the best companies go to market. The VC series brings on top investors to break down what is actually working in go to market today.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.Ads in ChatGPT Are Coming. What B2B Marketers Should Do Right Now | Keith Delaney, CEO Primer
LinkedIn CPMs just hit $800. AI is flooding every channel with content. Outbound is dying. So where should B2B marketers actually spend their ad budget right now?Keith Putnam-Delaney, co-founder & CEO of …
Notes de l’épisode
LinkedIn CPMs just hit $800. AI is flooding every channel with content. Outbound is dying. So where should B2B marketers actually spend their ad budget right now?
Keith Putnam-Delaney, co-founder & CEO of Primer, joins Sophie to break down the complete state of B2B paid advertising, what's broken, what's working, and where the real opportunities are hiding in 2025.
What you'll learn:
- Why LinkedIn & Google search are hitting a ceiling (and what to do instead)
- How to get 80% match rates on Meta and 70% on Reddit for B2B audiences
- The only moat competitors can't copy: your targeting
- Why you need to feed CRM conversion data back to ad platforms
- Holdout groups, attribution, and what actually proves paid ROI
- The truth about ads in LLMs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok)
- B2B influencer marketing: the most undervalued tactic right now
- Founder lessons from 6 years and 3 pivots building Primer
Chapters:
0:00 – The paid advertising crisis no one's talking about
2:40 – AI's real impact on ad costs
4:06 – Google Search & AI Overviews: what still works
5:04 – LinkedIn CPMs: $20 to $800 in 18 months
6:39 – Why B2B brands need to be on Meta, Reddit & Instagram
7:01 – What Primer does (80% match rates explained)
9:29 – The device fragmentation problem & attribution
11:16 – Holdout groups: the statistically proven approach
13:30 – Which channel to start with (and minimum spend)
22:18 – Paid ad creative: feed the algorithm with variants
25:14 – B2B influencer marketing & thought leadership ads
30:59 – Why you MUST push CRM data back into ad platforms
33:31 – Ads in ChatGPT & LLMs: what's coming
35:53 – Founder lessons, mental health & iteration
Connect with Keith Putnam-Delaney:
Co-founder, CEO of Primer
Twitter/X: https://x.com/kcpdelaney
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithputnamdelaney/
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
Follow Sophie: https://x.com/sophiebuona
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
About Keith Putnam-Delaney:
Keith is the co-founder and CEO of Primer (https://www.sayprimer.com/), a B2B paid advertising targeting layer that helps brands unlock high match rates on Meta, Google, Reddit, and beyond. Former brand marketer turned data-driven growth leader.
GTMnow is the media brand of GTMfund, sharing go-to-market insights from the top 1% of revenue operators.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.He's Seen 300+ Sales Comp Plans. 90% Make the Same Mistake | Siva Rajamani (Everstage CEO)
Most sales comp plans are quietly broken, and the people running them have no idea. Siva Rajamani, CEO of Everstage, has visibility into 300+ enterprise comp plans, and he says 90% of companies make the same …
Notes de l’épisode
Most sales comp plans are quietly broken, and the people running them have no idea. Siva Rajamani, CEO of Everstage, has visibility into 300+ enterprise comp plans, and he says 90% of companies make the same mistakes. In this episode he breaks down what's going wrong, how to spot it, and what a comp plan that actually drives revenue looks like.
Siva explains why sales compensation is not a back office cost center but the single biggest lever in your go-to-market strategy. It's the glue between what a company intends and what reps actually do. If your reps aren't doing what you want, the answer isn't in a 1-on-1. It's in your comp plan.
