Bret Taylor: evaluation

Transcript context

…Let me ask you one more question before we get to a very exciting lighting round. There's a lot of founders struggling with go-to-market in AI with their AI apps. There's so many apps these days, so many products, so many things coming at buyers, at large B2B companies. Clearly you guys have figured something out. I imagine your name helps, investors help, but what have you learned about just how to successfully do go-to-market with an AI product, say an agent-specific product that you think would be helpful for folks trying to do this better? I think there's a small handful of go-to-market models that have been proven to work, and I think it's important to choose the right one for the product category you're going after. One category I would say is developer-led. This is somewhere famously Stripe and Twilio where probably two of the original that did this exceptionally. And essentially, the go-to-market motion there is to appeal to an individual engineer often within the department of the CTO who have accountability and a fair amount of latitude to choose a solution. This works if your product is a platform product. It doesn't work, for example, if your product is trying to help a line of business because lines of business typically don't have dedicated engineering teams or let alone, the latitude to just go download a new library or start using a web service like that. It particularly works well if you sell to startups just because startups tend to have engineering teams with quite a bit of latitude to choose services to help them solve the problem given by the founder. Then there's product-led growth. It's a broad term, obviously every company's product matters, but product-led growth more specifically means users can sign up from the website, often get put on a trial. Often you can buy a couple of seats with a credit card and those work where your user and your buyer are the same person. So it works for small business software almost always because sole proprietors do everything. And so you're selling small business software like Shopify in the early days and there's a lot of other products like that where you're trying to sell to small merchants. That's great. It doesn't work well when your buyer and the user of the software are different. So I'll use the example of something like expense reporting software. The user of that software is an individual employee, but the buyer is often a finance department. And so having sign up and buy with your credit card doesn't make sense because the person using is not the person with the credit card and it just doesn't work. And then there's direct sales. And direct sales had gone, I don't want to say out of fashion, but if I think of the best direct sales companies, probably there's a lot of lineage from Oracle, but you think SAP, Oracle, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Adobe perhaps, and there's others as well. And these were companies that sold into large lines of business in a relatively traditional sales motion. I think because product-led growth became very popular. I think a lot companies use that, which is great, that motion produces great products, but if PLG means that you aren't actually engaging with the buyer of your software, you're not going to grow. ar. I think a lot companies use that, which is great, that motion produces great products, but if PLG means that you aren't actually engaging with the buyer of your software, you're not going to grow. And so, I've actually seen more recently, with a lot of AI companies, direct sales come a little bit more back into fashion because I think so many of the opportunities in AI actually meet that qualification where the buyer and the user are not necessarily the same person and it really requires that go-to-market motion. Where I see entrepreneurs stumble is they'll choose a go-to-market motion without thinking through what is the process of purchasing this software? What is the process of evaluating the value of this software? And I think people just need to be much more first principles about it and much more thoughtful about it. And candidly, I think a lot of companies should leverage direct sales more than they do. And even though because of the sometimes justified reputation of the quality of products of some of these direct sales companies, it had gotten a bad name. And I think I'm thankful to see it coming back in a lot of the AI market.…

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