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Brett Queener (Partner at Bonfire Ventures) joins GTMnow to share what three decades across Siebel, early Salesforce, co-founding, and seed-stage investing has taught him about what actually wins now that software is cheaper and faster than he ever imagined.
Brett was one of the earliest GTM hires at Salesforce when it had seven employees. He helped build the go-to-market playbook that defined a generation of SaaS: enterprise segmentation, sales motion design, product marketing, the whole works. He then co-founded SmartRecruiters, angel invested in companies like Outreach and Pando, and eventually joined Bonfire Ventures as a Partner to do early-stage investing the way he thinks it should be done: hands-on, operator-led, and built around founders who are ruthless about execution.
Discussed in this episode
- Why “the king of explaining” is no longer a competitive advantage in go-to-market
- How AI collapses the traditional sales motion from SDR qualification through CSM QBR
- Why your right to win becomes table stakes every 30 days and what to do about it
- What Brett looks for in founders now, and why he calls the best ones “psychos”
- Why vertical software is more defensible than ever in the AI era
- Why face-to-face still matters when buyers are betting their careers on a product that didn’t exist six months ago
- How the Salesforce and HubSpot ecosystems could become their own boat anchors
- Why events are creating 75%+ of pipeline for Brett’s early-stage portfolio companies
- What “deploy before you close” looks like in practice
- Why the functional GTM leader of today has to be a builder, not just a smooth talker
- What changes in VC when building software no longer requires capital or headcount to get started
- Why seven out of ten bets should die and what that means for how seed-stage investors should think about portfolio construction
Episode highlights
00:00 – Brett’s career: Siebel, Salesforce employee #7, co-founder, angel investor, seed-stage VC
06:58 – The big shift: from passive CRUD apps to agentic software that does the work for you
08:07 – “Failing upwards” and what the fastest-growing companies taught Brett about investing in people
10:58 – Why Brett moved into VC: 25 years of operators whose collective worth hit $25B
16:50 – What Brett looks for in founders now and how it’s changed over 6-7 years
18:05 – Why anybody can build anything: Brett builds a fully functional travel app in 15 minutes
19:20 – The last remaining moat in software
26:20 – The real threat to Salesforce and HubSpot and why their ecosystem might be the boat anchor
34:20 – How the entire GTM motion changes when the product does the job instead of just enabling it
38:30 – Why communicating the right problem to the right ICP hasn’t changed in 30 years
39:20 – Deploy first, close later
40:20 – Why face-to-face matters more now, not less
41:00 – Why events are driving 75%+ of pipeline at Brett’s early-stage portfolio companies
42:10 – Pricing and packaging: the most important GTM lever nobody talks about enough
46:35 – The death of the smooth-talking GTM leader
47:25 – What happens to VC when software is no longer scarce to build
52:00 – Why vertical software wins in the AI era: context, workflow, and the non-tech buyer
55:20 – The rep who drove 65 miles to drop off donuts and closed an $80K deal
Key takeaways
1. The GTM playbook most of us learned is already gone.
The entire motion from SDR to CSM was designed around one problem: the product didn’t do the job, so humans had to explain it. When the product actually does the job, that whole layer of explanation collapses. You’re showing product earlier, deploying before you close, and tracking outcomes from day one. The people who built careers on translating software into value have to find a new edge.
2. Your right to win becomes table stakes every 30 days.
In SaaS, you could build a wedge, raise a Seed round, hit $1M ARR, and spend 18 months turning that into a go-to-market machine. That’s a thing of the past. The rate of change in what your product does (and what your competitors can ship) means the messaging, positioning, and value prop have to move in lock step.
3. The founder profile that wins now looks inherently different.
Brett looks for founders who are building, not managing people who build. You need to be actually in the tools, shipping, and learning what the product can do firsthand. If you’re not building, how can you expect to have a clear enough point of view on what you’re selling or how to sell it?
4. Face-to-face matters more in the AI era.
Buyers right now are more nervous than ever. They’re betting their careers on products that are evolving fast and vendors who might look completely different in 6 months. They’re buying whether they trust you to build what they’ll need tomorrow. That trust is still built in person. It’s no surprise that events are creating 75%+ of the pipeline for Brett’s early-stage portfolio companies.
5. Vertical software is the most defensible bet in AI right now.
In vertical markets, customers hand you everything: their workflow, their edge cases, their entire context. That data is the moat. And to make matters even better, the non-technical buyer is now one of the most attractive customers in the market because AI finally makes their job meaningfully easier without requiring them to learn anything.
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GTM 183 Episode Transcript
00:00
Brett Queener: Thriving in the genetic age, is ruthless and much more ruthless than in the SAS age. But if anybody can build anything, what’s the last remaining mode in software? So like in that world, I kind of look for psychos.
00:11
Max Altschuler: Brett Queenan, managing director, Bonfire Ventures and we get into what the last mode in software really is.
00:17
Brett Queener: You are ruthless and relentless about execution. And then what do you believe is your right to win and the rate of change if your product isn’t on par? Like every 30 day sales and marketing breaks?
00:30
Max Altschuler: And for Brett, the founders who win right now, it comes down to one thing.
00:34
Brett Queener: I don’t think you’re a functional leader and go to market unless you’re building, because how are you going to go run the org and understand where I want humans and where I’m going use agents. Unless you’re building a generator.
00:45
Max Altschuler: How does this change how good a market’s been done?
00:47
Brett Queener: You’re showing product much earlier. Deployments often happen before you close.
00:51
Max Altschuler: Do you think a company like that needs less money over time? They need to hire less people.
00:55
Brett Queener: We need less people in the startups. That being said.
01:03
Max Altschuler: The.
01:09
Max Altschuler: Welcome back to another episode of the GTM Now Bonus VC podcast. I’m here with my partner Paul Irving. What’s up Paul.
01:18
Paul Irving: How are you doing? Max? We got the matching blue sweaters today. Lots going on in the, sapphire world. I world, ready to roll.
01:25
Max Altschuler: We got a great guest for the show. We got Brett Keener on from bonfire. Was an early Salesforce. Guys got lots of good stories, but also learnings from working very closely with Benioff and some of the folks, early at Salesforce to that point. GTM is changing more than ever before, you know, right from our eyes. And at the same time, you know, it’s funny, I feel like some tried and true stuff, you know, the last remaining things that are working from the previous eras.
01:55
Max Altschuler: What did you learn from the the Queen or episode on the GTM front?
01:58
Paul Irving: Yeah, it was really interesting, because we did so it would have been last year. We did our AGM, we got three of our founders on stage to talk about what’s working in GTM for them. We chose three very separate industries that these these founders are building in to get some diversity of strategies and execution on the stage that day.
02:17
Paul Irving: And two out of the three of them ended up with what they called the donut playbook, which was, you know, delivering donuts in person to customers, flying to them 70 miles drive or getting on a flight and renting a car and driving and showing up at the, you know, telecom office in rural Indiana. That could be a 250 K contract meeting.
02:39
Paul Irving: The VP’s that are decision makers in person, delivering food, you know, moving that account through the pipeline as a result of that in-person relationship building interaction that you had. And, I think Brett used exact same example. It was the donut playbook and in-person events seem to be working really well, whether that’s dinners or conferences. I think we see it across vertical software and AI.
03:00
Paul Irving: These trade show style conferences still seem to be where the most important relationships get built in. Go to market, smaller dinners and events, relationship building, whether that’s, again, you’re dropping off something and seeing your potential enterprise account in person, or you’re finding a way to get in a room with them in a variety of different other strategies.
03:20
Paul Irving: But but it seems like the old playbook of, you know, human to human relationships and decisioning is still going to matter. So what’s your competitive advantage to get in front of your buyers? And how can you create those moments of seemingly, you know, serendipity?