We get into the over-complication trap, the hidden math that makes reps refuse your best deals, the base-to-variable ratios that actually work, why your top reps should out-earn almost everyone, and how AI is about to blow open the gap between your best and average sellers.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:30 Siva's RevOps background at Freshworks
04:00 Scaling RevOps from 1 to 25
04:50 Why he left to build Everstage
06:30 Why incentives drive revenue, not tools
08:00 Comp as the glue between intent and action
10:30 The 1 to 2 mistakes almost every team makes
12:00 "If your comp plan needs FAQs, it's a tax code"
14:00 The 60-second test for a broken plan
15:30 Designing comp to retain top talent
16:50 How AI widens the gap between top and average reps
18:00 The $1M sales rep is coming
19:30 Why optimizing for top earners is better on margins
21:30 Quota to OTE ratios that actually work
23:00 Base vs variable: the 50/50 rule and exceptions
24:00 What Everstage does and who it serves
25:30 How Everstage structures its own comp plan
28:00 The rise of the revenue architect
48:00 CPQ and connecting margin to commissions
50:30 When should reps earn commission in the deal cycle
52:30 Six month vs twelve month comp cycles
54:30 The most a sales rep has ever made
55:20 Where to find Siva
Connect with Siva Rajamani:
Co-founder, CEO of Everstage
Twitter/X: https://x.com/siva_rajamani
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sivasrajamani/
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
Follow Sophie: https://x.com/sophiebuona
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
ABOUT GTMnow
GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/
Subscribe for more conversations with the operators and founders behind today's best go-to-market teams.The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content."We Don't Fund Good Companies" : A $1.5B VC Explains Why | Ben Lerer, Lerer Hippeau
Ben Lerer, Managing Partner and Founder of Lerer Hippeau, has built one of New York's most influential early-stage venture firms across nine funds and nearly $1.5B in AUM. In this VC edition of the GTMnow …
Notes de l’épisode
Ben Lerer, Managing Partner and Founder of Lerer Hippeau, has built one of New York's most influential early-stage venture firms across nine funds and nearly $1.5B in AUM. In this VC edition of the GTMnow podcast, Ben sits down with Max and Paul to unpack how he actually picks founders, why he wants to be the "worst investor" at his own fund, and the contrarian belief that backing good, sensible businesses is a mistake.
Ben got his start in media, building Thrillist before it merged into Group Nine, then turned those relationships and that operator empathy into a venture career writing early checks into companies like Warby Parker and Casper. He shares what's changed about winning deals in a more competitive, sharp-elbowed market, how Lerer Hippeau runs its investment committee on conviction rather than consensus, and the process failure behind passing on Peloton.
We also get into the debate every investor is wrestling with right now: the crazy, fast-moving AI-native founder versus the second or third-time operator with deep domain expertise, and why the answer is rarely a silver bullet.
A real venture-nerd conversation on firm building, IC decision-making, founder selection, and what it takes to chase the power law.
Topics covered:
- The "worst investor at my own fund" philosophy
- Conviction vs. consensus in the investment committee
- Why Lerer Hippeau funds "crazy" founders, not good companies
- The Peloton miss and what it revealed about process
- From Thrillist and digital media to venture capital
- AI-native founders vs. domain experts
- How to win competitive deals as a smaller firm
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:52 Max and Paul on the episode: IC process and founder selection
14:36 Conversation with Ben Lerer begins
15:02 Nine funds, $1.5B AUM, and the early-stage strategy
23:00 From Thrillist to venture: the media springboard
28:00 What's changed in picking founders and winning deals
33:00 How the investment committee grew and evolved
37:40 The "magic" deal and chasing high-conviction bets
50:43 Why Ben wants to be the worst investor at his fund
53:00 Funding crazy people, not good companies
51:35 Yankees or Mets?
Connect with Ben Lerer:
https://x.com/BenjLerer
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benlerer/
Connect with Max:
https://x.com/hackitmax
linkedin.com/in/maxaltschuler
Listen on Apple and Spotify, and subscribe for more GTMnow VC editions.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.How Esper Is Building the Operating System for Government Policy | Maleka Momand
Maleka Momand, co-founder and CEO of Esper, joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to break down what it actually takes to build and sell software to government. Esper is the operating system for government policy …
Notes de l’épisode
Maleka Momand, co-founder and CEO of Esper, joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to break down what it actually takes to build and sell software to government. Esper is the operating system for government policy, serving as the system of record for the regulation and internal policy that shapes daily life, from NYPD procedures to nurse practitioner licensing in rural Tennessee.
Maleka shares hard-won lessons from 8 years in GovTech: why winning trust matters more than winning business, why professional services are a moat (not a cost center), and how Esper turns slow, paper-based policy processes into live digital workflows. She also covers the DOGE effect across red and blue states, why enterprise SaaS still has defensible moats in the age of AI, and her advice to founders entering regulated markets.
