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Who you’ll learn from
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 had zero regrettable director-level attrition in 5.5 years, and why they hire people with the job title “Ghostbuster” to keep a 7,000-person company moving like a 30-person startup.
What you’ll learn:
- The five-star sales experience framework, and how to map your own process from three-star to five
- Why every new sales leader at Deel spends their first 30 days taking inbound and selling
- How speed became the reason Coinbase chose Deel over a legacy vendor with no references to show
- The hire-slow, fire-fast principle behind zero regrettable director attrition in 5.5 years
- Why “tell me about a time” interview questions optimize for the best liar, and the scenario-based alternative
- What a “Ghostbuster” is, and how the role fights operational decay as you scale
- Leading a sales team through public crisis: cry, quit, or fight
- The trillion-dollar thesis: why 95% of the world’s workers sit outside the US market
- Why Chris went back to first-principles systems thinking instead of fiddling with AI tools
Episode highlights
1:33 – From Granular (agtech, employee #11) to a DuPont acquisition
5:30 – The failed recruiting startup he launched in January 2020
7:17 – How he found Deel, and applying to the wrong role on purpose
9:48 – The first-30-days lesson from CEO Alex Bouazizi: go sell
11:44 – What Deel actually does today
13:14 – Scaling a distributed sales org remotely
15:41 – Building rapport on a global remote team
17:35 – From transactional SMB to multi-product enterprise
20:16 – Sales-led, not product-led, and why consolidation wins
22:45 – “Deel speed,” and why speed is a reason people buy
26:57 – Frank Slootman, Amp It Up, and outpacing competitors
29:12 – How he got Slootman to open the sales kickoff
30:28 – Zero director attrition in 5.5 years, and hire slow, fire fast
33:54 – Why “tell me about a time” fails, and the scenario-based alternative
37:46 – The five-star sales experience framework
41:54 – Bringing enterprise-grade experience to SMB with AI
45:49 – The trillion-dollar thesis: 95% of workers are outside the US
47:22 – Building 60+ payroll engines: the Amazon Prime parallel
53:02 – First-principles systems thinking for sales
59:38 – The problem-framing framework he gives his team
1:01:09 – The “Ghostbuster” role and fighting operational decay
Key takeaways
1. Sell before you build.
In his first week Chris showed up with a playbook and a list of fixes. CEO Alex ripped it up and told him to go sell first. That became culture: every leader Deel hires spends their first 30 days taking inbound and pitching before they touch strategy.
2. Speed is a reason to buy, not just a way to operate.
Deel won Coinbase, an early enterprise logo, with no references and two years under its belt, because it could onboard them into Japan in 2 months instead of the legacy vendor’s 9. Chris borrows Frank Slootman’s line: make your competitors’ years your months, their months your weeks, their weeks your days.
3. The best idea doesn’t win, execution does.
Plenty of companies chased the same global payroll problem Deel did. Deel dominated because of one cultural value, deal speed, applied to decisions, processes, and the product itself. Speed and work ethic are why companies win, not just being right.
4. Hire slow, fire fast, and treat it as a pyramid.
A bad leader hires bad people who hire bad people, and untangling that can cost a company a couple of years. At Deel’s pace that time doesn’t exist. Chris guards the top of the pyramid ruthlessly, which is how he’s kept zero regrettable director attrition in over five years.
5. Run a 5-star sales experience.
Map your whole sales process, score each step, and ask what a 5-star version looks like. Chris has given his cell number to thousands of prospects and tracks buyer sentiment on an internal leaderboard. AI now makes enterprise-grade personalization and ABM affordable for every segment, not just the top accounts.
6. Own the infrastructure, not just the app.
Deel built its own payroll engines in 60+ countries because the whole industry rents the same few calculators and nobody controls the math. Chris’s analogy: Amazon built its own logistics to deliver Prime speed, and now nobody can match it. Picks and shovels are the moat.
7. The operator of the future is a systems thinker.
Chris wasted time fiddling with AI tools before going back to first principles. If he started a company today, he wouldn’t hire a big sales team first. Deel even has a role called “Ghostbuster,” ops and AI-workflow thinkers who hunt operational bloat end-to-end, which is how a 7k person company still moves like a 30 person startup.
Chris Lee
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/techcontrarian
- X: https://x.com/TechContrarian
- Deel: https://www.deel.com
Sophie Buonassisi (Host)
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/sophiebuona
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GTM 200 Full Episode Transcript
00:00 – 00:06
Sophie Buonassisi: You scaled deal as one of the first sales hires for 1 million to 1.5 billion.
00:08 – 00:25
Chris Lee: First year at deal. We went from 1 million to. I think we ended the year 50 million. The next year was 50 million to 300 million. And within four years, we had $1 billion in revenue. We were rated as the fastest growing software company in history. This was pre AI. It was quite crazy.
00:25 – 00:33
Sophie Buonassisi: Chrisley head of sales, Americas at deal. She had at least zero attrition of director level sales leaders in five and a half years.
00:33 – 00:44
Chris Lee: How we could onboard them in two months, not nine. Speed can be a reason why people buy deal can be $1 trillion company. I know it’s controversial and I’ll tell you why.
00:58 – 01:00
Sophie Buonassisi: Chris, welcome to GTM now.
01:00 – 01:01
Chris Lee: Thank you. Honored to be here.
01:02 – 01:33
Sophie Buonassisi: Honored also super excited. Like you said, GTM now exclusive will take it. But you know you scaled deal as one of the first sales hires from 1 million to 1.5 billion, which is just tremendous growth. And so take us back through that journey through all the pivotal moments. And let’s start with the very first one, which was what was going through your mind when you joined deal? Like what brought you to deal? What did you see in this small startup before it obviously exploded?
