Jason Lalk

I can always tell when someone is hiring sales people for the first time. They typically make 3 rookie mistakes: 1) Hiring a VP as their First Salesperson Good VPs want to build teams, manage them, set strategy, and help with the most important deals. Good VPs DO NOT want to do the dirty out bounding, follow-ups, contract redlines, etc…that come with early stage sales. If you need help building some operations or strategy, then hire a good sales consultant. They’re going to help you avoid some very costly mistakes. And make sure your first hire is a full cycle AE that can prospect and close. 2) Complicated Commission Plans I’ve built dozens of sales compensation plans. I used to worry about every scenario…how do I protect the company? How do I protect the reps? The plans got complex. It cost the company company countless hours of expensive time trying to calculate every detail and manage the one off scenarios with the team. Don’t do this. Instead, keep it simple. - Your first plans should not include escalators, just flat rates For SDRs specifically: - Start with a commission for each meeting held and try to add a commission for each deal closed (if you can) - In the beginning, don’t penalize them for bad meetings set, but monitor it closely. Eventually you can add variable that measures the % of their meetings set that AEs mark as Sales Qualified Opps 3) Missing Obvious Red Flags in the Hiring Process A bad first hire will cost your executives a lot of time and a lot of actual money for the company. At a bare minimum, your first hires should be excellent with the small details around communication — good formatting, proactive, professional. You’re hiring sales because you need to get it off your plate. So while you’re juggling everything else, you don’t have time to train someone on the fundamentals of client communication. How they communicate with you during the interview process is a reflection of how they communicate with customers. Even if the candidate has good logos on their resume, don’t drop your standards on communication. The reason this is top of mind? We've been hiring a bunch of overseas SDRs for our clients and I've been having these exact conversations with founders and early stage managers.

@connorpera What were the roles and what was the vetting and testing process? This is usually the difference maker IMO. I've been build overseas teams for 13 years. I've certainly had some duds, but my entire team is based overseas and we have some killers.

I might lose some friends on SMB X for saying this but I think the global talent/outsourcing thing is extremely overrated. After multiple attempts, our experience has been that the talent level isn’t anywhere near what we’ve found from US-based employees. At 50% of the cost, even 80% output justifies the expense. Our experience has been 50% of the cost and <50% of the output plus the cost of headaches addressing performance issues. Admittedly a small sample size - we’ve made 4 hires total since inception from a couple different sources but am I the only one who has tried it and been like “this ain’t it”? I remain open minded to being convinced, but at this point our default is back to US-based, on-site for all roles.

@ajv Isn't Superhuman supposed to be able to draft emails for you? (I'm not a SH user)

Struggling with trying to integrate claude into my email for Drafts. I'm using gmail foundational connected to superhuman (my primary email client). I have tried routing it through slack channels/dm's, using labels with Gmail and Superhuman, etc. But all clunky in terms of workflow. Ideas?

@SahilBloom Scrolling X

What's something most people think is healthy that's actually not?

@meow @brandon Bill.com...total opposite. Support seems to have no idea what's going on

Want to shout out @meow for having awesome support. Quick responses. Super knowledgeable. Well done @brandon 👏

Impressions are far from cash...but 45K impressions from 1 comment certainly doesn't hurt

Inbound from playing golf? Best lead ever.

@jasonmpearl Made so many new friends

@jlalk Really well said. I thought the camaraderie was awesome this trip!

I spent 3 days with 12 founders at Pinehurst. What did we talk about during golf? - Claude Code - Income - Hiring - Parenting - GTM - Houses Completely candid conversations about any topic. It was awesome. (and way more Claude talk than I expected) To my kids, if you ever go on a trip like this, remember 2 things: 1) Don't be the score police Let people take a foot wedge. Give them a friendly drop. Root for each other. I love to compete. But I was there to make new friends, not prove I could win a golf match. Once you actually know them? Play for all the money you want. 2) My "fun rules": Have a beer or two, but go to bed early. Order the steak, but get a salad. Bring your computer, but try not to use it. Remember why you're there. Keep your priorities straight. This is exactly what I wanted out of a founder community when I joined @Tribefounders Candid conversations with people going through similar things as me. If you're a founder and you don't have that yet, go find it.

