(686) E107: Scaling ClickUp to 10M+ Users with COO Gaurav Agarwal - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4IxnlsNHhE

Transcript: (00:01) [Music] Welcome to Topline, the podcast for the best founders, operators, and investors in B2B tech. Every week, AJ Bruno, Asad Zaman, and me, Sam Jacobs, will break down what's important for you to know to be the most well-informed professionals in the market. [Music] This episode is brought to you by Atio, the AI native CRM built for the next era of companies. (00:34) Connect your email and Atio instantly builds your CRM right before your eyes with every company, every contact, and every interaction you've ever had, enriched and organized. With ATIO, you can build AI powered automations and use its research agents to tackle complex operational processes like finding key decision makers and triaging incoming leads. (00:56) Join industry leaders like FlatFile, Replicate, Modal, and more. Just head to atio.com/topline and you'll get 15% off your first year. That's atio.com/topline for 15% off your first year. Now, back to the show. Hey everybody. Uh, welcome to Topline. I believe 106 or 107. Assad will correct me. Is it 106? Let's go. 107. (01:25) Uh, 107 episodes. That's over two years with uh these uh these people. But today we've got a great guest uh that's going to elevate the conversation. Gav Agarwal who is the CEO of ClickUp. Uh, Pavilion is a huge ClickUp customer. I'm sure many people are listening that are ClickUp customers. Uh, Grav leads growth, marketing, product, revenue, sales, customer experience, and data. (01:52) He joined in 2022 as chief growth officer. Uh, under his leadership, ClickUp has scaled to over 10 million users, earned recognition on the Forbes Cloud 100 list. Prior to ClickUp, he held leadership roles at companies like Achieve, Molecule, and Unucial Business, and co-founded startups such as Vivify, and Medybeep. (02:11) He holds a bachelor's in industrial engineering from Karagpur and is based in San Francisco. Gav, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me, Sam. We're excited. Very young for a man who's done all those things. Ages just but a number indeed. Well, before we were started recording, Grav, you were talking about a little bit about your background and I I thought it was that's the reason I clicked record because I think it's useful to hear your perspective on so walk us through it one more time. (02:40) You started in banking but you moved into startup world and tell us what you learned over that transition. So I I'll maybe go a step even before that. I what industrial engineering for people who don't know is a course all about optimization where you're constantly trying to make datadriven decisions which route should airlines take how should Amazon distribute its parcels it's all about optimizing a certain system so I went to banking I was working on emerging uh emerging markets trading desk I was doing some quantitative stuff on the desk which is (03:13) perhaps the best job I've ever had the most high pressure you can ever feel like imagine You're responsible for assets worth nine figures that's sitting in your books and you have to maximize ROI on that and and and there's no margin for error because it shows up in your number. That's as raw as it can get, right? So did that but always wanted to build businesses, moved to e-commerce, move did some hardware, did some fintech, always held revenue leadership roles in those in those machines. And I I like to refer to (03:46) revenue as a machine all the time. revenue as a product. So you'll see me saying that over and over again. These businesses are natively low margin. There's a KPI we used to track. We used to call that contribution margin which I'm surprised a lot of people don't know. But imagine when you're selling something that is not a differentiated product. (04:06) You don't have too many modes. Distribution is a moat and you fight for every point in margin. When you sharpen your axe in an environment like that, you tend to think of revenue as a product. So then I was hired at ClickUp to build our self-s serve machine. Self-s serve is a massive amount of a revenue. (04:25) Think of that as a PLG revenue machine. I did something right. The business boommed. The business is continuing to grow in in a very short amount of time. We have continued to increase our growth. Our growth is mid double digits. We have reduced our CAC by 3x. Today we were a profitable company in January. So we're doing really well. (04:46) But over time my role has expanded and I've taken on all of the other GTM teams as well. So today I'm responsible for all things that drive revenue and also data because I think data is the powerhouse of all revenue. Data powers if revenue is a product, data is the lifeline. So that's how I see uh that's a brief intro about me and that's how I see my role at ClickUp. (05:08) It's powering revenue. And I was telling this to Sam that when I moved when I moved into SAS, I was just blown away by how marginri the environment has been. And it's what they say, right? When you grow up in abundance, you don't realize your own privilege. Mhm. Versus when you have to starve for every point in margin, you you end up operating at a level that I did not see in SAS. (05:34) And Sam, I resonate with all of the stuff you talk about in LinkedIn. And I do that deeply because I feel like the world is changing now. And and I I mean this across all teams in SAS, across marketing, across sales, across post sales. And the difference is if you meet the greatest of the great in SAS, you would actually find that they do operate like a wartime leader. (05:59) They're very vigilant of their margins. They're very cutthroat. But that is not the most common thing I see in SAS. And thankfully at ClickUp we've been able to change that and that that's really how we've grown so far so efficiently. Can you can you uh I'm just very interested in the growth story if that's okay. Um because I was I was thinking I was literally thinking about this recently because we are moving our OKR management to ClickUp and I go into ClickUp and it's a very complicated product. (06:32) You know there's a lot going on. Yes. And I think about project management tools and I think the barrier to change the the getting people to adopt a new project management tool is akin to getting them to adopt a new way of thinking and a new way of organizing their lives. How on earth have you been able to grow so quickly while presenting? Because again I think project management on the one hand is I'm sure people have a big problem with whatever jurro or lassian or whatever but I think getting people to adopt a new system which is again um (07:05) change management across the organization is very difficult. So what what were the secrets to the growth like what were some of the big decisions that you made based on data that enabled the massive growth that we've seen over the last couple of years? I mean that's a great question Sam. I'll try to answer this. (07:23) I I don't think we fully cracked it. That's that's my candid response. I think it comes down to a few things. People when I've I've operated in the early stage and late stage startup space for a while now and there's this saying that goes around in venture community circles that a massive TAM is one of the most important things for a VC investable business. (07:48) So I think our TAM is so big Sam that there's always people who are power users who are mostly the operations people on on your team. It could be a marketing team. It could be your chief of staff. It could be a sales team. They're constantly trying to build products or build frameworks to solve their operational problems. (08:06) ClickUp speaks to them and they are the ones who bring ClickUp into their company, set it up the way the company should work, the team should work. And this is why what you'll also find is most of collaborative productivity SAS is bottoms up because you it's an extremely hard thing to push tops down and even if you push tops down you don't get the engagement but it's something that spreads like fire bottoms up. (08:36) Goro um on that is ClickUp a simpler product for an operational person who is choosing something to bring into the organization to help them with the operational burden of this business. Is ClickUp in the competitive environment a simpler product or a more comprehensive product? What's the reason why they pick ClickUp over Asana versus Monday versus this versus that? It's the most comprehensive product. (09:00) So I I'll I'll it's it's the most comprehensive product and it's the most flexible product. These are the two reasons why ClickUp wins because we can adjust to any team's workflow. Case in point, go to G2 crowd. We are the number one bug tracking software. We are the number four CRM. If so like our community has done amazing things with us that we don't even like, oh wow, every day you wake up and you're like, oh someone is managing their avocado farm on ClickUp. (09:28) I'm like okay wow great I didn't know that someone is managing their fleet operations in ClickUp. So