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Who we sat down with
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 platform now serving 200 customers across 20 countries (recently rebranded and fresh off a $20M Series A). In this conversation, he gets specific on what is actually changing in the sales role, what should be automated, and why he thinks this is about to be the golden age for sales reps.
Discussed in this episode
- Why “I’ll follow up on that” is the most expensive promise in revenue, and how the execution gap compounds from rep to manager to CRO
- What parts of the rep workflow to automate now (research, CRM updates, business cases, follow-ups) and what stays human
- Why AI is squeezing middle management, not reps, and flattening GTM orgs
- How per-rep coaching changes when every call is recorded, shared, and analyzed for patterns
- The “corrective action” approach to coaching deals on the job, in real time
- How to sell globally when borders disappear but local-language talent still matters
- Why in-person events drove 70% of early pipeline, and how that compounds with cold calling
- How to keep your team at the AI frontier by never locking into a single model
- Adam’s #1 piece of advice for first-time founders (hint: it starts with your co-founder)
Episode highlights
0:00 – Why AI won’t replace sales reps
0:22 – Leaving DeepMind’s Gemini team pre-ChatGPT
1:18 – What Airspeed does and the “execution gap”
2:07 – “I’ll follow up on that”: the most expensive promise in sales
3:28 – The $20M Series A and the rebrand from Glyphic
5:30 – Why walk away from frontier AI research at DeepMind
7:17 – Leading when the frontier models keep changing
8:39 – Buy vs. build, and keeping customers at the AI frontier
11:03 – Landing the first 200 customers across 20 countries
12:41 – Advice for first-time founders
14:04 – Selling globally and what AI changes about language
17:07 – What the sales rep role looks like in an AI-first world
19:24 – How reps and leaders should start automating today
20:51 – The channels driving results right now
22:41 – How AI makes per-rep coaching actually work
25:14 – Building an execution-first culture
27:10 – The DeepMind departure story
28:51 – Building in London vs. selling in the US
30:43 – Adam’s favorite AI use case as a busy CEO
31:26 – The biggest misconception about AI in sales
Key takeaways
1. “I’ll follow up on that” is where deals go to die.
It sounds responsible, but the follow-up sinks to the bottom of an inbox and three days later the prospect’s urgency is gone (happens all too often). The deal still shows live in the CRM, so the manager forecasts it and the CRO presents it to the board, all on a promise nobody executed. Airspeed calls this the execution gap: the distance between knowing what to do and doing it.
2. Middle management gets squeezed before frontline reps.
Same pattern as engineering, where AI is furthest ahead: companies aren’t cutting engineers, they’re slowing junior hiring and keeping the team that executes. Orgs get flatter, reps get stronger, the layer above them gets thinner.
3. In-person events drove 70% of early deals.
At the half-year mark, 70% of Airspeed’s deals traced back to dinners, breakfasts, and hackathons. Cold outbound still works, but an in-person first touch shortens the cycle and lifts win rates. One early deal started by meeting at a random lunch table at a conference.
4. Keep customers as close to the AI frontier as possible.
Buyers now pick vendors on who can carry them forward, not just today’s product. Airspeed runs multiple models behind the scenes with eval frameworks that pick the best one per workflow, and has re-architected repeatedly to always swap in the best model available.
5. Make every rep’s calls visible to the whole team.
The unlock is openness, not just analysis. Adam pushes customers to make all recorded conversations accessible across the GTM org so the best patterns stop living in one rep’s head and become shared property.
6. Run hackathons where people automate themselves.
An Airspeed customer runs 2-3 day hackathons where everyone automates as much of their own job as possible. Adam’s advice to leaders: pick a piece of your workflow, automate it, measure the gain. And then repeat.
7. Your most important founder decision is your co-founder.
Everything else is downstream. It’s a long journey, and you need someone to carry momentum when you’re down. Adam and his co-founder Devang Agrawal started meeting outside DeepMind during Covid, realized they were both pulled toward building and selling, and the rest is history.
Follow Adam Liska
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adliska
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/adliska
Follow Sophie Buonassisi (Host)
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/sophiebuona
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GTM 196 Episode Transcript
00:00 – 00:22
Adam Liska: I think there was a lot of talk around. I completely replacing sales reps. I don’t think that’s happening. Adam Liska, co-founder and CEO of airspeed. Adam Jung, doing both keynotes, one of the most elite research environments in the world, frankly, DeepMind. What made you walk away from frontier AI research and start a company as a founder? So we left in 2020 to actually preach GPT.