03:33
Max Altschuler: Yeah. For the most part, the buyer is still a human. Maybe tough for that to ever be, like fully AI in the meantime, for the next few years, the buyer is human, and so the seller needs to make a genuine connection with human. And the best way to do that is events. But it’s also listening to and finding things out that you can find out, you know, Nick Bata posted the other week how a toy Porsche on Amazon changed, massive deal for his company because a new executive took over for business and they were going to churn, and he had no connection with the new executives.
04:11
Max Altschuler: And he finally got 15 minutes with the executive. And one little nugget he learned from that phone call was that they were into racing, and he sent them this little toy Porsche. And, you know, a nice note. And that was enough to get that person to come to the table and do a meaningful evaluation. And they ended up retaining the customer and growing that customer to a multimillion dollar contract.
04:32
Max Altschuler: And we a similar thing at outreach. We had, a massive deal that we were trying to break into. Couldn’t get into the main point of contact or anybody on her team called a big, executive meeting for it. I was on Twitter on this woman’s Twitter scrolling, scrolling, scrolling all corporate comms, all about their upcoming event or, you know, previous events.
04:55
Max Altschuler: And then finally, five years earlier, a tweet referencing the Steelers saw she went to Penn State, sent her some James Connor swag, who was the running back for Penn State and then the Steelers a week later, we had her entire team on a meeting and we had the the ball rolling on deal. That genuine connection between humans. There’s nothing like it.
05:16
Max Altschuler: It is one of those things where you talk about kind of moats or things that are enduring through the kind of AI craziness we’re going through right now, that is going to endure until the buyer is AI that will endure. We talked about PMF also, and Brett said this. We had one of our portfolio companies, May Habib from writer, say this, but PMF is a treadmill in the AI days.
05:39
Max Altschuler: At this point, you’re constantly reinventing. Andreessen said this in his post in his podcast with Lenny to. You’re constantly rethinking. You’re constantly reinventing your companies.
05:49
Paul Irving: Yeah, it’s really interesting because I think it reframes the way you think about company building. If you’re a founder or one of the operating executives at a startup, and it changes the way we look at investing as well, there just used to be very clear stages where, you know, in the early days we’re working with design partners, and then we find a common problem that people are willing to pay for.
06:07
Paul Irving: That’s a burning need, and we sell them our technology to be able to solve for it. And then we start to feel repeatable, pull in the ecosystem or market we’re selling into to solve that particular problem. And you have this foundational ground you can stand upon. But when technology is moving this fast, what’s possible and the surface area of what you can solve for your customers is shifting this fast.
06:30
Paul Irving: The number of competitors that are coming to market is growing at the speed that it’s growing at the moment. You start to get this feeling that that Brett and we’ve had founders and other investors, you know, echo before, which is that product market fit feels like a treadmill. You have to almost earn it every single quarter. And the best founders and the best companies are going to stay incredibly close to their customers of where their problems are shifting and where that’s moving.
06:52
Paul Irving: Stay at the cutting edge of where technology is going, and make sure that their product roadmap reflects that at all given times. And the people who are able to stay at that treadmill or on the treadmill at the speed in which it is moving right now are going to be the successful companies. But it’s a reality from the earliest stage startups, and now you’re seeing it in the public markets as well.
07:10
Paul Irving: Product market fit is in a constant.
07:12
Max Altschuler: We’ve had a couple of our portfolio companies that have had pivots, one product to a completely new product, and more of a pivot from we’ve had product market fit, but the way that the product is built completely needs to be reimagined. And we have to like, break it all down and do it again based off I native and it’s incredible to watch these founders do that.
07:33
Max Altschuler: They get it done. What a VC is looking for founders these days. And I guess the second question to that is are there any moats left? What do you think? What are you seeing.
07:43
Paul Irving: Yeah, I mean there’s the constants which are always going to be things that you look for. I mean, these are exceptional outlier human beings that are, you know, creating magic out of nothing. And that requires them to be very spiky in certain skill sets. I mean, I think that’s still something we look for. We probably look for more than ever is, you know, you almost want to find somebody who’s not a 90 out of or 100 on everything, but you want them to be a 99 out of 100 on a few important things.
08:09
Paul Irving: And then, you know, our job is to see if we can help them, whether it’s hire or just learn and grow to support the other, you know, attributes that will make them successful. To that point. I think slope of learning is is always been important, but probably now near the top of my personal list, because you know, the point about product market fit being a treadmill, if things are going to move in, change this fast.
08:30
Paul Irving: You need to have somebody who is both like willing to learn that really thin line of acting with conviction, but also be open to changing your priors when new information comes to the table, and then learning constantly, you know, wanting to talk to the best people, the smartest people listen to their customers and have this really, really high slope where if the world is going to change around them, they are going to ensure their business is pointed in the right direction as a response.
08:55
Max Altschuler: You know, on the moats point, obviously with AI easier and easier to build than ever before, you’re seeing it. You’re seeing cloud come into everybody’s space. It’s incredible to see what some of these founders are able to do with way less resources. I mean, you get you get a founder who’s kind of a tinkerer, and they can get very far tinkering.
09:17
Max Altschuler: They could go build an entire product. They can go do some really hacky stuff on go to market. You’re seeing more and more people hiring and vetting for this generalist or this ability to kind of use cursor or replit or lovable. And some of these and some of these products renegades and less on historical. Oh, can you, you know, do the sales job.
09:41
Max Altschuler: Can you do the marketing job. It’s fascinating to see, but it’s also when I have phone calls with founders and phone calls with, you know, folks that are coming out of companies and looking for their next job. So, like, what do you recommend I do? I’m like, I recommend you understand cloud code. I recommend you get in the weeds and understand how these things work, because you’re going to be expected to do these things in your business.
10:02
Max Altschuler: Like we’re getting out of these like political structures and like hiring 30 people to, you know, be on a marketing team. It’s like, okay, all of this can be done by less, less folks. Which brings me to another point. It’s like, does that mean that jobs are going to go away?
10:16
Paul Irving: I think February of 2026 was one of the most narrative dense months that we can remember, like probably since ChatGPT launched. So in years.
10:24
Brett Queener: Where.
10:25
Paul Irving: You saw it in the public markets, you saw it in some of the smartest and most influential people within tech, in VC coming out and writing very thoughtful essays for their description of what the future is going to look like. And one of them that caught fire was this Katrina article about, you know, the ghost economy. And we’re going to lose all these jobs.
10:41
Paul Irving: And I well, it’s going to create efficiency across all these businesses. It’s not going to go into the pockets of the individuals within the economy. And if they’re not spending like we’re going to have this huge economic collapse. And the problem with that point of view and orientation on AI and what it’s going to do to the economy at large, is you’re applying a dynamic variable, new technology, AI, in this case to a static ecosystem, which is the global economy.
11:11
Paul Irving: And companies, when in reality the global economy and companies are anything but static. You’re applying in the real world. You’re applying a dynamic variable AI to a dynamic ecosystem. And the idea that it’s not going to respond in turn to the changes, the impact, and to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction in the idea that, I think Marc Andreessen summarized really nicely, which is okay, sure, we might eliminate this section of your job in XYZ company, but you have the most powerful leverage point in the history of humanity sitting on your desk to do anything you want.
11:50
Paul Irving: Create a new job within that organization by native you know, ahead of the rest of your peers. Go become an entrepreneur because you’ve never been able to create more on your own than you can today, and you will be able to tomorrow. And so this idea of loss without a response is always felt like a half story. And in my eyes, at least.