01:33 – 05:28
Chris Lee: Yeah. So my my background is this I originally joined, uh, my first startup, um, was this company called granular. It was another Andreessen Horowitz company. They did something unique, which was software for farmers, mainly financial software. A lot of farmers spend their time in spreadsheets managing multi-million dollar businesses in spreadsheets and, um. And there was an opportunity that I was looking into. Like, for example, you know, what was the next frontier that software was going to disrupt. And you had companies at that time this was like 20 1415, uh, like Pro Core. Uh, if you heard of them, they were disrupting the construction industry. Um, and they had become $1 billion company off of construction tech. Um, and I was going down the list of what other industries are left are left to be disrupted because I didn’t grow up on a farm. Um, and agriculture came up. And so, uh, that’s what attracted me to this, uh, this company I was attracted to the challenge of here’s this industry that’s kind of old school, but it’s bound to get disrupted by technology. Um, and Andreessen had invested in this strong executive team and a tech company called granular to go disrupt them. Um, ultimately, we ended up growing that company. I joined as employee number 11 pre revenue. Uh, we grew that company 35 million in revenue. We we got acquired, uh, for 300 million at the time. That was interesting. Um, it was like it wasn’t a grand slam. A grand slam was like a few billion in, like, 2017, but 300 billion was interesting. I worked for DuPont for a while now. How I found deal. This is how I weave in the story. How I found deal. As we were growing granular, I was leading the sales team in the US and we were trying to expand into new markets. Um, so another large agriculture market is in Australia. Um, a lot of farms in Australia. And um, we had approached the market by just, you know, I was I was personally cold calling email outbound farmers in Australia working crazy time zones and you know it doesn’t scale. I even got to the point where I’m going to move to Australia for like 4 or 6 months, um, to go launch a team there. Now, what went wrong with that? Because the company had never had experience going global. Um, we didn’t have experience doing it. None of the executives did. Maybe that was like a lacking thing at the time. But, um, we were learning as we were going and as I interviewed a bunch of people, I finally found the first few people that I wanted to hire. I go to make the offer and the HR team stops me and they say, hey, we can’t hire this person. We are not ready to hire this person. We don’t have the compliance setup. We don’t have a business entity in Australia. There is no way to pay these people in Australia. Right. Um, and fast forward. That set the company back from launching internationally. Uh, by about nine months. It took nine months to finally set up the business entity. And that always stuck with me. Um, because as a startup, you want to move fast and launch into new markets and find new revenue streams. And, um, because of compliance and complexity, international. We couldn’t do it. So fast forward. I worked for DuPont for a few years. Who acquired granular.
05:30 – 07:15
Chris Lee: End up launching my own company. Terrible idea. Not many people know this, but in January, I’ve always wanted to start a business. Right. Right. And I learned a lot from this. But in January of 2020, I started a recruiting firm. A tech enabled recruiting firm, right where you leverage data. At the time, I didn’t know. I couldn’t have predicted what would happen. Um, but what happened is, uh, every every company stops hiring, uh, pandemic hits, shutdowns. You know, nobody’s going into the office freezing the hiring budgets. Nothing’s happening. And I thought, this is the world’s worst time to start a recruiting company. And so I go about it for a few months. It’s failing. I’m like, I see the writing on the wall. The pandemic’s not getting any easier, and I just, hey, let’s chalk it up to bad timing. I also learned a lot in the process. I didn’t think recruiting was the best business. I wouldn’t do it again. Um, even the tech enabled recruiters, you rely on LinkedIn. That’s a side note. You rely on LinkedIn. LinkedIn you can’t scrape I don’t know, there’s all sorts of problems with that. But I decided I’m going to pivot. I really want to get back into sales leadership. I want to find a company where I can invest the next ten years at. And um, as I was looking across the landscape of companies that Andresen has. I have this notepad of of as sorry, an Evernote of companies that I wrote down at the time. This is in 2020, and deal was one of them. And I reached out to Alex and Schwab and on.
07:15 – 07:16
Sophie Buonassisi: How did you reach.
07:16 – 07:17
Chris Lee: Out on LinkedIn.
07:17 – 07:17
Sophie Buonassisi: Email, LinkedIn.
07:19 – 07:25
Chris Lee: Multi thread. Yeah, you got to take it. So I apply online. Now here’s the catch. Here’s the funny part.
07:26 – 09:18
Chris Lee: Um, there was not a head of sales role on the career page, but I knew I really wanted to join the company. And there was a head of sales APAC role on on the career page. So I applied to that. I ping Alex and Shaw on LinkedIn. I send them an email. Hey, I just applied to this role. Would love to meet you and got into the interview process because I had experience launching Australia in my previous company. There we go. I was willing to move to AIPAC if necessary. Right. This is at the time I didn’t have a family or anything like that. Now, what was funny in the interview process, after like eight interviews, I ended up. They ended up saying, hey, we like you, but we don’t like you. For the Head of Sales APAC role, we want you to lead our sales team in the US. I said okay. Even better. Yeah. Um, and I ended up joining the company. And the thing that resonated with me because at the time, deal had some early signs of success, but it wasn’t apparent. It wasn’t apparent it was going to be a rocket ship at the time. Um, 1 million in revenue. They got some traction, a couple hundred customers. It was mainly the founders selling, um, and a few sales reps that they’d just hired. But what attracted me was I resonated with the business problem that they were solving because had my previous company granular had deal, they would have launched in Australia in two days, not nine months. And to me, are you just resonating with me? I was like, that is pure value. I understand this and if I understand it and if I know, um, my previous company could have been a fit for this. I know there’s other startups looking to expand globally who would be a fit. So I understood the problem. That’s what attracted me.
09:18 – 09:47
Sophie Buonassisi: Um, which is such an important part. I think one of the most underrated parts, everyone says, is to really feel the pain and be passionate when you’re selling it. Yeah. That’s right. And so you join at around a million IRR, mostly founder led selling, like you said, maybe a couple sales hires or SDRs in the mix, but you’re really building out sales in America. What were some of the key inflection points of that build and of your scale that has now led you to $1.5 billion in revenue.
09:48 – 11:26
Chris Lee: I learned a lesson in the first 30 days of joining, and this is from our CEO, Alex Bu Aziz, who taught me this lesson. And so I come in with a lot of experience. At the time, I had managed a team of 50 sales reps roughly, and I come in and I’m ready to make. I’m analyzing everything in the business and I’m ready to make changes. I come up with a playbook. Here are my thoughts. Here’s what I think is going wrong. Here’s what we’re going to do. Alex rips that apart and says no. Within like the first week you’re going to go sell. And that’s what you’re going to do and you’re going to learn from that process, and then you’re going to build this up from scratch. And that’s a principle actually, that I’ve, I’ve, I’ve instituted as part of our culture on the sales team. Every leader that we hire, you are going to spend your time the first 30 days taking inbound leads and selling. You’re going to learn how to pitch our products as we launch new products. Our directors, including myself, we’re going to learn how to pitch those products. We cannot be the types of leaders that are in our ivory tower making decisions without understanding what’s happening on the ground. And so, um, that was my first bit in the whole 1 million to 1.5 billion journey was, um, okay, I’m going to be in the trenches, I’m going to sell, and I’m going to learn from that process. And it was eye opening as to what we could potentially build.