00:22 – 00:42
Adam Liska: I guess being a DeepMind, we kind of saw the future. We weren’t an AI, were on the Gemini team before it was called Gemini. But scaling alone, training, scaling the models. You recently raised $20 million around. You branded from your former name perfect to airspeed. What prompted the rebrand? Yeah, no. Super excited about the series. A kind of a unlocking a lot of the growth that we want to do right now.
00:42 – 01:00
Adam Liska: On the rebrand side, it’s an interesting one. We started with the name glyph. The meaning behind that was really, you know, generative intelligence language. But as we were building the product and as we were seeing our users use the product, well, we realized that it’s not really matching anymore, kind of what were the problems we’re solving for the teams, which is mostly around execution, mostly around speed.
01:00 – 01:11
Sophie Buonassisi: You now have 200 customers in 20 countries. How did you get your first customers?
01:18 – 01:47
Sophie Buonassisi: Adam. Welcome to GTM now. Super excited to be here. Hi, Sophie. Great to have you here. For anyone unfamiliar, give us a quick overview of airspeed. Great. Yeah. So airspeed is the. And if revenue execution platform. When you look at your GTM stack now, most of it is mostly storing data, analyzing data and airspeed, really executing on that data, whether that’s, you know, understanding your dealer risks, and the suggested best next actions, updating your CRM or improving a forecast.
01:47 – 02:07
Adam Liska: And through that really improving how your how your team executes. Maybe if I can give you an example here. Every rep has said, and we’ve all heard this, this sentence I’ll follow up on that. It’s a, you know, very simple, very simple question. It sounds kind of harmless. If anything, it sounds maybe even a bit, responsible. You know, you’ll do that, you’ll do that thing.
02:07 – 02:25
Adam Liska: But in in revenue teams, it’s really the single most expensive promise, you can do. And that’s where most of the deals go to die, actually. When, And why when you when you when you think about it, when when someone says this, what happens afterwards? They, they finish the call. They might have five more additional conversations.
02:25 – 02:49
Adam Liska: And that follow up gets put on a list. That list then really loses to your inbox your personal admin at the end of the day. And what happens, you know, three days later, the urgency on the prospect side is gone. And that this is this is a problem that we see across the board. And it’s also a problem that compounds within, within the organization because the CRM, the deal is live in the CRM, but it’s not moving.
02:49 – 03:13
Adam Liska: The manager makes it forecast. They they’re relying on the on the data in the CRM, but they know they’re mostly guessing. The the CRO then goes this is their plan. In a board meeting they’re kind of stumbling, trying to understand, trying to explain, explain what happens. But the problem is that, you know, this whole time this data was based on a promise and a promise that wasn’t executed on.
03:13 – 03:28
Adam Liska: And that’s, that’s really that’s really the problem. That’s the problem we’re trying to we’re trying to solve. Because when you when you look at it, you have you might have all the data, you might know what to do, but there’s still like a huge gap between knowing what to do and doing that thing internally. We call it the the execution gap.
03:28 – 03:57
Adam Liska: And that’s the thing that we’re where we’re trying to close and we’re trying to solve the execution gap. I love it. Before we get into the nail specific areas, you recently raised a $20 million series A round. Huge congratulations and thank you. Rebranded from your former name Prolific to Airspeed. What prompted the rebrand? Yeah. No. Yeah. No. Super excited about the, the series a, it’s I’m sure we’ll get to that later, but it’s kind of, unlocking a lot of the growth that we want to do right now.
03:57 – 04:13
Adam Liska: On the rebrand side, it’s, it’s an interesting one. We we started with the name graphic, you know, back already 3 or 4 years ago, you know, when when it was early days and kind of when we were really thick. It’s really from hieroglyphic, what we wanted to the meaning behind that was really, you know, generative intelligence language.
04:14 – 04:33
Adam Liska: But as we were building the product and as we were seeing our users use the product, well, we realized that it’s not really matching anymore. Kind of what what were the problems we’re solving for the teams, which is mostly around execution, mostly around speed. And so that kind of prompted prompted the search when I, I think that’s kind of one part of the story.