we are we are almost too flexible that creates the challenge that Sam has been mentioning but we are the most comprehensive product too. What I mean by that is and and I think in the world of AI this becomes an extremely powerful mode. (09:47) So imagine if this was a meeting with my ClickUp meeting note taker on it'll take action items it'll record notes then it'll take action items create those tasks in ClickUp. If those tasks have an ideation component, AI will go and ideate, create a whiteboard. That whiteboard will then be sent to my team in chat and then the team will act on it and will close that task and then you'll get an email that that task was completed. (10:13) So, ClickUp has built the most amount of surface area in SAS you can think of. You can you can use ClickUp. ClickUp has docs, tasks, lists, whiteboards, chat or chat is actually at par even ahead of Slack. uh clips, meetings. So you can think of any product that's out there that you're using in collab outside of spreadsheet. That's something we'll be building. (10:35) But outside of that, we pretty much built every work surface out there. And the beauty is AI can seamlessly take your data from one to the other. Yeah. Today my team if they want to kick off a project, they'll jump on a call, they'll discuss ideas, the meeting noteaker will then convert that into brief. (10:52) Brief will be converted. AI will then convert that brief into uh emails, landing pages. All of that stuff happens because AI can seamlessly take data from one one AI takes down the complexity of using u the product and probably over time even the complexity of setting it up. I want to go back to one thing you mentioned about the growth. (11:14) I think the the growth is impressive undoubtedly. Um but there are a lot of companies in the world that grow quickly. They have great products, but there's something I think that's even more impressive about ClickUp, which is your CAC. Your CAT's been coming down. And so I want to ask you a question and get your thoughts on this. CAC CAC versus LTV or CAC and LTV and then CAC payback. (11:37) If you look at a business from 0 to 10 million, another business from 10 million to 100 million, and then a business from a 100 million to a billion, what should be happening to those three numbers? because we sometimes feel that cash should go up over time. Uh the pay the payback will stay rough. Uh it doesn't ne we don't see a lot of companies where paybacks decreasing but LTV might increase. (11:59) What do you think happens to those three metrics as companies go through those three stages? I mean in the first stage really in that 0 to 10 million stage you should be efficient because you're doing things that are you're plucking the lowhanging fruits. So your CAC, your payback, your LTV to pay back, whatever that is, should be efficient, more efficient than it would be because now when you when you raise money, you got to 10 million. (12:28) You raised some money and you got to 10 million through pure hustle, right? So there were no systematic things in place. Maybe it's 5 million. The only question that though, hold on. I think the one piece to that or just question on that is that I mean definitely depends on your your contract values. (12:43) I mean you mentioned productled growth and being a very PLG first to get to 10 million that's thousand potentially thousands of customers that you would need to get and obviously as a founder sales motion yes your CAC potentially is going to be lower in an enterprise motion but I I would argue that your brand and your product marketing need to be like first and foremost positioning wise which has kind of the opposite effect on CAC at at start with right is that or do you see it differently even at that stage like let's say I'm starting a business today. (13:15) This is the best product marketers are actually the CEOs themselves. I've seen this over and over again. Of course, when you have like 10 reps, you don't need as much enablement. These reps are what you might call chefs. They love to cook up new stuff versus line cooks who need to be told exactly what to be do done. (13:36) You don't need a ton of product marketing. One product marketer. When you are a small team, each person carries their weight and some more, right? But it's just startup physics. You start throwing bodies. After a certain stage, I'm not saying it's 10 million. It could be 5 million as well. At at some stage, you feel like now I can hit the gas pedal. (13:54) So, what do you do? You throw bodies at the problem. And you have to, right? In a PLG motion, you throw dollars in advertising, and you don't necessarily understand what advertising is good or bad. In sales motion, you throw bodies at hiring more reps. When the truth is, you haven't really nailed your sales motion as a repeatable process. (14:13) And then what happens? More sales people, you need more enablement people, you need more leadership, you need success. So now suddenly you realize that your system is not as leveraged as it was before. Something that I track a lot is variable cost to fixed cost ratio. What I mean by that is a seller is a variable cost. (14:29) The cost I incur to support that seller is a fixed cost. I love that. So what you realize now is the system is getting bloated and you don't realize why but you've just pumping a lot of people. What happens now is uh with a lot of people comes mediocrity. Any the more the more you try to scale a system the system would regress in performance. (14:50) That's the start of physics as you might call it. So now after 10 million you enter this range where you're in no man's land. You kind of know what works but you're having difficulty scaling it. You think money is the way to solve it, so you throw money at it. At this point, as you scale, your low hang and also your lowhanging fruit begins to evaporate. (15:10) The 10 people you could have hit up and five of them bought your product no longer exist. So now your tag begins to go up. But this is the time you need to build that culture of intellectual honesty as we call it. It's a principle in ClickUp where can we disassociate ourselves like I use this with my exec staff all the time. (15:31) I'll get them in a room and I'm like I'm not talking to the operators in you. I'm talking to the shareholders in you. So forget that you work in ClickUp. You have all retired. You have ClickUp stock. Now we need to objectively look at the situation and now you what you do is you put everything on the table. What is fat? What is muscle? Start optimizing cutting mediocrity. (15:54) The good thing is you've acred a lot of data now because you have taken a lot of bets. You have splurged a bit. So what you do now is you start shaping it, sculpting it and that's how you identify what is working at the core and now you keep scaling that as a repeatable motion. So fair to say that like past 100 million like once you get to that 100 million stage you have enough data you you have enough of an eye on what's working and you can start introducing these efficiencies where your cat starts going down your payback can come down as well. I guess the the (16:26) question many will have about that is there's that but at the same time you're now going in further into your TAM you know you were selling into SAS now you're selling into constru roofing companies or whatever you're doing right like you're selling into these more tougher to sell into markets and so there's this counter pressure and you guys have been able to negate that counter pressure and reduce your CAC 3x like 3x reduction in CAC is pretty spectacular right you don't I've not spoken I don't Yeah, I think that the (16:56) Well, tell me if I'm wrong, Gorav, but I don't think the market is not going to the market to Assa's point, the market will increase CAC as you try to find new people that haven't used the product before. The CAC is going to come down either through the discovery of new channels or through the interconnectedness of the systems like probably CAC came down by a third because you switched from salesled to productled or something like like there was some transition that you made in terms of what the initial touch point (17:23) was and how you moved them into the ecosystem. Is that how you No. So I would say you put it very well Sam the second law of startup physics right CAC would always go up. That's just the nature and you have to continuously you have to cut fat because you have to the the name of the game is you have to test cut fat and scale what works and what works will always tap out. (17:48) There's law of diminishing returns that always kicks in. So in the we got it down to 3x and a lot of that Sam was just cutting fat and simplifying our processes because a lot cutting fat as in cutting unproductive sellers for example not unproductive sellers as much as unproductive media spend then not growing our sales team in a very wacky way but but allowing matching up our PLG and SLG machine in a way that our sellers are always fed. (18:18) then simplifying our sales process, you don't need a customer to talk to 10 people to get to the