12:08
Paul Irving: And I think Mark did a good job of summarizing, that is, you have the world at your fingertips more than ever before. The question is what you’re going to do with it.
12:15
Max Altschuler: Well, it’s an exciting time. You know, we had the Citrine research post that came out. You know, everybody starts going into all the doomsday scenarios. But you’ve now had obviously we’ve had time to sit on it. I think we’ve kind of done a rebuttal with our own LPI update, which was which we’ll share publicly. You’ve got the Michael Block 2028 global intelligence boom rebuttal.
12:37
Max Altschuler: You’ve got The Citadel Securities, which was another rebuttal. The David Andre SAS is dead. Agents killed it article. There’s so many different points of view on kind of what we’re we’re going through right now. And, and I really appreciate a lot of the smartest minds in the world kind of chime in on the stuff. But at the end of the day, it’s nice to be in a seat where, you know, we’ll kind of see it or see it happening right in front of us, unfolding right in front of us.
13:00
Max Altschuler: And, you know, we’re able to kind of re underwrite our thesis, our ever evolving thesis at this point, based on that, it’s just moving faster than ever before. And you really have to kind of keep a finger on the pulse.
13:11
Paul Irving: It’s an exciting, as exciting time as ever before. I don’t know if I’m sleeping well. I think if you’re not equal parts excited and paranoid simultaneously, you’re missing out on the full experience. But probably more opportunity than ever before, which is fun.
13:23
Max Altschuler: Anxiety, anxiousness, excitement. All high. We are going to get into the Brett Keener episode of the podcast. A really great one today. We’ll pass the baton. So, Brett, great to have you here.
13:37
Brett Queener: Absolutely glad to have you in my hometown. Yes. And Barbara, it’s not bad place. It’s a nice, nice respite for a day a week. Yeah. From the, from all the noise.
13:46
Max Altschuler: Quick flights to San Francisco get if they.
13:49
Brett Queener: Leave on time.
13:49
Max Altschuler: If they leave on time.
13:50
Brett Queener: Direct flight to Chicago.
13:51
Max Altschuler: Not really. Yes. No more land.
13:53
Brett Queener: No, it. No more through Denver.
13:56
Max Altschuler: Okay. Yeah. All right. Need a New York.
13:59
Brett Queener: Do you work? You have to go through me to Miami. We need to. I don’t know about that.
14:02
Max Altschuler: Yeah.
14:02
Brett Queener: That’s a that’s a nice day out of Miami. Yeah.
14:04
Max Altschuler: Okay. Well, your career talk about a roller coaster. So started Siebel, Salesforce, 75 employee around 70. Yeah. Now in venture capital. Yeah. Now, looking at all these agents making your heads been like. Yes. Well, this has been quite a journey from where I started. Talk me through one. How you ended the VC in the first place, and two other things that you’ve gleaned from, I guess, working that closely early at Salesforce of Benioff and folks that, you know, help you be a better VC today.
14:35
Brett Queener: I think what is interesting good to be see in a second. Two thoughts. One is my career is weird, right? Like I got into I got out of college when client server was coming out, so I was the Jimmy Neutron that brought like email and client server into a company in Milpitas back in the early 90s. There were no jobs in San Francisco.
14:58
Brett Queener: You lived in San Francisco, and you drove all the way to the South Bay. Now, before that, life was cool because when work was over, you would go home and no one could get Ahold of you. Like try to explain to your child what a pager was and a car phone is. Or a public phone is always an interesting conversation.
15:12
Brett Queener: And then I got out of business school right as Netscape, went public. So the birth of the internet. And so I think what is interesting about Salesforce and kind of where we are today, where this big shift, there was a big shift from on premise to cloud and there was huge differentiation, etc.. Right? Like, and right now we’re moving from what I call sort of passive Crud applications, where the human does all the work to a genetic products, where the software helps you do your work or does a lot of work on your behalf.
15:47
Brett Queener: Right. So very few sort of transition, it turns out like DC, we look, you know, we’re at bonfire, we do seed stage, we’re investing early. It’s like 5 to 8 people. We got like 3 to 4 weeks to figure out if we’re going to dance with this founder. But we try to do spend more time with pre-seed people right out of Pre-Seed.
16:07
Brett Queener: So we get to know them, etc., etc.. And look, I think the similarity with Salesforce or working at Salesforce or working at Siebel or so, one of the similarities is an operator being a venture capitalist, right? There is the you know, there are venture capitalists that are professional venture capitalists. They don’t look for deals. You’re a little more like me, right?
16:24
Brett Queener: We’re operators. Right. We we look for people that we think can out execute other people. We look for signs of emotion where we can sniff repeatability. But for me, if you think about my career at Siebel or Salesforce for the two fastest growing companies, respect to time was I picked right and I failed upwards and in failing upwards.
16:44
Brett Queener: For those who know what failing upwards is, if you join a company that’s growing so fast, they can’t hire enough, and they basically try to give you as much responsibility until you break. Yeah. All right. So you’re like an SVP before you’ve reached puberty, right. And let me know what that means. Right? Yeah. So I did a really good job of that.
17:00
Brett Queener: But look, I think, you know, in your experience as well, like, if you’re investing early, you’re really investing in an individual going. Gonna have to pivot. Now I’ve got founders have to find a refind market fit like every friggin 3 to 6 months. Yeah, that one bullshit works. They’re all excited, like, oh shit, that broke. Yeah. And like all of my success prior to BC was tied to the quality of the people that I hired and affected by was and sort of managing and motivating them.
17:28
Brett Queener: So I think there’s something similar there in terms of like, the relationship you build with founders. And I don’t want to call it therapy, but like, look, being a founder, having been a co-founder, it’s a lonely, hard, existential place, you know, and I think, Horowitz said it best, right? Hard things about hard things. Nobody cares.
17:50
Brett Queener: Like nobody gets to shit. And so to the extent that as people are working through stuff they can call us and be like, dude, I need some help because my, my general view of life and I say this to my kids as well, or people, when they struggle, I go, you know, we don’t want too much of a struggle, right?
18:06
Brett Queener: I want physical pain. But we as humans, we only learn from mistakes. You never learn from like, oh, I did something. Well, it’s been something doesn’t go well that you process and go, let’s not do that again. I mean, if you think about your time as an operator or my time at working at Salesforce in the early days, was it’s just a series of trial and error and loops, and you need to be, thoughtful enough to have trade offs of what you’re going to do, but you need to be humble enough to basically say that didn’t work and then operationalize that.
18:38
Brett Queener: And that’s really I mean, you think about the early days of Salesforce. There was I make a blog. I don’t think a blogging platform existed. Maybe it did, but like, there was no How-To. There was no podcast. We were just making this shit up. Was doing a lot. Yeah.
18:53
Max Altschuler: Now there’s more content you knew personally.
18:55
Brett Queener: Oh my God. Like on the way here, I was listening to a notebook. Llama. Two of my founders are trying to explain to me, you know, the meaning of a word has no meaning unless it’s a relation to other as the basis for why AI and where it’s going. And graph. Right. And at some point it’s turn it off.
19:09
Brett Queener: But I feel like the early days of Salesforce is very much of a beginner’s mind. And I think where we are today, we have to approach what we’re doing. Very much of a beginner’s mind. So that’s sort of how prepared me for VC and like, you know, people ask me, why did you do VC or why are you doing VC?
19:27
Brett Queener: Like probably more reflection of them than my hiring capability, but have a look at the people that have worked for me over a period of time. I think their collective worth worth is like $25 billion now. I wish I’d been able to invest in each of them, but for the limited period of time that they worked for me, they defined my success.
19:43
Brett Queener: And so for me, this is sort of giving back. Yeah.