Whether you're a founder, GTM leader, or operator selling into complex, slow-moving markets, this conversation is packed with practical playbooks on trust, go-to-market, and building durable enterprise software.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:44 Two types of government policy (regulation vs internal)
02:06 The NYPD 3,000-page policy problem
03:23 Digitizing a paper-based, 20-person workflow
04:12 Why policy is infrastructure
05:23 Real impact: Tennessee healthcare & Arkansas hunting licenses
07:45 Esper's ideal customer: complexity, catalyst, volume
08:18 Going to market in GovTech (and why it's slow)
10:16 Advice for founders entering GovTech: win trust first
11:27 Why professional services are a moat
12:38 In-house vs third-party services
13:49 What DOGE actually looks like on the ground
15:11 Is DOGE a tailwind for Esper?
16:36 The new funding round & enterprise SaaS in the age of AI
19:13 From VC to founder: why Maleka made the shift
22:10 Advice for founders: read fiction, not productivity books
24:14 AI, data quality, and the problem with vibe coding
26:43 How Esper uses AI internally (meet "Poly")
27:27 Building a high-agency culture while scaling
29:00 Closing thoughts
Connect with Maleka Momand:
Co-founder, CEO of Esper
Twitter/X: @MalekaMomand
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/malekamomand
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
Follow Sophie: https://x.com/sophiebuona
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
ABOUT GTMnow
GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/
Subscribe to GTMnow for the latest episodes on AI, founder strategy, fundraising, and go-to-market from the best builders in tech.#GovTech #GoToMarket #EnterpriseSaaS #StartupAdvice #GTM #SaaS #FounderAdvice #GovernmentTechnology #PolicyTech #AI
The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.How He Built a $250M Company With Zero Employees | Ben Cera, Polsia
One Person, $10M+ ARR, $30M Raised: How Ben Cera Built Polsia (AI Operating System) SoloBen Cera, founder of Polsia, just raised $30M at a $250M valuation while running the entire company alone. His AI agent …
Notes de l’épisode
One Person, $10M+ ARR, $30M Raised: How Ben Cera Built Polsia (AI Operating System) Solo
Ben Cera, founder of Polsia, just raised $30M at a $250M valuation while running the entire company alone. His AI agent handles his emails, manages customer support, even led his fundraising calls. This is what a solo founder with an AI operating system looks like at scale.
Polsia is an AI operating system that builds and runs companies autonomously. Give it an idea and it builds the product, writes code, conducts research, creates tweets, sets up company infrastructure, and works 24/7 on your behalf. Users are hitting $10M+ ARR using Polsia to scale their businesses.In this episode we cover:
00:00 - Intro & The Viral Launch Nobody Forgot
01:24 - How He Raised $30M at $250M Valuation with Himself as the Only Employee
02:15 - The Origin Story: Building Polsia from Scratch
04:13 - Why the Controversial Product Name Became Free Marketing ($Millions in Earned Media)
05:55 - What Polsia Actually Does (AI Operating System for Founders)
06:25 - How He Hit $10M+ ARR Running Solo (No Cofounders, No Hires)
10:30 - Building a Company OS That Works 24/7 on Your Behalf
12:00 - The Psychology of Single Founder Mode (Why It Scales Faster)
14:45 - AI Agents Handling Customer Support, Refunds, & Bug Fixes
16:30 - Email Automation: How Polsia Responds to 100% of His Emails
20:15 - The Viral Fundraising Stunt (Live Dashboard + Agent-Led Investor Calls)
25:00 - Why He Let His AI Agent Handle First Meetings with Investors
28:30 - The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Distribution (More Visibility = More Traction)
32:15 - How Distribution Strategy Becomes Your Go-To-Market
35:45 - Building in Public While Running Everything Solo
38:00 - Customer Obsession at Scale (Staying Close When You're Alone)
42:56 - Founder Availability: Direct Phone Access to Customers
44:00 - Manufactured Moments That Feel Authentic
50:13 - Why Distribution Isn't an Afterthought Anymore
Key Insights:
- One founder + AI operating system beats small teams without leverage (speed, decision-making, equity concentration)
- Polsia lets you build multiple products simultaneously without hiring (products work 24/7 on your behalf)
- The more controversial your positioning, the more people talk (free marketing from debate)
- AI agents can handle 80% of founder work: emails, support, customer refunds, even investor screening
- Live dashboards showing real-time growth create self-fulfilling prophecies (transparency = conviction)
- Distribution is how you reach product-market fit faster (not an afterthought)
- AI agents leading first investor meetings works (validates the product claim + generates buzz)
- Customer intimacy at scale = founder still takes direct texts from users
- Retention matters more than naming: customers don't complain about the name, they just use it
- One person with AI tools > 5 people building without leverage
Why This Matters:
This is the playbook for next-generation founders in 2026. Ben shows you how to: scale solo using AI agents, multiply your output without hiring, go viral intentionally, raise capital through distribution, and stay close to customers at scale. If you're a founder thinking about AI leverage, autonomous systems, or scaling lean, this is essential.