same outcome. So, one of the things I learned in in my growth days, people talk about multi-touch attribution a lot and now you're playing the credit game. I don't care about Netflix was the one company that said, "We don't care about MTA. (18:39) We don't care about multi-touch attribution. We care about incrementality." Just because you saw like imagine 10 years ago, right? you were just bombarded with display ads everywhere and these display ad companies would claim a lot of credit and they'll be like we were the last one we were the first one and then we should give us credit and Netflix is like nope everything will be measured as an experiment as much as possible and experiment doesn't mean you have to be fully precise it could be a directional experiment it could be a high medium low (19:04) kind of a situation but Netflix flipped the game into modern growth mechanics by saying that we only care about incrementality we will put the money wherever we see incremental returns. I'm taking a similar approach with ClickUp where across the entire we call it PLGTM PLGTM or every investment we try and attribute incrementality to it. (19:31) And we use an incremental lens to then cut the fat, find what's working and do more of that. And then we keep about 25% of our resources constantly experimenting for new grounds. Interesting. like we have to break into new channels, new mechanics. Would you say that would you say that incrementality is the approach that has gotten you to a point where you believe that this rule of SAS that CAT will just go up over time might not be as true as we all think it is? Like do you believe it's actually not a real principle? No, I think it's a real principle. CAC will (20:06) always go up over time, but you will have to find efficiencies and you will have to find newer avenues to grow. Got it. What are your favorite channels right now? I mean, so the good thing is we have a PLG machine where we deploy a lot of advertising capital. Sam, the goal is to scale that. (20:24) Like I see ClickUp as a company that can scale up to a billion dollars in advertising spend in the next five years, per year. And where are you spending on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit? We spend on all of these channels. We also spend on TV. We spend on out of home, YouTube. The the beauty is all channels. It's it's it's knowing how much to spend in each of these channels in a measurable way. (20:46) Did ClickUp have a a Super Bowl ad this year? Super Bowl. We had one. We had one two years ago. Not It was before me. They also had a Asia. They also had a rap album. Yes. that they released that got a million downloads I think on Spotify which is quite that's got to be in the in the brand bucket not in the demand genen bucket definitely in the brand bucket we also have I don't know if you guys have seen but we we call them HR guys we go viral on social almost every other day we get 200 million impressions on organic social (21:18) just making funny videos are you a B2B tech CRO VP of sales or VP of revenue operations join over 200 of your peers at CRO Summit 2025, a one-day executive onlyly event designed to help you tackle the challenges of today and position you for growth tomorrow. Hosted at the Denver Art Museum, this summit combines cutting edge insights and actionable strategies. (21:43) Learn from industry pioneers covering all aspects of sales and revenue growth into 2026 with sessions from Andrea Kol of Help Scout, Guy Rubin of Esta, Wendy Sturgis of Cleverbridge, and more. Visit joinpavilion.com/cro-summit to secure your spot today. I want to click into this brand part because okay so there's this huge debate that's happening in the world of SAS where you have people that have designated themselves as brand marketers that are very frustrated with operators for with CEOs and founders specifically and their frustration is that you have (22:16) turned us into these pipeline generating machines. We're measured everything has to be optimized. We have all these targets and what we don't have is the ability to make these big bold brand bets that we can't measure and that won't pay off in the near term. You've got to believe. You've got to have this belief that one day it will pay off and it'll be the reason we win. (22:37) But I can't tell you when and I can't measure it for you and you just got to believe. And there's this frustration that's boiling up right now. And there's some other lens elements of this frustration, but this is the fundamental aspect to it. And you guys have invested a ton in brand. But then you also believe in incrementality and in measurement and all of these things. (22:58) How do you view brand uh investments? If are you in the bucket of I sp do all this stuff stuff that I can measure and then I just throw money at brand and fingers crossed hope it works out or is there a different way that you guys do it? This is a great question and I laugh at this because I feel like it's let let's say I'll be more productive and constructive in this conversation. (23:25) I think I see too I think good executives know how to tread that. All marketing that you do is brand marketing. All GTM that you do I'll replace it. Even a sales conversation is an opportunity to build a brand. Interesting. and and all GTM work that you do is revenue driving and that's the only way to look at it. People try to bucket the these in black and white and often times that's because you will have to take a more nuanced approach especially if you want to win the CEO over and CFO over especially the CFO you can't go and say at some point (23:57) willy-nilly something will happen what's their famous saying I know half of my marketing works I just don't know which one and I would extend that to some of the GTM stuff as well like I know half of the stuff that my sellers do work but I'm not able to pinpoint and great people know so in a lot of different way like I see my role as this may sound arbitrary but I'll still share it. (24:19) It's like seeking truth all the time and the more you do the more the more waste would accumulate. So then you need to go seek truth and figure out how to triage what's happening. Coming to your question directly brand marketing it comes down to how much investment are you making for us brand marketing is defined as good solid organic marketing. (24:40) It's less than a couple of points of my total SNM budget. Now if I was going to say let's spend 100 million on out of home advertising then I would be so it comes down to like the level of investment you make decides how much measurement you want to put in place. If I'm going to spend a few hundred,000 on an SNM budget that is that is n 8 figures like touching n figures then yeah go spend it because I need you to create chatter and how do you know that? You know that because you can still track leading KPIs and you can then tie it up with anecdotes. But if (25:18) that investment started becoming a six a seven figure investment then in that case I would want deeper measurement in place because now this has a material impact to my payback. This has a material impact to CAC. So if I was doing an out of home I would 100% run that channel as a performance channel. What I mean by that is I'll put the measurement in place so I can I can track how much does my organic traffic lift or organic signups lift or organic lead volumes lift after 3 months, 6 months, 9 months. There are ways in (25:49) which you can test all of this. Consumer brands spend billions of dollars building brand. You can't assume that they don't know the ROI of those spend and and there it's always a cat and mouse game, but there are enough measurement mechanics in place that allow you to estimate is this a good decision or a bad decision. (26:09) Even if you That's a really like important point. People forget that most of consumer marketing is branding and that there's a lot of measurement that happens there. like you pre this PNG is not spending billions of dollars fingers crossed hoping things work out like they're measuring leading indicators they're looking at ROI like they're not thinking three years later we'll find out they're figuring out along the way is this working do we do more do we do less like CPG specifically is extremely measured when it comes to how this work (26:39) so I do agree that a lot of people become so shortsighted on just leads I think a better reframing of this is top of the funnel, GTM activities, midfunnel, bottom of the funnel. Where are you investing how many resources? You still need to measure it. Just that you have to assume that investments that you make at the top of the funnel will have a longer time to maturity. (27:02) Investments that you make at the bottom of the funnel will have a quicker time to maturity. And good operators know how to directionally blend all of these to manage a portfolio where you can manage we can you can manage top of the funnel, bottom of the funnel and midfunnel and ensure that your funnel is constantly expanding versus becoming a diamond or becoming like shrinking at the top. (27:28) You don't want that. I have this joke, right? If