19:46
Max Altschuler: Right. You kind of beat me to it. Actually, the Salesforce was a obviously if you were there early, but even now it’s a very entrepreneurial company. A lot of people come there, do their tours duty, then they start a company. And a lot of those companies have gone on to be very successful. You were one of them, smart recruiters were founder of small, co-founder Coca-Cola.
20:06
Brett Queener: There was a founder. I had thought at the time that I wasn’t a fan. I wasn’t a founder because there’s something about the soul and spirit of the founder that you the sort of the craziness of it, you know, were operators were saying, I mean, people think I’m pretty crazy, but we think systematically and we process thinkers.
20:25
Brett Queener: Yeah. And so I partnered with Jerome, to go and try to change recruiting, which was not easy. Like, that’s a hard.
20:33
Max Altschuler: But you got to put yourself in the founders shoes there.
20:35
Brett Queener: And I got it was painful. I think that was very helpful in working with founders because you, you work at like a Siebel or a Salesforce, this market said they’re succeeding, you know, and yes, you add value to those companies. But like they were going to succeed without you. And I think in that co-founding spot, it was really hard.
20:56
Brett Queener: I brought all the playbooks I knew before, which was sort of the, you know, the challenger sale, the innovator’s dilemma to a market that didn’t work in any way, shape or form was like a risk averse buyer. Yeah. And so in, like, struggling, it allows me to empathize with founders. Right. You probably like I could look at a founder, you’re on a phone, call it them and you’re like, all right, come on.
21:17
Brett Queener: What’s going on?
21:18
Max Altschuler: Yeah. And it’s like.
21:19
Brett Queener: Part of it. Yeah. I often tell them like, look, Jimmy Slack or I don’t need to be on your slack or, but like, create a general feed, you know, new hires. I can read all of that. We don’t need to have a call for you to tell me what’s going on. Yeah, I can see that. But let’s get down to, like, what are the top 2 or 3 things that you know, you’re worried about?
21:36
Brett Queener: And like, every founder has this version of a dream. We all have these anxiety dreams, right? You know, the dream about, like there’s some math class in your in school, there’s a math class or there’s an exam you didn’t study for, right. And mine was, I’m on Broadway, of course, a little dramatic. The lead, of course.
21:54
Brett Queener: I’m the lead in a show, and I’m going on stage and, families in the audience, new York Times, critics in the audience. Naked. And I forgot my lines. And I always woke up before knowing if I was too much of a coward to turn around and go for it, but that was like a constant train. And look, if you’re you’re a founder in a startup, you have like three things.
22:15
Brett Queener: You know, you’re wrestling through your head, you like, what is the thing you wish you knew so you could go do something about it? Yeah. That’s stressful. The bigger stress is, you know what you should do. And you’re, you know, you thought you’ve assembled the team you need to go do. And it’s not executing. That’s the one that you’re like, oh, you know.
22:35
Brett Queener: Yeah. But I think that has been, you know, helpful.
22:39
Max Altschuler: And you’re also, you know, that entire time angel investing. Yes. So you’re working with companies, you know, as an individual individual.
22:48
Brett Queener: And then for example, and Pando was one of the first checks and dependable. I’m the independent.
22:53
Max Altschuler: Okay.
22:54
Brett Queener: So you know.
22:55
Max Altschuler: And you’re still on the board, they’re just there.
22:57
Brett Queener: To support me.
22:58
Max Altschuler: And you never did anything to bonfire. There was there was.
23:00
Brett Queener: No that was before. That was before. And then outreach. Yeah. Right. With Manny.
23:04
Max Altschuler: Yeah.
23:05
Brett Queener: And now he’s over at paid. Yeah. I was a little upset that he didn’t call me with his reason that Randy play with Brett. This is the round I did. You can. I’m like, you’re right, I don’t invest. That’s a little pricey for me.
23:16
Max Altschuler: That was that was a crazy one. And you know it’s Manny. So he’s got a million people knocking on the door at all times. But so okay, so you’ve got this early Salesforce experience. Then you went out did the founder thing yourself. Obviously Angel invested along the way. So you’re already working with a bunch of other founders. How’d you end up a bonfire?
23:36
Brett Queener: Well done. You know, I moved to Santa Barbara like 16, 17 primarily because my wife’s like, we need to get these kids into college. And she’s from Santa Barbara. We had a home down here. And you come back and forth. It’s not so far from the Bay area. It’s pretty nice on the weekend to sort of, like, clear your head so you can think anew on Monday.
23:55
Brett Queener: Yeah. And, you know, I came down here for a couple years. I came down here, the kids sort of active in their high school experience because, you know, we work at Siebel and Salesforce and, you know, your global services. There’s a time of which you need to pay back and like takes responsibility here. And then I had known Jim and I was, independent on a company down here called in Boca.
24:18
Brett Queener: He was an investor through his predecessor fund ring. Kind of. We got to know each other. And they were coming together with bonfire. They were looking for a third partner that was more of an operator. And it was seed stage, and it was going to be hands on.
24:32
Max Altschuler: Our LP base spans from individual operators to institutional allocators and angels, has been instrumental and supporting all of them. They handle everything from investor onboarding and accreditation to distribution and tax documentation, creating a seamless experience across geographies and fund types. Plus, all of this is available on a single modern platform for an LP base like ours, with over 300 C-suite and VP level operators, this kind of white glove service and seamless workflows is so important, also instrumental, that we support our institutional LPs and we’re fortunate to work with an angels is able to do so every step of the way.
25:07
Max Altschuler: If you’re looking for a platform that can support any type of LP investing in your fund. Learn more at Angel’s dot com slash GTM fund. New fund to 30 to 50 to 50. Amazing. All preceding seed.
25:20
Brett Queener: Or seed.
25:21
Max Altschuler: Or seed.
25:22
Brett Queener: But we got to find what the hell seed means.
25:24
Max Altschuler: Is that mean? There’s. I don’t even know. But, So tell me about it. What are you looking for in a founder? You know, you have this kind of robust history where you’ve worn these three different hats. It’s hot early at Salesforce. Then the founder yourself, an angel investor that’s kind of informed your thinking to date, mixed with this kind of a, energetic new world that we’re in today.
25:49
Max Altschuler: How is your thinking changed? What kind of in an investment? What are you looking for?
25:55
Brett Queener: Well, I think the biggest thing that’s changed if I get a day, and you’ve probably seen this yourself, which is if we’re an operator, we mistakenly assume that, like, we have a very outsized impact on a company. Like, there have been founders that have, but great ideas, etc., etc.. But then you have to realize you’re not running their business.
26:19
Brett Queener: So I think the biggest thing that I’ve changed for investing over the last 6 or 7 years is it can be a great thought partner. I could be a great sparring partner. I can help them as they’re thinking of scaling and thinking through those things. But they need to succeed independent of me. That’s the biggest thing.
26:36
Brett Queener: Yeah, I think the second thing we’ve always said, it’s about founders. But I would say that thriving in the agent age is ruthless and much more ruthless than in the SAS age. Interesting, right? If anybody can build anything, I don’t know if you’ve been messing around cloud code, cloud work, but let’s maps last week I built apps. I built an app in 15 minutes, and ten of it was just remembering how to like install Node.js and figure out, deploy and reap.
27:05
Brett Queener: Because I cut in high school, a terminal is like, okay, yeah, I’m going on a daddy data trip. My daughter is 26, so she let’s do one, which is great, right? We used to get I’ve seen Harry styles seven times, four times, One Direction, whatever it takes, whatever it takes, whatever it takes. So I told her that Harry styles was coming to New York.
