Shawn Wang: observation

Transcript context

…yeah now it's probably going to be military and then after that it might be taking over the world like he's just going to keep increasing the stakes and like there's no playbook on how this really works it's just a little bit of like you know solve a hard problem and work backwards work backwards from that right? and we'll get lucky along the way I don't think like you think everything from first principles to the best of our abilities but there's just so many variable unknowns that yeah like we don't know everything that's happening in every company out there and everyone knows how fast the AI space is moving like we have to be pretty pretty good at adapting I want to double click on one thing just because you brought it up and it's like a rare thing to touch on VPO sales we don't get to actually we talk to pretty early stage founders mostly they don't usually have a pretty built out sales function advice what kind of sales works in this kind of field what didn't work anything you can share with other founders? I think one of the hard parts about hiring people in sales and I really like Graham Unschul can also attest like we have amazing VPO sales at the company one of the things is like if you're purely a developer sales people their job is to like talk like really well prim and proper I mean very obvious if you hear like me talk like I'm not a very polished person you're great by the way I don't know compared to most pure pure sales people so actually just checking based on the way they speak is not that interesting I think like you know what matters in a space like ours that is very quickly moving very quickly I think it's like intellectual curiosity is very important intellectual horsepower understanding how to build a factory I'm not trying to minimize it but in some ways you need to build something incredibly scalable here right it's almost like every year you're kind of making this factory twice thrice maybe as big right because in some ways you have people that are quota carrying you need some number of people and you need to make the math work and you actually the process of building a factory is not something you need to do you can just take someone who is a great rep at another company and just make them build a factory this is actually a very different skill how do you actually make sure you have hundreds of people that actually deeply understand the product actually Unshul works very closely also with sales to make sure that they're enabled properly make sure that they understand the technology our technology is also changing very quickly let's maybe take an example on how our company is very different than a company like MongoDB when you sell a product like MongoDB no one at the company is interested in how the data is being stored it's not that interesting right I love databases I would be interested but most people are like solve the application problem I have at hand people are curious about how our technology works people are curious about RAG right people that are buying our technology and imagine we had a sales team that is scaling where no one understands any of this stuff we're not going to be great partners to our customers so how do you create almost this this growing factory that is able to actually distribute the software in a way that is true to our partners and also at the same time like taking on all the new parts of our product right like they're actually able to expound on new parts of our product so sorry that was more a question more a statement of like building a scalable sales team but in terms of like who you hire is you just need to have a sense like in some ways this is maybe an example of talk to enough people find out what good looks like potentially in your category and find someone who's good and humble and willing to work with you yeah that's just generic hiring…

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