04:33 – 04:54
Adam Liska: I’ll be open. There’s a second part of the story as well is, you know, I’m sitting I’m sitting with the sales folks. They’re behind me calling and then very often I would hear, you know, hi. Hi, this is Hector from from glyph ic glyph ic g l y p h I c. And then kind of hearing that on a daily basis kind of made me realize we need to rebrand.
04:54 – 05:11
Adam Liska: And so we kicked out of it was a it was a, you know, tough decision. It’s not the decision you take that you take lightly. But, it was the right, right decision. And then kind of now looking back, we we announced it when, I think two weeks ago or something like that. And it’s been been accepted, you know, great by our customers.
05:11 – 05:30
Adam Liska: The team really embraced it. And so I think it was the right decision. Incredible. I mean, if you’ve already got some rich data just to extend that, it was the right decision. That’s fantastic. Yeah. No, I’m definitely getting you know, I’m probably getting biased, biased view of the of the feedback. But, I would say 99% of the feedback people, people liked, like the new name.
05:30 – 05:49
Adam Liska: Some of them kind of like the quirkiness of glyphs. And so, yeah, I mean, just just like I did, but yeah, we’re very, very happy that we, we, we’ve gone through this, well, two different names, different eras of the company’s growth. And Adam, you diving both came out of one of the most elite research environments, in the world.
05:49 – 06:10
Sophie Buonassisi: Frankly, DeepMind, what made you walk away from, like, a frontier AI research and start a company as a founder? Good question. And I, I get this question quite, quite often. It’s so we left in, 2022 actually preaching GPT, but kind of, I guess being a DeepMind, we, we kind of saw the future we weren’t doing.
06:10 – 06:31
Adam Liska: And I were on the Gemini team before it was called Gemini. But really scaling, scaling alone, training, scaling the models, especially looking at how how lmms can work with external data, how they can be kind of kept up to date and reason about external data. And, we’re really excited about the shift that that was going to, you know, going to bring about.
06:31 – 06:54
Adam Liska: But it’s also funny, you know, it’s just four years. But looking back, it was pretty GPT people were actually especially even even internally. Google kind of very unsure, you know, will this go into production? What are some of the risks around that, etc.. And so we knew, you know, this is going to change things. But at the same time, we we knew that if we wanted to move fast and build something in this space, we we had to leave.
06:54 – 07:17
Adam Liska: And, and so in the end, it was, it was it was quite, quite an easy decision. But yeah, kind of DeepMind very, very fortunate. We we both really enjoyed that in that time there. It’s funny I thought 2022 when we’re leaving, it was really, you know, the top AI hype. In a way I knew you know, the, the kind of the, the things it was going to bring about by kind of the growth since then it’s been it’s been amazing.
07:17 – 07:45
Adam Liska: And it’s, it’s very easy to kind of underestimate how how quickly change can happen. Truly and very timely. Seeing as, mythos has had some recent updates and is now more generally publicly available, what is that like for yourself as a leader, as a CEO, when the frontier models and underlying AI that products are built on are just constantly changing?
07:45 – 08:14
Adam Liska: Yeah, the rate of change is really high in this space. And it’s I think it really pushes companies and and product builders to operate much more flexibly. And you just need to execute faster because there’s just so much, so much change happening. And we when I look back kind of over the last three years of us building, our speed, it’s really we’ve, we’ve had to change the underlying architecture so many times because, you know, we, we started with actually our own models that we train ourselves because in the early days there were already MLM APIs available.
08:14 – 08:39
Adam Liska: But the context length wasn’t it wasn’t good enough for us. And so we actually had to train all of our models. Since then, we kind of we learned, that we had to build the products so that we can we can be always moving to the best model available. And in a way, it’s also kind of what we it’s part of the promise at our speed as well around we want to keep our customers as close to the AI frontier as possible.
08:39 – 09:01
Adam Liska: What we see on the on the product side in GTM tech, but it’s also in, in in other areas, you know, you’ve got an existing kind of legacy tool somewhere over here. And then AI, AI capabilities are somewhere over here. And people people know what’s possible because they they’re really kind of playing with it. They’re using cloud for their personal admin, for planning, you know, for planning their trips and all that stuff.
09:01 – 09:18
Adam Liska: And so they know there’s this huge gap between what what they get and what they have in, you know, their daily work and what’s possible out there. And that’s why, in a way, it kind of spurred a lot of a lot of kind of internal building. And I feel like it kind of there’s a resurgence of the buy versus build, conversation.
