Bones

@TechSalesGuy @pipelineclub100 And just like with sports teams when you're a draft pick, you want to be careful to identify orgs that care to (and are good at) identifying talent in and developing their bench players rather than being graveyards where promising talent languishes

@pipelineclub100 love a good sports analogy

Sellers hitting 200% quota typically have 2-3 years tenure. Sneaky reason why: They have the best accounts… 1. It takes time to earn the trust of your manager so they pass the ‘gold’ leads - referrals etc. 2. It takes patience to wait for your peers to leave and/or give up account ownership 3. It takes consistent performance to move into the best segments and territories (this is my favorite sales podcast right now)

the 5-10% who have the prompting gene are really prone to overestimating how useful the genpop is going to find AI tools

I have this unusual take on AI and the future of work: Knowing "what to do" is more important than knowing "how to do". AI is basically solving all the "how tos" But the "what to do" seems almost impossible for AI, because in most cases it's something that has never been done before (kinda the opposite of "how": smth that has been done a million times before and been present in the training dataset) It gets even trickier if you add "why?" into this. Because the "why" creates the demand. It's the key pillar of any marketing/brand. So the big picture here is no different from the past. AI will simply add an abstraction laywer on top of the jobs. E.g. when you use the calculator, you dont have to know "how to multiply", you only care about "why and what" and the calculator handles the "how". The software 3.0 will abstract the "hows" away and leave you the "why and what". Until AI is capable of solving the "why" or at least the "what", humans are safe. However, if your job is about "hows", I would move up to the "what" area asap.

@justinskycak Perhaps the best career advice I've ever seen on this app

1. Learn the material before you take the course. 2. Blow the course out of the water, no matter how terribly it’s taught. 3. Be first in line for any “smart kid” opportunities: research, internships, recommendations, etc. 4. Compound the advantage. The more “smart kid” opportunities you capitalize on, the more you get. 5. Find your niche. You’re so far ahead that you have plenty of time to explore until you land on a career you love and are amazing at, instead of getting time-pressured into the first thing you’re decent at and don’t hate.

@BowTiedCocoon Plenty of SaaS co's growing at a great clip that are total churn and burns. Auto-PIP policies, tiny territories, etc. Seriously, tech sales can be a great career and I know complainers and woe-is-me types are annnoying. But what function does this copium serve?

Tehc sales is only “unstable” at clown companies. Incredibly hard to get laid off as a revenue contributor when a company is growing high digits (aka sellin a lot). most of the people that actually get cut are support departments (finance, accounting, HR etc) and bottom 20% performers. You're safe if you actually try to make it work, but won't if you don't.

@michaelmiraflor Unfortunately many of them also still in leadership or middle management positions at these SaaS companies More common for them to fail upward than be churned out

There’s a good, related parallel to this: there are a lot of “GTM gurus” that work at or with VC firms (usually early stage) that made their name / found success with early and mid-2010s SaaS playbooks. Those playbooks no longer apply in 2025, and should be thrown out / burned.

@roy_is_living Nothing puts you in greater touch with the reality of America's working rythyms more than cold calling folks at different company sizes and all throughout the or heirarchy every business day for a few years

i swear a large % of people in saas just dont work like 30% of business days in the winter. not even PTO they just do absolutely nothing

@scottdwitt @Cyrushshirazi @sequoia I think it also has to do with the fact that the early employee economics make less sense than ever. Many talented enough to be engineer #2 or sales hire #3 at 40-100 bps of equity are opting to found their own thing for double-digit ownership or opting for big company salaries

@Cyrushshirazi @sequoia I wonder if this scarcity of talent also reflects SV's traditional inability to look beyond a narrow slice of talent to the universe of individuals working in the wrong industry or burdened by the wrong birth date. anecdata: "A quick chat w/ a founder (I only have 10 min)... 1/

The chief of @sequoia is quitting b/c venture is toast and the math doesn’t work anymore. Everyone keeps asking why so many top operators are stepping down from big jobs, leaving prestigious firms, or skipping the “career ladder” entirely to start their own companies. People want some conspiracy theory answer. But there’s a simpler explanation: The most important thing you need to build a generational company is an exceptional team. And it has never been harder to assemble one. Not because talent disappeared. But because all the exceptional people left to build their own companies. Twenty years ago, if you were a cracked engineer, you’d go join Google or Amazon, get a ridiculous comp package, stack your RSUs, and coast. That was the playbook. The smartest people went to the biggest companies because that’s where the upside lived. Today? - You can raise a pre-seed from your kitchen table. - You can ship a product in a weekend. - You can find customers on X, LinkedIn, Reddit, hell even TikTok The distribution is global from day one. Starting a company has never been easier. But because of that, keeping exceptional people has never been harder. It’s not ego, or pride, or impatience. It’s access. The people who would’ve spent 5–10 years “earning their stripes” at a big company don’t need to anymore. They were always going to build companies. Now they can just do it way quicker. I left @meow after basically a year to build my own company. Other early staff left and did the same. We found problems in a market we were passionate about and were raising capital in no time. This is happening everywhere. There’s so much more capital and opportunity in the ecosystem that the best people no longer feel the need to “wait their turn.” They don’t need the credibility badge. They don’t need the résumé. They don’t need permission. Which sounds great for innovation… but there’s a consequence no one is talking about: Talent is now fragmented across thousands of small companies instead of concentrated inside a few great ones. This means that we'll see way more companies succeed…but far fewer companies scale to generational size. Not because the ideas are bad. Not because the markets are small. But because the talent density isn’t there. The best founders in the world still need other exceptional people around them. You can’t brute force a generational company alone. And if all the best people are building their own thing, the firms (VC or otherwise) that rely on assembling an A+ team inside a single institution are screwed (kind of). They won’t get the returns they’re used to. Their bets won’t compound the way they did in the past. Because when access increases, concentration decreases. And when concentration decreases, generational outcomes become rarer. Everyone celebrates how easy it is to start something today. Nobody talks about how hard it is to build something great in a world where your best possible cofounder, early engineer, or right-hand operator is already off running their own startup. It’s not good or bad. It’s just the new reality. If you want to build something with longevity today, you need two things: 1. A mission that exceptional people are willing to pause their own ambitions for. 2. A culture so high-standard and so aligned that talent density becomes your moat. Everything else is noise.