11:26 – 11:44
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s a I mean, super fantastic lesson and definitely a very important one. Now with AI and realizing that everybody is now a practitioner, and if we even take a step back and just zoom out a little bit for anyone unfamiliar with the deal, which I feel like most people are. But just in case, would you mind giving just a quick summary on deal before we.
11:44 – 12:46
Chris Lee: Yes, a deal has evolved and what we are today are a global HR, payroll, IT and now AI platform. We have four verticals. Okay. Um, and what that means in terms of like what products people buy and what problems we solve. Um, whether you’re a US company that is just looking to hire people and pay people and ensure that they get a laptop on time and in time for their start date deal is going to manage that entire process for you. Um, but where we are really strong, where our differentiator is, is we also have built the infrastructure outside the US. Um, so as you build abroad and you want to expand into new markets, um, deal can help you. It’s a fully compliant HR payroll platform in pretty much any country, any non sanctioned country. We can help you hire, pay manage your employees.
12:46 – 13:14
Sophie Buonassisi: Perfect. Super super helpful. Thank you. And very timely. Like we were saying, with the pandemic now in post pandemic, when people are running more distributed organizations, including yourself, you know you’re running a distributed sales org, I believe at deal. Um, before we jump back into some of the key lessons learned, just as you built out the organization, how have you been able to scale a team successfully, remotely? What are some tips for anyone that’s looking to scale remote team?
13:14 – 15:22
Chris Lee: Remote teams? Yeah, I had never worked at a company. Um, remote. It was in office culture at my previous company, so the first time I’d worked with remote was at deal, and I don’t think I would change anything like I’m going to be working remote the rest of my career. I don’t know if I ever want to go back into the office And, um, you know, it’s not all that different. If you work for a large company and you have a, uh, one of these skyscrapers like the Salesforce Building, for example, if you work in the Salesforce building, you have colleagues that you work with on other floors, and you’re as a sales rep, you’re going to be in demos. You find yourselves in one of those telephone booths or in a locked in an office on zoom calls all day and even on internal meetings. So, like, what’s the difference, really, between going to the office, locking yourself in a room, joining zoom calls versus being at home, being on zoom calls. But you don’t have that commute back in home, uh, back to and from work. Um, so you save time, you save money from doing that. And, uh, it’s much more efficient. Um, as an individual, if, uh, if you can work from home where you have your setup. I have my multi, what do you call it? I have my two screens. I have my strong Wi-Fi. So that’s the thing on remote work. Second how do you build a a business around this. How do you scale a sales team around this? I actually think it’s easier. I think I have an easier job to scale a sales team remote company than if it were a company just in San Francisco. Why? Because I have access to a talent pool anywhere across the US and Canada. I’m not just trying to hire in a 30 mile radius of of the office, and that allows me to hire the best of the best talent, regardless of where they’re located. I do think that’s a superpower for our company.
15:24 – 15:41
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, rapport is something that people often bring up with remote organizations. But I think the reality is, even when you are remote, you’re still getting together. Every so often. You’ve typically got some off sites or typically got some other ways of building rapport. It’s more of an evolution than simply in person where you might go for lunch.
15:41 – 17:12
Chris Lee: Yeah. In terms of building rapport, there are some cool things that we do. We have an annual sales kickoff where it’s usually it’s always been international. So, uh, last year we went to Dubai, the year before we were in, uh, in Spain. And it’s it’s always somewhere cool. And then we fly the global sales team out to that location for a week. So we have this annual kickoff. We do quarterly off sites. Um, we have hubs of people where people work and they do a lot of stuff. They get we works, they have, we work days, they’ll do dinners and whatnot. So so that exists. And, you know, we’re very slack native. Um, I’m always sending audio notes and things like this. There are ways videos. There are ways to bridge the gap, create rapport, establish relationships with people. Um, aside from being in person now, I will say, because you don’t see your colleagues in the office every single day when you do meet in person, it is so special, right? You. There have been times where I have worked with someone for years, and I’ve never met them in person and finally get to. And it’s like knowing a friend that you’ve never met, um, and you immediately just kick it off. I don’t think you experienced that quite as much. If you just see the same people in the office every day.
17:12 – 17:34
Sophie Buonassisi: Um, yeah. You have to really be intentional about how time is allocated, whether it’s work time or building rapport time when you’re in office. But yeah, you’re right, you get that, that cool surprise and delight. So you scale this organization globally. You know, you’ve done that after that lesson in the first 30 days, what are the other lessons along the way? Are pivotal go to market and sales decisions that really has led to this outcome.
17:35 – 20:15
Chris Lee: Yeah. So when you launch a company, you usually identify a specific problem that you’re solving in the market. And it starts with one product and you’re focused on a single segment. And so for us it was a very transactional product. It was SMB types of companies that we were selling into sometimes. I mean, Alex and Shweta were incredible at selling deals over the phone on the first call. So within the first 30 minutes, getting them to sign up and um, obviously as you grow, usually companies don’t build billion dollar, $100 billion businesses off of one product. You have to scale into multi-product. So you have to be a platform. You have to scale into different segments. What’s crazy about deal is we achieve this scale when most companies take 7 to 10 years to get to this scale and level of maturity, and that’s that is time that you earn where you you have the time to adjust and build, and you have tenured talent who can build playbooks and process. We didn’t have that luxury. You had to build this within 1 or 2 years at the same level of scale. And so it really was drinking from the firehose in terms of how do you scale fast. And within the the first year at deal. We went from 1 million to I think we ended the year at 50 million. The next year it was 50 million to 300 million. And then it went from 300 to I think 500 or 600. And within four years, we hit $1 billion in revenue. And now what we’ve ended with, well, what’s public today is 1.5 billion in revenue. I think the thing that put a deal on the map, what made the company noteworthy was in 2023, 2024, we were scaling so fast. And as a software company, we were rated as the fastest growing software company in history. This was pre AI. This was super impressive pre AI right. Um nowadays we’ve been we’ve been eclipsed by a few companies Claude for example OpenAI for example. Um and a few others that are just crushing it at an incredible pace. But we still continue to move fast and we still hold that culture of moving fast as a business.
