Prompt Driven

Hello, @Replit 👋 Build anything – like a journal based on your meeting notes – now with your meeting notes as context 🚀

New episode drop of the VibeScaling podcast with Ghazi Masood (CRO at @Replit)! His resumé reads like a developer tools hall of fame: Oracle → Auth0 (acquired by Okta) → Retool → now building Replit's enterprise GTM as vibe coding goes from buzzword to legitimate billion-dollar category. This one is for founders hiring their first sales rep, VPs building a GTM org in the AI era, or anyone trying to figure out why the best sellers at the hottest companies don't look anything like traditional salespeople. Our key takeaways from the conversation on what GTM leaders continue to get wrong in the AI era: 1️⃣ The best seller at Replit had previously never sold a day in his life. He closed a $3.5M deal. The path there? Pretty atypical, after spending years serving in the US Marine Corps. His passion for the product was impossible to miss after he had built a training curriculum in Replit before he ever applied. Passion > experience. 2️⃣ Staffing aspirationally is a trap. Listen to demand. Hiring a VP of Sales before you have repeatable pipeline shouldn’t be celebrated as growing to where the company is going. It’s a costly mistake. Do the back of the napkin math first: where does your pipeline actually come from, and how much can you realistically generate? Then hire to feed that machine (not the other way around). 3️⃣ Developers hate salespeople. Solution? Stop sending them salespeople. No sales engineer required when everyone is a product advocate. In the AI era, the new intro call is pulling up Replit in a browser mid-call, dropping in a prompt, and showing the art of the possible in real time. 4️⃣ The traditional pre/post-sales model is dead. Ghazi scrapped the CS + SE structure and replaced it with Field Engineers: one technical resource that owns the deal from first call all the way through customer activation. No handoff means no context lost. That’s how you sell more efficiently. 5️⃣ A blank LinkedIn request is the best way to guarantee your request gets declined. Ghazi goes through dozens of connection requests every night. No note = no shot of accepting. But a personalized DM with a Replit build attached? Immediate forward to the recruiting team. The best candidates sell before the interview even starts. 6️⃣ Distribution is the moat. Not technology. Every founder Ghazi advises has this flipped. The product isn't what wins. The ability to reach, educate, and convert the right people at scale is. 7️⃣ Short tenure isn't always a red flag. But four quick stints in a row probably is. The signal Ghazi actually looks for: did this person weather multiple storms at one company and come out the other side? That's a green flag. We learned a lot from this one. If you're building a sales org in the AI era, or trying to figure out where passion fits in a world that used to run on résumés, you'll enjoy it.