Watch This If You're:
- Solo founders scaling without a team
- Founders interested in AI agents and autonomous systems
- Learning about AI-first product development
- Studying modern GTM and distribution strategy
- Raising capital in 2026 (fundraising case study)
- Building products with AI agents doing the work
- Curious about the solo founder + AI agent trend
- Following autonomous company builders
Connect with Ben Cera:
Founder & CEO of Polsia
Twitter/X: @bencera
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benbroca/
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
Follow Sophie: https://x.com/sophiebuona
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
ABOUT GTMnow
GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/
Subscribe to GTMnow for the latest episodes on AI, founder strategy, fundraising, and go-to-market from the best builders in tech.The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.The $575B AI Bet (Biggest Since the World Wars) and the New Two-Buyer Reality in Software | Tomasz Tunguz, Theory Ventures
AI Infrastructure Spending is Insane: Hyperscalers Betting $575B on the Data Center Race | Tomasz TunguzThis year's data center infrastructure spending will be the 5th largest infrastructure project in …
Notes de l’épisode
AI Infrastructure Spending is Insane: Hyperscalers Betting $575B on the Data Center Race | Tomasz Tunguz
This year's data center infrastructure spending will be the 5th largest infrastructure project in history (bigger than everything except railroads and the two world wars). Tomasz Tunguz breaks down what nobody appreciates about the scale of the AI boom.
Tomasz Tunguz, General Partner at Theory Ventures, and one of the most insightful voices on AI infrastructure, data stacks, and founder strategy.
In this episode we cover:
00:00 - Intro & The Scale Nobody Anticipated
02:13 - Data Center CapEx Could Hit 5-7% of US GDP by 2030
05:21 - For Every $1 AI Companies Make, They Spend $12 on Infrastructure ($575B Bet)
06:20 - Market Share Capture vs. Margin Games: The Chicken Game Big Tech is Playing
09:48 - How the Data Stack & AI/ML Worlds Have Completely Fused
12:33 - Product-Market Fit is No Longer Binary: It's Continuous Now
15:17 - How AI is Changing Venture Capital & Portfolio Management
17:09 - The Future: Image & Video Data is Going to Require MASSIVE Infrastructure
18:25 - Pattern Recognition Across Winning Companies (Domain Expertise is Key)
20:50 - Hot Take: Corporate Org Structure Will Transform in 5 Years
21:00 - Final Advice to Founders: Nobody Knows the AnswerKey Insights:
- Hyperscalers are spending ALL free cash flow + borrowing heavily to fund data center CapEx (Meta, Google, Oracle levered 7:1 on cash flow basis)
- The dominant metric: intelligence per watt of electricity
- Anthropic rumored to have very high gross margins (first wave competition)
- Data teams are now reporting to heads of engineering (huge organizational shift)
- Inference demand is infinite: models are growing 5-10x in size
- Foundation models broke product-market fit: it's now continuous, not static
- Second-time founders win because they understand domain history & distribution
- PR is now a major distribution channel for AI companies (unlike software era)
- Building for images & video is the next frontier (1,000-10,000x larger than text data)
Watch this if you're:
- Founders building AI/data companies
- Investors analyzing the AI infrastructure play
- Product leaders understanding AI's organizational impact
- Anyone following the AI market seriously
Connect with Max:
https://x.com/hackitmax
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxaltschuler/Connect with Paul:
https://x.com/PaulGTM
https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulsirving/
Guest: Tomasz Tunguz, General Partner
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomasztunguz/
https://x.com/ttunguz
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
https://x.com/sophiebuona
ABOUT GTMnow
GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/
Brought to you by: AngelList
From starting as a small, operator-led rolling fund, to evolving to an institutional platform, AngelList has been a core partner in every phase of GTMfund’s growth. Their software-first fund admin infrastructure allowed us to scale without sacrificing agility, from onboarding hundreds of LPs seamlessly to handling compliance, capital calls, and reporting as our fund size evolved.Transcript available under the episode here: https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
Subscribe to GTMnow for the latest episodes! https://gtmnow.com
For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]
GTMnow is a media brand brought to you by VC firm, GTMfund: https://gtmfund.com/
The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.SEO Is Not Enough Anymore: Webflow's CEO on the Rise of AEO | Linda Tong
The future of websites isn't a builder problem anymore. It's an agent problem.In this episode of GTMnow, Sophie Buonassisi sits down with Linda Tong, CEO of Webflow, to unpack how the entire web is …
Notes de l’épisode
The future of websites isn't a builder problem anymore. It's an agent problem.