20:16 – 20:36
Sophie Buonassisi: And I’ve heard you maybe before that you know, this is true with now a lot of AI companies. But an important note is many of them have appealed to emotion, whereas deal scale predominantly, I believe with sales led motion, which feels like it should get its own thrown from a sales motion perspective.
20:37 – 20:38
Chris Lee: Or B2C versus B2B.
20:38 – 20:42
Sophie Buonassisi: Yes, yes yes, precisely, exactly. There’s some some key differences there.
20:42 – 22:45
Chris Lee: Yeah. And, you know, I would love to see, um, a plug motion. Um, the thing is, we deal with complex products and companies come to us. They are trying to understand how did they overhaul their existing systems? A lot of companies are using old school HR platforms, payroll platforms. They’ve pieced together ten different products to actually make global HR and payroll, and it work for their business. Um, so there’s a lot to unpack there. We have over 20 different products today, but it’s certainly a big feat to rip and replace a company’s. His system, this is their source of truth. It’s like a sales force for any sales leader. We’re ripping and replacing the HR team CRM essentially. Um, but not only that, you know, what we’re doing is consolidation deals. This is the number one reason why we win right now is consolidation. Companies are looking to get rid of all these vendors that don’t all talk to each other well and are old school and are not AI native, and they are looking to optimize that and consolidate that into one place. Um, so that is a huge evolution in terms of our product, in terms of our sales team. Um, to go from a very transactional sales process to a multi-product, uh, go up upmarket into mid-market and enterprise. You are selling a very complex product, not transactional, that in a lot of ways requires a different profile of talent. It requires enablement and training. And again, we didn’t have 7 to 10 years to go through that evolution. We had 1 to 2. Um, it was quite crazy, but uh, but we’ve we’ve done it when we’re still improving.
22:45 – 22:57
Sophie Buonassisi: And deal’s obviously known for its speed of growth, deal speed, if you will. What are some key insights of how to actually move fast? Because that’s the speed that most companies, most founders are aspiring to do.
22:58 – 25:22
Chris Lee: So we have a few different company values. And for a lot of companies, you know, it’s fluff, it’s corporate jargon. Um, I don’t subscribe to a lot of company values. I’m not saying deals, but uh, uh, the one that resonates with me the most is deal speed, and it’s something that started when we were, uh, in our infancy. Um, what deal speed means. It translates to everything that we do. Um, you know, the decisions that we make, the processes that we build, and even the product, uh, speed can be a reason why companies buy. I’ll give you an example. Uh, Coinbase, for example, one of our first enterprise customers. And when we approach Coinbase, um, they were looking at, you know, one of the legacy vendors who’s known for payroll, everybody knows this name. Um, and they were looking to expand into Japan. And, uh, this company said it would take them nine months to expand into Japan. Um, nine month onboarding process. Wow. They they have a lengthy onboarding process. They move at a certain pace. And as a tech company for Coinbase, they’re not moving at a tech company pace. So deal approached them. And one of the primary reasons we won. Because we didn’t we didn’t have the credibility. We were a company with just a couple years under our belt just approaching enterprise. No enterprise company was using us. We didn’t have any references. But the thing that one was the fact that we could onboard them in two months, not nine. And again, for a business who wants to expand into new markets, that’s meaningful. So speed can be a reason why people buy. And we often think about that in the product. How can we be the fastest company, the fastest product to onboard someone from start to finish? How can you be the fastest for when you fund your payroll to win? The employees actually get paid that that can make a difference. So speed in the product is really important. Speed and decision making. Operating style and culture is one of the things that set Diehl apart. I’ll explain that to okay. One of my favorite operators is Frank Sweetman. Do you know Frank?
25:22 – 25:31
Sophie Buonassisi: I don’t know him personally, but I’ve heard great things about him from Chris Dinan, who was the first sale sales hire at snowflake and worked closely with him.
25:31 – 26:56
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26:57 – 29:12
Chris Lee: So if you don’t know Frank, this guy is a three time CEO who’s taken three companies public, and I can tell you that doesn’t happen with luck. Um, this guy is a machine, and I think he’s retired now, so, you know, you can’t join his next company. But his first company was this company called, like, data. Something I can’t remember. It was in the 2000. Then he was the CEO of ServiceNow. Then he was the CEO of snowflake. And, um, he wrote a book. It’s called AMP It Up. And for the first time, I read a book where I 100% resonated with this guy. I was like, yes, finally, it’s not fluff. It’s not, uh, corporate, you know, BS. It’s not someone who maybe led a was a leader, you know, 50 years ago and is finally writing a book. It’s it’s now um, and these are fundamentals. And so I’m a huge believer in this book. AMP it up. But in in the book, he talks about speed, and this is the thing that resonated with us the most. He talks about speed. He talks about he put it in a in a way that I couldn’t describe better. That’s why I’m bringing it up. Yeah. He talks about speed as, um, make your competitors years, your months, make your competitors months, your weeks, make your competitors weeks, your days. And, uh, you know, speed and hustle and work ethic, uh, are reasons why companies win. It’s not just the right idea that wins. Because plenty of by the way, plenty of companies have tried to do what deal did. We were not the first company to have a unique product to go after this unique problem. There were plenty of companies within a few years. We dominated this place because of this cultural value called deal speed. And, uh, I actually, um, funny enough, I reached out to Frank Sullivan and. Yeah.
29:12 – 29:14
Sophie Buonassisi: How did you reach out? My question to you.
29:14 – 29:14
Chris Lee: As you’d.
29:14 – 29:16
Sophie Buonassisi: Expect, LinkedIn multi thread.
29:16 – 29:25
Chris Lee: Multi thread. Beautiful. I, I in fact we were selling snowflake and I got the finance leader of snowflake to introduce me.
29:25 – 29:26
Sophie Buonassisi: Perfect. Even better.
29:26 – 30:05
Chris Lee: Yeah. And uh what attracted him I explained to him hey I’ve read your book. I literally I brought this book to our leadership offsite. We bought the book for everyone at the company. Our number one company values deal speed. It really resonates with with how you how you think about business. And, um, we have a sales kickoff coming up, and I would love for you to do the opening speech. And, uh, although he didn’t fly in, we did have him live, um, remote, uh, to do the first five minutes opening speech in 2023 for our sales kickoff. For the sales team, it was awesome.
