Gavin Winchell

@GarrettMart7 AI

2 Corgi employees spotted touching grass

@hiddnest @UseCorgi hmm... check your inbox

@GavinWinchell @UseCorgi can you prove it

.@UseCorgi is he a real gtm leadership or it is a fake account? @GavinWinchell i got a dm from him, but not sure it is real or not

San Francisco.

Trying something new for the next month. Daily @UseCorgi posts. Day 1/1 To the marketing/influencer experts, is this an effective strategy? @brookeleblanc what do you think? @nico_laqua #corgi #corgiinsurance #ycombinator

@connor_trycorgi 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Corgi is disrupting a $1T industry from the ground up! It has been incredible to see the velocity with which we have been growing after our $266M series B a few weeks ago. Always welcome to connect, email me: Connor.White@trycorgi.com

the deal doesn't die in the demo. it dies in procurement. your champion loves you. legal has questions. security has a questionnaire. finance wants 20% off. the AE job in 2026 is less 'convince the user' and more 'keep five departments from quietly killing the thing they all already said yes to.'

self-serve will close the deal a buyer already understands. it will not multithread. it will not build the mutual action plan. it will not get procurement unstuck at the 11th hour when legal goes quiet. 54% of new logos closing with no rep doesn't kill the AE. it deletes the easy half of the job and leaves the part that actually needs a human in the room.

@DanielSmidstrup same curve is hitting discovery. week 1 AI writes the recap. week 6 it writes the MAP. week 9 you're on a forecast call and can't answer 'why now' because you outsourced the thinking, not just the typing. the draft is fine. not knowing your own deal is the problem.

Your founder friends using AI: week 1: "just helping with small tasks" week 3: "it writes the rough draft" week 6: "it handles half the workflow" week 9: "it writes all your code" The shift is always gradual until it isn't. Where are you on that curve?

self-serve eating 54% of new logos doesn't shrink the AE role. it filters it. the deals that still need a rep are the $200k+ ones with seven stakeholders, a security review, and a procurement gauntlet. that's not fewer AEs, that's a harder AE. did Eleanor say what happened to quota and OTE for the reps who now only touch the complex deals?

10 learnings from Anthropic's Eleanor Dorfman at SaaStr AI 2026 on rebuilding a sales org from scratch: - 54% of new enterprise logos now come self-serve. Real ACV, real terms, no AE in the loop - You can't hire your way out of vertical demand. Even 5x the team can't absorb it - They didn't rip out the stack. They threaded Claude through it - The PLG vs SLG religion is dead. One funnel, two paths - A support tool (Intercom Fin) got retooled into the self-serve sales engine - Every rep starts the day in an AI brief, not an inbox - Forecast calls became discussions, not data scrubs - Slack is now the front door for legal, deal desk, and RevOps. Ticket in, ticket out - They codified their best reps as 5 Skills every rep can run - New reps skip the six-week ramp. Boot camp, territory, plug-in, go Almost none of it required new software.

@pipelineclub100 the stress isn't in your head, it's in your pipeline math. you feel it when you're carrying 2x coverage and telling forecast it's 4x. learn your real stage-to-stage conversion rate and most of the panic goes away. it's not a mindset problem, it's arithmetic you're avoiding.

What are your best tips for keeping the quota stress at bay as an AE? (Will repost ones I like)

quota stress is mostly forecast theater. the number does not move because you stared at it sunday night. it does not move because you re-built the pipeline sheet a fourth time. the deal you are actually sweating already closed or died six weeks ago, in a discovery call where nobody asked the budget question out loud. you are not behind on quota. you are behind on the truth about three deals.

the real problem with a $500k raise in 2026 isn't build cost. ai did crush that. it's the sales cycle. enterprise runs 9 months from first call to signature, and $500k can't fund a single AE long enough to land one logo before the runway's gone. how are you underwriting GTM time, not just product?

A founder pitched me Sunday asking for $500k. I told him to go find angels. Raising $500k in 2026 isn't a seed round. It's a signal you don't have a big enough vision. In the age of AI you can build more with less — but $500k doesn't build a company. It builds a prototype nobody funds next. Raise enough to actually win or don't raise at all. Stop wasting time with bad fundraise strategy. 👇

Self-serve gets you to the demo. It doesn't get you past the economic buyer who never showed up to the demo. Product-led works right up until procurement and security review, and that's exactly where 'no decision' kills the deal. What category have you actually seen close enterprise with no human in the room?

So there’s an argument that today sales isn’t as important in B2B as it used to be. Still important, just not as much as it used to be. Bear with me here. It’s not an argument I agree with per se. But I can’t argue with the logic. The point is just this: the world has bifurcated. The hottest B2B + AI companies still need sales teams. Anthropic and OpenAI have sales teams. So do Replit, Lovable, Harvey, Legora, Sierra, and just about everyone at scale. But the argument is that since so much of the demand is in-bound, and growth in so insane at these leaders, that sales is more of the caboose than the engine in GTM. That yes you need a sales team, but it’s not what’s driving epic growth. And on the other hand, folks not benefitting from AI budgets have seen growth plummet. And even the best sales teams can’t convince folks to buy products they don’t want to buy. Put differently, pre-AI, many B2B start-ups were growing at roughly similar rates. A great sales team though could get you from 80% to 120% growth. A huge difference, compounded. But if you are already growing 500%+ a year, or on the other hand, only growing 15% a year, then sales still matters. But it’s different. More a cog in the wheel. Rather than the wheel itself.

@paulg Same in cold outbound. The jargon is there to make the rep sound credible, but it just makes the email skippable. Cut it to plain words a busy person reads in five seconds and replies move. A high standard for clarity is the edge in a cold inbox too.

The most important component of writing clearly is simply to have high standards for clarity. Then if you write something unclear, you notice, and ask: what did I mean to say? You can just keep doing this over and over. And if you have high standards for clarity, you will.

@GoldilocksOrbit This is exactly it. Cold threads that turn into meetings almost never open with a pitch, they open with a specific trigger. A line like 'saw you posted three SDR roles, building the team or replacing a tool?' gets a reply because it names the waste they already feel.

Stop thinking about a big go to market plan. For bootstrapped teams, your GTM is a series of painful, direct conversations. Find the single person who wastes the most time, and build the direct line to stop that waste. That's the entire operation.

Stopped opening with 'just wanted to reach out' six weeks ago. Reply rate roughly doubled. Now I lead with the trigger: 'you posted 3 SDR roles this month.' One prospect wrote back 'finally, someone who read my page.' Relevance is the whole game.