Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:30:38 · Brian Halligan, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:30:38] S0: Yeah. And what I want is connect that thing to my email, into my Granola, into my plot, and it knows everything about me. And then, when I go to a meeting, Lenny, I want to invite that thing to my meeting. So, it's sitting there in the Zoom meeting, it's not just taking notes like Granola, it's a participant. So, if I forgot something, I ask it a question, if somebody else forgot... I think every knowledge worker will have one of these in 3, 4, 5 years. But mine was more on the go-to-market side, where I think every website will change and there'll be an all-knowing avatar on that homepage. And if it's a considered purchase, I think it gets handed off to a sales rep, and that sales rep has a conversation, but when that sales rep's on Zoom, they have their SE avatar that's kind of all-knowing. And so, I think this stuff all changes a lot in the next few years, but it hasn't really unlocked yet. [00:31:28] S1: What are we going to be doing in this world, these two bots chatting with each other? [00:31:33] S0: It's going to be great, Lenny. You and I are going to be sitting on- [00:31:37] S1: We're into podcasts. [00:31:37] S0: We're in Turks and Caicos, relaxing, on a month-long vacation, sending our avatars to all the meetings. [00:31:42] S1: Go buy me some HubSpot seats please. I think this is why ClawdBot was so popular. I think this is essentially what they're building, is this idea. Which is now called Moltbot, which might be changing again. It's just this personal agent that can go do stuff for you. [00:31:56] S0: Totally.
00:31:56 · Brian Halligan, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:31:56] S0: Totally. [00:31:58] S1: So, you're talking about the future of go-to-market is this world where there's these little bots and agents that are doing things for you on both sides. When you look at companies today that you work with, that are doing well, that are especially AI-driven companies, what are they doing differently in terms of go-to-market that is working really well? [00:32:15] S0: Honestly, the only thing that's different today, it's exactly the same as it's been for 100 years, except they call their SCs or their system consultants for deployed engineers. The rest of it is the same. I thought it would be totally different in AI, and working with all these companies, they're hiring all the same folks, running the same enterprise sales processes. So, it hasn't changed that much, at least on the enterprise side. Actually, I spent the first 10 years of my career at a company called PTC, which is like an enterprise sales machine. Enterprise sales hasn't changed that much since the 1990s. [00:32:49] S1: And so, forward deployed engineer, a very hot term, the idea there is they come work with the customer and help them implement this thing. And that's come up a lot on this podcast just with AI tools, rarely are they just plug and play, you can't just set up some agent that figures everything out. Takes a lot of onboarding and integration. Is it actually a different thing at all versus sales engineering in the past, things like that, or- [00:33:12] S0: I think it's a solutions consultant sales engineer. [00:33:14] S1: Okay.
00:33:14 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brian Halligan
[00:33:14] S1: Okay. [00:33:14] S0: They're technical, and they help you implement it, they connect all your systems, they customize it. It's different. You're training it in a different way, but... Well, anyway, I think the term is fine. I'm sort of being light on it because, boy, it looks similar except that role has a different name to it. [00:33:31] S1: Got it. So, if anything, the device I'm hearing here is just lean into this, continue to lean into this idea of having your employees help the customer on board, be successful, integrate all that stuff. [00:33:43] S0: I think the thing that will change first is the top of the funnel around getting found inside Google, you got to get found in these... [00:33:51] S1: Yeah, AEO. [00:33:52] S0: Yeah, that's going to be really important. And the way you build your website is very different for that to optimize for it. And then, I think your homepage is totally different. I think you land on an avatar and have a conversation with them, versus you're going through all the pages on your site. I think the top of the funnel is about changed a lot. [00:34:09] S1: Has anyone doing this well yet, this idea of this avatar or is this just kind of in the future- [00:34:13] S0: There's a few startup programs. HubSpot does it, we built one, it's working. [00:34:17] S1: Oh. Okay. Okay. Let me ask one more question around CEO stuff, and then I want to move on to Halliganisms. [00:34:24] S0: All right.
00:34:24 · Brian Halligan, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:34:24] S0: All right. [00:34:26] S1: How is just being a CEO different than it was? So, you've been doing this for 20-ish years, what's most different about what it was like to be a CEO maybe 10, 20 years ago versus today?
00:34:39 · Brian Halligan
[00:34:39] S0: One of my... It was actually Winston from Harvey, said this a year ago, and I was like, that's bullshit, but I actually think he was right. He, he's like, "You can just do a lot more." You've got AI agents doing stuff, everyone's more productive, the software developers are more productive. Something that used to take you a year takes two months now. And so, the amount of projects and the amount of stuff you can do is much, much more, I think he's right. I think that's a little dangerous. Let's say you found your beachhead market, and that beachhead market is really good, and it's very deep, there's a lot of work to do, I think what's dangerous for companies is they hop to that second act too quickly, and they lose focus on that first act. And this isn't a completely perfect analogy, but you think of OpenAI and ChatGPT, and its consumer app is doing incredible, and they're doing lots and lots and lots and lots of other things, and then Gemini comes out and they've kind of focused back on the core. I think there's a lot of competition, everything is moving fast. I do think people get more done, and I think that impacts everything. The planning cycles used to be a year, I think the planning cycles now are three months long. Yeah, that's a big change. I think it puts pressure on the CEOs to be faster and better decision makers. I just think of times in HubSpot when things slowed down and there was churn, it was usually my fault. It was because there were some hard one-way door type decisions on my desk, and maybe every year I would sit down and I'd open that one-way door or close it, and it just freed everyone up and we just started moving so much faster. I think people need to be making those decisions and walking through those doors much more quickly than they used to. I think that's new and different. I was someone who always valued optionality, I think there's a massive tax in optionality when you can move this fast and try a lot of things. So, I do think the job's changing a lot.
00:36:45 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brian Halligan
[00:36:45] S1: Yeah. And there's so many reasons this is happening. One is just technology is just every week there's a new shift in what is possible. [00:36:53] S0: Yeah. [00:36:54] S1: So, if you're spending all these months thinking and planning, just what a waste of time it ends up being because so much is changing. [00:36:59] S0: I know. Yeah, it's hard to keep up.