09:18 – 09:34
Adam Liska: I think it’s just a temporary thing, because legacy products are not delivering the value that’s out there. And so people are kind of trying to bridge this. But but that’s one thing, one thing that we, we try to do and it’s we try to do with our experience. One of our promise is really keeping our users, our customers, as close to the AI frontier as possible.
09:34 – 09:56
Adam Liska: And so we had to build everything, in the back end so that we can always be kind of using the best model for the best thing. And so we’re we’re actually we’re not using just a single model behind the scenes. It’s multiple models. We have to build a lot of evaluation frameworks, etc., so that we kind of always pick the best model for a specific workflow within the product.
09:56 – 10:26
Sophie Buonassisi: Brilliant. Yeah. I heard of saying where customers are really looking to vendors now to bring them into the future is less about just your product quality in the moment. It’s much more of who is the vendor that can actually keep you at the top. As all of these changes occur. Definitely. And I think that’s, I think people are really looking kind of trying to evaluate, vendors and partners, through this lens is just because because of the rate of change, they want to make sure they’re investing in something that’s going to stay stay around.
10:26 – 10:43
Adam Liska: And I think kind of looking looking back at some of the tech in in the space, I feel like there were very few GTM tech products that were kind of that build durable products. It’s very often, you know, you build something, you scale something very fast that works in that moment. But GTM is always it’s kind of constantly evolving.
10:43 – 11:03
Adam Liska: You’re always looking to get that alpha, to get that small improvement over others. And then if, if you’re, if the products that you use are not improving that kind of chasing that, you’re stuck with, you know, with the previous generation of tools. And so I feel like that’s maybe in GTM, it’s even this feeling is even stronger than than in other areas.
11:03 – 11:26
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, I would definitely agree. The advances are just far quicker and there’s a lot more options, but only a few actually durable companies that will be at that top level and you’ve been building for a couple of years. You now have 200 customers in 20 countries. How did you get your first customers? Yeah, I mean, there’s nothing really glamorous about that.
11:26 – 11:46
Adam Liska: It was a lot of, a lot of hustle, a lot of founder led sales. We were in Iowa going, you know, to many conferences, meeting people kind of where they were and kind of really talking about the pains they had and kind of looking back at, early days of our speed, one of the biggest pain we were solving back then, and it’s a pain we’re still solving now, is around data.
11:46 – 12:04
Adam Liska: Because if you want to execute fast, you really need to have a good understanding of what’s happening in your motion. Why are you winning? Why are you losing and all that stuff? And it’s really the data piece that was our first kind of wedge into into many conversations. And it also with people kind of understood very well. And so we were, we were we were kind of discussing that problem.
12:04 – 12:22
Adam Liska: We’re solving that problem very well. And it was yeah, kind of a lot of, a lot of hustle, a lot of fun, too. Let’s say I was, a member. I kind of. And a lot of chance as well. But it’s all, serendipity. It’s, I, I’m sure this is kind of the case for everyone, but I remember one of our early, bigger deals, a company called Price Effects.
12:22 – 12:41
Adam Liska: I remember I was in Nashville at the pavilions GTM conference, and the last, I think the last day, the last lunches, people are leaving and randomly, you know, join the table with, with their team. We start their conversation and then and that led to, a big deal for us back in the day. So and so, yeah, a lot of a lot of that I love it, I love it.
12:41 – 13:06
Sophie Buonassisi: And you got a chance. And I say you open up the opportunities and kind of surface level for that chance. What kind of advice would you have for first time founders? Yeah. I mean, it’s I think they kind of went it’s changed a lot, between I think when we started and it’s been just a few years ago, and now but it’s, but I think the, the speed and everything, I think all these things change, but I think the basics are still the same.
13:06 – 13:29
Adam Liska: So, you know, you want to be solving a major pain. You want to be moving fast. You want to be kind of really staying close to your close your customers, understanding how they use you. How their workflows work and what doesn’t work, kind of all that, all that really, really stays the same. But then it means, you know, going out there talking to as many people as possible, being very flexible on the setup as well.
13:29 – 13:46
Adam Liska: We in the early days were doing a lot of POCs, a lot of trials going on, making sure that we work with companies that we we learn through that as well. And I think that kind of that learning process, kind of as you we’re very fortunate, actually, that we had a stable product engineering team at, at our speed.
