andy whyte

openai and anthropic probably have terrible sales reps they're talented, but they've never actually had to sell anything. ben horowitz said it best in a recent conversation: "right now with openai and anthropic, everybody wants to buy ai. they're already predisposed to buy." that's order-taking, not selling. let's zoom in on this distinction. 1) the order-taker problem cloudflare's CEO admitted in 2023 their product was so good that "many of our sales team succeeded largely by just taking orders." deals were like "fish jumping right in the boat." then the economy shifted and they fired 100 salespeople who'd contributed just 4% of new business. when your product sells itself, mediocre reps look like rockstars. they crush quota, win the president's club, and get promoted into leadership. nobody knows they can't actually sell until the fish stop jumping in the boat. 2) why hard sells matter ben won't shut up about ptc, a 90s cad/cam company. the product "wasn't that great." "the windshield wiper didn't work." but that forced discipline. you had to map accounts systematically, lay traps for competitors, and build airtight technical cases. his favorite hire was ryan gabrisco at databricks, who came from a company selling secure ftp as a public company. think about how good you have to be to make quota selling that. when ben hires sales leaders, he looks for people from companies where the product was hard to sell because that's the only way to test if someone can actually sell. 3) what happens when markets turn every hot market eventually cools. i'll give you a few examples. salesforce in 2001. facebook ads in 2012. aws in 2015. the order-takers got exposed every time. modern AI sales reps don't know how to qualify prospects who aren't already sold or how to systematically lock out competitors or how to build pipeline when inbound dries up. ben's story about hiring at Okta: two candidates, one super enthusiastic, the other said "let me talk to your customers first." ben told the ceo: "you want the guy qualifying YOU. that's what good salespeople do." 4) openai scaled their sales team from 10 to 500 people in under two years. anthropic is scaling fast too. but how would anyone know if they're good? you can't test sales ability when customers are lined up begging to buy. when real competition arrives, the kind where enterprises have three viable options and care about pricing, support, and vendor risk, AI companies will discover which GTM leaders can actually sell and which ones were just processing waitlists. 5) how to hire right if you're building a GTM team right now, think like a value investor. resumes don't matter. look for human capital that the market has significantly underpriced. someone who's had to sell a product that didn't sell itself, someone who's built discipline through necessity, not abundance (no order-takers). find the person who sold enterprise software at a company nobody's heard of. find the person who had to fight for every deal because the competitor was already embedded in the account. the person who figured out how to systematically lock out competition even when they were the underdog. those skills matter. for AI companies, the question is whether they can close deals when the market shifts. because when inbound dries up (it always does), you'll discover who can actually sell.

@ZssBecker hey alex, i appreciate your POV. can you give a little more context on what you are doing to spend so many credits? and what you are vibe coding 'every day'? your post seems a little contradictory to a muppet like me 🙂.

I vibe code every day. I have a team of 30+ engineers. We spend F tons of credits. And I will tell you this about AI from my experience. It’s being wildly over hyped. Everyone is drunk. Fucking drunk. All the CEOs and Gen Z’s saying coding is dead are idiots. IDIOTS.

@TylerPurcell24 if so good at outreach then why so bad at outreach.

I get about 5 messages per day over on LI that go something like this: “Tyler, would you like 10 appointments per month with highly qualified prospects?” My reply is the exact same to every single one: “Sure. If you get me my first client for free, I will sign up for a years worth of service” Guess how many have taken up that offer?

author james baldwin on change: “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

entrepreneur patrick collison on the value of reading: “you could try to pound your head against the wall and think of original ideas or you can cheat by reading them in books.”

@thedealdirector i think they should take a leaf from anthropic’s book and focus on their models instead.

New merch drop, wdyt?

@scottmartinis @iamjasonlevin i get at least a founder a week from a non sales background DM’ing me to request free consulting on their product. they all have a disrespect for the craft of sales and unsurprisingly are terrible in their efforts to persuade me to help.