you let marketing or growth to CMO to CFOs, they'll only spend in branded search. M that's the only thing they'll do or they won't hire any SDR BDRs. Let's keep the sellers we have they'll harvest the demand that we get and it'll be super productive. But that's where a nuance marketer comes in and like yes we need to expand our funnel and messaging has an extremely important role to play in expanding the funnel but you also can't come and say I'll expand the funnel through some (27:56) Super Bowl ad like what's the how are you measuring the success of that Super Bowl ad? I think the uh to your point Aid I think the problem as that marketers have is just the lack of fluency in in the conversation like you can make you can have it's like Gorab is saying you can have brand investments and you can focus on you know traditional marketing activities but you have to contextualize it against the fact that you are a capital allocator and you are managing a portfolio of investments and you just have to say (28:26) this is and I think that skill has evolved so much over the last 5 to 10 years that there's just a lot of people that are frustrated that they have to develop it. I actually think that most in most functions the majority of people in those functions are horrible at their jobs. (28:43) I think the really good ones sit at like 10% of the professionals out there across every function. And so that means 90% of people are like meh and within that probably 50 60% of people are really really bad at their jobs. And I think marketing is unique where that 90% still has loud voices. So I think the chatter that we hear is incomp from a lot of incompetent people that have loud mics that go around. (29:05) Well, we've got to the hot this is the hot take portion is right. Like it's people that you would not really trust to market for your business that know how to gain attention online. All those people live in RevOps. They're all RevOps people. All RevOps leaders. You wouldn't trust the Mary Poppins of marketing. That's it, right? Like you wouldn't. (29:26) But Mary Poppins has a great mic. And so now that defines the conversation, but that's not really the conversation. The very good ones are not talking about what Mary Poppins is talking about. So I I run this I have I have someone on my team. He's extremely extremely good at creative, but he struggles with ops. And he comes to me and like, "God, why don't you come to me with big grand ideas? I'd love to bring them to life. (29:45) " And I'm like, "I love you as a friend. You should come at my house. Stay at my house. I I can trust you with my family. I can trust you with my cats. I won't trust you with my life savings. If I can't trust you with my life savings to multiply that, how can I trust you with the company budget? Now, thankfully, he's in a creative role, so he's very happy. (30:06) So, I take that lens often. It goes back to like people you bring in, you should ask yourself the question, will I give this person all the savings I've accumulated and expect this person can go? That's such a good question. I love that. I'm hiring this marketer. Would I trust them with my RSPS? I wouldn't. (30:22) Then why am I hiring them as a marketer? Like I think that's really good. It's the second part that I think no one is good at everything. That's just the reality. But you need people who are self-aware about what are they really good at? What is it that they want to get good at and what do they suck at? The problem is when when people have POVs on things that they don't fully understand and then that catches up. That's an interesting one. (30:49) I I self-awareness a lot. I can't coach anyone. I can coach anyone who's hardworking and is self-aware and of course has has that ceiling but self-awareness is the biggest thing where I see a lot of revenue leaders across like again not debating not verifying that number 90% is accurate or not but is lacking and I think the other thing that has happened like when I hire execs and I hire leaders everyone does an ops exercise I don't know how it happened because I grew up in banking I had to crunch my own numbers because I'm making (31:21) these bets I'm not going to do what an analyst an analyst is just telling me. Yeah. How many financial decisions do you just make because your friend told you to do that or someone data driven? You you try to think for yourself. I don't know where the separation happened but every leader has an ops function and they think that the ops function is the one that's going to tell us what to do and we'll do what's needed. (31:43) I'm like no like pull your own report. At ClickUp I we we all including me I spend five hours in Tableau every week. Why? Because when you go deep into that operational machine when you try to visualize what's happening, yes, new ideas come to you. You build an instinct like instinct is not built by watching some telling by having someone else. (32:03) It's like the difference between wisdom and knowledge. You can chat GP can give you knowledge but wisdom comes when you go deep in your machine every day. I mean, wisdom wisdom comes from uh knowing when chat GPT is completely making it up and being able I I just want to agree strongly with what you're saying because I run into executives sometimes that can't conceptualize the mechanics of the business. (32:27) And so we're in a board meeting and the the they think that the question being asked is an opinion question and it's a fact question. Why did this happen? Well, it's sort of these three things. Nope. Punches. Story time. I think I think Well, this this actually goes to my question for Guav because you recently took over the sales team, right? This was a pretty about one and about one and a half year now, close to two years. (32:54) So, you you have this foundational systems operation thinking, right, which I I absolutely love. I actually don't carry that gene as well. I have a ton of people on my team that do and make up for it. And that's I just know that about myself. And you're self-aware, AJ. I think that's the big part. If you were not self-aware and you would claim to have it but not have it, that's when the system is now going into dark places. (33:17) But but I wanted to just call that out. Sorry I interrupted. Oh, I appreciate that cuz a lot of I think I think you're right. A lot of CE CEOs are just like, "Oh, yes, I'm very operator operations driven." And I think as long as you are self-aware and you rely on people on your team to give you that feedback and you can you can cross you can check these you can make sure there's a checks and balances on this but curious because I am a sales leader and I think the sales piece of it is really interesting when you bring this forward because like (33:43) sales leaders everyone thinks they're money driven and and a lot of times it is about their incentives but when you're bringing them into this like ops background I I'm curious as to if there were any cultural shifts that you had to be aware of and like had to like navigate because of just like the the sales brain that is activated in this. (34:03) So this is interesting. I took over sales about one and a half two years ago and then I'm I'm just as I I try to just consume a lot I I learned I try to learn from other people and try to break down what they did in first principles and then see what can I apply to my business or not. (34:22) Interestingly, I think a lot of what sales has become is like we need our like it's it's just feel-good. People are motivated. People are inspired. Uh everyone should be success. I I think all of that is true. But when I and that's what I I think there's a lot of fluff, but then when I talk to the greatest of the greats, man, they were beasts like and they are some most of them are retired. (34:46) Most of them have had successful outcomes and you see the difference. like there's a leader who has be like I don't know if I should do this. I don't know how my reps would respond. I need to figure out a way to like make it nice for them versus and and then they're not so much in the data. They're trying to lead with like there's not a ton of top down inspection. (35:04) There's not a ton of standard standardization of operating processes. There's a lot more like people will just go do what they do and those people are stuck at 40 50 sellers. Then you go talk to people who have built who have who have built sales teams that goes into hundreds and thousands of sellers and you and machines. (35:23) They are machines and like they're beasts and I used to think that I'm a beast coming from that banking high intensity environment and you look at them and they know exactly what's happening. There's this extreme accountability on on at the seller level. One of the most legendary CRO that I've heard about. I won't take his name but repeat success. (35:40) He just had one of the biggest exits to Google as well. His team was known every seller who did not meet their activity targets, they had to report Dollal Dolly uh from App Dynamics. Yes. And and you and you and I bet you get 10 random sales leaders today and say, "I want