In this episode of GTMnow, Sophie Buonassisi sits down with Linda Tong, CEO of Webflow, to unpack how the entire web is being rewritten for a world where humans AND AI agents are your audience.
Linda breaks down why Webflow is no longer "just a website builder" (it's an agentic web marketing platform), what the Vidoso acquisition unlocks for AI-generated brand assets, and how the rise of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is forcing marketers to rethink content from the ground up. She also shares the practical playbooks her team uses to "vibe" sites into production with the Webflow MCP server, why human creativity is the only real moat left, and how she built her own personal CRM using Claude Code.
If you run a GTM team, lead marketing, or are trying to figure out what your website should even look like in 2026, this one is essential.
WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
-Why your website is now the #1 source of truth for humans, bots, and agents
-The shift from static sites to continuously optimizing, dynamic experiences
-How "vibe coding" with MCP is changing the way teams build on the web
-Inside the Vidoso acquisition and what "brand-governed AI" actually means
-AppGen: going from prompt to production without losing brand consistency
-Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): the non-obvious mistakes marketers are making
-How to structure a marketing team made of humans plus agent swarms
-The "5 words" exercise every CEO should run inside their company
-Linda's personal CRM built with Claude Code (and how Webflow scales internal AI)
-Why "unlimited credits" and Builder Days unlock real AI productivity
ABOUT THE GUEST
Linda Tong is the CEO of Webflow, the agentic web marketing platform powering some of the most respected brands on the internet. Before stepping into the CEO role, Linda served as President and COO at Webflow, and previously led product at Cisco's AppDynamics and held senior roles at Google.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
01:41 From static to dynamic
03:12 Inside the Vidoso acquisition
05:38 The human moat
07:17 Beyond the website builder
08:55 Structuring human + agent teams
09:58 AppGen, explained
10:45 Prompt to production
12:11 AEO misconceptions
14:40 Holistic AEO strategy
16:38 The 5 words exercise
18:10 Linda's personal CRM
19:31 Central vs. individual AI
20:44 Inside Webflow's Builder Days
Guest: Linda Tong, CEO Webflow
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lktong/
https://x.com/YayLT
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
https://x.com/sophiebuona
ABOUT GTMnow
GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/
Sponsors:
.Tech - Domains, where the next generation of builders is planting their flag.
Secure your .tech domain today from any registrar of your choice.
Transcript available under the episode here: https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
Subscribe to GTMnow for the latest episodes! https://gtmnow.com
For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]
GTMnow is a media brand brought to you by VC firm, GTMfund: https://gtmfund.com/
#GTMnow #Webflow #AI #LindaTong #AnswerEngineOptimization #AEO #GoToMarket #B2BMarketing #AgenticAI #VibeCoding #AIAgents #FutureOfWeb #MarketingPlatform #SaaS #aimarketingThe GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.Inside Reevo's $80M Bet to Kill the $10B Frankenstein Stack | David Zhu, Cofounder & CEO
AI is rewriting go-to-market and most companies are still operating with a “Frankenstein stack.”In this episode of GTMnow, we sit down with David, founder & CEO of Reevo, to unpack how AI-native companies will …
Notes de l’épisode
AI is rewriting go-to-market and most companies are still operating with a “Frankenstein stack.”