13:46 – 14:04
Adam Liska: And I think that that kind of compounds, as well as you kind of work with customers, with every new one, you learn something new, that you can then kind of incorporate in the product to incorporate in your next approach. Yeah. So kind of all these things kind of remain the same. But I think just the speed, speeds kind of, changed a lot.
14:04 – 14:32
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Well, it’s now in the new name. Exactly. Now you scaled, globally and you’re in over 20 countries. And similarly, a lot of other companies are operating globally. AI has changed what it means to actually be able to operate globally. And sales are huge, huge part of this. When we talk about language, what have you seen on your side and what are you kind of seeing in the space overall around how language is evolving, how we can actually sell globally?
14:32 – 14:48
Adam Liska: Well, so I mean, we we started in London by kind of from the very beginning. We wanted to build, we wanted to build a global business. I think if you want to, if you want to, you know, when you need to, you need to sell globally. And so from from the early days we were selling globally. US actually has been our main market from I would say like month three or something like that.
14:48 – 15:16
Adam Liska: And so it’s, it’s something that you, you need to do. Also I think what’s what I think one thing that, you know, makes it a bit easier or yeah, something has changed is that, you know, the talent is global and people are looking for solutions in the market. They’re looking globally, if they can get, you know, a slight improvement over their existing way of operations or the way they execute that they will and and that, you know, that piece of tech is based out of somewhere else.
15:17 – 15:37
Adam Liska: They’re going to go for it, because the borders have really kind of disappeared in that way. I think in terms of language, etc.. I think that to be honest, I helps with. But it doesn’t really I don’t think that kind of. So it you still probably want to if you’re if you’re selling in a specific market where maybe English is not the main language, you probably would want to still have local, local talent there.
15:38 – 16:07
Adam Liska: I think that’s something that I, I will not not, not change. But I think what, what I definitely helps with is around when you build a global business, understanding how the different GEOs operate, what are some of the problems in the different GEOs, etc.. We a lot of our customers, they might actually have the leadership in the US, but a big part of their business is in Latin America, and some of their managers actually don’t understand what’s happening or the product doesn’t understand what’s happening on, on sales calls in, in that specific geo.
16:07 – 16:26
Adam Liska: And then they want to keep everything in English so that they can they can they can they can review everything, get the feedback to product team, etc.. So I remember one, one example with one of our customers was where in a specific geo in actually was a case where in Europe I think their soc2 compliance kind of wasn’t wasn’t good enough.
16:26 – 16:48
Adam Liska: The leadership just kind of wouldn’t really believe the sales team that this is the main, main problem that they that they see in the market. But then with our speed, with all the data that we’re getting, they actually saw that, okay, we need to change this, this, this, even though they didn’t really understand what’s happening in Germany, what’s happening in France, they could tell from the insights were surfacing that they need to change something around their, compliance posture.
16:48 – 17:07
Adam Liska: And then that led to, to them actually unlocking that specific geo. So I would say it’s become easier to operate because you can you can really understand what’s happening across like what’s happening across all the different teams, but you would still want to have your local teams if, if, in that market, people are not comfortable kind of being sold to in English.
17:07 – 17:27
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, yeah, definitely. That makes sense. And let’s go a little bit deeper into the sales role itself and how it sees all and, and what’s different, what people need to know. The big, big question number is asking is how much of the reps workflow should be automated. And what does that mean in an I first of all, like what does the reps role look like now?
17:27 – 17:44
Adam Liska: Yeah, I mean a lot is changing. I think there was a lot of talk around. I completely replacing sales reps. I don’t think I don’t think that’s happening. And I think we’re kind of over, over that already. But they’re the kind of the, the workflows and the activities that reps are doing that’s definitely, definitely changing.
17:44 – 18:09
Adam Liska: And if anything, to be honest, I think what’s what’s happening now is that the role of the sales reps is actually getting, increased and accentuated. We see that, for example, in software engineering as well, where so fine tuning is kind of really ahead in terms of AI adoption. But I don’t really see, you know, engineers being completely replaced by their, their work and the, the kind of requirements and expectations have changed.
18:09 – 18:28
Adam Liska: But because everyone’s moving faster, you actually want to keep your engineering team. You might be actually slowing down junior hiring, etc., but you still kind of want to keep your your team there executing. And I think something similar is happening in in in 2009 GTM, where the roles of sales of sales reps is getting increased, where you need to iterate fast, but you don’t need to.