your reps Yeah. to take that operational approach. (36:00) " A lot of that will not be able to Why? Because I think it's not just a sales problem. I think it has become a problem everywhere. leaders care a lot more about being liked versus being respected. And he's from the John McMahon school of thought like he's he's that lineage. So John McMahon to him and then he did App Dynamics took it to where he did Zcaler then then did Whiz. (36:21) He's just been a beast. All three of the companies where he was the CRO had multi-billion dollar exits or had multi-billion dollar market caps. Genuine beast. Probably the best in the world right now. And I think I have not met him but I've worked with his lieutenants a lot and you learn that he built it again he's a beast that's the right way to define it and I think what has happened in modern leadership is it's become a lot more about being liked versus being respected. (36:47) The thing is it's very easy to be liked. It's extremely hard to raise the bar on someone because it's painful in the short run. Like if I come to you and I say this podcast is bad. we need to figure out a way to like improve this podcast 10x and you I'm going to thrash the system a lot then it's painful and and but people need you need to get people through the hump to that to that final destination where it feels like wow this is so much better and if you when you look back a year and you don't laugh at yourself you're not moving fast (37:18) enough right so the problem is a lot of leaders care about being liked versus being respected but the real alpha is built in that respect bucket because top performers, the best of the best, want to be pulled into better versions of themselves versus being Molly cuddled into like, hey, you are happy where you are. (37:42) It and I think this happens a lot even with parenting that you see this like if it all goes back to like this psyche of we don't want people to feel inferior. We don't want them to feel like they're not adequate and I want them to love me and I want to build this nice family versus no, you're running a professional sports team. In the business context, this is the mecca of capitalism. You have to generate value. (38:00) Value demands pain because there's no pain. There's no success without pain. And it's not easy. I mean, let's uh where's the snipped snip that one? Value demands pain. Gorava, that's brilliant. AJ, a lot of this, you know, I resonate with what Gorov was talking about and I think a lot of this does come back to self-awareness and sometimes we meet people that are self-aware and you can tell. (38:28) Um, my question for you is you've coached hundreds of people over your career as our uh commercial leader AJ. Um, do you think self-awareness can be taught or is it just a natural thing? You either have it or you No, I think it's 100%. I mean I think there's some level of common sense and we learn by failures and we learn what our strengths are. (38:51) I think this is really important where we certainly as CEOs but operators themselves need coaches and need people to like really give them that that straightforward uh painful feedback in a way and that's how self-awareness really happens to to you need to be open to it and take a pause on it. (39:11) I think a lot of what I was talking about I can resonate with my previous like CRO jeans. We had 150 reps but activity like if you didn't hit your activity bonus it didn't unlock your commission. You literally had to to to hit your AJ would fire people if they came to the office at 8:05 for an 8 a.m. meeting. Um, good. I uh, yeah, that's the only way a ginger can be respected, I think, in the world is I had to I had to own that self-awareness where where I do think there's some level of I would say not to say disagreement, but maybe nuance is in (39:49) from a CEO standpoint and like looking at departments and different types of leaders. I've always thought like why can't we just quote our engineering team? They should just be doing And you know, ClickUp is actually really interesting in this. I remember reading an article three years ago about how much they just release release. (40:06) And when you have a massive TAM and you're building a call listening tool with a CRM, with a spreadsheet, you you have to be like just always thinking about it, which is really awesome. Like that's just uh so cool to to think about that story. I'm I thought about that. I'm like, man, that's awesome. But at the same time, I look at that from my own leadership style and how it's changed over time. (40:28) And someone today asked me, "AJ, what's your leadership style?" And it's such such an interesting question because there's no way I could answer that in a 30-minute call. It's like literally impossible. Like, well, what's your communication style and what's my communication style? And like, let's actually let's talk about that. (40:43) That's why I think that document that some leaders like to write on themselves, they hire somebody and they're like, "Here's the document on how I like to go about things." And I think it's a useless document because leaders like good leaders like the very best what they do is over the course of their career they create like a treasure chest of things they can pull from. (41:02) And so your leadership style is situational. You're adapting it to this moment I'm going to do this and in that moment I'm going to do that and I don't have the time to write you a 100page document on all the various scenarios that we might come across and what I might do over there. (41:18) So I find that document very well that's and that's why you think about like oh who are the best quote unquote leaders in the world and people come up with Steve Jobs now but anyone that worked for Steve Jobs was like that guy is an he sucks he was awful but the reality is they and I know someone personally that worked for Steve Jobs they made him a way better leader himself just by like really just being as blunt forceful with the the problem and the urgency behind the problem to create a bar that was way above outstanding. (41:46) And that's the area where it's this like I love what you're saying Gorov and I 100% agree with it and truly do believe that there's this like opportunity for especially today when remote work is so prevalent and uh there's so many startups that are just failing and challenged is to let's all like take a step back and look at our own leadership style. (42:08) Do we want to be respected? Do we want to create a family? Or do we want to win? And if we want to win, then we have to actually probably do things that are going to be painful, that are going to to challenge our short-term thinking. And that has you have to be okay with that. But not everyone's okay with that. You might want to switch the word respected with liked. Liked. Liked. (42:26) Sorry. Respect. He Yeah, Gorov said you want to be respected as well. Liked. We do. We want to be a family liked versus respected. Thank you. I feel like a lot of the leadership sty like you asked me what's my leadership style. I don't I would not have an answer for you. I I think the way I look at it is I just like to win and I like to win across multiple fronts which means I have to then depend on creating winning teams because that's the only way I can open up more fronts and win on more fronts. (42:55) So I want to maximize how many fronts I win at which means creating winning teams. And I the other thing that I've internalized is like I used to think everything is a process problem and now I think everything is people problem people problem yeah agree lot of like Steve Jobs I don't think he had this massive leadership st if you were not an A+ player you would you cannot work with Steve Jobs and succeed in his team so I think that's exactly to your point I I that is a lesson that I struggle to internalize and it become (43:28) and I think the valley specifically like being in San Francisco, being in the Bay Area internalizes that lesson better than any other geographical place and especially in a remote world. I I I want it's more true every day to me, Gorov, that you if you don't have the right people, then you're making mediocre decisions all the time when you and you're trading great decisions for mediocre decisions and you're trading great execution for mediocre execution. (43:57) But to your point, it's hard to really like to believe that sometimes and understand that like everything is about the quality of the people on the team. And you hear about, you know, open AI and every, you know, who's Andre Carpathy working for and how much money are we throwing at this person and how much money are we throwing at that person and you realize Silicon Valley understands this to the to the tea. (44:18) The rest of the world still struggles with it, I think. And I'll tell you a place where this backfires. Again, I'm the operational guy. So like hey we want to elevate how let's say a certain field team works what does what does my brain do you try to make everything trackable and you need to do this you need to do that and you realize there's no end to it and this is where