Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:37:03 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:37:03] S1: [inaudible 00:37:04]. Luckily we got some sweet podcasts to check out, to keep up to date with what's happening. We'll link to yours, of course. Here's a puzzle for you. What do OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, Vercel, Plaid, and hundreds of other winning companies have in common? The answer is they're all powered by today's sponsor, WorkOS. If you're building software for enterprises, you've probably felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, SCIM, RBAC, audited logs, and other features required by big customers. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs, with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Whether you're a seed-stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer, or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise-ready and unlocking growth. They're essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit WorkOS.com to get started, or just hit up their Slack support, where they have real engineers in there who answer your questions super fast. WorkOS allows you to build like the best, with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to WorkOS.com to make your app enterprise-ready today. Let's talk Halliganisms. Essentially these are nuggets of wisdom and advice that you find yourself sharing often, you've written about a bunch of these online, and so let me just go through them and then just share the synopsis of the advice and the lesson around this Halliganism. The first is, "When you have to eat a shit sandwich, don't nibble."