*FORMER GOOGLE CEO ERIC SCHMIDT OWNS ABOUT 1% OF ANTHROPIC

Why is average tenure in tech sales 18-24 months? Well its really hard. $NET

Today, Ramp raised $1.85B at a $60B valuation. Seven years ago, Karim and I wrote our mission on a Post-it: “Save companies time and money.” Our mission hasn't changed. It’s just gotten bigger.

Say you joined a company within the last four years and vested an initial $250k stock package - here are the 25 top performers

Fuck Y*u

OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Cognition all claim to be building "the best GTM team in the world," yet the same sourcing company is doing the hiring for all three. Why do the new sales leaders at these AI natives all come from the same background: Snowflake, Grafana, MongoDB, Zscaler, Rubrik, Datadog? Why do they only seem to hire reps referred from one of these companies? It's called the playbook mafia, and it's part of the underbelly of tech sales today. The high-level story is simple. PTC was one of the moderately successful enterprise tech companies of the 1990s, and one of its sales leaders, John McMahon, popularized a qualification framework called MEDDPICC. The team that worked directly for John went on to different parts of the industry, notably companies like MongoDB and Snowflake. They created sales cultures built on high pressure to generate new pipeline and a big focus on following a single process in their daily work. Those who played along were paid handsomely, and those who didn't were kicked out quickly. Are these bad things? Not in isolation. We want mission-driven individuals in tech sales, and we want them to hold themselves accountable to a high standard. The catch with playbook companies is that nobody has rethought what the "playbook" looks like since its heyday at the peak of the ZIRP era. The profile for success is changing, and a heavy focus on personal drive and quality of execution is now table stakes. When they say "we will build the most successful GTM team in the world," the obvious question is: have you done it before? Microsoft Azure has built exceptional account teams, closing billions of dollars with single customers, and has $124B ARR. Anthropic reached $64B ARR while asking every employee to swear on the Claude Constitution. Databricks reached a $7B run-rate, outplaying Snowflake, which had a massive early lead. Yet for some reason, none of the best-performing sales reps at these companies are a "fit" for a playbook company. In fact, if you listen to a recent interview with Chris Degnan, their profile is undesirable. Sales reps who are industry experts, have technical insight and thrive at building successful long-term sales cycles (consumption contracts) are frowned upon. The goal is to only hire people who show "grit" and want to work for YOU. And if they do well, we will push the company to PAY AS HIGH AS POSSIBLE to retain them. There is no interest in what the best strategy is for the company or its customers. It's about MY team and MY people. So what we're seeing now is the same group of leaders, and the sales reps loyal to them, moving into AI-native companies. If you want a shot at working for those companies, you need to go back to the "training factories" like Snowflake or MongoDB first. In the ugly situation with Factory and Cognition, the tribal lines became obvious. The shocking part wasn't just the breach of trust of advising one company and then becoming CRO of its competitor. It was that the most important thing to mention in the announcement was "I'm bringing my friend and business partner to hire all the reps at the new company." What played out is no surprise to those who have seen firsthand how the playbook mafia behaves when things go sideways. Take a look at Lacework, and how Andy Byron (the CEO who famously got caught at a Coldplay concert cheating with his HR leader) got pushed into a leadership role at Astronomer. Something similar is playing out at OpenAI, where the current crop of sales leaders has been cleared out, even though the company had a great last quarter and pushed past Anthropic's ARR. If you're a sales rep at a playbook company, it's important to remember that you're just a product, to be upsold to the next employer as long as you keep your mouth shut and nod along.

We are terminating Chris Degnan for unethical conduct involving Cognition. The last few months have seen incredible progress in AI capabilities. San Francisco has flourished as new companies that solve new, more ambitious problems are finding great success. Generally, it is a wonderful time to be building. We at @FactoryAI have seen overwhelming interest in our model-agnostic coding agents and our software factory product. Our team has 10x’d in size, while our revenue has 100x’d year over year. This momentum has been unprecedented. A much larger competitor, Cognition (makers of Devin) has fallen behind us on the capabilities that matter most to customers: cost, quality, and security. Instead of competing in the market, Cognition engineers feigned interviews with us to pry information about our product. Not finding what they were looking for, Cognition has decided to throw their weight and money at people with direct knowledge of our most confidential plans. It feels as though ethics is being thrown out of the window in the AI era. People are willing to do anything, including exploiting privileged information and violating ethical boundaries. I think this is unique to our time, and I don’t think it’s right. Integrity still matters. Yesterday, I made the decision to immediately terminate Christopher Degnan’s roles as a Board Observer and Advisor to Factory, after over a year of service. Prior to this decision, Chris told me he had a casual conversation with an executive at Cognition AI. When I questioned his intentions, he reassured me that ethics aside, he had “made too much money” and was “too lazy to go work for Cognition,” which I trusted and believed. On Monday, Chris spent time advising the Factory team on a handful of confidential board-level matters. That evening, he called me to say that the conversation that was initially described as casual and one-off was actually formal and recurring. For weeks, while he sat in our board meetings and advised our leadership team, he was also confiding with executives of our largest competitor. Chris was subject to confidentiality obligations in connection with his work with Factory. We do not know the extent of the information he shared, but it puts his timely questions about our product roadmap and what the parity gap involves into a new light. It is sad to sever a relationship with someone who has been a trusted advisor - and even a close friend - for over a year. But Chris’s conduct is unacceptable to me. Trust in Board Membership is one of the sacred bonds in the Silicon Valley, one that helps the startup ecosystem thrive. With it comes an enormous responsibility. That trust was violated. Competition is good. I respect and in many cases admire our competitors. San Francisco is a beautiful, singular place where the bold and ambitious go to defy the norms and precedents of the past. But certain principles that must remain. Violating ethics to seek advantage turns what should be positive-sum into zero-sum. We all love technology. And we all love to compete. But we must hold ourselves to a higher standard. The future of software engineering comes with abundance that will impact every person on Earth. Building that future comes with immense responsibility. We must build and compete with integrity.

this year @harvey hired: - prev CMO at notion - prev VP at slack - prev VP of product at rippling - prev CVP, AI at microsoft - prev VP of design at atlassian - prev VP of sales at canva - prev GVP at rubrik - prev CISO at roblox 🤯🤯🤯

JUST IN: OpenAI is working to prevent its AI from hacking the US power grid

We did it AE Promo secured for Q4 The SDR journey is over What an 18 month stretch it was 2 companies 10000s of calls 12/12 hitting quota Now the real work begins