18:28 – 19:05
Adam Liska: Now, do you know, in terms of execution? I think there’s a lot of a lot of things that we can we can take off your plate, whether that’s, you know, doing some of that account research, whether that’s doing, you know, post call, post call workflows, CRM updates, prepping the business case, prepping that, that follow up email, prepping that handovers, all that stuff that’s getting automated and should be automated and in a way, kind of sell selling won’t be really just about selling, whether that’s, you know, back channeling, understanding, you know, that hesitation in your champions voice when you talk to them or when you meet them in person?
19:05 – 19:24
Adam Liska: I think that has always been the main kind of I think best sales reps were always really good at doing that. But then on top of that, they had to do a lot of admin, a lot of other, other, other tasks. I think those tasks are getting automated, but the selling is still is still remaining though way the way it was.
19:24 – 19:53
Sophie Buonassisi: And presumably, I mean, you’re using airspeed yourself. Your, which we think about an overall kind of maturity curve. You are far along the maturity curve from a sales organization perspective, what advice would you give to any kind of sales rep that’s trying to evolve that process, or a sales leader? Yeah, I think it’s, I think one thing that I, that we see in the market, we what we’ve been pitching kind of has been the same, let’s say, over the past two years, year and a half.
19:54 – 20:12
Adam Liska: But it’s really in the last 6 to 8 months that things have really changed, where people realize the urgency and they want to move faster. My advice to to leaders or sales rep or sales reps is really kind of embrace that and do that every day, kind of when you when you think about your workflows, what do you think you can automate?
20:12 – 20:31
Adam Liska: Experiment. If you can automate this part of your of your workflow, try automated and then see, you know, see what kind of gains you you can you can get from that. What we see in, one of our customers at Fermat, what what they’re doing actually is I think they could monthly or quarterly hackathons where everyone I think it’s like two days.
20:31 – 20:51
Adam Liska: Three days where everyone’s tasked with trying to automate themselves as much as possible. And I think kind of I think the, this type of, this type of, kind of approach or outlook is really something that that everyone needs to have an experiment so that they, they can learn what’s possible, and then can kind of always be pushing, pushing the boundary.
20:51 – 21:13
Sophie Buonassisi: And then if we think about how sales reps are actually generating results, are you seeing any particular channels take the lead right now? Yeah. I mean, I think it really depends on on your vertical and you know, what you’re selling. I think what what works really what works really well for us is in-person events, especially kind of on the top of funnel in the in the kind of yeah, very much top a final.
21:13 – 21:32
Adam Liska: We do we do dinners, we do breakfasts, we do hackathons as well. And all these events kind of really, really help because you might you know, we’re still doing cold calling. It works really well for us. But if you have that kind of initial relationship you met somewhere. You you went to an event together or you, you organized that dinner where where the prospect came.
21:32 – 21:53
Adam Liska: I think that always helps when you reconnect with them, you know, a month later, half a year later. And so I think in person, in person really helps kind of early on. We’re still mostly selling, you know, over zoom. Not that hasn’t really changed. We’re doing cold calling. We’re doing, automated outbound with, with emails. But I think that kind of in-person touch really, really helps.
21:53 – 22:23
Adam Liska: Yeah. I mean, it goes back to your first customer. Sorry. Exactly. Exactly that in-person tap challenge. Yeah, I remember we were, I think in when we were finishing the first year, I think kind of half a year since our first, paid customer. I did, I did a review of where the different prospects or the deals came from, and I think 70% where it just events, and that, that kind of really, really, I think meeting in person, having that initial conversation, even if you close eventually kind of over zoom, it just increases your win rate a lot.
22:23 – 22:41
Adam Liska: Is that recent or visit? Oh, that was that was, yeah, a couple of years back. Yeah. Yeah. I haven’t looked into it recently, but I would imagine we’re still doing a lot of events. I don’t think it’s 70% now, but definitely I think meeting that person in person, first improves the sales cycle length, improves the win rates.
22:41 – 22:58
Adam Liska: I don’t have the numbers from our pipeline, but I would. I would still think so. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Or at least it’s more of an omnichannel experience now where it’s supporting the efficiency of other channels. Exactly. I love it. And, you know, a big part of sales role is also improvement, especially when you take away a lot of the administrative work.
22:58 – 23:27
Sophie Buonassisi: Now we’re talking about relationships. We’re talking about hands on conversations with prospects. And coaching is usually a big part of that. You know, how do I platforms like airspeed, make personalized coaching better than otherwise possible? Yeah, I mean, there’s I think the issue with coaching kind of traditionally was, you know, it was very much reliant on you talking to your manager, your manager actually spending time to review some of the conversations or some of the activities you do.