In this episode of GTMnow, we sit down with David, founder & CEO of Reevo, to unpack how AI-native companies will replace legacy GTM systems, why the future of sales teams looks radically different, and how AI agents are becoming the new operating layer for revenue teams.
David shares why Reevo stayed in stealth while building a vertically integrated AI revenue operating system, the problem of institutional knowledge loss in sales organizations, and why the old playbook for SaaS and GTM is breaking in 2026.
We also dive deep into:
- AI-native go-to-market strategy
- The death of the legacy SaaS tech stack
- Revenue operating systems explained
- AI agents for sales, marketing, and customer success
- How founders should think about AI adoption
- Building startups in the age of AI
- Why “failure is the cornerstone of innovation”
- AI-driven sales productivity and revenue efficiency
- Founder-led sales in 2026
- The future of CROs, CMOs, and RevOps
- AI copilots, Jarvis-style workflows, and GTM automation
- Scaling teams without scaling headcount
If you're a founder, CRO, CMO, GTM leader, SaaS operator, AI builder, or investor trying to understand where B2B software and go-to-market are headed next, this episode is for you.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:20 Why Reevo built in stealth
04:50 Why AI can finally disrupt GTM tech stacks
09:20 What Reevo actually does
11:10 AI outcomes vs headcount growth
15:00 How AI changes leadership & innovation
19:00 Why legacy GTM teams are vulnerable
23:00 The future of AI-native GTM organizations
29:00 Running an AI-native company internally
34:00 David’s favorite AI workflows & tools
37:40 Advice for introverted founders & leaders
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP Marketing at GTMnow
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi
Guest: David Zhu, Co-founder and CEO at Reevo
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zhuventures/
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/
Sponsors:
.Tech - Domains, where the next generation of builders is planting their flag. Secure your .tech domain today from any registrar of your choice.
Transcript available under the episode here: https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
Subscribe to GTMnow for the latest episodes! https://gtmnow.com
For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]
GTMnow is a media brand brought to you by VC firm, GTMfund: https://gtmfund.com/#AI #Sales #GTM #SaaS #ArtificialIntelligence #RevenueOperations #Startup #B2B #RevOps #AIAgents #Founder #SalesLeadership #CMO #CRO #GoToMarket #AIStartup #TechPodcast #SalesTech #FutureOfWork #Automation
The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.VC: "Software Is Basically Worth Zero Now" | Tyler Hogge, Ex-Pelion
Tyler Hogge helped take Divvy from zero to a $2.5B acquisition by Bill.com. Now, as General Partner at Pelion Ventures, he argues that charging for software is dead, per-seat pricing is collapsing, and the next …
Notes de l’épisode
Tyler Hogge helped take Divvy from zero to a $2.5B acquisition by Bill.com. Now, as General Partner at Pelion Ventures, he argues that charging for software is dead, per-seat pricing is collapsing, and the next decade of venture-scale companies will be built on outcomes, not subscriptions.
In this episode of the GTMnow VC Podcast, Tyler sits down with Max to break down what comes after SaaS pricing, why founder intensity is the only trait that still matters in 2026, and how Pelion concentrates capital into its biggest winners (Cloudflare alone returned over $1B to the fund). He also shares why most startups won't survive going head-to-head with OpenAI and Anthropic, the "bent the odds" contract he signed with Redo's CEO, and the lesson from raising four kids that changed how he leads.
This is an honest, no-fluff conversation about where venture is going as AI commoditizes software.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:14 Intro
18:48 Tyler joins
23:09 "Sell Jesus, sell anything"
27:42 The $2.5B Divvy exit
34:39 The "bent the odds" contract
38:11 Startups vs. OpenAI and Anthropic
39:05 "Software is worth zero"
40:55 The death of per-seat pricing
43:02 Lessons from raising 4 kids
46:44 "LinkedIn is the trailer park"Connect with Tyler:
https://x.com/thogge
https://www.linkedin.com/in/thogge/Connect with Max:
https://x.com/hackitmax
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxaltschuler/
Connect with Paul:
https://x.com/PaulGTM
https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulsirving/
About Tyler Hogge:
Tyler Hogge is a General Partner at Pelion Ventures, Utah's oldest and largest venture fund with $500M AUM across eight funds. Before Pelion, Tyler was VP of Product at Divvy, which sold to Bill.com for $2.5B in 2021. Earlier in his career, he was a product leader at Wealthfront under Andy Rachleff and Adam Nash. He's based in Utah and one of the most active venture capitalists on X.
