The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:52:58 · Max Freeman, Harry Stebbings
[00:52:58] S0: In consumer, you can. Yeah. You flip the light switch on. Yeah. [00:53:01] S1: Yeah. No. Honestly, yeah, you can, and it's much easier. Let's see how it goes. But it's so different, and it's so complex. And this is why I think people get it so wrong when they're like, oh, Astra Law is gonna kill Harvey and Legora. It's like, are you serious? You think the training and deployment methods are gonna be the same for OpenAI and for Harvey and Nagora who spent two years [00:53:21] S0: kissing the ass. [00:53:23] S1: Completely agree. Final one, where do you fall down as a sales leader where you feel you need to improve most? [00:53:31] S0: There's a lot [00:53:32] S1: that I I need to improve.
00:53:32 · Harry Stebbings, Max Freeman
[00:53:32] S1: that I I need to improve. [00:53:33] S0: I think my my biggest thing that I'm I'm working on is resisting the instinct to personally jump into every important problem. A lot of what helped me progress at Ramp was being incredibly hands on. You know, if there's an important deal, important customer, I'm all over it. But, you know, that that only works well for a certain period of time. Like as your scope gets bigger and bigger, that instinct can actually become a weakness. And so said another way, if I jump in to every deal and solve it, maybe we win the deal, but I haven't necessarily made my sales organization better. And worse, I can, you know, unintentionally teach people that when something gets sufficiently important, Max is just gonna jump in and take over. That's gonna become a constraint. Like, I need to build more and more barrels inside of the go to market organization. Otherwise, I'm I'm not doing my job effectively as a leader. [00:54:29] S1: And you don't build those barrels because you're busy just in the machine? [00:54:33] S0: I think you have to do both. Like, something I pride myself on as a leader and I force it across all of the other leaders in go to market is you gotta be a dual threat. You gotta be able to operate in the clouds. You gotta be able to go toe to toe with me, toe to toe with Eric, toe to toe with Will and Colin. At the same time, you have to be in the trenches with your sellers. Still to this day, I'm making cold calls. I'm sending at least five cold emails every single day. [00:54:59] S1: Are you really?
00:54:59 · Harry Stebbings, Max Freeman
[00:54:59] S1: Are you really? [00:55:00] S0: Yes. I have to. And the the moment that we as leaders get further and further away from the customer and what it is that our sellers are doing, I think we die. I don't think we're being helpful or adding value to our sales team. There's nothing less inspiring as a seller than taking instruction from someone that you don't believe can do the job better than you. [00:55:22] S1: Can I ask you, what what do you think Eric Kareem did to imbue a founder like mentality within you? When I talk to you now, it very much feels like speaking to a founder. You know, I was just thinking, my gosh, I would like to poach Max. I I was upfront about alternate investment. I'm like, we got a poach, Max. Come on. And, like, you know, I I know that you'd be like, come on. Go fuck yourself. And so my question just to you is, like, it's amazing, and I'm giving Ram credit here. What do you think Ram and Eric and Kareem did to make, no offense, Max from Namely who wasn't extraordinary Yeah. A founder?
00:56:03 · Max Freeman
[00:56:03] S0: I think a few things. One, a lot of exposure. When I joined Ramp, my boss was effectively Eric. I'm seeing him in sales conversations. I'm seeing him talking to investors. I'm seeing an operating out of his email inbox. Like, it felt like I earned 50 MBAs in a nine month period of time. That was an insane acceleration. And then two, also exposure to investors that have seen and done this before. Like, I'm super grateful that I get to call Dave Schneider a friend and a mentor. I've learned a lot from him. And then two, Colin, my boss, is exceptional. Like, he's taken companies public. He's sold businesses, and so I think just being in the room has allowed me to absorb a lot of this knowledge, and two, it's forced me to figure it the fuck out. Like, I'm not naive to the fact that I have to earn this every day. If I don't perform, I could lose my job at any moment. If I'm not buttoned up in executive conversations with Eric, whether it's external with a customer or internal with a hot board topic, why would I still have this position? And so, like, I I think it's a a combination and a sum of all parts of the founders have given me a lot of exposure. They hold me intensely accountable, and I have, like, a healthy amount of stress and paranoia that if I don't keep delivering and I don't keep growing, the music could stop.
00:57:22 · Harry Stebbings, Max Freeman
[00:57:22] S1: Yeah. Dave Schneider said one of the greatest lines ever to me on a podcast. He came to London. Love this guy. He says VCs are like seagulls. They like to fly, you know, a 100 feet ahead of you, look down on you, and then just take a big crap all [00:57:36] S0: over you. [00:57:39] S1: And I just say that honestly, I can't remember anything else he said. But that that one line really stuck with me. He had [00:57:46] S0: he had the best one line around... I forget what the topic. It was something around, like, how do you how do you measure performance? And, like, how do you how do you stack rank? And he's like, Max, there's three categories of performance in sales. One, you are god. Two, I don't know yet. Or three, you're fucking fired. [00:58:04] S1: It's so true. You know what? It also taught me that when you listen to what I just said, which is like, oh, the seagull shitting on you. [00:58:11] S0: And [00:58:11] S1: Yeah. It's better to be a purple cow sometimes, which is like, you know, the Seth Godin being different is sometimes being better. Dude, we're gonna do a quick fire because otherwise I could talk to you all day and you've got a quota to hit. Yes. What one sales tool could you not live without? [00:58:26] S0: I don't know if I could say this publicly, but I'm going to. Inspect. Inspect is Ramp's internal coding agent in harness. It feels as though I have an engineer and a sales engineer in my pocket at any given moment. [00:58:41] S1: Have you guys just built all your own tools?
00:58:41 · Harry Stebbings, Max Freeman
[00:58:41] S1: Have you guys just built all your own tools? [00:58:43] S0: Harry, this... When I come to London, I'll I'll show you this. It is insane what our sellers can accomplish with inspect, like creating bespoke custom demos, performing any analysis on, you know, current customers ramp configuration. It's epic. [00:58:59] S1: Who's to credit for that? Is that as the CTO who's built the internal tooling? [00:59:04] S0: Yeah. I I give dual credit to Eric and Kareem. It's just culturally in our DNA to push forward and go build. [00:59:13] S1: Okay. You have a job offer that you know will not be rejected. You can give it to anyone in sales in the world to join the Ramp Sales team. Who is it? [00:59:24] S0: ICR leader or anyone. [00:59:25] S1: Anyone. I liked Becca Lindquist a lot from Clay. [00:59:29] S0: So I was literally gonna say, Becca or someone that's under... Like, I'm a big believer in finding someone that's just about to hit an insane trajectory. Again, my whole thesis on mispriced assets. There's a guy, Charlie Demuth, who's an enterprise frontline leader at ProFound, who's a... He's an animal that I've been... Every every six months, I I try and bring him in. Hopefully, Mark, doesn't listen to this because he's the SVP of sales at ProFound. [01:00:00] S1: What's your biggest advice to a new rep on their first day?