The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:16:05 · Max Freeman, Harry Stebbings
[00:16:05] S0: I feel the same way because exact... Yes. That's exactly my point. [00:16:09] S1: Yeah. It... It's like the John Scully, you know, the apple moment. You're really gonna spend the rest of your life selling flavored water. [00:16:16] S0: That's it. Unless you have the belief and the conviction that this could turn into something that rivals Salesforce, sure, by all means, go swing for the fences, but that's hard. [00:16:27] S1: Totally get you. So sorry. Number one was market. What was number two and number three? [00:16:30] S0: Talent density [00:16:32] S1: Talent density. Mhmm. [00:16:33] S0: On the current roster. And then third, founders. [00:16:36] S1: Okay. And so talent density, if we just unpack that, is that just how good the team is? What does that actually mean? [00:16:41] S0: You know, working in sales, you wanna be the beneficiary of having killer engineers. And so first engineers that I met at Ramp were otherworldly. Like the youngest person to ever graduate from MIT, someone that had already built and sold a business to Apple in his dorm room at Stanford. You know, the the IOI gold medal Olympic track, that... That's what you wanna underwrite. And then the fact that Eric and Karim had already built and sold a business to Capital One, that doesn't happen by accident. [00:17:09] S1: That's a pretty solid engineering team to start, isn't it? Youngest kid to ever graduate from MIT? Gosh. Gosh. Okay. Fine. My four weeks at university are really making me feel guilty now. That's why we're sellers, Max. Okay?
00:17:09 · Harry Stebbings, Max Freeman
[00:17:09] S1: That's a pretty solid engineering team to start, isn't it? Youngest kid to ever graduate from MIT? Gosh. Gosh. Okay. Fine. My four weeks at university are really making me feel guilty now. That's why we're sellers, Max. Okay? [00:17:26] S0: That's right. That's right. I went to state school, baby. [00:17:29] S1: Yeah. There we go. Okay. So that's talent density. I get that. And then the third is founders. And when we say founders, like, can we unpack that a little bit? Because we see a rise of engineering led founders who suck at sales, definitely haven't built out a sales playbook, definitely don't have really much clue about sales. How would you think about that as a potential founding team to join?
00:17:29 · Harry Stebbings, Max Freeman
[00:17:29] S1: Yeah. There we go. Okay. So that's talent density. I get that. And then the third is founders. And when we say founders, like, can we unpack that a little bit? Because we see a rise of engineering led founders who suck at sales, definitely haven't built out a sales playbook, definitely don't have really much clue about sales. How would you think about that as a potential founding team to join? [00:17:49] S0: That's totally fine. I think we're gonna see more and more of that as a lot of engineers are looking to go start their own AI native businesses. I think you need to test for a few things. Are they seller friendly? And I'll explain an example of what that might mean. And then two, their willingness to engage and be involved in taking feedback such that the product can mature and become sophisticated enough to meet the demanding needs that sales will face. I'll go deep on the first example. Being seller friendly, what does that mean? Will your technical co founder give you engineering resources to help build the machine? Sales is very much an engineering problem when you break it down. It's a data infrastructure problem. It's a math problem. And so you need to build the systems to help give you leverage and automate such that you can create a ton of capacity. And I give a lot of credit to Kareem early on with providing engineering resources to myself to build out our OATS program super early on in the business.
00:17:49 · Max Freeman, Harry Stebbings
[00:17:49] S0: That's totally fine. I think we're gonna see more and more of that as a lot of engineers are looking to go start their own AI native businesses. I think you need to test for a few things. Are they seller friendly? And I'll explain an example of what that might mean. And then two, their willingness to engage and be involved in taking feedback such that the product can mature and become sophisticated enough to meet the demanding needs that sales will face. I'll go deep on the first example. Being seller friendly, what does that mean? Will your technical co founder give you engineering resources to help build the machine? Sales is very much an engineering problem when you break it down. It's a data infrastructure problem. It's a math problem. And so you need to build the systems to help give you leverage and automate such that you can create a ton of capacity. And I give a lot of credit to Kareem early on with providing engineering resources to myself to build out our OATS program super early on in the business. [00:18:49] S1: I'm so sorry. What is an OATS program? Why is it a data infrastructure problem? Why is it a math problem? Can you just help me understand this seriously?
00:18:49 · Harry Stebbings, Max Freeman
[00:18:49] S1: I'm so sorry. What is an OATS program? Why is it a data infrastructure problem? Why is it a math problem? Can you just help me understand this seriously? [00:18:58] S0: Yeah. So outbound used to primarily be a writing and a calling problem. I think increasingly it's becoming an engineering problem. In late twenty twenty, early twenty one, even before the rise of AI, we built our own internal infrastructure to help automate a lot of our outbound, and that's what OATS is an acronym for, outbound automation team. And so let me break this down. So the team was understanding what I was doing to go to market, how I was creating signals inside of accounts, and the signals could be unbounded. It could be a new hire just joined the business, It could be, I went to the same university as this person. We have overlapping investors on our cap table. And that was very manual. You know, you got to build the templates, you got to find the contact data. Why is our sales team doing that? They should be focused on just speaking with the customer and helping solve their business problems and getting Ramp deployed. And so our team of engineers built a lot of automation to do the list scraping, do the email outreach, and it was [00:20:05] S1: I'm so sorry. If I'm a founder then listening to this wanting to see the same, what what do I do? I tell my engineers to get Zoom info?
00:20:05 · Harry Stebbings, Max Freeman
[00:20:05] S1: I'm so sorry. If I'm a founder then listening to this wanting to see the same, what what do I do? I tell my engineers to get Zoom info? [00:20:13] S0: No. That's part of it. You tell one or two of your top engineers that, hey, we could build the coolest product in the world. It doesn't fucking matter if it doesn't get into the hands of paying customers. And so we need to obsess over growth as it's existential for our business. [00:20:28] S1: What are we solving for here? I didn't get it. Are we solving for finding new leads or for outreach to them? How do we handle the integrations of whether it should be an email or a LinkedIn message? [00:20:38] S0: Yeah. You're you're solving for coverage. Right? In the the early innings of your business, you're not gonna have an army of go to market talent. You might have three to a half a dozen of folks that are responsible for outbounding. Guess what? If you do that manually, like, maybe you could get a couple 100 emails out, maybe you could make a 100 dials. That's not enough. Especially in markets today where the TAMs are becoming more and more unbounded, you need leverage. And so the the the problem you're solving for is coverage and brand awareness and getting your name out. You just can't be dependent on sellers to do that.