Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, we actually made this decision pretty early in the company's history, I would say. We hired our VP of sales over a year ago actually. And the go-to-market team is now over 80 people inside the company. So it's a pretty sizable function inside the company. Yeah. Maybe a little bit of a backstory here. So when we started the company, actually we had a handful of angels that actually were operators, go-to-market operators. So an example of one was Carlos Delatorre who used to be the CRO of MongoDB. And I think for us, we never viewed enterprise sales and sales as a very negative thing. I think this is a interesting thing that technical founders sometimes don't really like. They think sales is a very negative part of the process. Everything should be product-led growth. I think it's not that black and white. I think enterprise sales is really valuable. But maybe when we were a GPU virtualization company and we were an infrastructure company, the reason why we never hired a salesperson is, I didn't know how to scale the function. I was the one who was selling the product. So ultimately speaking, if it was hard for me to sell the product incrementally, I didn't know how we could make that into a process that we could then go and scale. I didn't know how we could take the revenue of the business from a couple million to hundreds of millions and let alone even tenths. So if I didn't know how to do that, how could I go out and hire someone and make them scale it out? On the other hand, for Codeium, very quickly, a lot of large enterprises reached out to us. And from that alone in the middle of 2023, we started, I guess, me and a handful of other folks at the company started selling the product and we were doing tens of pilots concurrently with large enterprises and we were very quickly able to understand that there was a large enterprise motion that needed to be built in this space. So by the end of 2023, we actually hired our VP of sales. And very quickly after that, scaled our sales team. Yeah, I mean look, if you want to sell to the Fortune 500, it is very hard to do that purely by swiping a credit card. Let's talk about Cursor. I don't want to spend too much time with competitors, but that's what everyone's always thinking about when they think of you guys. You guys are kind of the leading players, I think, in the space also. There's Copilot, but that's different. So what's the simplest way to understand how you guys are different from Cursor and also just how you think you win in the space long-term? So I think maybe a handful of things that I could share. So on the product side, I think we've invested a lot in making sure code-based understanding for very large code bases is really high quality. And that's just because of where we started. We worked with some of the worlds are just companies like Dell, JPMorgan Chase. Companies like Dell have singular code bases that are over 100 million lines of code. So being able to understand that really, really quickly to make large scale changes is something that we've spent a lot of time doing. And that requires us actually building our own models that can consume large chunks of their code base in parallel across thousands of GPUs and almost rank them to be able to find out what the most important snippets of code are for any question that are asked about the code base. So we've gone out and built large distributed systems based on our infrastructure background to go ahead and do that. That's maybe one.…

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