The GTMnow Podcast

Legora went from $3.5M to over $100M in revenue in about a year, the fastest any company has ever scaled a direct-sales motion from zero to $100M. Then, they doubled revenue in less than 6 months and hit $200M ARR. Patrick spent seven years at Braze, from the early days through IPO, before joining Legora (a vertical legal-AI company founded by Max, backed by Benchmark and Redpoint) at $3.5M in rev...

The CMO of Samsara joins GTMnow to walk through exactly how she ran an AI transformation inside a public company, from a 2.5 week boot camp to 113 agents in production, all while keeping headcount flat and pushing pipeline and revenue up. Meagan has led teams through platform shifts before (PLG, social, Covid) at MongoDB, DocuSign, Nieman, and now Samsara, and she argues AI is categorically differ...

Information has never been more abundant, and trust has never been harder to earn. That's the tension at the heart of LinkedIn's new research, "The Trust Advantage," and Catherine, who leads marketing for LinkedIn's Sales Solutions business (Sales Navigator), joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to unpack it. The headline gap: 86% of B2B buyers say expertise is what builds tr...

The CMO of Nooks (and former CMO of Jasper) joins GTMnow to explain why buying more agents won't grow revenue unless you rebuild the process underneath, and what the human-plus-agent revenue team truly looks like. Loreal has had a front-row seat to two AI waves: first at Jasper, where AI reshaped marketing content, and now at Nooks, building toward what she calls the revenue agents category....

Chris McDonough has joined four companies right before they exploded. At the first, Motive, he was employee 40 and watched revenue go from $800K to $30M in about 100 days. The VP of Sales at Campfire joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to break down what he learned riding hypergrowth over and over, and why he thinks AI is about to split the sales profession in two. Chris gets tactical on the whole a...

The founder and CEO of Electric, Ryan Denehy joins GTMnow to explain why and how he rebuilt Electric as an AI-native software company. Ryan gets specific on why he split the business in half, how the pivot forced a total change in distribution (from direct sales to embedded channel partnerships with payroll platforms), and why a new product doesn't just need a new channel, it can unlock ones...

Ross Rich is the co-founder and CEO of Accord and spent five years leading go-to-market and partnerships at Stripe. He talks to hundreds of CROs and serves thousands of reps, so he has an unusually clear view of what the top performers actually do differently. His starting point: roughly the top 20%, often closer to 10%, of any sales team drives most of the revenue. Every leader says they want to...

Is Salesforce the dominant player in the AI platform shift, or the incumbent about to be disrupted? Kris Billmaier, EVP and GM of Agentforce Sales and Growth Products, sat down with Sophie Buonassisi at Salesforce Tower to answer that directly. Kris runs the business behind Sales Cloud's 26-year run and its rebrand into Agentforce Sales. He makes the case that CRM is becoming "agentic re...

Chris Lee joined Deel at $1M in revenue. Now, it just hit $1.5B. He joined GTMnow to walk through the pivotal decisions behind that run, including the ones he's never discussed publicly. Chris (Head of Sales, Americas at Deel) breaks down the "five-star sales experience" framework he built by studying luxury hotels, why speed itself became a reason customers bought, how he's ha...

The Co-Founder & CEO of Merge joins GTMnow to break down how she built a company that now powers integrations for OpenAI, Perplexity, Netflix, Uber, Mistral, and enterprise logos like Mastercard, JP Morgan, and Amex, backed by $75M from Accel and NEA. Shensi gets tactical on the GTM decisions behind that growth: why she went enterprise-first into greenfield, why she's now layering a self-...

Are your sales compensation plans driving the right behaviors or causing your best reps to quit? In this episode of GTMnow, Brian Le (Global Sales Compensation Partner at Notion) breaks down how to build a scalable sales comp operating system. Brian shares his firsthand experience scaling Notion's sales comp from 80 to over 400 employees and explains why trust is the ultimate currency in reve...

"Investing in companies that OpenAI won't kill." That's Vanessa Larco's thesis, and in this VC bonus episode of GTMnow she breaks down exactly how she decides what survives. Vanessa, founder and GP at Premise (formerly a longtime partner at NEA, where she backed Robinhood from seed to IPO), joins Max to get into the nitty gritty of how AI is rewriting venture, distribution...