30:06 – 30:28
Sophie Buonassisi: Very very cool. It all comes full circle. It’s incredible to to see the impact that he’s had through that book alone. Yeah. And when you’re moving at such speed, obviously you need to be hiring people. And you were hiring a lot of salespeople along the way, but you actually had, I believe, zero attrition of director level sales leaders in five and a half years.
30:28 – 31:17
Chris Lee: How so? I’ve had the honor of managing these 14 directors that I have today. I haven’t had any voluntary or regrettable attrition at the director level, and very few at the manager level as well. Over the last five and a half years, I’m not sure how long I can keep that record going. I mean, time, time. Time will eventually catch up with this and somebody will leave. Um, but I think I’ve done a good job of hiring the right talent for the right role, and who continually to uplevel the team. I think I’ve also made a lot of hiring mistakes, and I have a big principal when it comes to terminations. So
31:18 – 31:43
Chris Lee: some of those mistakes, I’ll just explain, for example. Yeah, there have been people that come on our radar that apply to our roles that I get introduced to who have an impeccable resume and who come from really noteworthy companies. Right. And, um, who, when doing back channeling and getting references,
31:44 – 32:08
Chris Lee: have had celebrity CEOs. I’ll put a reference for, for for this person. And then I find myself thinking that they’re not working out. And when you’ve hired someone and you’ve made a mistake, and it’s something that you’ve overlooked in the hiring process. One of the biggest second mistakes that you can make is keeping them around too long.
32:10 – 32:41
Chris Lee: If you hire a bad leader who isn’t a culture fit, who maybe doesn’t have the right experience or mindset or skills for the job that they have, that’s going to have a compounding effect on your business. Hiring is in terms of like a pyramid of what is most important for me, how I spend my time. Hiring is number one. If you hire the wrong leader, they’re going to hire the wrong people under them
32:42 – 33:36
Chris Lee: who are probably going to hire the wrong people under them. And it’s going to take a long time to try to untangle that mess. And in a lot of cases, I’ve seen it. It can set a company or a Our department back a year or a couple of years to try to backtrack and and get this back on the right track. And for a company that’s moving as fast as deal, you don’t have the time for that. You don’t have the time for that. You have crazy goals to hit. Uh, so, um, I have this principle where for the directors that I’ve hired, they’ve been with me for years, and we have this super strong bond and relationship. And for the directors that are no longer with us, I have let go. And they were let go within a few months. Um, so high or slow fire fast is basically the principal. And I think that’s better for us as a company, but also that individual if it’s not working out.
33:36 – 33:54
Sophie Buonassisi: And was it the cultural element that didn’t work out for people that may have the right resume and these celebrity CEOs endorsing them? What was the factor that made it not fit? Because I’m sure a lot of founders and operators also are are receiving and seeing this, and they’re trying to actually decipher who the right fit.
33:54 – 36:26
Chris Lee: Culture can be. A huge piece of it. It goes back to that story about, um, you know, in the first 30 days, you need to be in the trenches with the salespeople. You need to understand the role of the sales rep. If it’s an SDR leader I hire, I want you to make cold calls. You’re going to you’re going to do outbound. You’re going to understand, um, the role of the people on the ground. And that’s going to help you best shape that business. If you don’t do that, what do people do? They do surveys across the team when they join like, oh, what do you think are the problems? Um, they make judgments, um, based on how the company does it versus how their previous company did it. That’s a massive mistake. Yeah, I’ve seen that a million times. Culturally. Not every leader, especially the higher up you get, the more senior. Um, they aren’t willing to to get in the trenches and do that. And um, so that was a big thing. Second thing that I think is really underrated is critical thinking, critical thinking skills, common sense actually. So so how do you how do you suss out some of this stuff? Let’s say critical thinking, whether you’re a leader that you’re interviewing for or a sales rep, your first sales hire that you’re interviewing for. One controversial take that I have in the interview process that a lot of leaders have been doctrinaire, indoctrinated with is, I don’t know what they call it. I think it’s like star or something interviewing interview questions, something like that, where it goes like this. They’re behavioral based interview questions. Tell me about a time and tell me. So it’ll go like, tell me about a time where you faced a challenge and you overcame it. And first of all, I would be offended if somebody asked me this in an interview. I would actually probably hang up on the interview, but, uh, it’s it’s actually the majority of leaders. They use these behavioral questions. Tell me about a time. And I actually think it doesn’t optimize for the right thing. It optimizes for who’s the best liar, who’s who can on the spot. Uh, tell me a a story of how they faced a challenge and overcame it. And, um, there’s probably a skill in that, too. I’m not going to deny that.
36:26 – 36:26
Sophie Buonassisi: Storytelling.
36:26 – 37:28
Chris Lee: But instead I like to ask a scenario question instead. And I will lay out the scenario. And it’s a scenario that every sales rep or every leader has ran into, and I will want them to talk me through it. How have they, if they are in this? um, scenario, and they’re stuck at this pivotal point. What are they going to do? How do they handle that? Um, how do they think about this problem? And we’ll just chop it up back and forth on. Um, okay. Well, what about this? Well, what about that? Okay, well, you think that this is going to happen, but what if this actually happens? Because sales is unpredictable, and I think you get a better sense of how people think. Again, it goes back to critical thinking, not who can make up the best story. And that has been effective for sussing out great sales reps and and sales leaders.
37:28 – 37:46
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s a great tactic, and one that I’m sure a lot of people will now employ. And speaking of a star methodology that you mentioned, I believe you also have some star methodologies for your actual sales process. You know, what is a three star versus a five star sales process? Tell us a little bit about that.