23:27 – 23:52
Adam Liska: But we all know, you know, this wasn’t happening. And if there was any feedback, it was kind of very much, you know, ask better open questions or, you know, listen more things like that. I think it was very, very generic, feedback. I think what’s, what happens now? Kind of one thing that we also want to encourage with, I encourage with our with our product and, you know, our customers around, you know, being very open within, within the go to market teams so that everyone can learn from everyone.
23:52 – 24:11
Adam Liska: And so without all that, all those conversations, most of the conversations these days are recorded or transcribed. We we kind of encourage everyone, all our users, to make all this available across all their teams so that everyone can learn from everyone else. And once, once you have all this data, you can actually have a look at per rep kind of patterns.
24:11 – 24:30
Adam Liska: You know who’s bringing up pricing earlier versus later, who’s doing better, multithreading, who’s actually really good at understanding the paper process, you know, before they commit their deal. Kind of all these things I think we can we can now analyze per rep and then give give that feedback to to, you know, to kind of everyone within the team.
24:30 – 24:53
Adam Liska: And I think feedback also change from, you know, getting that written feedback or, you know, feedback in your one on one quarterly to actually now in a way, we’re actually kind of creating corrective actions in, in our speed where we can we actually suggest you should really engage the, the CFO on this deal because in similar deals previously, this was the case and the CFO blocked it.
24:53 – 25:14
Adam Liska: And you still, you know, you still haven’t discussed the CFO at all. And we can actually kind of do coaching on the job around the conversations through these corrective actions and corrective suggestions. So I think that that really change. But I think that’s one thing. The other thing is around just that mindset around, you know, having everything open, accessible to everyone so that the people on the team can learn from each other.
25:14 – 25:50
Sophie Buonassisi: Brilliant. And as I makes information accessible everywhere, it’s really execution that becomes more of the competitive advantage. And this translates not only from the product itself, like we’ve been talking about, but also to go to market teams. And I think if if anyone meets someone from the air speed team, you get that notion of everybody is here from an execution capabilities and desire perspective, like, what are you doing as a CEO, as a as a leader to motivate your people and empower them to be so execution first for anyone else looking to empower, motivate their teams?
25:50 – 26:13
Adam Liska: Yeah. No. Great question. I think one aspect of this is, you know, I think people people on the team and one thing that I kind of want to when I get, get across to my team in our all hands and when, when we, when we talk internally is that it’s there’s a really great reset happening right now around tech and software and kind of what’s possible with with AI and the kind of execution really being, being the, the next and maybe the last frontier.
26:13 – 26:33
Adam Liska: And I feel like kind of people internally understand that we, we kind of preach it across the whole team. So it’s not just the GTM team, but it’s also the the engineering team. And if anything, we’ve got this nice healthy competition between within the GTM team and the engineering team around, you know, who can execute and who can automate more and faster.
26:33 – 26:49
Adam Liska: And where we’re actually kind of sharing learnings that actually it’s it’s quite interesting. I think we’re quite, quite a fortunate building in this space. And seeing how things are developing in software engineering, I think we can bring a lot of those learnings to to go to market. I think the team on the go to market side, they’re really excited.
26:49 – 27:10
Adam Liska: They know the opportunity. They know we can win. They know the size of the market, their salespeople, and so they know the tech, they know the opportunity. They know the problems, that the sales teams have been kind of running into over the past decade. And so I think all that really, really helps internally to to keep that execution and urgency very high.
27:10 – 27:32
Sophie Buonassisi: Nothing like a little healthy competition to get people motivated. Yeah, I know for sure I love it. Well, I’ve got a couple last questions for you, Adam. One, going back to DeepMind. You and and leave. This is pretty beat. What was actually happening. Like take us back to that moment. Who pitched the other on leaving or was it a mutual.
27:32 – 27:50
Adam Liska: Yeah. No, I think it was, somehow mutual, I think so. Devon joined during Covid and I think we when we were working from home. And so that meant that we actually started, you know, meeting outside of the office and discussing as well, because that was kind of the only way how how we could talk about projects, etc., because we were not in the office and Devon gonna live nearby.