Is this trivial? Absolutely. But who cares. It works.

Incredible use case for Claude Cowork for busy parents if your kids play sports. It can add all of your kids sports events to your calendar in 1 minute. Apps that manage youth sports...all suck. You can subscribe to the team's schedule through iCal, but you can't invite your spouse to that event or update it. But you can copy and paste the schedule into Claude Cowork, give each event a naming syntax, and tell it to add your spouse to the invite. 60 seconds later and you have the full schedule. Our oldest is playing on 3 different teams this spring. This just saved us tons of headaches.

@DannyMagazu I've never fired someone too soon.

The best thing you can do for your company is to constantly cycle out people who are not a cultural fit or underperforming. This does a couple of things: 1. This keeps your A players happy because they're working with really good people. 2. This creates an environment where mediocrity is not okay. My company is growing really rapidly, and we probably let go of just as many people as we hire, constantly improving our team. I I think a lot of people underestimate how much time you should put into making a really strong team. It's not easy to manage a company of 50 people if not all 50 people are good. They don't all have to be great, but if they're not at least good, it's really tough to grow when you have people who aren't contributing, and communication is off. You always have to be constantly cycling people out. Look through your team today and really decide who's making an impact and who's not. Firing used to be hard for us, and the moment we decided this wasn't going to be something we put up with anymore, we experienced real scale. That's my hiring piece of advice for the day. I would love to hear how you guys tackle this and how you view team building.

Computer nerds...I just got a new Macbook Pro. How do I keep the keyboard feeling this bouncy for as long as possible? Typing is much more fun on this than my M1 Pro... I don't want to lose this feeling!

@hthieblot This puts you at a competitive disadvantage from the jump. I get the point but it would take some massive market shifts to incentive companies to do this

Unpopular opinion: If I started a company today, founders & founding employees shouldn’t fully vest in 4 years. Building a real company takes a decade. What I recommend to founders: Founders 6-year vesting, 1-year cliff Back-weighted: Year 1 — 10% Year 2 — 15% Year 3 — 15% Year 4 — 20% Year 5 — 20% Year 6 — 20% Founding Eng / Growth • 2–5%+ equity • ~$120k salary • 6-year vesting, normal weight • 1-year cliff Employees • 4-year vesting • 1-year cliff

@jasonmpearl @ajv @Tribefounders @trentjhughes great convo!

Had a great conversation yesterday with @ajv inside our @Tribefounders peer group. Grateful to @trentjhughes and the TRIBE. team for consistently bringing in speakers who actually build real businesses and are willing to share what they’ve learned along the way. A couple insights from AJ that stuck with me: 1. If you want to scale, hire talented people and let them truly own their role. Yes, it may shrink margin in the short term, but strong operators help you grow faster and farther than trying to control everything yourself. 2. The right partners matter. Owning a meaningful piece of something great is far better than owning 100% of something that never reaches its potential. I’ve followed AJ and Gary for years, and AJ absolutely lived up to the reputation. Down to earth, direct, thoughtful, and clearly passionate about helping entrepreneurs win. This is one of the things I appreciate most about @Tribefounders. Serious entrepreneurs learning from people who have actually done the work.

@DannyMagazu Hearing a lot of the same. Lots of babysitting Openclaw. Add the security risks and it's probably not worth it for most people.

Here's what I've learned over the past couple of weeks with people who are really in touch with AI. They all think OpenClaw sucks. They all have advised on focusing on mastering Claude Co-Work and Claude Code. Even if they are doing something productive with Openclaw, the other tools on the market will pass it in a matter of months. They all say that anyone telling you to use OpenClaw is just peddling garbage. What do you all think?

@JerimiahLee Absolutely loved this story. Seems like a great guy that raised a great guy.

Fwiw, I didn't take down the review. The people need to know!

Would you take down a negative review for someone if they offered to refund your purchase? Or do you eat it and leave the review for the good of the people? Bought an Evolution basketball on eBay for $40 It was fake (not surprised) My review said it was fake, but I wasn't mean about it. What would you do?