27:23
Brett Queener: Let’s go to New York. It’s like I don’t do it, but let’s do a daddy daughter trip, which was great. Well, I’ve tried to invite herself on and she’s like, mom, it’s daddy Dodger in another life would have been a travel planner. So I’m detail. I’m like, what do you do in the morning, afternoon, etc. let me go do six hours of research.
27:37
Brett Queener: I want to be special. She’s vegan, vegetarian friendly, and we’re going to Bad Cooper. She lives in Bainbridge Island and I was like, I’m fucking built up in 15 minutes. I had a fully functional app, with logins for both of us that she could log on. And for each day, look at the activities, figure out which one, and she could heart it.
27:56
Brett Queener: And then I will heart it. And then when it hearts together will auto schedule and deploy. And it’s so good that I’ll probably use this for any travel plan that I do with a group of people to me do that in 15 minutes. Yeah. And if you think about all I wrote, my latest post was like, you know, what’s the last remaining mode in software?
28:11
Brett Queener: We could argue in the SAS era, leaving it out or the rest of it, like when you were the second player in a given category in SAS, there was no. But then what was execution? Do you execute faster than somebody else? Do you are you able to hire just better people? Right. Who go hard.
28:29
Max Altschuler: Difference between outreach and sales off was who’s executing better.
28:32
Brett Queener: At the more who can go hard. Yeah. Right. And product matters, but a lot of it is tied down to like, sales. So how effective your sales and marketing was, do you need a good enough product to enable that? Yeah, we’re now in an era where like if your product isn’t on par, like every 30 day sales and marketing breaks, and so in that world, and what defines a winner like before you be like, oh, I built this little wedge, I raise seed financing.
28:59
Brett Queener: I got to a million, million and a half dollars. Now I’ve raised 20 million. Now I can build another team. I can build, go to market. Now I can hire another scrum team. And there was just sort of this, oh, I sound fit now. I’m scaling. Yeah. So you got fit, you know, like, as if, like, you were two years old and then you’re scaling.
29:19
Max Altschuler: So it was kind of like this.
29:19
Brett Queener: And then you were like, oh, I gotta add another product. Add another product. Yeah. Now that’s all gone. Yeah. Now it’s like I kind of have said, I gotta find fit. I got to find fit. I got gotta find fit. And the rate of change of the value prop of your product, these would be your customers. And how you communicate that changes like every 30 days.
29:41
Brett Queener: So like in that world I kind of look for cycles. And you hope they’re good cycles, not bad cycles. I mean I say crazy people. Yeah. You know, we’re back to Steve Jobs. You basically, you know, it’s the crazy people. And I got a limited amount of time to figure out their good crazy and bad crazy. And sometimes the most of the time the good crazy.
29:59
Max Altschuler: How does that crazy show up? Like, what’s an example that they’re just building stuff already tinkering there.
30:04
Brett Queener: Well, first of all, I just want this world in the past where you could have a technical founder who has to find a business person, or there’s a business founder and hope they have a technical person is over. Yeah. The founders building. Yeah. Because unless you’re building and using these tools, you can’t have a clear point of view of not only what the offering you’re bringing is, but what’s the operating system, you know, how are you running your company differently?
30:31
Brett Queener: You’re on a lot of the time. We talk on weekends. Yeah. You are ruthless and relentless about execution, but you’re always humble that, like, what you’re doing is probably only good enough. And you’re looking ahead. I remember there was this conversation. I didn’t know he got it from Tony Robbins, his heart racing at Mark when I would come down.
30:52
Brett Queener: And I ran product for a while after I was running go to Market at Salesforce, they let the inmate run the asylum. And I’m all about, you know, as an Ops got a lot about priorities and X amount of developers. We make some priority suspects, some hard call us that have 30 boats, a three. That’s not going to move the needle.
31:08
Brett Queener: At the end of the day. I need to give the sales and marketing team one big thing that they can live with it, you know, and I would come in a little bit of that, put and I’d be like, look, we got to fix forecasting for the fifth time. A pyramid doesn’t work. We gotta, we gotta refactor the fact that there’s 15 ways to call a a document attachment content piece.
31:28
Brett Queener: And Mark would be like, no, we got to build up the platform. We got to build a programmatic code, visual force, and declared them the rest of it. Not be like like nobody’s asking for that. And he would say, but don’t overestimate. You could do a year. But don’t understate, but you can do it a decade. And was he right?
31:47
Brett Queener: I mean, like Salesforce took a metadata customization model and a lot of like, you know, sales admin love to multi hundred billion dollar valuation. Right. Yeah. And so I think that now has been brought on the AI world maybe down to like don’t know rest or you can do it a month dollars that you can do in a year.
32:05
Brett Queener: They’re constantly thinking that way. Yeah. And they’re thinking about what I will say to them. You have to pick the right moment when it’s at seed, it’s literally we start getting, you know, they start getting to like five, ten, 15, 20 million. What is what is your right to play the water table stakes. Yeah. That last post, basically what I thought was the right to win just became table stakes.
32:29
Brett Queener: Yeah. And then what do you believe is your right to win? It could be wrong. But what is it that you believe and that should be imbued across the company. And let’s just drive that hard. Yeah. And that’s definitely true. And you think about your go to market solve for best. It’s a hard place to invest. But like you look at gong versus course these versus that.
32:47
Brett Queener: These were people that just like had a vision had a mission and you know, built a movement. You know, you got to be the Pied Piper. It’s hard. So that’s how I think about it.
32:57
Max Altschuler: What about vertical versus horizontal?
32:59
Brett Queener: Yeah. I mean, we tend to do more vertical.
33:01
Max Altschuler: Or vertical like I, you know, you talk about go to market investments and some to me most of that’s in the horizontal category. And you know we quite frankly haven’t done a ton of horizontal either because.
33:11
Brett Queener: It’s hard.
33:12
Max Altschuler: It’s very hard. The motor
33:15
Brett Queener: It’s super noisy.
33:16
Max Altschuler: Collapsing and supersaturated.
33:18
Brett Queener: There’s no context.
33:19
Max Altschuler: It’s really hard. You know, I kind of like go back and forth on the whole lab code thing where it’s like, okay, cool. You can vibe code like add ons to your current product. You can vibe code, you know, interactive decks and stuff like that now. And, but, like, you know, there’s a reason why people use DocuSign.
33:37
Max Altschuler: Like, you could use a PDF viewer and, and send us an attachment in the past to sign a document. You didn’t need to use DocuSign. So a whole hold of in court, right? Use it because it has digital fingerprint technology and things like that that allow the document. But you also.
33:50
Brett Queener: Just trust.
33:50
Max Altschuler: It. You trust it. It’s it’s $9 use or something like that. Again, I really going to go hire somebody to build this themselves. And and I.
33:58
Brett Queener: Don’t want to break and I don’t want an innovation I don’t want 15. If, you know zoom keeps throwing out these new things like zoom is great. So just be so yeah. What’s all this popping up stuff.
34:08
Max Altschuler: So yeah. So I guess the question is like, you know, if you’re if you’re Salesforce or HubSpot, some of these horizontal platforms, you know, how big is the worry from, oh, somebody is going to code their own CRM. Somebody is going to, you know, is that is there a worry there for those types of companies? Is it. Yeah.
34:26
Max Altschuler: Monaco is in the days and the adios and zero. I love numbers.
34:31
Brett Queener: I see every one of those people assume that I’m all in on the AI CRM. Yeah. And I’m like it for that’s that’s a bloody battle. Eventually at some point, yes. I think the biggest challenge to Salesforce and to HubSpot is if you think about the value of those franchises, it is the metadata customization model. It is that somebody went in, customize, put in their logic and their stuff and then the integration, and then the rules and the alerts and the rest of it.