then AJ what you said situational leadership comes in there are amazing sales leaders success leaders who can go to their team and say I need you to buy in into doing things (44:48) differently and I'm not going to add 10 operational guardrails to track everything that you do because at some point that does not scale But I either need you to be on on this or not and you can choose out. So one of the things I said right like greatness demands pain or value demands pain. It's also fully okay for people to say I'm not ready to sign up 5 years from now I may not sign up for that pain because I'm I have different priorities in life and I think it's okay. (45:17) But what usually ends up happening, Dorov, is that so there's I think with pain comes great leaders what I've noticed is that they build this endurance for friction. Like I look at my like I don't think I'm a great leader but I think coming up my tolerance for friction was a lot less than it is right now. Like right now I can tolerate 10 times more friction than I could 5 years ago. (45:37) And I think it increases over time if you are trying to do something really well. If you earnestly want to do something great, then you understand that it'll require tons of friction and you build the endurance for it. I think the problem happens where people say, I don't I don't want to sign up for this thing, but I don't want to sign out of the organization. I want to be here. (45:57) I want this job. I want to do this thing, but I also don't want these other things. And that's where the I think the challenges occur in organizations. That's where the inefficiencies and the slack comes into a business because you then you have people that are operating in a way that isn't going to lead to the win but now and they bring others down that whole department one step below everyone else. (46:18) It has an effect on their uh departments that collaborate with them etc etc. So there's a lot of that that you see in the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, one of the questions that our CEO has when he hires people is he asks about what's the hardest thing you've done you've had to go through in your life. (46:35) And the truth is work is work. If work is the hardest thing, if you feel like working at like like working at a high stress job is the hardest thing you'll ever do, then perhaps you've had you've not gone through like real hardships in life. I'm not I hate it. I hate it when people are like getting into college. (46:53) I'm like no, sorry. We interviewed somebody many years ago whose answer to that question was uh going for exchange to uh some European country and not knowing the language there exactly and I came out of that interview I was like guys you can't hire her and she had everything else was fantastic I was like you cannot hire her she cannot do this like it won't work and at the time I was I was more junior and so they ended up hiring her and it was a complete disaster because the job that we do is really really hard you have to tolerate pain for it and there (47:24) just wasn't that resiliency The other part is like ask that question and then ask for a second or third example like just keep pushing to see okay is that like a moment or is this a trend in their life. Yeah. Yeah. We do that. We I mean and that question has never let us down because the other thing is a question like that I mean again also tells you about a person's ability to go deep and and introspect and again like that that central theme then connects back to self-awareness your desire to be like when you ask that question some people (47:56) give you very bad answers like I had a very difficult boss once and I had to learn how to improve my communications and like you're just giving a madeup answer like talk to me about real Like, have you gone through hard stuff? Health, family crisis, you couldn't find a job because you graduated in a bad year. (48:15) You couldn't go to college because you didn't have the money. Like, grew up in a war zone. Grew up in a war zone or grew up with a sick parent. Like I have heard stories that you then that makes you respect those people because they've seen things an ugly divorce that that shattered their entire like that is real to go through as a child versus I had a very demanding boss and it took a toll on my health. (48:38) I'm like yeah okay I have to co-host this show with Sam Jacob every week. That is hard. I agree that's hard. Is ClickUp fully remote Gorov? We have an office in San Diego. About 20% of our people are there. We we get together twice twice a week but it's fully remote for the rest. So we have figured out working in ClickUp Sam that allows us to work better as an async company. (49:01) Garve one of the things that ClickUp has done that's really interesting to me is this integration of PLG and SLG. So generally what I would see in the market is you have these firstly that it's almost like it's very polarizing you know the but the PLG movement had that like Slack um mindset behind it where the founder of Slack was like we'll never need a salesperson ever like this is the way to do it and the product sells itself why do you need commercial people and then and you felt even though Slack eventually added on salespeople (49:35) because they couldn't break into upper mid-market and enterprise without a sales motion. Um there is this uh this polarized view of PLG is PLG and then there's this other world that is SLG. And what sometimes you would find is that some PLG companies they would grow grow grow and they would hit some type of plateau and then it's like oh no we need sales and then they would create this other division on the side run by somebody else. (50:03) you know, you had the chief growth officer and the chief revenue officer running these two separate functions. And what you guys have done that was interesting. I was looking at the data last night is you added on your sales motion, but both PLG and SLG Drew and you've integrated them rather than run them as very separate functions. (50:24) So, can you tell us a why you did this? You know, where did this idea come from? Why didn't you just do what everybody else was doing? Um so the thought process behind the decision to do it this way and then maybe some of the moments that mattered or the lessons that are memorable in trying to execute this. Yeah. (50:42) I mean of course I I say that we have both PLG and SLG but but deeply how I think about it is a lot of people are up in arms against either of these motions. PLG on the SLG side SLG on the PLG side because people are worried about their own existence. They're not willing to adapt to change. How I look at it is I don't care if it's digital, if it's sales. (51:06) I care about building the best revenue mechanics that I can in my business. That's all that matters. And a a lot of what modern day SAS is, especially if you're not selling into like the CIO and like the big seven figure, 8 figure deals, is a game of whale hunting. And there are examples of other businesses where whale hunting is extremely common. (51:28) Gaming being the big one. Cast a wide net. A lot of gamers begin to play. But then you make all your revenue in that last 5% in like your top 5% power users. A lot of software businesses are meant to be similar businesses. So I don't look at PLG, SLG in ways people have defined it. I look at it as what allows me to expand my funnel and cast a really really wide net and what allows me to maximize LTV out of that funnel. (51:57) PLG the product because it has no marginal cost allows us to cast a really really wide net and do it in a high leveraged way that allows us to catch a lot of fish and then sales are the whale are the whale hunters. They come in and they know that which fish is worth going after, which fish is not worth going after. In our motion, we find that it's much easier to use productled growth at the top of the funnel and sales at the bottom of the funnel. (52:26) Can sales go and can we also build a hightouch SDR motion that expands the top of the funnel? For sure, and we will 100% do that. So, I don't think in terms of PLG, SLG, I think in terms of what tactic should we deploy here to succeed in that objective. So we don't create these lines artificially and we understand that it's a game of making progress on both at the same time because it's truly a compounding function. (52:52) The problem I see a lot is people are I see another one up market versus down market. Why do you have to abandon down market? Why do you have to abandon your commercial business to go to enterprise? You'll have to abandon it unless your if your commercial business sucks. But if your commercial business is a cash machine, why would you abandon it? I'm sure there's more nuanced answers to that. (53:12) Sometimes I think it's usually around churn, right? um where a company is like we have really high churn in this segment and we we're not going to get a great multiple in market even if we have the growth but let's say our burn is bad our churn is bad our growth is great now we get this discount then you should abandon it but at we have built