Howard Lerman

Roam customer acquired

We're announcing our $50M Series B led by Benchmark. Founders Fund and Human Capital are tripling down in the round. We gave Benchmark a sneak preview of our upcoming GA release. They saw the future of sales. We had a term sheet 2 hours later. The future of sales is Monaco.

@medinism What was your ARPU?

On the last day of Q4, Salesloft posted a "free lawn mower" ad on Craigslist with my Head of Sales cell phone number. He got over 100 calls. It was a nasty tactic, almost ruined our quarter, and I wish I would have thought of it. It was 2017. Over half of Outreach’s business was SMB and transactional — small deals, fast cycles, the last day of the quarter doing 30% of the month. Mark Kosoglow was on the phone closing those deals. Or trying to. Every other call was someone asking about the lawn mower. It took us six hours to figure out what was happening. One rep checked Craigslist on a hunch and there was the ad. Mark's name. Mark's number. Free lawn mower, come pick it up. We couldn't take it down. It wasn't his ad. So Mark spent most of the day distracted and pissed. That night our team huddled. Michelle Obama was everywhere then — "when they go low, we go high." One of my execs pushed hard for this approach. I agreed. We didn’t respond. That was the wrong fucking call. When business is two guys fighting in a phone booth with a knife, you are always at war. Salesloft threw a good punch. It got us off our feet a little bit. No impact to the quarter, but definitely made it harder than it should. And most importantly it got us talking about them internally. And getting in your head, is free competitive real state. What should we have done? Get right back at them but harder! Hire away their best rep with access to their top accounts. Buy out their contracts. Hire their best engineers. Attack their customer base with all their shortcomings. Profile all their churned customers on targeted ads. Infinite possibilities to respond and a golden opportunity to take this affront as a rallying cry for the team to go take market share. ”When they go low, we stomp on them.” - that’s a better slogan Your job as a startup leader is not to take the moral high ground. The job is to win.

When I see someone using Microsoft Outlook on their iPad, I wonder which part of Germany they're from.

I know this sounds insane I read "Extraordinary Popular Delusions: And the Madness of Crowds" as a teenager I thought AI would likely have a bubble phase 18 months ago But now I think this is 1000x bigger than the Industrial Evolution This is an evolution of our species

@APompliano Now do that but add in no social media

There is something spiritual about living your life with no alcohol, drugs, nicotine, vaping, steroids, peptides, tattoo ink, Botox, lip injections, spray tans, antidepressants, ADHD meds, or melatonin. Nearly impossible in modern society, but aspirationally superior lifestyle.

Trying out @roam and gotta say... they are going to give @SlackHQ a run for their money!

NICE City.

@TheBabylonBee 🤣🤣🤣🤣

'I Am Your Father,' Reveals Trump To Horrified Mark Hamill buff.ly/gaj1ack

I freaking <33333 @roam

@ryancohen 🔥

The Hollow Men American capitalism is rotting from the head down. We have replaced the "Owner-Operator"—the risk-taker-with a new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider. By "Insider," I am not referring to a specific title. I am referring to the entire administrative state that has captured the modern corporation. This includes the Directors who exist solely to collect fees, the Executives who exist solely to collect bonuses, and the Managers who exist solely to hire consultants. These are the hollow men of the boardroom. They are masters of PowerPoint. They wear the right suits. They say the right buzzwords about "governance" and "ESG." But they are mercenaries fighting a war with someone else’s ammunition. In a functioning economy, authority is tied to liability. If you make a bad decision, you lose your own money. That fear of loss is the only thing that keeps a business honest. It forces you to cut waste, obsess over the customer, and stay late to fix what is broken. Today, we have severed that link. We have rigged the game so that heads, the Insider wins; tails, the shareholder loses. If the stock goes up, the Insider collects a massive performance bonus. If the stock crashes due to their own incompetence, they are fired with a "Golden Parachute" worth tens of millions. They are gambling with the house’s money, and they never leave the table poorer than they arrived. This looting starts in the boardroom. We have normalized a "Country Club" culture where directors are selected based on social profiling rather than their ability to build a business. The modern board member is often a professional tourist—paid an average of $350,000 a year. Let’s be brutally honest about what that number represents. The average director is paid nearly five times the GDP per capita of the United States. They earn more for attending four quarterly lunches than the vast majority of Americans earn in five years of hard labor. And for what? Most of these directors are "over-boarded," sitting on three or four boards simultaneously. They treat directorships as a gig economy for the elite. They fly in, rubber-stamp a compensation package they didn't read, and fly out. They collect checks from companies they do not understand, do not use, and certainly do not love. They are not there to ask hard questions. They are there to be collegial. They are there to protect the other Insiders. And what happens when these boards hire executives who also have no personal capital at risk? We get the Delegation Economy. When a Risk-Free Insider faces a crisis—bloated expenses, a broken supply chain, or a stale product—they do not roll up their sleeves. They hire a consultant. They pay a strategy firm millions of shareholder dollars to produce a 100-page deck telling them what they already know. This is not management. It is intellectual money laundering. They use shareholder capital to buy an insurance policy for their own careers. If the plan fails, they can blame the consultants. They delegate the work because they are terrified of the responsibility. They would rather preside over a slow, comfortable decline than risk a bold mistake. While American Insiders are busy optimizing their severance packages, our global competitors are optimizing their products. They are not slowed down by bureaucracy. They are not waiting for a slide deck. They are outworking us. If we continue to fill our C-suites with administrators instead of operators, we will lose our edge. We will see iconic American franchises hollowed out by fees, managed for the benefit of the Insiders, while the true owners—the shareholders—are left holding the bag. The time for polite governance is over. If we want to save the American economy from mediocrity, we must demand a return to the "Owner’s Mentality." We need leaders who treat shareholder capital with the same reverence they treat their own savings. The era of the Risk-Free Insider must end.

@TiffanyFong No

Am I the only one who is NOT on GLP-1s, SSRIs or peptides ?

if you want someone to really, really listen ... compliment them

I’m selling stuff on eBay to pay for eBay ebay.com/usr/ryan_5050

Big shout-out to @roam. A teammate had a product suggestion. Nothing big - just a little idea to remove a minor, annoying point of friction that crops up most days in using Roam. I passed the suggestion along at 3:02 PM on Tuesday. It was built by 10:30 AM Wednesday. Wow.

the industrial revolution made goods abundant. ai will do the same for services

the best people have a story to write or a story to tell

@alex @ilyabrotzky @roam we can do mashup content on old books we're reading + AI Agents we're building.

@ilyabrotzky @howard @roam once my company has more people we gonna roam

April @roam !nvestor Update +ARR +123% YoY, $3.25m +ARR +6.8% vs last month +1,006 logos +1,000,000 meetings, ~5,000,000 chats -115% NDR *The Office That Thinks* ... Where People & AI Agents Collaborate.