35:11
Brett Queener: If you have gone and use cloud code and you watch it, assemble a set of agents for you and you tell it what you want done, and it just goes and just does it for you, that’s not the metaphor anymore. Nobody goes in and sets up rules and workflows and alerts. Let’s go. And the entire ecosystem around that, which is I don’t know, what do we got to say, a couple hundred thousand professional services people around the world, around those two ecosystems.
35:37
Brett Queener: Now, for that reason, they’re fine. You’re not going to see existential, you know, churn. But I think they need to remodel and rethink through what is the experience for which what I call like who has the context? You know, my entire career after business school was working at companies that went to people and said, you should not build this yourselves.
36:01
Brett Queener: We understand this. We’ve been spending time in SFA or CRM. Oh, and then we’ve got the vertical edition. We know how it works for banks, etc. and then you go to them and you say, okay, it’s going to take X to implement. What does that mean? You’re asking them their context. How do you run your business? What matters to you?
36:19
Brett Queener: What did you do care about. And that’s like us is user testing and the rest of it to put it in this database. Yeah that’s a stupid idea. So an area I’ve been looking at quite frankly was I think AI is very much coming for that because look if I’m deploying Salesforce I should have I understands the schema of Salesforce.
36:40
Brett Queener: What all the objects are. I should know what kind of couple you’re an insurance company, etc., etc.. I’d be like, okay, well give me your documents. This is like your business process. I should be able to ask you a couple questions, etc. etc. and just deploy it for you. So what is, if you will, what I’ll call this entire ecosystem around Salesforce that keeps and also keeps it going, the admins, the Dreamforce, the knowledge, the trailblazer.
37:07
Brett Queener: In the end may be the boat anchor.
37:11
Max Altschuler: Yeah.
37:11
Brett Queener: That’s the thing.
37:13
Max Altschuler: The also the thing holding it down. But maybe that’s the last to go. Yes. Type thing. Yes. It’s this. It’s just a crazy world we’re living in right now where, you know, when I was, when I was probably my daughter’s age, six, six, I one of the creative activities my dad would do is we would type a story together.
37:33
Max Altschuler: Yeah, called Darren and Eddie. And my daughter is just starting to get into stuff now, like, write her own stories, and she’s writing them out. And the other day, I’m like, oh, man. Like, I should teach her how to type this. And then I was like, wait a second, typing this, the thing in the paper, are.
37:46
Brett Queener: You a whisper flow guy?
37:47
Max Altschuler: Yes.
37:48
Brett Queener: I’m not I it’s funny, I when I’m a writer, I mean, I think people are like, what skills in your career? Like I’m a writer, so I like to write. And so in writing other we’ll talk about it. You know, people can catch the dashes in my writing. I’ve got editors that help me now they’re called I.
38:05
Brett Queener: Yeah.
38:06
Max Altschuler: But that’s how you clear.
38:07
Brett Queener: That’s how I, that’s how I think about my thoughts. Yes.
38:10
Max Altschuler: So that was the thing I was like, do I teach her to type even though typing is going to be obsolete because everybody’s going to basically speak into some.
38:18
Brett Queener: Individual teacher to type.
38:19
Max Altschuler: Or, you know, do you write it? Do you do cursive that works a different brain, like do.
38:24
Brett Queener: Miami or Miami? How old are you? A 38. Okay. So you went to college at the time when was the beginning of, de-emphasizing humanities and over funding of Stem programs?
38:36
Max Altschuler: It was 2005.
38:38
Brett Queener: No, not when my son especially right, I sent my son to Stanford as a top. Sam came out of high school and he came out like a Fulbright scholar. She knows anything about genocide studies. I’m not sure what happened. I’m fine. We need somebody to help us, you know, save this world. But if you really think about what’s going to be the dearth of hiring and some of and I have this at some rare companies is I need really smart liberal arts majors with agency people that think think people that are think about what you’re doing.
39:07
Brett Queener: You’re asking either today in the jet age, an assistant to help you, but in the in the I’ll call it a Claude code, opening at Codex World, you’re actually giving words to direct, and you be intentional at the words and what you’re directing and how you’re. And then you’re managing that. That’s not coding. Yeah, right. It’s actually outcome and thought based.
39:31
Brett Queener: So it’s very interesting. So it was always this thing that A16z Andreessen would do about me. You know, they and I was shape rotators and I know what it was, but it was basically like Stem kids making fun of like MBAs. I think it’s what it was. Right. Okay. He thinks the classics people. I’m gonna have to come back now.
39:49
Brett Queener: Yeah. So. Well, I would never. I never write.
39:51
Max Altschuler: I’m in the same boat. You know, do you type, do you write? Do you cursive, all that type of stuff. But I agree, like, no cursive writing.
39:59
Brett Queener: It’s ridiculous. And if you have to write a card now in cursive in your hand hurts like hell.
40:03
Max Altschuler: I’ve. I literally only use cursive to, like, sign my name. Right? Like I don’t think I ever use it or read it or, you know, spend so much time learning it. We were kids. So, you know, just like trying to think through because they’re so young, like, where is this all going? What is the knowledge work that’s going to be available to them in 10 or 15 years when they’re in the workforce?
40:24
Max Altschuler: It’s a trip. I’ve never had this much anxiety, trying to stay ahead of the curve.
40:30
Brett Queener: It is a very interesting time to raise young children.
40:34
Max Altschuler: Yes it is, it is. But what better place than in Santa Barbara, California. So you’ll be outside?
40:41
Brett Queener: They’ll be fine.
40:42
Max Altschuler: They’ll be outside. Yeah. All right, so we’re in this kind of AI era, what we’d call 2.0, 3.0 at this point, definitely tech 1.0.
40:51
Brett Queener: I just called the agent error.
40:52
Max Altschuler: Agent error. How does this change how go to market’s been done?
40:55
Brett Queener: Well, one thing I’ve been saying for a while now is that to some extent, your success as an operator and my success as an operator was we’re the king of explaining. So you think about SAS or before SAS, there were software products that were primarily Crud databases that IT workflows. If we were selling down market, we would limit the screening workflow.
41:14
Brett Queener: So it was easier to understand it was upmarket. There could be a bunch of configuration, but these products never actually delivered the end value. They were always like, you could use this such that you could achieve this goal as a business. And so your entire go to market organization, from marketing to stars to CS to reps to implementation to CSM was all town to explaining because the product in itself didn’t do the job.
41:43
Brett Queener: You could use this product to help do the job to be done. But it was it didn’t do the job. So when the product you’re selling now does the job well, hack, we can remove a lot of explaining. It’s much clearer. What do you want to get done? Let me show this to you. Look, it does this. Now you have to explain.
42:05
Brett Queener: It does it better than 2 or 3 other competitors. Let’s get going. So in that world, what happens to like a website that somebody finds to SQL? They hunt and peck across the grab some content. Maybe they do give you your contact info and then it goes to an SDR qualify. And then and he goes and talks to them or somebody actually paper to bypass the orders.
42:33
Brett Queener: And then, oh God, we don’t know what a stage 1 to 2 is because APIs are inconsistent of accepting an opportunity. And then he does a bunch of discovery and then an s he comes in and does stuff. And then if it’s an enterprise deal, we bring in professional services to come and do it. So w and then there’s a timeline for the S or W.
42:52
Brett Queener: And then we tell the customer, oh remember you had this event. There’s a real business about if you don’t buy now my services people right. Yeah. And then you deploy and they’re kind of happy and you track success around whether they log in or not. And then some poor CSM supposed to show up and do a QBR to speak to the outcome.
43:08
Brett Queener: Oh, you’re not getting the outcome because they’re not using the features they should be using.
43:12
Max Altschuler: Are you talking about W shaped or U-shaped exam.