27:50 – 28:13
Adam Liska: And so we started talking and I think, you know, very quickly we really realized that we both are really excited about building products, about selling, about being, you know, close to our customers. And then I think it kind of all developed relatively, relatively quickly from that. We saw, you know, the change that was happening. We also saw that that change is not happening fast enough for us internally, especially on the product side.
28:13 – 28:32
Adam Liska: And, but to be honest, I think the main thing and in starting a new business is finding a co-founder. You’re comfortable with that you you can rely on because it’s, you know, it’s a it’s a long journey. You spend so much time together. You need to rely on each other when you know one is down and the other one is to kind of maintain the momentum and maintain the excitement.
28:32 – 28:51
Adam Liska: So, yeah, I think the single most important decision or the single most important thing is really to find the right co-founder, and then everything is downstream from there. I love it, find the right person and both of you when you were meeting up. And maybe people can tell by your accent, but when you were meeting up, that was in London.
28:51 – 29:11
Sophie Buonassisi: The company’s HQ is in London. Any strong thoughts about company building in London versus the US? Yeah, I mean, I don’t really have super strong opinions on this. It’s just it just happened to both. Imagine I move to the UK eventually ended up at DeepMind work together. And so it just it just kind of made sense for us to start start the business there.
29:11 – 29:29
Adam Liska: I think the talent in, in London is amazing. It’s very international. I mean, I’m India and we ended up there, I think we, I don’t know now how many, how many nationalities we’ve got on the team, but but it’s going to be a lot. It’s so it’s it’s great to be building in London. I think what’s, what’s nice in London as well.
29:29 – 29:46
Adam Liska: I think, the team is, is more loyal. We’ve been, you know, we’ve been building with the same team from the very beginning on the other same team. And that really compounds, you know, that experience with all the different customers, all the different new models and all that stuff. So I think we’ve been really fortunate, in this way.
29:46 – 30:08
Adam Liska: But, you know, as I mentioned before, from the very beginning, we we want it to be a global business. We were selling globally. We’re selling remotely. You know, I remember, you know, doing so many late evening calls, I still do a lot of late evening calls, maybe a bit less now. But, one thing, one thing that I also wanted to add is, you know, building London, we, we really enjoy, selling in the US is, you know, what we need to do.
30:08 – 30:24
Adam Liska: Us just moves much faster. I would say in terms of tech adoption, that can one you guys are one generation ahead of the rest of the world. And so you’re always looking for that next solution. And so I just made a lot of sense for us to be selling more in the US than, in India, in the, in the early days.
30:24 – 30:43
Sophie Buonassisi: But yeah, I think it’s really interesting when we talk about retention of employees, too, because it’s one of the most underrated things for growth, if you have the right personal caveat with that. But yeah, if you look at companies like GitHub or Cada, we’ve had Crowes that have just sailed with the organization or snowflake or, you know, other orgs, you see it compound over time.
30:43 – 31:10
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. And it reflects in their revenue. So that is very, very cool. Yeah. And what’s one of your favorite I use cases that helps you as a busy CEO. I mean, I’ll be a bit boring, but I think for me it’s really staying on top of all of my inbox and, LinkedIn inbox especially. And so actually, do I have a mac mini, you know, running, running keyboard remotely and then helping really understand what are the top conversations that I maybe forgot to answer and get back to?
31:10 – 31:26
Adam Liska: I was I was a very much in zero type of person. But then I had my daughter now two years ago, and I think everything slept. And then I wasn’t really able to get back to in book zero. And I think that is a use case that I love, and that I’m kind of like fully, fully embracing.
31:26 – 31:45
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. I have to agree with you. That is my favorite use case to, email inbox. Last question. Biggest misconception about AI in sales? Yeah, I mean, I think I mentioned that earlier as well, but it’s I think what when you look at the, you know, the discussion a year ago, two years ago, it was all around AI replacing salespeople.
31:45 – 32:03
Adam Liska: And the role of sales reps kind of diminishing, if anything, I think is the other way around. The role of sales reps is getting stronger. Potentially. The middle management is getting squeezed a little bit. And so organizations are getting flatter. But yeah, I think that would be that would be the biggest one. And I think it’s it’s going to be the golden age actually for, for sales reps.
32:03 – 32:13
Sophie Buonassisi: No better time to be in sales. Exactly. Adam, this has been fantastic. Thank you for the time in the conversation. Thanks very much Sophie. Really enjoyed it. Absolutely. And congrats on the series. Thank you. Thank you.