About GTMnow:
GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, a pre-seed and seed-stage B2B SaaS venture firm backed by an LP base of 300+ C-suite and VP-level operators from the best go-to-market organizations in tech. The GTMnow VC Podcast publishes every other week with the investors and operators shaping the next decade of B2B software.
Brought to you by: AngelList
From starting as a small, operator-led rolling fund, to evolving to an institutional platform, AngelList has been a core partner in every phase of GTMfund’s growth. Their software-first fund admin infrastructure allowed us to scale without sacrificing agility, from onboarding hundreds of LPs seamlessly to handling compliance, capital calls, and reporting as our fund size evolved.
Transcript available under the episode here: https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
Subscribe to GTMnow for the latest episodes! https://gtmnow.com
For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]
GTMnow is a media brand brought to you by VC firm, GTMfund:
https://gtmfund.com/
Subscribe for new episodes every week
#VentureCapital #VCpodcast #SaaS #AI #B2BSaaS #GTMnow #StartupFunding #TylerHogue #PelionVentures #FounderAdvice
Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.How AI Will Go From Influencing 20% to Making 90% of Your Decisions | Steve Lucas, Boomi CEO
Boomi was founded in the early 2000s by Rick Nucci, acquired by Dell in 2010, and then spun out to Francisco Partners and TPG Capital in 2021. Today it powers 30,000+ enterprise customers globally and moves …
Notes de l’épisode
Boomi was founded in the early 2000s by Rick Nucci, acquired by Dell in 2010, and then spun out to Francisco Partners and TPG Capital in 2021. Today it powers 30,000+ enterprise customers globally and moves more data per second than the entire Visa card network, times two. What started as an integration platform has evolved into something bigger: the leading data activation company, purpose-built for the agentic AI era.
Steve Lucas took over as CEO in early 2023, just as ChatGPT was about to reshape the entire software landscape. A three-time CEO with nearly 30 years in enterprise software, Steve previously led Marketo through its $4.75B acquisition by Adobe (the largest in Adobe's history at the time), scaled iCIMS into the world's leading talent acquisition cloud, and held senior roles at SAP, Salesforce, Adobe, and BusinessObjects. He's also the author of "Digital Impact: The Human Element of AI Driven Transformation," a book arguing that the AI revolution will stall unless companies fix the fragmentation of their data first.
In this episode, Sophie Buonassisi sits down with Steve at HumanX in San Francisco to unpack why 2026 is the year AI moves from pilot to production, the three diagnostic questions every CEO should ask before deploying agentic AI, and why "change only happens at the speed of trust." Steve also gets candid about the internal protest that erupted when Boomi rolled out its first CSM agent, his prediction that AI will go from influencing 20% of executive decisions to making 90% of them within 2 years, and how he picked up Claude Code on an airplane to vibe-code a contracts agent for his sales team.
If you're a founder, operator, or GTM leader trying to figure out whether your business is actually ready for agentic AI (or just chasing the buzzword), this one is for you.
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
0:58 Welcome to GTMnow at HumanX
1:10 Why 2026 is when AI moves from pilot to production
2:32 Influencing decisions vs. making decisions: the next 2 years
3:18 Digital Impact: why fragmentation will stall the AI revolution
5:01 "Get your data to the gym": the new slogan
5:20 The 3 questions to know if your company is AI-ready
6:47 Change happens at the speed of trust
7:53 The internal protest behind Boomi's CSM agent
9:32 From integration platform to data activation: the strategic shift
10:50 Steve's most transformative AI workflow as a CEO
11:12 Vibe coding with Claude on an airplane
12:20 Where to follow Steve and Boomi
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP Marketing at GTMnow
linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi
Guest: Steve Lucas, CEO at Boomi
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nstevenlucas/
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Transcript available under the episode here: https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
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GTMnow is a media brand brought to you by VC firm, GTMfund: https://gtmfund.com/
Keywords: #AI #AgenticAI #Boomi #SteveLucas #GTMnow #DataActivation #HumanX #EnterpriseAI #AIStrategy #B2BSaaS #ClaudeCode #VibeCoding #CEOInterview #DigitalTransformation #futureofworkThe GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.
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