@iamjasonlevin I feel this for sales and B2B A lot of engineers thinking they can build better AI employees than people who've lived it And it's one thing if they want to learn... But a lot of the time they can't Well we can code now Good luck

Fuck the engineers trying to launch AI CMOs. There, I finally said it. Y'all are egotistical pricks who have never marketed anything in your life. I was literally the ghostwriter for founders like this 2 years ago. Too smart to write their own words. Ironic, right? I got sick of working for pricks like that, so I quit my job and decided to build my own software. I raised $3M for my meme marketing app and now we have an AI meme agent and do you wanna know how I market it??? "It's your marketing intern's intern" Our agent is 1000x more useful than your bullshit but I'm not trying to take marketers' jobs because I respect them. All I'm trying to do is give me and my friends superpowers. You have no respect for the people you're trying to sell to and that is why you will fail and be miserable inside. I've been the socials intern. I've been the CMO. I've gotten billions of views organically. I've literally started fake viral boycotts bro. I'm friends with social media managers and marketers at every brand because these are my people. But yes, you can make an AI CMO without marketing anything in your life. Y'all think buying some retweets from some agency and lying and ragebaiting is marketing. Losers. Go work at HP or something in the basement where you belong. Sit down, be humble. Idiot marketers like me can build software now, so you better fucking run 🫵🏃

@elonmusk my microwave cooks a steak faster than a charcoal grill and uses more voltage than my oven.

Cybertruck is quicker than a Porsche 911, more powerful than a Ford Raptor

the poet and pulitzer prize winner mary oliver with some suggestions for your one precious life: “instructions for living a life: pay attention. be astonished. tell about it.”

the author and aviator antoine de saint-exupéry on motivating others: "if you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. instead, teach them to yearn for the vast endless sea."

@Todd_Spence WHAAAAT!!!

Someone created a fully operational JOHNNY 5 from scratch and omg how cool 🙌 (instagram Saundersmachineworks)

@HarryStebbings people are being a lot kinder to you in the replies than i got for holding the same view earlier on reddit 😂

Single biggest red flag when hiring: Jumpers. Year here. Year there. When it happens 3 times or more for less than two years, I am out.

@georgywalks @NorwichCityFC @Grantholt31 @DHucks6 thanks, george 🙂

@andywhyte @NorwichCityFC @Grantholt31 @DHucks6 Brilliant video - looked like a great evening!

still can’t quite believe we pulled this off… special thanks to @norwichcityfc, @grantholt31, and @dhucks6 for making my brother’s surprise 50th birthday present so special. one he’ll never forget😁😁. youtu.be/arBlDylbMUM #ncfc #otbc

inventor and engineer alexander graham bell on focus: “concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. the sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”

french moralist joseph joubert on dealing with conflict: “never cut what you can untie.”

@jasonfried HEAVY +1. this reminds me of that classic mistake new managers make where they mistake ‘busyness’ for ‘importance’.

Jessica has worked in more places, run more teams, and seen more conditions than I have, so I'm not discounting her personal experience. Chaos does seem to reign in many companies, and corporate calendars can look like you're losing at Tetris. It seems especially bad in tech, which is fascinating given how much the tech industry promotes products that are supposed to help people manage all the work. However, to play the other side here, and give some credit and cover to executives who don't find themselves constantly staring at an organization on the edge of a catastrophic wildfire... I'd say a huge list of urgent things first thing every morning signals deep organizational disfunction. If that's the status quo, woah! It absolutely does not have to be.

@JamieMordecai @NorwichCityFC @Grantholt31 @DHucks6 ah thank you jamie. he used to love working in asda, the colleagues were all so great with him 🫶.

@andywhyte @NorwichCityFC @Grantholt31 @DHucks6 Love this James is a lovely guy. I remember many years ago James doing some work at Asda in Lowestoft. I had many chats about Norwich and the Bowls with him and your mum. Glad he had the best experience 😊.

@dianencfcfan @NorwichCityFC @Grantholt31 @DHucks6 thank you so much, diane 😁. glad i am not the only one who has been teary eyed with this 🫶.

@andywhyte @NorwichCityFC @Grantholt31 @DHucks6 Lovely video, brought a tear to my eye, glad he had a lovely day & that the club did him proud

@RetentionAdam what a great post.

I talk to delusional Series A founders every day. So now, I just tell them this. If your company does under $10M ARR, burns over $200k/mo, and has low Gross Retention…you are not worth $50-100M to anyone. Doesn't matter what your investors or your bankers tell you. Dirk Sahlmer from FE International has done nearly 6 years in SaaS M&A and hundreds of valuation conversations. He calls it Schrödinger's valuation, and he's right. Check it out and start recognizing what game you’re actually playing. Don’t waste the next 10 years chasing a fantasy.

@bingers14 @NorwichCityFC @Grantholt31 @DHucks6 thank, philip 🙂

@andywhyte @NorwichCityFC @Grantholt31 @DHucks6 Lovely stuff 👏