37:46 – 37:49
Chris Lee: That’s a good segue. Yeah. Uh, so
37:50 – 38:24
Chris Lee: there’s this topic that I haven’t really talked about publicly. And it’s funny because people ask me about this, um, in panels and conferences and whatnot. And the thing I say is, look, if we’re doing something unique, the last thing I want to do is tell hundreds of thousands of people what we’re doing. Uh, because sales is one of these things where people sales and marketing, they quickly iterate. They’re always looking for the new thing. And, um, they’re copying, you know, what’s working from others. I can tell you this. So
38:25 – 40:36
Chris Lee: there’s a whole story about how do you operate a five star sales experience. You’ve heard of customer experience? I’m talking about sales experience. Nobody really talks about this. Um, and where I got inspiration for this is, um, well, everybody stayed at a three star hotel, like a marriott or whatever. Maybe that’s a four star, I don’t know. Um, everybody stayed at those types of hotels. And what does that experience like? You travel hours to your destination. You finally arrive. You have to wait 20 minutes in line to check in at the hotel. They finally give you the hotel room. You go up to your room, you unpack, etc. it’s actually, you know what you’re getting, but it’s not. There’s no wow factor in a in a three star hotel experience. Now for the audience. If you’ve never stayed. I try to say this without sounding pretentious, but one time I was at a wedding. We stayed at a five star, like, ultra luxury hotel. Let me tell you the experience you drive up, there’s a there’s a gate to even get to the hotel. They know who you are. They know what time you’re. You’re going to arrive. Um, you check in with the security. You drive up to the lobby. People are waiting for you to open the car door and greet you. Hello, Mr. Lee, welcome to X. You’ve already pre-paid up front for your room. You’ve already given them your ID and credit card through a portal. And there is no waiting line. Here’s your key card. Let me take your bags. Let’s go up to your room. There’s chocolates on the pillow. There’s a concierge who’s asked you. Hey, what are your plans for the week? Um, do you plan to have dinner tonight? Let me book a reservation for you. It’s quite a different experience at a five star hotel, and I try to think about that framework in the sales team and in the sales process
40:37 – 41:12
Chris Lee: when a lead comes in and they’re interested in deal. Uh, what is that experience like? And the only way you do this, because I don’t want to give away too much, is you map out your entire entire sales process today, end to end. And you think to yourself, what is a four star sales experience if today is a three? If today is mediocre, what is a five star? And you can even take this to the extreme of like, what is a ten star if if just just for the hell of it.
41:12 – 41:14
Sophie Buonassisi: Make your own scale. Yeah.
41:14 – 41:53
Chris Lee: Um, and you decide what are the things that make sense for your business to invest in? You know, there are things you you can bridge the gap on, um, to create a really personalized experience with your clients, with AI that you couldn’t do before. There are things that cost money. There’s things that don’t. And you can decide every step of the journey. What that experience can look like based on your product and your persona and and your industry. So you have to think about the experience that you’re giving your clients when they come in through the door. And
41:54 – 43:12
Chris Lee: as an example, are they coming in on a weekday or a weekend? Maybe it’s a founder who wants to meet with you on the weekend. Are you available? Five star hotel would be available 24 over seven. Yeah. When a prospect does a demo of the product, um, does your senior leadership team get introduced to them saying, hey, I’m going to move mountains for you? I love your company. I’ve researched it. I’m super excited about potentially doing business for you. If there is anything that we can do. Here’s me, the head of sales, here’s our director, here’s the sales manager of the account executive that you’re working with. Here’s my phone number. I’ve given my cell phone number to thousands of people at this point. You reach out any time and number. All I ask from you is one. Give us. Tell us about your experience. What do you like about deal? What you don’t like? Um, what could be improved in the sales process? And what I can promise to you is that we’re going to move mountains to ensure that you’re successful, should you choose deal as your vendor of choice. And that simple thing has
43:13 – 45:22
Chris Lee: been incredible. I actually have a leaderboard internal leaderboard. Most of the sales reps don’t know this, but I have a leaderboard of responses from prospects whether the sentiment is positive or negative about the sales process. Because again, if you’re a five star hotel, you care about experience. You want to be delightful to the customers that come in. And I do think although it’s old school, one reason why people buy is because of the person who’s selling them. Like, do they like that person? Are they are they, um, proven to be a very competent professional that’s going to help guide them through this evaluation that is not cheap and might be a headache for them. So, um, this is something that we track. The five star experience is something that we’re mapping out. AI, um, really unlocks this like never before. Um, you can finally, you know, these are things that you would invest in for enterprise companies, like if you had Amazon come inbound or something, like, how are you going to treat Amazon? Are the founders going to reach out to the decision maker? Yeah. Um, you can do things that were once important for enterprise. Same with account based marketing. Why is it in the past that account based marketing was limited to enterprise? What is account based? It’s basically, um, personalizing the marketing and the content that a company sees. So when they’re scrolling on Instagram or they download, they’re surfacing a piece of content for them. It is. Personally, it might even have the company logo certainly customized to the persona, um, but is personalized. Now, traditionally, that’s always been done for enterprise because it’s time consuming for the marketing team. There’s a lot of work required. AI disrupts that. Why can’t you do account based marketing for the S&P market for anybody who comes through the door? Why you got to share this five star experience. And that’s that’s what I’ll leave it at.
45:22 – 45:47
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s such a refreshing and important perspective, because I think a lot of the time now with AI, people are excited to almost cut back that human experience as this part of the sales process. But, you know, you just mentioned key stakeholders actually getting involved and and things that are almost counter to that, because at the end of the day, it is an experience. So very refreshing perspective. And now you’re at 1.5 billion would deal. What’s next.
45:47 – 45:48
Chris Lee: Yeah.
45:49 – 47:21
Chris Lee: So here’s here’s here’s here’s a bit about the vision. Here’s how I think about it. Deal can be I know it’s controversial, but deal can be $1 trillion company. It’s not that crazy. And I’ll tell you why. Every company needs payroll. And there are, uh, well, there’s about $300 billion in market cap of public companies who do payroll and HR. There’s a few hundred billion more of private companies who do payroll and HR. The most mature market is in the US, and what these companies have optimized for in their product is building HR and payroll for the US market. Now, what’s funny to me that everybody ignored, and one of the reasons why deal was growing fast is because the US only represents 5% of the world’s population. You have 300 million people in the US, but it’s much less in terms of like working class people who would be on payroll. So if 5% of the world’s population is in the US, that means 95% is outside. And the bigger market is if you can become the HR payroll IT AI leader of the world, you should be $1 trillion company. Um, and certainly deal is building the infrastructure to do that.
47:22 – 47:52
Chris Lee: I’ll give you an example of why infrastructure is so important. So an example. Yeah. You know Amazon Prime. Of course you order something. If you’re in the US, you order something and come. Same day maybe a day later. Most of the time. Right. Yeah. That didn’t exist ten years ago. Remember the days when you would order something and it would take a week, two weeks to arrive to your door?