@staysaasy Most people have no more than 4 hours of quality work in them per day. 8 if you're an absolute unit (the corp. lawyer billable hour target). You may be more sleep deprived / less available after hours but I doubt you have fewer actual total productive hours

When you have a kid, some people in the workplace will see that as a sign of weakness, that you’re going to be a blob for a year, that you’ve entered a less intense stage of life. And they’re right in some ways. You do have bath time and bedtime every night. You do have doctors appointments and birthday parties. But you can still work hard. And more importantly, nothing is stopping you from upping your intensity, which is exactly what you should do. After you get back from leave and are done showing everyone pictures of the baby, you should be showing that you are hardcore and here to play in the big leagues. Hold your team accountable. Hold your peers accountable. Hold your superiors accountable. Make everyone so focused on how to step up their game that they have no time to gossip about if you’re still as leaned in as you need to be.

@NorthmanTrader twodollarbill1.substack.com/p/the-anatomy-…

I wrote about the AI bubble last week. Most pieces of coverage focus on either the evolution of the tech itself, financial markets, or historical / sociological perspective. This seeks to address all three to give a fuller picture of where things stand. [Link below]

@staysaasy I love so much about the work in tech but am considering going to law school (something that was always the plan growing up) for this exact reason. Tough to feel like you need to make all the money you’re ever gonna make by 45-50, there are older folks but they are few

It’s kind of crazy to how fearful people in tech are of turning 40. Besides all the talk of being unemployable after 40, there are deeper fears. People in tech just don’t see old people that often. My wife is in finance. She has multiple coworkers over 65. The only people most people in tech know over 65 are close relatives that share every medical thing that ever happened to them. So tech people walk around literally feeling like turning 40 is a fast track to death. And their timelines on apps knows it. People in tech are about 100% more freaked out about the rise in early onset colon cancer. They’re being fed stories on their timelines, being told that 40s is when it gets you. People in tech talk about colonoscopies in their 30s. They obsess about not dying. Don’t die they say. The undercurrent - you’re definitely going to sooner than you expect. In concert this all creates a tremendously fearful workforce. I don’t know what to do about this. But we need more examples of old people in tech. If for no other reason than to keep the stallions calm.

@thedealdirector This is validating - wrote yesterday about o1-pro's retirement signaling we've already passed peak viable AI and wondered if I was being too cynical. twodollarbill1.substack.com/p/the-anatomy-…

@bonesisstoked It's a fair comment, not sure why they are omitting it from the paper since they also didn't test Grok Heavy. My guess is that it's on purpose due to the cost to scale not being realistic atm as a "full job replacement".

What would you call a tech sales rep, anon? Something like a sales industry expert?

@JustJake What I think gets lost as well is how "specific" of a skill they both are. Take a very driven and sociable person and drop him into an SMB AE role and they may take a while to get good - many specific things they need to learn (inc. about human behavior)

As an engineer, it’s easy to not prioritize Marketing/Sales/etc “Great products sell themselves” This is incorrect Marketing is a skill. Sales is a skill Learn them, or accept you will lose to those who do

@BenyaminHolley This is some of your best work

how it feels to work enterprise deals

@Eric_Erins Real

A man reaches a point in his life where he has to consider an MBA or Law School unfortunately

Who gets a masters of finance from university of Chicago instead of an MBA? Who is that for?

@beegcookie @Eric_Erins The one's who like it are:: A) Criminal defense lawyers or prosecutors, most not making big $$$ but doing interesting work / trials B) The percentage of plaintiffs lawyers that make a lot of $$$ (& also love trial) C) The subset of BigLaw lawyers who genuinely like it (<15%)

@Eric_Erins Every lawyer I ever met told me "Don't go to law school" and refused to elaborate. what are they keeping secret what dark truth must not be uncovered?

@staysaasy Unironically it sped up my work by allowing me to have it give me a thumbs up when we reached diminishing returns on the edits

ChatGPT has absolutely solved a true hair on fire problem for me – providing a sounding board for me to massively overthink email responses without driving my friends and family insane.