43:16
Brett Queener: Like that’s all going.
43:18
Max Altschuler: Yeah yeah.
43:19
Brett Queener: That’s all gone. And I’m thrilled about that. You know why. Like for years I would people be like what should we do Brad I’m like, this is how you are an SDR. And I would just like to leave the iron on. And now somebody asks me and I go, shit, just think about that. I don’t know. Which is really fun.
43:39
Brett Queener: Right. So that all changes. And so then the question is, well, what is true here is what true the best good American organizations versus another one did this better than the other. They’re able to communicate to the right ICP that the problem they have is a real one. It is urgent and and what they care most about.
44:01
Brett Queener: We solve more effectively in the competition. And then the value that we’re offering forward is worth. The problem that solves. That’s been true for 30 years. I still do that still because and the question within that core, what changes. Well, you’re showing product much earlier. So A’s or salespeople that understand how product work or the rest of it China, I mean, unless it’s like some custom platform with a forward deployed engineer, you’re talking about some theoretical thing.
44:30
Brett Queener: Deployments often happen before you close. Is that pretty interesting? If you can deploy somebody like, oh, I don’t know if this works, what if we just turned it on and I’ll give you whatever 60 day out. Now you don’t do that for customers that you know you can’t serve bypass procurement. Get going. And then deployment just not this long deployment.
44:51
Brett Queener: Right. So like that is what everybody’s sort of re understanding and what those skills are. And then secondly for the humans that you have involved, that all the stuff that we wish people did and entering stuff in Salesforce or doing account plans or doing whitespace analysis or God forbid, just do some research for you, get on a call.
45:11
Brett Queener: Well, that’s just automatic. Let’s just provide it to you. Automatic. So all the lazy tendencies is automatic. Now I will say there’s a little bit of anxiety. If you now know that I can bring you all the information so you can have the perfect call, the perfect interaction. There’s this anxiety. Yeah, that you see. So it’s kind of really cool.
45:30
Brett Queener: Now I will tell you what still is true in this world. There’s so much Asian tech face to face really matters, especially now. Maybe in five years. It doesn’t because most people are buying an AI right now are like your buyers, like, okay, you know, discussed this before, people only buy for two reasons. Greater fear. Right? Yeah.
45:48
Max Altschuler: And they’re still buying from people are still buying from people at least right now.
45:52
Brett Queener: So buy from people for now. I’ll tell you something that’s a little scary. And they’re trying their betting their careers. They don’t want to be placed by AI. And they’re basically saying, can I trust you? And it’s really important because I’m not just buying the product you have today because the product in six months is going to be ten x better than the product you gave me today in person.
46:09
Brett Queener: Events matters a lot, a lot. Clearly events are back like in my verticals. Offer companies events probably create 75% of the pipeline at least the first two years. Yeah. And then I think brand matters. I think that’s probably why you’re seeing these, later stage VCs just writing large checks they’re trying to king make. Right. That’s the thing.
46:33
Brett Queener: And there’s just crazy stuff happening and I’m just trying to digest over the last 40 to 50 days, which is if you really dig in to using Clod or Codex and you give it planning on your go to market and then you let it go, execute the stuff that doesn’t require human and then get better where it’s failing, as long as you’ve given it context.
46:58
Brett Queener: It’s a little mind blown.
46:59
Max Altschuler: Pricing and packaging is often a part of go to market that I feel gets left out of the conversation.
47:08
Brett Queener: It’s like the most important one.
47:09
Max Altschuler: Exactly. Right. So do you do you think that now we’re kind of definitively in a phase of plg, has seat based pricing dieting in for not in PG now we’re moving to like platform plus consumption model or credits only. You know, if you’re a founder or you’re, you know, helping coach founders, are you trying to shift them in, in one direction or another?
47:32
Brett Queener: For me, I think it it matters by nuance. It matters by which vertical which customer pricing and packaging should always reflect two things. One, if you explained it, does it seem fair? Makes sense. The unit of value you’re doing right. And then two, does it inject just the right amount of friction like there are businesses where founders have been trying to do annual contracts upfront.
47:57
Brett Queener: That’s just adding friction to make VCs or happy. Which is ironic because now we’re going to get to a rare is not a thing. Right. And then plg like, my sense is we often think of plg as a go to market motion. It can be if you’re self-serve, but at the end of the day, I always thought of Plg as here’s what’s very interesting, but I products SAS products Plg was, hey, we’re serving a non sophisticated organization or a smaller organization that doesn’t have it doesn’t have sophistication.
48:27
Brett Queener: So we have to hide all of that and we hide that in our UX and what we give so that they can come in and start to use it on their own without any foresight, knowledge, etc.. Yeah. And then at some point, those companies I got to move up marketing higher reps and the rest of it. But in my mind it was always the case, even if I had an enterprise sales organization where I was focused up market, if I could have a product that somebody in the org could experience and understand the value of and have delight.
48:54
Brett Queener: Before I was trying to sell them up, it was always helpful. Right? What you’re seeing in AI is this delineation goes way. There’s no such thing as simplistic is this thing is like an easy to use product that’s simplistic for non-power users. If you think about sales loft or super sophisticated for smart people who really want to like, like outreach.
49:17
Brett Queener: No, just tell me what you want to do and I will do what you want to do. You want to do simple things a product, a simple things. You want to get a little smart and even. And the great thing is, an AI product will be like, hey, you’re doing this, this, this, hey, do you want to try this business?
49:31
Brett Queener: And we’ll do it for you. Like, so this is all going to break down? Yeah. What’s very interesting is what you’re seeing in AI companies is plg motions for large multi hundred thousand dollar sales.
49:42
Max Altschuler: And is that is that because they’re using, you know, PhDs basically or know this.
49:48
Brett Queener: That’s not Plg. Well they’re that’s person led growth. That’s your pick. That person says no, this is the you get into an Or somebody starts using it. It’s like, wow, this is really good.
49:58
Max Altschuler: So you’re saying those are the is this is where just spreads like, well, it spreads like wildfire.
50:02
Brett Queener: Right. And they go, okay, let’s go do that. And then there’s the other Plg is FTE personal LED growth. Yeah. Which look, I think what’s happening there, you and I think it’s more a, it’s a phenomenon of the last two years and that there are holes or gaps in what the model providers provided, and there was holes and gaps of what people wanted to do.
50:26
Brett Queener: And so if you could go in there and you could understand the problem and you could assemble, if you will, in ontology layer that worked for the company and found a use case, then you could rip for me. Whether right or wrong, I’m an intentional. I’ve always been intentional. That doesn’t reflect intentionality in my mind. But, it’s worked for some firms, right?
50:48
Brett Queener: So that’s how I think about with go to Market is changing. And I think the interesting thing is that, like my first job at Salesforce was I was first within call it then was Reebok’s. Yeah. I was hired to be like all right well what’s this model is to find this SaaS model and and you know Brett what where do we hire the next 100 people and and go to market.
51:08
Brett Queener: What do we go do. What segment. How do you know all of that. And that business group where I had like systems sales enablement, product marketing, whatever, like, you know, at the end of the quarter, I would like yell at the RFPs. It was like some that yell at me back like some episode of you. Good man. You can’t handle the truth.
51:24
Brett Queener: Like you’re getting your ass kicked right? What I’m seeing now is functional leaders instead of, like, you know, do interviews. Like, we’ll see a process guy. Is he a system guy? Is you do a forecasted or. No, no, he’s a good sales or deal guy. I don’t think you’re a functional leader and go to market unless you’re building.
