The GTMnow Podcast

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  Why More AI Won't Grow Your Revenue (and What Will) | Loreal Lynch (CMO, Nooks) 15.09.2026 29min

  The CMO of Nooks (and former CMO of Jasper) joins GTMnow to explain why buying more agents won't grow revenue unless you rebuild the process underneath, and what the human-plus-agent revenue team truly looks like. Loreal has had a front-row seat to two AI waves: first at Jasper, where AI reshaped marketing content, and now at Nooks, building toward what she calls the revenue agents category. She breaks down why the tools in today's GTM stack were built for humans to click through, not for ag...
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  Building an AI-Era Sales Machine | Chris McDonough (VP Sales, Campfire) 10.09.2026 42min

  Chris McDonough has joined four companies right before they exploded. At the first, Motive, he was employee 40 and watched revenue go from $800K to $30M in about 100 days. The VP of Sales at Campfire joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to break down what he learned riding hypergrowth over and over, and why he thinks AI is about to split the sales profession in two. Chris gets tactical on the whole arc: how a two-week decision to sign a lease and move to SF changed his trajectory, what a federal...
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  Inside Electric's AI Relaunch, from a 3X Founder | Ryan Denehy (Founder & CEO, Electric) 27.08.2026 45min

  The founder and CEO of Electric, Ryan Denehy joins GTMnow to explain why and how he rebuilt Electric as an AI-native software company. Ryan gets specific on why he split the business in half, how the pivot forced a total change in distribution (from direct sales to embedded channel partnerships with payroll platforms), and why a new product doesn't just need a new channel, it can unlock ones that were impossible before. He also shares the ADP partnership that put Electric behind 1,700...
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  What the Top 1% of Sellers Do Differently | Ross Rich (CEO, Accord) 25.08.2026 51min

  Ross Rich is the co-founder and CEO of Accord and spent five years leading go-to-market and partnerships at Stripe. He talks to hundreds of CROs and serves thousands of reps, so he has an unusually clear view of what the top performers actually do differently. His starting point: roughly the top 20%, often closer to 10%, of any sales team drives most of the revenue. Every leader says they want to move the middle 60%, and Ross doesn't think AI is doing it. Tools like Claude and Codex make the...
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  Will Salesforce Win the AI Era Like It Won Cloud? | Kris Billmaier 11.08.2026 43min

  Is Salesforce the dominant player in the AI platform shift, or the incumbent about to be disrupted? Kris Billmaier, EVP and GM of Agentforce Sales and Growth Products, sat down with Sophie Buonassisi at Salesforce Tower to answer that directly. Kris runs the business behind Sales Cloud's 26-year run and its rebrand into Agentforce Sales. He makes the case that CRM is becoming "agentic revenue orchestration," that the category needs a new name, and that the future is headless. For Salesforce,...
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  Inside Deel's $1M → $1.5B Sales Machine | Chris Lee 03.08.2026 1t 6min

  Chris Lee joined Deel at $1M in revenue. Now, it just hit $1.5B. He joined GTMnow to walk through the pivotal decisions behind that run, including the ones he's never discussed publicly. Chris (Head of Sales, Americas at Deel) breaks down the "five-star sales experience" framework he built by studying luxury hotels, why speed itself became a reason customers bought, how he's had zero regrettable director-level attrition in 5.5 years, and why they hire people with the job title "Ghostbuster" ...
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  Inside Merge: The $75M Bet on Open Source AI (Powering OpenAI, Netflix & Uber) | Shensi Ding, CEO 22.07.2026 47min

  The Co-Founder & CEO of Merge joins GTMnow to break down how she built a company that now powers integrations for OpenAI, Perplexity, Netflix, Uber, Mistral, and enterprise logos like Mastercard, JP Morgan, and Amex, backed by $75M from Accel and NEA. Shensi gets tactical on the GTM decisions behind that growth: why she went enterprise-first into greenfield, why she's now layering a self-serve motion back on top (20,000+ self-serve orgs, 400+ enterprise customers), how forward-deployed e...
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  The Blueprint for a High-Performing Sales Team | Brian Le, Notion 09.07.2026 45min

  Are your sales compensation plans driving the right behaviors or causing your best reps to quit? In this episode of GTMnow, Brian Le (Global Sales Compensation Partner at Notion) breaks down how to build a scalable sales comp operating system. Brian shares his firsthand experience scaling Notion's sales comp from 80 to over 400 employees and explains why trust is the ultimate currency in revenue operations. If you are a founder, revenue leader, or sales professional, this breakdown covers ev...
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  VC: How a 2-Person Fund Runs Like a Startup (Memos, KPIs, R&D) | Vanessa Larco, Premise (ex-NEA) 08.07.2026 48min

  "Investing in companies that OpenAI won't kill." That's Vanessa Larco's thesis, and in this VC bonus episode of GTMnow she breaks down exactly how she decides what survives. Vanessa, founder and GP at Premise (formerly a longtime partner at NEA, where she backed Robinhood from seed to IPO), joins Max to get into the nitty gritty of how AI is rewriting venture, distribution, and the entire go-to-market playbook. She makes the case for why "it's just a wrapper" got a lot of VCs in trouble, why...
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  Why a $1.2B exit felt like his biggest failure, and the customer-obsession thesis behind Agency 02.07.2026 52min

