James Underhill
1.4K posts
James Underhill
@junderstorm
GTM @ Profound. ex-MongoDB / Thrive Capital
New York, NY Katılım Aralık 2010
1.2K Takip Edilen412 Takipçiler
There are a small number of elite go to market leaders. Graham Moreno is one of them.
He recently joined @p0 to help lead GTM. Before that, he was at Cognition, Grafana, and MongoDB.
One of his core philosophies is that a great go to market system raises the floor and introduces predictability while still leaving space for exceptional people to use their judgment to delight the customer.
“One of my favorite stories is, one of the best reps I’ve ever worked with, during the pandemic found out that the son of a champion at one of his companies had been taking guitar lessons and couldn’t anymore because of COVID. So he ended up teaching this guy’s kid guitar over Zoom during COVID.
And he also didn’t tell anyone. No one found out about this for a long time. Then the champion at this account brought it up on a call with me six months later and was like, ‘Oh yeah, Isaac has been teaching my son how to play guitar.’ At no part in our process does it say, ‘teach someone guitar.’”
This is one of my favorite deep dives on what it means to be an executional revenue leader in a post AI world. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Timestamps
00:32 Has the sales playbook changed in the AI era?
02:13 Why "showing up" beats letting the marketplace decide
06:50 Why great salespeople sell to engineers and executives in one motion
11:37 Selling to AI-native buyers who grew up on ChatGPT
13:49 Same seller, different tempo: 8 weeks vs. 8 business days
15:57 How AI-native buyers handle build vs. buy decisions
17:48 The rep who taught a champion's son guitar over Zoom
19:03 Raising the floor without capping the ceiling
22:09 Why too much process narrows the kind of seller you attract
25:46 The three pillars of GTM excellence
31:00 Building peers who are 80% aligned, not 100%
38:03 Whether AI is changing what good enablement looks like
41:35 Selling against direct and implied competitors at once
42:45 Instrumenting the funnel from stage zero to close
45:57 Why post-sales should always roll up to the revenue leader
48:19 The case for outsized commissions
52:02 The 96 hours of panic before Cognition acquired Windsurf
53:04 How far out should a GTM leader be planning?
57:53 What a normal week looks like in hypergrowth
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The Marketing Engineer is the most important hire a marketing team can make in 2026.
Not to run campaigns, but to build the agents that run them.
Today we're introducing a new role to the marketing org:
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗿
We believe every business on the planet will eventually need one. Their job is to build the Agents, automations, and systems that create a new kind of marketing. Part-builder, part-strategist.
They build Agents that monitor media coverage, flag sentiment shifts, and draft journalist outreach before your PR team even knows there's a story.
They build Agents that track every competitor move, grade its severity, and rewrite your battle cards and talk tracks before your next sales call.
They build Agents that turn every webinar into a brand-voice article, refreshed weekly and queued for your team to review before posting.
Our first marketing hire @nicklafferty has already become @tryprofound's Founding Marketing Engineer, the first person to hold this title at a company fully behind it.
Every marketing team on the planet will use AI to do their jobs better. But to build truly impactful systems, you need an owner and an orchestrator.
That's the Marketing Engineer.
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Reporting in Profound just got a lot faster.
We've launched Custom Dashboards, a fully configurable, shareable view of your Profound data.
Build it once. Come back to it anytime.
With Custom Dashboards you can:
• Filter by date, platform, competitor, topic, region, and more
• Drag and drop charts to build the exact view you need
• Export as a clean PDF in one click
Watch Helen Martin, from our Product Marketing team, walk through how to build a weekly report from scratch.
Available now for all Profound customers. Link in comments to learn more.
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James Underhill retweetledi
With the Series C comes the launch of Profound Agents: Customizable, autonomous workers that collapse the time between campaign concept and execution. Profound Agents will 10x the productivity of the modern marketer.
Dylan Babbs@dbabbs
Today, @tryprofound is excited to announce our $96M Series C at a $1B valuation, led by @lightspeedvp with participation from @sequoia, @kleinerperkins, @mattevantic, @saga_ventures and @southpkcommons. When we started Profound 18 months ago, we had two fundamental beliefs about where marketing is heading: 1. Every company will care deeply about how AI talks about their brand. 2. Every marketer will use AI Agents to do their best work, faster. Those beliefs are becoming reality faster than we imagined. Now, we serve more than 10% of the Fortune 500 and are the number 1 leader on the G2 grid for AEO. To double down on that momentum, we’re taking two big swings: 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗔𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀: AI workers that take marketing teams from concept to execution. 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗨𝗻𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆: certifications and cohort-based learning for marketers who want stay at the forefront of AI marketing. Reply with 𝗔𝗚𝗘𝗡𝗧 for free access to one of our most popular agents. No account required and no strings attached.
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James Underhill retweetledi
Today, @tryprofound is excited to announce our $96M Series C at a $1B valuation, led by @lightspeedvp with participation from @sequoia, @kleinerperkins, @mattevantic, @saga_ventures and @southpkcommons.
When we started Profound 18 months ago, we had two fundamental beliefs about where marketing is heading:
1. Every company will care deeply about how AI talks about their brand.
2. Every marketer will use AI Agents to do their best work, faster.
Those beliefs are becoming reality faster than we imagined.