A $1.2 billion exit is the dream. Elias Torres calls it his biggest failure. The Drift co-founder joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to unpack why the headline number felt hollow, what he learned in the quiet stretch afterward, and why he jumped straight back in to build Agency, an AI company that runs your entire customer organization. Elias gets honest about identity after the exit, the differenc...

The single most expensive sentence in sales is "I'll follow up on that." Adam Liska joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to break down the "execution gap," the space between knowing what to do in a deal and actually doing it, and why that gap is where most pipeline quietly dies. Adam left DeepMind's Gemini team in 2022, pre-ChatGPT, to build a native revenue execution pl...

Benchmark's Chetan breaks down why the path from $0 to $100M has collapsed from five years to under two, and the one thing that is actually getting harder in the AI era: reaching your first million in revenue. In this VC bonus edition of the GTM Now Podcast, he sits down with Sophie Buonassisi to unpack how AI native companies are compressing 180 day sales cycles into 30 days, why direct sale...

LinkedIn CPMs just hit $800. AI is flooding every channel with content. Outbound is dying. So where should B2B marketers actually spend their ad budget right now? Keith Putnam-Delaney, co-founder & CEO of Primer, joins Sophie to break down the complete state of B2B paid advertising, what's broken, what's working, and where the real opportunities are hiding in 2025. What you'll l...

Most sales comp plans are quietly broken, and the people running them have no idea. Siva Rajamani, CEO of Everstage, has visibility into 300+ enterprise comp plans, and he says 90% of companies make the same mistakes. In this episode he breaks down what's going wrong, how to spot it, and what a comp plan that actually drives revenue looks like. Siva explains why sales compensation is not a ba...

Ben Lerer, Managing Partner and Founder of Lerer Hippeau, has built one of New York's most influential early-stage venture firms across nine funds and nearly $1.5B in AUM. In this VC edition of the GTMnow podcast, Ben sits down with Max and Paul to unpack how he actually picks founders, why he wants to be the "worst investor" at his own fund, and the contrarian belief that backing g...

Maleka Momand, co-founder and CEO of Esper, joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to break down what it actually takes to build and sell software to government. Esper is the operating system for government policy, serving as the system of record for the regulation and internal policy that shapes daily life, from NYPD procedures to nurse practitioner licensing in rural Tennessee. Maleka shares hard-won...

One Person, $10M+ ARR, $30M Raised: How Ben Cera Built Polsia (AI Operating System) Solo Ben Cera, founder of Polsia, just raised $30M at a $250M valuation while running the entire company alone. His AI agent handles his emails, manages customer support, even led his fundraising calls. This is what a solo founder with an AI operating system looks like at scale. Polsia is an AI operating system tha...

AI Infrastructure Spending is Insane: Hyperscalers Betting $575B on the Data Center Race | Tomasz Tunguz This year's data center infrastructure spending will be the 5th largest infrastructure project in history (bigger than everything except railroads and the two world wars). Tomasz Tunguz breaks down what nobody appreciates about the scale of the AI boom. Tomasz Tunguz, General Partner at Th...

The future of websites isn't a builder problem anymore. It's an agent problem. In this episode of GTMnow, Sophie Buonassisi sits down with Linda Tong, CEO of Webflow, to unpack how the entire web is being rewritten for a world where humans AND AI agents are your audience. Linda breaks down why Webflow is no longer "just a website builder" (it's an agentic web marketing pla...

AI is rewriting go-to-market and most companies are still operating with a “Frankenstein stack.” In this episode of GTMnow, we sit down with David, founder & CEO of Reevo, to unpack how AI-native companies will replace legacy GTM systems, why the future of sales teams looks radically different, and how AI agents are becoming the new operating layer for revenue teams. David shares why Reevo sta...

Tyler Hogge helped take Divvy from zero to a $2.5B acquisition by Bill.com. Now, as General Partner at Pelion Ventures, he argues that charging for software is dead, per-seat pricing is collapsing, and the next decade of venture-scale companies will be built on outcomes, not subscriptions. In this episode of the GTMnow VC Podcast, Tyler sits down with Max to break down what comes after SaaS pricin...

Boomi was founded in the early 2000s by Rick Nucci, acquired by Dell in 2010, and then spun out to Francisco Partners and TPG Capital in 2021. Today it powers 30,000+ enterprise customers globally and moves more data per second than the entire Visa card network, times two. What started as an integration platform has evolved into something bigger: the leading data activation company, purpose-built...