51:42
Brett Queener: We have a guy for Salesforce. It was super success. Like General Garcia. We just put into one of our companies. James Kickass gave the intro into octave. He’s been building on day three. He’s just in their building. He’s taken octave. It’s taken clay, etc. and he’s just building because how are you going to go run the org and who you need to hire and understand where I want humans and where I’m going to use agents unless you’re building.
52:07
Brett Queener: Yeah. So I think the world of like the old fashioned, really nice haired, you know, smooth talker, smooth talker. Yeah. Really good manicure. Pedicure. Yeah. Class ring has that go to story.
52:20
Max Altschuler: Yeah. I think phase out of that.
52:22
Brett Queener: Time for them to like, just enjoy the enjoy. They had a great run. Yeah. Joy element.
52:27
Max Altschuler: Awesome. Last question for you then what happens to VC in this kind of new era?
52:34
Brett Queener: Well, look, I think it’s, I think money. Look, I think it’s something I think it’s something it’s really interesting. Look, I think VC goes through revolutions. Yeah, right. You know, the last 15 to 20 years, we invest the application level. We’re not infrastructure investors, hard core data centers, etc., you know, and and to some extent there has been sort of a model SAS model.
52:54
Brett Queener: We’ve come up with metrics, the magic number, you know, the cash burn that are detrimental into it, that is no longer the way software works. We need to revisit what are we investing and how much capital is required. You know, we were raising this fund 18 months ago, started raising the fund. And I put out a piece that said that 75% of customer facing software applications would disappear and 50% of applications software categories would completely go away.
53:24
Brett Queener: Now, we remember this because the thesis was we were headed that curve a little bit and we would pick, so we think how big changes? It’s been weird, right? If you look at VC right now, like 80 to 90% of Arc has been raised by like six funds. And to some extent they were either like in anthropic or in open air, etc..
53:46
Max Altschuler: Right. Andreessen Lightspeed right index. Yes. Yeah.
53:49
Brett Queener: All right. And they have a ton of money. Right. They make a lot of money on fees. I’m not saying they’re not good investors, but for them they need to invest those dollars. Right. You know, we’re a seed stage investor. We make our money off of Kerry. You have a lot of funds early fund one pre-seed people.
54:10
Brett Queener: These aren’t people that are, like, putting their kids through college. Being a venture capitalist, it’s only, Kerry and that Kerry 20 years ago used to be at Salesforce. Siebel went public at 40 billion revenue. I think Salesforce was like 100 would have been earlier. But we said something about the Dalai Lama and we need to we need to wait a year.
54:27
Brett Queener: Yeah. Now they’re not going public until like multi-billion dollars. Right. And so unless you’re selling secondary along the way it’s a long thing.
54:35
Max Altschuler: So we had Bill bench on and yeah he said Marketo I think was like 82 million. Yeah. At that. Right. That was in the 20 tens. Right. I mean how fast has changed.
54:44
Brett Queener: So and so you got to do this for the love of the game. Yeah. Right. I think what is interesting is I suspect that we’ll see more investments in what I call non consensus bets because like if everything becomes easy to build software then what are you investing in other than a phenomenal founder a judgment that’s good actually there’s still that it’s hard to identify that at the early stage it’s easier to identify.
55:13
Brett Queener: Series ABC. And so I think you’re going to look for stuff that’s quite hard. And remember what venture capital came from, right. The regional venture capitalist were the people that funded the ships that left Portugal and Spain for the New World to come back with riches, but most of those ships were lost at sea, but one came back the turbo jacket economy for like ten years.
55:35
Brett Queener: You ever go to, like, Portugal or Amsterdam and you’re like, well, why are these towns here? Like, they put this in a lot of ships and you have to be ready for things to fit. Yeah. Which is, you know, you’re probably the same as I am, which is an operator. We’re trained that nothing could fail. We know our cod the day we fix stuff.
55:53
Brett Queener: And the challenge venture as a former operator is just understanding that, like, if you’re investing in the right things, right where it’s the alpha of the one deal. Yeah, seven out of ten should die.
56:05
Max Altschuler: Yeah.
56:07
Brett Queener: So anyways, we’re in the middle of forming our thesis around. We’re investing in, you know, we’ve done a lot of vertical we’ve done, which has been very helpful to us. It’s very defensible. And they AI helps accelerate because the interesting thing about vertical companies versus horizontal, which is customers are much more willing to give you all of their workflow and not only their workflow, but if it’s an interconnected system where there’s like a if there’s like there’s a multi-tier supply chain or demand chain, and if you’ve built this ontology system across those things and you’ve given it meaning, and now somebody gives you cloud code, oh, how you can deliver amazing stuff.
56:43
Brett Queener: And so a lot of really exciting stuff is the nonspecific gated buyer. Yeah, right. We have a lot of companies where they’re very successful selling software to buyers who have never used software before because it makes them more successful. Yeah. So like we’re an investor in a company called super. Yeah, that’s one of the rocket ships. And personal injury law.
57:02
Brett Queener: These people did not use software before.
57:04
Max Altschuler: And now they hit one button. Well, it’s.
57:07
Brett Queener: Not one button. But if you think about if I’m a Pi firm, think about this I used to there’s a whole franchise where I outsource half of my cases, where I sell my cases that I can’t handle.
57:17
Max Altschuler: Yeah.
57:18
Brett Queener: They don’t do that anymore. Yeah. And then too, I get paid on the outcome of the verdict. And if I could basically make sense of every single artifact or document that matters, understands the way in which I like to practice law so I can process more cases and I can generate much more revenue.
57:38
Max Altschuler: But do you think a company like that needs less money? Over time? They hire less people because they’re using their own.
57:44
Brett Queener: Who? The law firm. No one can argue right now, given we’re going for a genetic less because I think the reality is, is that a bunch of the AI companies are working right now how to invest a bunch of people and infrastructure to fill in the gaps where the the bottles part. So that goes away. You don’t need as much human toilet.
58:02
Brett Queener: Yeah. To you definitely as a percentage of what SAS people would be the number of people you need in the organization agents versus human changes. We need less people in these startups. That being said, I said this two years ago, I think we can get back to winner take all. So the question is, what man of money are you willing to spend to create missionaries, either working at your company, sir, because like, I just I’m in their slack feed to let me know, hey, this guy, one of the raps, drove 65 miles outside of downtown Baton Rouge to the regional PR firm that handles the PR on the air.
58:40
Brett Queener: He dropped off donuts, built a relationship with them, and that’s now an $80,000 customer.
58:45
Max Altschuler: And did that in Salt Lake City once, right? For average shit. Right.
58:48
Brett Queener: So I don’t know what I do know though, in running these companies I’ll give you a back running. You probably I’m like, God, I should go back to build or run. It’s a lot pure because you used to spend time. I spend my time. I had space at AVP, work for the BP’s work director, and there was different functions.
59:07
Brett Queener: I felt like I had to go like, cover Undercover Boss to figure out what was actually going on. Yeah. And I would have meetings not to have meetings, but to look at people to understand if they were aligned or not. Do you actually wake up each day and my version of Claude Button, tell me what’s going on, who’s not working together, what’s going on?
59:23
Brett Queener: Give them advice, Kevin got it’s etc. like there’s no mysteries.
59:28
Max Altschuler: Yeah.
59:29
Brett Queener: Which is super exciting. The hope the only downtime is. I’m not sure when you stop. Right. Because if, you know, like, if you could be, you know, we still need humans. Still need unlike agents, humans still need downtime. Yeah. And that’s why you and I are in Santa Barbara. Yeah.
59:44
Max Altschuler: Well, thank you so much for coming on here. This is amazing. Right. That was another fantastic episode of the VC series on the GTM now podcast. Head over to Apple, Spotify or YouTube and give us a like and subscribe and we’ll see you on the next one.