Now, we serve more than 10% of the Fortune 500 and are the number 1 leader on the G2 grid for AEO.
To double down on that momentum, we’re taking two big swings:
𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗔𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀: AI workers that take marketing teams from concept to execution.
𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗨𝗻𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆: certifications and cohort-based learning for marketers who want stay at the forefront of AI marketing.
Reply with 𝗔𝗚𝗘𝗡𝗧 for free access to one of our most popular agents. No account required and no strings attached.
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James Underhill retweetledi
Sequoia just called the end of an entire go-to-market era and most SaaS companies won’t realize what hit them for 18 months.
Product-led growth was built on one assumption: humans would try the software. The entire playbook since 2010 optimized for human discovery. Beautiful landing pages. Frictionless free trials. Viral invite loops. Slack, Dropbox, Zoom, Calendly. $200B+ in market cap created by winning the user’s first 5 minutes.
None of that matters if an agent is picking the software.
Claude doesn’t care about your hero image. It can’t be impressed by your Dribbble awards. It’s reading documentation, parsing user reviews, checking API reliability, and matching features to use case. All the surface-level polish that convinced lazy humans to click “sign up” becomes irrelevant.
The new PLG funnel isn’t landing page → free trial → activation → conversion.
It’s agent query → documentation scan → feature match → recommendation.
Which means the new moat looks completely different. You don’t need the best onboarding. You need the best documentation. You don’t need viral loops. You need structured data that agents can parse. You don’t need a beautiful UI for the first session. You need an API that an agent can actually call.
The companies that won PLG hired designers and growth hackers. The companies that win agent-led growth will hire technical writers and developer relations engineers.
And here’s the part nobody’s pricing in yet: agents don’t have loyalty. They don’t have switching costs. They’ll recommend Supabase today and something better tomorrow if the documentation is cleaner or the pricing is more transparent. The stickiness that made PLG so powerful, the network effects and learned behavior, doesn’t transfer.
Sequoia is telling you the entire distribution layer is being rewritten. The question is whether your product is optimized for human attention or machine parsing. Most are built for the wrong audience.
TBPN@tbpn
Sequoia partner @sonyatweetybird says we're going from the age of product-led growth to the age of agent-led growth. "You see this most clearly if you're using Claude Code actively. It says, 'Hey, for a database, you should use Supabase. For hosting, use Vercel.' It's choosing for you, the stuff you should be using." "Product-led growth brought us closer to the vision of 'best product wins,' but ultimately people are still lazy. They can't read all the reviews, and they kind of default to what looks cool on the website." "Whereas your agent has infinite time to go and make these choices for you. It can go and read all the documentation, read all the user comments, and figure out [what you need] for your use case."
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Some of my favorite people here. Worth a listen over the holidays to learn more about how agent of search is changing consumer behaviors
Grit Podcast@KPGrit
Customers now meet brands inside AI responses. @thejamescad, CEO of @tryprofound, shares how the company is rethinking marketing to reach millions as machines become the primary audience. He also explains why Profound isn’t “SEO for AI,” and why hiring exceptional talent has become one of the toughest constraints for early companies today. Tune into the full episode with @Joubinmir and @ilyaf. Link in the comments.
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Game changer for marketers and brands. You’ve been waiting for AI? Here it is
Dylan Babbs@dbabbs
Today, I'm excited to announce @tryprofound Workflows is available in public beta to all enterprise customers. The automation layer for content operations in the era of AI Search.
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❤️❤️
Dylan Babbs@dbabbs
When we launched @tryprofound 14 months ago, we focused on driving impact for larger enterprises like MongoDB, Indeed, U.S. Bank, DocuSign, and Zapier. We’ve since expanded the product to help businesses of all sizes. Whether you’re a seed-stage startup, a family business, or a Fortune 500 brand, Profound is here to help. Profound is now self-serve. You can sign up instantly w/ 3 plans: ◆ Starter: $99/month ◆ Growth: $399/month ◆ Enterprise: custom We will remain the #1 enterprise platform to quantify your AI Visibility and orchestrate content creation.
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James Underhill retweetledi
We've been cooking up workflows @tryprofound 🙏 Stay tuned! Here are some snippets from the big picture
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James Underhill retweetledi
We had our first @tryprofound user conference today in NYC:
Zero Click 2025
Was a total blast - thank you to everyone who came through
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James Underhill retweetledi
James Underhill retweetledi
All companies run on IT.
But almost all IT teams are underwater.
The ones that aren't run on Console.
Console raised a $23M Series A led by DST Global Partners and @ThriveCapital to help leading companies like @scale_ai, @tryramp, and @webflow automate 50%+ of their tickets.
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James Underhill retweetledi
What @rabois calls barrels, Slootman calls drivers. Critical to hire as many of this archetype as possible.
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I’m joining @Kalshi !
Markets have always been my obsession.
For as long as I can remember, I have been on the trading floor.
Literally...
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James Underhill retweetledi
What a privilege to be tired from work you once begged the universe for. what a privilege to feel overwhelmed by growth you used to dream about. what a privilege to be challenged by a life you created on purpose. what a privilege to outgrow things you used to settle for.
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I am excited to share that I have joined the founding team at Thrive Holdings (@ThriveCapital) to help build exceptional businesses designed to compound over many decades.
GIF
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