a m we have built an amazing machine where every segment carries its weight on its own so a lot of these zero sum conversations as SMB versus upmarket PLG versus SLG is because there are fundamental flaws (53:45) in which you can't make these things work. But these are actually compounding levers. Our commercial business is our cash cow today that actually funds the investment we need in upmarket because up market takes time and we are able to manage both business with their own P&L like pseudo P&L of sorts where we can be like yeah our commercial business payback is this and our upmarket payback is this and that's great. (54:09) Our PLG payback is this and our SLG payback is this. Our PLG growth rate is this. Our SLG growth rate is this. So I we have not been we we see all of these as positive sum games and we optimize all of them in tandem. So you don't get you don't have this problem where you have too much of a funnel and you don't know how to draw LTV out of it or your your funnel has run has has dried up. (54:32) That's interesting Sam. Yes. It seems like we've went from calling ourselves sales, marketing, customer success to go to market as like we're one. But really when you click into it, especially when you look in organizations or online, it feels like we're still very fragmented, right? Like it's it's a lot of me versus them that still plays out within this broader community. (54:57) What do you think? Like do you think that ever goes away or is that just like a foundational aspect of it? We are commercial people. We're intense. We we work on these um target driven roles. The job is hard. If I'm PLG, I believe it's the best. So, I will think it's the one to go with. Like, is this foundational or will we evolve past this? I think um first I think go the go to market evolution [Music] um is I think the problem that marketers have with it is when we say go to market, we mean in a way. (55:33) And uh and so even when we're talking to Gorav about marketing, we're talking about attribution. Now he's saying, you know, you need some portion of your budget that is an experiment that doesn't have great attribution. As we scale up spend, we need more attribution. But the context is still measurement. And I think that if we're going to have a different conversation, uh it's a very strange conversation to have because the the premise is we need to talk about things you can't measure. (55:58) And okay, that's but that's really hard to do at a board level when you're a capital allocator, which is what every executive's job is. And so I think the problem that marketers have is that they want us to talk about thing that we are maybe not educated about, you know, well the the mark the four Ps of price, product, positioning, promotion, you know, and and why aren't we talking about that? Why aren't we talking about that marketers should own pricing? It's like, uh, I don't know. (56:25) I don't know. I haven't seen that many marketers that should own pricing. I think the CRO should probably own pricing if the CRO is but they're saying no no no the marketer is the representative of the market back to the company and I find these conversations very confusing which is why I think they have a problem with GTM because GTM is we have to measure what we're doing and we have to make sure that what we're doing is accreative to the overall enterprise value of the business and that just feels very logical to me so I think there will be (56:52) tension between people that think marketing is of is is strategy in a way because I think then what happens is the CEO says no I'm strat I'm the strategy I don't need this I'm not going to give the strategy of the entire company to the CMO like that's not what I'm going to do that's there's no one executive that owns the strategy like the strategy is the accumulation of the ELT pursuing a direction but like what we charge and who we're going after and where we sit in the market that's not just the province of the marketing team (57:25) but I think marketers would say yes it is. And I think that that is part of the tension. Um it's probably why the least amount of CEOs come out of marketing and HR because you can't become a CEO if you can't measure and you can't things like that. I think it's I just think that apparently there's a you know that a bunch of people have gone to business school and gotten their degrees in marketing and they're frustrated at those of us that haven't and I can understand that. (57:52) I guess I'll actually challenge that. Assad. Go look at go look at the CEO of PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, McDonald's. They all grew up in marketing. I guess let me let me fix that. I I mean in B2B tech in B2B tech HR and marketing are where the least amount of transitions. I think one thing that completely I I do I do think I actually Sam I'd love to do this thought experiment with you. (58:17) If you can tell me what does a marketer do that you can't attribute accreditive revenue to? I'd love to just run that as a thought experiment and see are there real things because I think everything should tie up to accretive revenue if not you are just bluffing and then when I when I switched to clickup this was my first real B2B gig I'm like oh so you make decks and you make white papers who owns revenue like and I think sales has taken off that heat so much that marketers think of themselves as like a center of excellence versus again you hop the line (58:51) into B2C there's no sales because you can't afford it. These are like $100 customers. And go talk to someone at uh some a lead genen like go go go talk to someone at Lending Tree and you'll find like marketers there are more cutthroat than any people ever because they have to fight for every point. (59:09) They get fired if they don't deliver a certain contribution margin. Super Bowl ads. What was the uh what was the revenue on the Super Bowl ad? Is that something you guys were How do you measure that? Actually, how would you measure that? Yeah. Yeah. I mean I I it was done before me and I'm not saying Super Bowl ads are a bad thing. (59:28) Super Bowl ads depends on the scale and the size of your company but marketing is ultimately in the business. I I was just defining this with my team yesterday is building retained mind share as cost-ffectively as you can and knowing that that mind share translates into revenue. So if I take that equation when you buy a Super Bowl ad now you can do that through a sorry this will get boring and you may want to edit it out if you want to edit it out. No editing. (59:55) A lot of people in this group perhaps would undervalue creative. Creative is the biggest reason why a messaging sticks in your head and stays there so that the next time when you bring up that topic you want to buy. So that's the problem with like people like me. We think that it's all a game of trading and portfolio management. (1:00:14) No, it's com it's creating it's creating compelling messaging that can that can move move the world and great marketers very very very very few marketers are able to do that. Everyone claims they can do it. Very few can actually move messaging that can move millions. Yeah. But Super Bowl ad if you have a big message like that and you could buy that ad spot at a cheaper CPM then it's 100% a game. (1:00:41) You should then be tracking cost per uh cost per aided awareness like how much awareness have you delivered that's high quality some metric in that it could be cost per visit it one of the things we track with our YouTube ads is cost per lifted user which is after we have stopped adding how many users do we see organically coming to our website that we could attribute back to YouTube after a week of spend a year of a month of spend two months of spend so ads are not a bad thing it depends Coca-Cola should 100% run a Super Bowl ad. (1:01:11) You then need to ensure your creative is so memorable that people remember that. And because you need to at some point like if I want ClickUp to take over the world, which I 100% want and I want us to be a hundred billion dollar company, the truth is I will if I am at a $10 billion ARR, I will have to learn how to deploy 2 to3 billion in productive SNM. That is just the reality. (1:01:36) Like advertising works, sales works, and if you truly want to grow a business to 100 billion in revenue, you will have to learn like go look at Salesforce's SNM cost. Go look at Amazon's S&M cost. Go look at Google's SNM cost. These were all companies that grew up in tech. You could argue they did not need a lot of sales and marketing, but they deploy sales and marketing dollars. (1:01:58) So the truth is that if I want to build a $10 revenue machine, I'll need to learn how to deploy$1 to2 billion in in in sales and marketing dollars. So that means where do I go? I have to go spend I have to go buy a stadium and call it the ClickUp stadium, right? Let's go. Will I do that now? No. It doesn't make sense because there are better ways to deploy that capital. (1:02:21) But it's like if you were if you're managing a personal portfolio of $10,000 versus $100,000 versus 5 million