47:53 – 50:35
Chris Lee: Um. Oh, that’s because it relied on the infrastructure, the logistics infrastructure of UPS and Fedex. And over time, as Amazon grew, they knew they needed to control this goes back to experience, um, goes back to speed as to why people buy. People love Amazon Prime because it’s fast. Yeah. They would choose to buy from Amazon because they’ll get it tomorrow and not a week from now. And so Amazon had this dilemma. Over time they became the largest customer of Fedex, and during peak holidays, Amazon had to compete with other businesses who were also making deliveries to their customers, and they would have to rely on the infrastructure and the logistics of another company to ensure that their customers had a great experience. And it’s something that they had no control over. And so, um, what they started building was their own logistics infrastructure, from the warehouses to the custom delivery vans that are optimized for the Amazon boxes. They make their own boxes, too, and that is what enabled them to deliver Amazon Prime. And that has really changed the business. And that is a moat for Amazon. Nobody can deliver Amazon Prime Speed today unless you’re Prime. Nobody else has this infrastructure. Even the greats who focus on this, like Fedex and and UPS, um, can’t compete. And so that’s how I think of infrastructure. And it’s the picks and shovels. It’s the, um, if in our business of payroll, a lot of companies use third party vendors, they use these old school service based vendor vendors who are calculating payroll for you. They use a bunch of different systems. No one actually owns the payroll calculator. Um, the the the the math behind, uh, if this person with this visa and they’re spending time in this country, in that country, how much should they be taxed? Um, there is a payroll and a tax engine calculator behind all of that, and nobody really owns it. And so everybody uses the same few set of tools. And because of that, everyone’s reliant on those vendors to deliver. For us to be in control of our customer experience. And in the spirit of deal speed, that’s just not acceptable. So
50:36 – 50:46
Chris Lee: we started building our own infrastructure, building our own engines. Um, to my knowledge, uh, we are the company with the most engines globally.
50:46 – 50:48
Sophie Buonassisi: Um, define engines.
50:48 – 51:24
Chris Lee: Yes. So, uh, everybody knows of ADP in the US. ADP has a payroll engine in the US. Um, we have built payroll engines in about 60 plus countries today. That’s growing every quarter. Um, including the US. So, uh, not just the US, but anywhere. And that ensures that this type of speed and experience, when you’re running payroll that you’re used to in the US with which all the vendors have. You’re going to get that in any country that you hire through. Dale.
51:25 – 51:40
Sophie Buonassisi: Incredible. Well, I really appreciate you sharing that vision, Chris. You’ve shared a lot about what has worked along the journey. What about what hasn’t? Have there any? Have there been any kind of near-death experiences or really challenging points throughout the scaling journey?
51:40 – 52:41
Chris Lee: I wouldn’t say we’ve had a near-death experience, but certainly it’s not always been up until the right. And I think one thing that I’ve learned, and some experiences that I’ve never gone through before in my own career. As you grow larger as a business. None of the great companies that you think of that are public. Companies have a flawless track record in the media. And, um, you know, one of the most attractive things to the media that would get the most clicks is not positive news, but it’s negative news. And as you get larger, you’re going to have people, competitors who are going to try to cut you down. They don’t want you to grow so fast. So, um, you rise above, you fight, you don’t give up. You can cry, but only for a day and you suck it up.
52:42 – 53:01
Sophie Buonassisi: I love it, I love it and take me through or take us through a little bit more around your thinking in a different manner. You know, you just shared your thinking around these challenging times and how you actually communicate to the team. But what about more of, you know, the systems thinking of sales itself?
53:02 – 55:41
Chris Lee: Yeah. So systems thinking. Over my career, I’ve gone through different inflections in my own learning, my own self-development. I always want to be a student in my career, and where it started out was finance and investing. That’s where I thought I was going to start a career. It’s what I studied in in college. I read every book on investing, every major book. I got into sales. I immediately started to read every sales book I could. This was before podcasts were popular. Yeah. Um, and it was an incredible experience because, you know what? Um, if someone writes a book, it means they are a true domain expert in something. If you’re reading a book on negotiation or discovery. This is a person who has, has lived and studied um, this topic for years. And as a new salesperson in a role, um, you know, you have three options. You can, uh, just do trial and error, which is actually the slowest. Yeah. You can hopefully you can only hope that you learn from your mistakes because you have your own self-awareness to learn from your mistakes. Number two, you can learn from others or expect to learn from your manager, which is the wrong expectation. And we can go into that too if you want. But this is also slow. Um, or you can try to consume as much information as possible. Nowadays it’s podcasts and ebooks and maybe TikToks on sales or something. Um, but in my day it was books on sales, and this is what had allowed me to level up so fast. I’m a young guy, um, I have maybe ten years younger than most heads of sales in my role. Um, but this is what allowed me to scale up in my career. So as my role, my career has has evolved over time, I went from learning about sales to, uh, consuming every book I could on leadership and leadership and culture and how to drive a team to do things that you you have a mission, how to drive them to accomplish that mission. And I’ve read every book there. I’m actually tapped out on books, and I’ve learned a lot from that process. And that’s helped me grow as a leader. Where I’m at today with AI
55:42 – 55:42
Chris Lee: is,
55:44 – 56:11
Chris Lee: well, everyone goes through this, this mini evolution cloud OpenAI launches, every CEO is like, how do we implement this into the business? If you’re not using AI, you’re you’re falling behind, right? I spent countless hours. I actually like to think I wasted time. Not in a good way. I wasted time just fiddling with AI tools and building
56:12 – 59:37
