Lenny's Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
28 published records
01 / recommendation
“They need help from the founders in the early days. They need help from sales engineers or product people, which is my favorite place to get the help as you scale, but they need help.”
02 / evaluation
“We can talk about all this kind of stuff, but when you go out as a first time founder and interview 30 reps, and you're going to have to interview 30, and 20 are just going to break your brain because they don't do any work and they don't do any prep and they didn't even go to your website.”
03 / recommendation
“I love Lenny, but he was a director for two years before this, and this is his first rule, and he did so good last year, but I'm worried Lenny's going to break.”
04 / belief
“I think a thing that's gone on in the industry that founders expect now because there's so much discussion of it on LinkedIn and social media, but I haven't found work, is that an account executive will magically be full stack.”
05 / observation
“Listen, as hard as it is for a lot of founders to even get their arms around, the reason is you've got to be that crummy first head of sales with them.”
06 / belief
“I think just make this the year of the customer guys. And I really think that sales has been under so much pressure the last 18 months.”
07 / belief
“I think you got to push it up and I think you got to force the VP of Sales and the VP of Product to have this weekly meeting about the budget, and that will force them to have enough, just enough organization on their team so that it can all be surfaced up.”
08 / commitment
“The last thing I will say is, there is another community called Pavilion, and I do think it's great, Pavilion.”
09 / belief
“I think Notion, I think at 10 million ARRs when they hired their first salesperson.”
10 / belief
“I think that's where the energy should go, is relentlessly bringing down churn so that, 20 years from now, we all have billion dollar AR companies.”
11 / prediction
“Just be honest about, yes, the motion that it will take to get those first 10, 15, 20 customers, and if they were able to find you by putting their credit card and no one had to talk to them, then that's your DNA today.”
12 / uncertainty
“I don't know," and I was like, "I was curious how you could do it," but GitHub was so well-established that it's 10 questions.”
13 / uncertainty
“I don't know if that exists in 2024 or not, but yeah, that's me. So thank you so much for letting me come.”
14 / belief
“I think hopefully all your audience would agree, when it's done right, software's magical.”
15 / commitment
“We have really good conversations. And I will tell you, if you have a question like you really need some help in your business or you want to do a pitch, if you send me the world's best email pitch, I will read a 100% of them.”
16 / belief
“I think you will regret it if you don't hire these first couple of sales reps that have a couple years of experience if you're in B2B with B2B sales. They need a couple of years of experience and they need a certain amount of maturity, and maturity is a real issue, and these are in any early hire because we just don't have time to babysit people.”
17 / belief
“Another black box for me, and I think a lot of people with sales, is comp and quota, had actually set up their comp for early hires, and then how to actually decide on a quota.”
18 / evaluation
“Just out. And that was the best one I got the last 30 days. That was the best inbound that I personally got.”
19 / evaluation
“You're not in enough deals if there's no stress. But the stress has to have enough process, even in a startup, that it doesn't break because your question alludes to the fact it can break organizations again and again.”
20 / recommendation
“Sales, whether it's prospects or existing customers, it can vary, but they should be like, "On my first day, I want to join five calls." And when you hear that story of, "I don't want to travel out of Pleasanton," or they say, here's what you're going to hear from the wrong person for anything, even up to 50 million in revenue, "I'm going to spend that first month working on process," "I'm going to spend that first month getting Salesforce up and running," "I'm going to send the first month on territory planning, Lenny, because we really, with our three reps, I really want to make sure we've nailed territories, right?”
21 / prediction
“Even the smallest experiment, no matter what it says on the internet, again, that we release 100 a day, I would argue bringing any product extension to market's very expensive and risky because you're taking away from something else.”
22 / evaluation
“The problem is if you let this go for too long, more than a quarter, if you make it too easy for long a quarter, the problem is the mediocre lean into it too much, and that doesn't help.”
23 / observation
“People don't even do reference checks. And they don't, they stopped doing, "Do me this demo," because they were so worried the rep would go to Gusto or would go to Deal, or would go to remote.”
24 / prediction
“It's never going to happen. So I used to say I don't know if it matters, but what I've learned the last 18 to 20 months when everyone has gotten lazy, Lenny, everyone in tech has gotten lazy, is I see way too many VPs of sales that come in and never have any idea how to sell the product, never, never.”
25 / prediction
“The tools change and the pace has changed, but the issues, I love to dig into them because we keep making the same mistakes as founders and executives again and again and again.”
26 / evaluation
“Because if you're a startup, your product isn't very good, your software is not very good, and you have a competitor, but you have some 10x feature that is driving people to buy you something you're doing that does not exist in the marketplace.”
27 / evaluation
“Whether it's burnout or whatever out or just too much change, I would say I've probably interviewed for different reasons, 50 VPs of sales in the last 12 months, I would say the majority don't want to do sales.”
28 / evaluation
“Having said that, I will tell you, and again, no knock on Adobe, but when I was a VP at Adobe, and it was a long time ago, when product was in another building, in some cases, that was not great. And I love Scott and the whole team, it was a great experience, but I can just tell you, what I learned is, that did not work for me as an agile guy, having groups that would do this work in isolation.”