versus 500 million. You will have to deploy capital in different assets, but you'll have to understand the ROI of each asset class such that your blended portfolio hits a certain ROI that you need at a certain risk profile. (1:02:40) I think a Super Bowl ad is something similar, but I would not do it if I'm only spending if my SNM cost is only 50 million. But if my sales and marketing cost is a billion dollars, yeah, I'll have to figure out how to deploy. I'll still not do a Super Bowl ad or if I do it, I'll buy it for super cheap and I'll buy it in geos. (1:03:00) Yeah, that's what uh Udy did that at Gong. And as the answer to your question is one of the things he did for attribution was listen to Gong and he put a tag for Super Bowl ad and so you listen to how many demos uh they ref like when a customer references the Super Bowl it gives you some notion of influenced uh you know in the period afterwards and one one of the common tactics that's used is you track when you buy TV they call it uh ad stock that's the that's a technical word but what you then do is you you watch did you see a lift in your organic traffic (1:03:31) and direct traffic after 5 minutes after the spot airing and how how long did that lift go on and because you know what your regular baseline is. So there are ways in which uh you can do that with content as well right you can say let's say if YouTube you're investing into YouTube and YouTube is taking off it's like if something drops on Monday over the next hour 2 hours 5 hours 1 day one week like did it have any effect on website traffic or not you could do that with YouTube the problem 100% and with TV as well that's the way you measure TV (1:04:02) you just have to restrict it to a location if you can then you'll have much cleaner data because in a rapidly growing business like ClickUp, there's always more noise in the machine than you can control for. Maybe it's the Easter holiday, suddenly signups drop, but your ad like Super Bowl, there's a good chance that your organic is going to be low that day because people are not looking to to come in and sign up for ClickUp. (1:04:27) They're looking to watch TV. So, you need a control market for as much as possible and and that's how you you benchmark was this good or not. So yes, 100% run a Super Bowl ad. If you are a Coinbase, if you're a ClickUp, then be very smart about it and ensure that your messaging delivers above its weight class. (1:04:48) Gorav, it's been uh just so you know, most guests only get 30 minutes and then we cut them off. Uh and you got to go the full hour, which is a testament to your contribution. So thank you for being a great guest. Before we wrap up, we uh we might ask you for a shout out or win of the week, but we do also want to understand who's influencing you. (1:05:07) When you think about great books you've read, podcasts you've listened to, mentors, inspiring people, some idea, some person you think we should know about, what comes to mind? So, I'm not too much of a reader, Sam. But I've I've right now I'm in the pursuit to connect with the best of the best in GTM and I'd love to connect with you guys as well because especially you Sam like I've been following your content. I'm like yeah this guy gets it. (1:05:35) I've been taking your screenshots and sending it to my CEO that this is the brother I don't get it. You should see the inside of Pavilion how we run it. It is but I also know it's a very like what you spew out. I'm sure like a lot of sellers will probably hate you because of how direct you are. Sam is under under threat these days. (1:05:57) There's a bounty on Sam. Yeah, for sure. Especially on the marketing side. Yes, exactly. But the people I met recently, uh I we just brought on Ashley Kelly. She's the she's the global head of SDRs at Trippling. Oh, she was extremely like again I'm I'm surrounding myself with these mentors. Kman, her those are great hires. Yeah, she's an adviser. (1:06:21) She's not a full-time hireer. Our enterprise sales leader. He he's again he's amazing. He's a college drop school dropout actually. But he knows more math like he told me new things about a sales machine that I didn't even think about it like oh wow and you run that and you didn't even go to school. (1:06:39) I was like I didn't need to go to school to like understand the mechanics of my business. So I can connect you to a few of those people. Jeff comes to his name is Jeff. Kelly is good. In terms of books, I haven't read too many books generally because I I read LinkedIn for what it's worth in the time I have, but 0ero to one was was one of the most crucial books that I read. (1:07:00) Awesome. These days I I read more. Gorov, we got we got just the thing for you, my brother. We got Pavilion Gold. We're building an elite membership tier for the very best PTM operators in the world. And I think you got to join. So, I'll send you more information. They can screenshot away. (1:07:17) You can just screenshot all the slacks. Just screenshot. Yeah, I'd love to learn more, Sam. Like, I'm looking to connect with the best of the best. I got you. Um, should we do shout outs? Mint of the week. Yeah, of course. I mean, Gorov just shouted out all all these great people. AJ, who are you shouting out? He just shouted out you specifically you. (1:07:40) He said Ashley Kelly and uh I'm gonna enterprise sales. So you all can't see it even if you're on the YouTube watching this uh but my office is super clean and stuff is clean. So my wife my wife was like and no not made my wife was like AJ we need to do something with your office getting a little cluttered and I cleaned it out and the productivity talked about like you can measure productivity like said $327,000 $32367 more productive because of of that I'm just kidding but like seriously your mental state when you have a clean (1:08:19) office is a total game changer. So if you're out there and you're sitting in filth or whatever acid, then clean your desks and it feels good. My office is the cleanest. I know you are the cleanest by far. You have one shirt, one size shirt of your black shirt. I don't think I've seen you wear anything else in 30 of them. So I have a way to go. (1:08:39) Yeah. Okay. So shout out to my wife and my clean desk. And it's a win of my week as well. You don't you don't have any monitors? No laptop on I have a monitor. Yeah, I do have a monitor. One monitor just right there. It's right there staring at it. That's new. You never had a monitor. I never had a monitor. (1:08:53) I was an anti- monitor guy and I I thought about it and I like this is for him about this. I was like, you're not serious if you don't have a monitor. I'm the only one here. The self awareness piece of it. Like why am I holding this grudge and like I have a chip on my shoulder against people that have two multimonitors when it will make me more productive if I have my calendar there. (1:09:11) And I finally just did it and it's way better. It's insane. Why? What was I doing all my life? I don't know. Here I am. Okay, I'll go nets. Um, there's a new show that I've been watching. It's called Mobland. And Mob Land. Mob Land. It's Pierce Brosman, who is my favorite James Bond ever. (1:09:31) He's a a whiter version of my dad. They look very similar. So, I always That's a hot take, by the way. Hot take there. Terrible takes on this call. Conory, Daniel Craig. No. Pierce Broen, Tomorrow Never Dies. Top. Listen, you guys might be older and I'm looking at like the guys that were there in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s. (1:09:50) He's the guy I grew up around. Golden Eye. Golden Eye was legit. Okay, fair enough. It was great. Um, and he's on in it. Tom Hard is in it and there a bunch of other great people. It's fantastic. It is really good show and everybody should go watch it. That's great. I will shout out I will shout out a book I uh I just finished uh the man who mistook his wife for a hat which is a very famous book of case histories by Dr. (1:10:17) Oliver Saxs who wrote awakenings and uh it's all about the neurology of the brain and I can tell you that our brains are far more confusing and mysterious and magical uh than than we even can comprehend and it just makes you marvel at uh at human nature and human reality because we've created this thing. Uh so with that Gorav thank you for being a great guest. (1:10:43) AJ Acid, great seeing you both. And listeners, give us five tunes in a store where you listen to podcasts at your earliest convenience. Thank you so much. Goodbye. Thank you everyone. Thank you Assad, AJ, and Sam. It was great to be here. Thanks, G. [Music] Thanks for listening to Topline. New episodes come out every Sunday. (1:11:07) If you like what you heard today, subscribe so you never miss an episode. Leave a fivestar review and share it with your friends. Don't forget to join our topline Slack channel to connect with us and discuss the topics we cover with other listeners. Click the link in the show notes. Lastly, if you're interested in joining Pavilion, you can learn more about membership at joinpavilion.com/membership. (1:11:26) Thanks again for listening. [Music]