Chris Lee: products internally that were subpar. Um, and I kind of got to this point where, you know, so much of my career, I have gone back to the basics. Let’s be a student again. Let’s go. I learned about sales. I learned about leadership. What are the fundamental things? What are the first principles of AI that I would need to learn? If I’m an operator of the future? And how I was reminded of this. If you were to start a company today, I wouldn’t go hire a big sales team. The first thing I would do is optimize a AI driven sales process. And if you want to go down that path, um, you need to be a systems thinker. And I don’t like to outsource things. I don’t want to outsource knowledge on what should be the future of how to build a business with AI. Uh, to an operations team or rev ops or something like this, who are systems thinkers who build and build systems and processes? Um, so I went back to school and figuratively and started reading books on first principles, systems thinking, that sort of thing. And, uh, this is providing a really solid foundation for myself. So when you think about your business, every department, this is not just a sales thing, but when you think about sales, there is a process. There is a system here. Again, leads come in. What happens if this happens? Then that happens. There’s a huge set of branching trees and workflows, um, that are essentially made up of your sales process. These things are made up of the talent that you hire. The incentives that you structure, that ultimately dictate the behavior that your team drives. Um, to the things like, you know, in order to get a deal done, you have to rely on some other departments like legal like deal desk if you’re a larger company, um, like rev ops and, uh, onboarding. So, um, there is a huge system here. And sometimes, like, I wish I really hope that I could someday get this. I haven’t seen this doesn’t exist, but I want to be able to visualize this kind of I don’t know, I bounce back and forth between different analogies. Maybe it’s an engine, maybe it’s a watch which, with a bunch of gears and with a really healthy, um, go to market system, the watch is running perfectly. The watch is running on time, and if you have one gear in that watch that is broken or that is not working, that is not time to properly. It clogs up the rest of the system and it’s not going to tell time on time. Um, and I would love to visualize that because, you know, as you think about your go to market process, if you have something that is a processor, you have SLAs that delay other things from it that you want to accomplish
59:38 – 01:00:01
Chris Lee: that might break the system. And, um, you do have to be a systems thinker in order to unpack that, um, in your business. The other thing that I think a lot about in terms of first principles, is you have to break down a problem into its smallest constraints
01:00:02 – 01:00:37
Chris Lee: And, um, something, a framework that I give my team and they know. They already know. We’ve been working together again with with my leaders for years together. They know how I operate. So when they come to me with a problem, they already frame it in. Here’s the situation, here’s the problem, and here’s my proposed solution. And instead of complaining because I don’t like complaints, they have to think about what is the problem, what are they trying to solve? Why is that a problem? And
01:00:38 – 01:01:09
Chris Lee: I think, you know, first principle systems thinking whatever, these are buzzwords, but these are the things that go back to a leader who can be strong at critical thinking, who can unpack problems, rebuild them from first principles, not just copy what they did at their last company, but understand the situation at hand. What are the constraints and optimize around that? That’s that’s what we think a lot about.
01:01:09 – 01:01:20
Sophie Buonassisi: You know, on LinkedIn and on your careers page. There’s a role live with the title Ghostbuster. Tell us what this means and whether other people should be hiring Ghostbusters.
01:01:20 – 01:01:57
Chris Lee: Yeah, I think so. Um, every, uh, look, Ghostbuster, it’s a real title. It’s a real role. It’s on our career page. They are paid handsomely. Who are they? They are people with experience in building AI workflows. Um, probably consulting backgrounds, operational operations backgrounds, systems, thinkers. And what do they do? So look, as you, um, as you grow a company from 30 people, when I joined to we’re 7000 people today.
01:01:58 – 01:02:08
Chris Lee: There becomes operational bloat. And again I mentioned our number one company value its deal speed. Over time
01:02:09 – 01:02:21
Chris Lee: companies will grow and they get to scale and they start to slow down. And what can you do in order to ensure that you are developing
01:02:22 – 01:03:54
Chris Lee: decision making operational power at a speed faster than you decay as you grow? This is what a Ghostbuster is optimized for. So as a company grows, it’s unintentional, but companies start to slow down. Most companies do. They start to decay. And it’s unintentional because, you know, as a startup, you, uh, you start out as a generalist. Everybody does everything. You are in survival mode. Um, you will do anything to get stuff done. Right. As you start to grow, you start to build processes. You have defined teams with defined SLAs. And if one thing used to take a day, all of a sudden, um, there’s actually multiple teams required in order to get this thing done. Each team has an SLA. They’re all abiding by their SLAs. Nobody pays attention to when I want to do this thing. It actually goes through multiple teams. Each team is abiding by their SLAs. Each team is saying I’m hitting my target. But for the customer, it’s 3 or 4 days before they hear back and that’s a problem. This is where a Ghostbuster comes in. They will analyze across the entire business the different processes that are in place and the speed at which it takes to actually get things done. And
01:03:55 – 01:05:09
Chris Lee: oftentimes processes in the old world were manual. And now with AI you can automate stuff. And as a big business, there is a whole lot that we need to go automate. Um, and this is this is essentially what the Ghostbuster does. So whenever I have a problem department agnostic, I can insert a Ghostbuster who will coordinate with all the different departments, who will understand, uh, from a first principles perspective, what is going on and suggest a new workflow or new solution, and then go out and do it and they own the project end to end. Um, which is difficult when it’s multi department problems. Yeah. These are hairy. Maybe my problem is not another department’s number one problem to have this third party owner who owns an end to end and works with everybody, Um, has proven that even deal operating at a 7000 person company. We have not slowed down. We have. We have the same culture. We have the same startup mentality, uh, as we did as a 30 person startup versus a 7000 person team.
01:05:09 – 01:05:24
Sophie Buonassisi: That is amazing. That is exactly what every company is trying to hold on to as they scale. Well, Chris, this has been fantastic. Really appreciate you joining us. All of the insight that you’ve imparted on sales and the journey scaling deal, where can people find you if they want to follow along with your journey?
01:05:25 – 01:05:31
Chris Lee: Yeah. So on LinkedIn it’s LinkedIn.com contrarian like technology tech.
01:05:32 – 01:05:33
Sophie Buonassisi: That was a fun fact.
01:05:33 – 01:05:36
Chris Lee: And on X it’s at tech contrarian.
01:05:36 – 01:05:39
Sophie Buonassisi: How did that start that handle.
01:05:39 – 01:05:41
Chris Lee: I thought we were ending the podcast.
01:05:41 – 01:05:42
Sophie Buonassisi: I know.
01:05:42 – 01:06:34
Chris Lee: Uh, so again I wanted to be, uh, in finance, um, in college. And I read a lot of books on Warren Buffett, he writes this book called The Intelligent Investor or No. Benjamin Graham, his teacher, wrote a book called The Intelligent Investor. Okay. And in there they talk about the contrarian investor, the person while people are selling, he’s buying. And, um, I’ve always thought about myself in the same way, the types of companies that I choose to work for, um, and the different decisions that we, we make as sometimes against the herd or contrarian and, uh, uh, Chris Lee at Chrisley wasn’t available. So I did at Contrarian Fear.
01:06:34 – 01:06:42
Sophie Buonassisi: That was my assumption. It may be a common name, but I love it. Tech contrarian for anyone looking will be where to find Chris. Chris, thank you so much.
01:06:42 – 01:06:43
Chris Lee: Thank you.