  A $1.2 billion exit is the dream. Elias Torres calls it his biggest failure. The Drift co-founder joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to unpack why the headline number felt hollow, what he learned in the quiet stretch afterward, and why he jumped straight back in to build Agency, an AI company that runs your entire customer organization. Elias gets honest about identity after the exit, the difference between chasing a title and building something enduring, and the operating thesis behind Agenc...
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  From DeepMind to 200 Customers in 20 Countries: Building the Execution Layer for Sales | Adam Liska, CEO of Airspeed 25.06.2026 32min

  The single most expensive sentence in sales is "I'll follow up on that." Adam Liska joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to break down the "execution gap," the space between knowing what to do in a deal and actually doing it, and why that gap is where most pipeline quietly dies. Adam left DeepMind's Gemini team in 2022, pre-ChatGPT, to build a native revenue execution platform now serving 200 customers across 20 countries (recently rebranded and fresh off a $20M Series A). In this conversation,...
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  VC: How Benchmark Picks AI Winners - Max 10 Bets a Year, 5 Partners | Chetan Puttagunta (GP) 24.06.2026 59min

  Benchmark's Chetan breaks down why the path from $0 to $100M has collapsed from five years to under two, and the one thing that is actually getting harder in the AI era: reaching your first million in revenue. In this VC bonus edition of the GTM Now Podcast, he sits down with Sophie Buonassisi to unpack how AI native companies are compressing 180 day sales cycles into 30 days, why direct sales is here to stay, and how value is shifting away from code toward the last mile of customer service. ...
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  Ads in ChatGPT Are Coming. What B2B Marketers Should Do Right Now | Keith Delaney, CEO Primer 17.06.2026 45min

  LinkedIn CPMs just hit $800. AI is flooding every channel with content. Outbound is dying. So where should B2B marketers actually spend their ad budget right now? Keith Putnam-Delaney, co-founder & CEO of Primer, joins Sophie to break down the complete state of B2B paid advertising, what's broken, what's working, and where the real opportunities are hiding in 2025. What you'll learn: - Why LinkedIn & Google search are hitting a ceiling (and what to do instead) - How to get 80% match...
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  He's Seen 300+ Sales Comp Plans. 90% Make the Same Mistake | Siva Rajamani (Everstage CEO) 15.06.2026 57min

  Most sales comp plans are quietly broken, and the people running them have no idea. Siva Rajamani, CEO of Everstage, has visibility into 300+ enterprise comp plans, and he says 90% of companies make the same mistakes. In this episode he breaks down what's going wrong, how to spot it, and what a comp plan that actually drives revenue looks like. Siva explains why sales compensation is not a back office cost center but the single biggest lever in your go-to-market strategy. It's the glue betwe...
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  "We Don't Fund Good Companies" : A $1.5B VC Explains Why | Ben Lerer, Lerer Hippeau 09.06.2026 55min

  Ben Lerer, Managing Partner and Founder of Lerer Hippeau, has built one of New York's most influential early-stage venture firms across nine funds and nearly $1.5B in AUM. In this VC edition of the GTMnow podcast, Ben sits down with Max and Paul to unpack how he actually picks founders, why he wants to be the "worst investor" at his own fund, and the contrarian belief that backing good, sensible businesses is a mistake. Ben got his start in media, building Thrillist before it merged into Gro...
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  How Esper Is Building the Operating System for Government Policy | Maleka Momand 04.06.2026 31min

  Maleka Momand, co-founder and CEO of Esper, joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to break down what it actually takes to build and sell software to government. Esper is the operating system for government policy, serving as the system of record for the regulation and internal policy that shapes daily life, from NYPD procedures to nurse practitioner licensing in rural Tennessee. Maleka shares hard-won lessons from 8 years in GovTech: why winning trust matters more than winning business, why prof...
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  How He Built a $250M Company With Zero Employees | Ben Cera, Polsia 29.05.2026 50min

  One Person, $10M+ ARR, $30M Raised: How Ben Cera Built Polsia (AI Operating System) Solo Ben Cera, founder of Polsia, just raised $30M at a $250M valuation while running the entire company alone. His AI agent handles his emails, manages customer support, even led his fundraising calls. This is what a solo founder with an AI operating system looks like at scale. Polsia is an AI operating system that builds and runs companies autonomously. Give it an idea and it builds the product, writes cod...
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  The $575B AI Bet (Biggest Since the World Wars) and the New Two-Buyer Reality in Software | Tomasz Tunguz, Theory Ventures 26.05.2026 34min

  AI Infrastructure Spending is Insane: Hyperscalers Betting $575B on the Data Center Race | Tomasz Tunguz This year's data center infrastructure spending will be the 5th largest infrastructure project in history (bigger than everything except railroads and the two world wars). Tomasz Tunguz breaks down what nobody appreciates about the scale of the AI boom. Tomasz Tunguz, General Partner at Theory Ventures, and one of the most insightful voices on AI infrastructure, data stacks, and founder ...
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  SEO Is Not Enough Anymore: Webflow's CEO on the Rise of AEO | Linda Tong 20.05.2026 24min

  The future of websites isn't a builder problem anymore. It's an agent problem. In this episode of GTMnow, Sophie Buonassisi sits down with Linda Tong, CEO of Webflow, to unpack how the entire web is being rewritten for a world where humans AND AI agents are your audience. Linda breaks down why Webflow is no longer "just a website builder" (it's an agentic web marketing platform), what the Vidoso acquisition unlocks for AI-generated brand assets, and how the rise of Answer Engine Optimizatio...
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  Inside Reevo's $80M Bet to Kill the $10B Frankenstein Stack | David Zhu, Cofounder & CEO 14.05.2026 41min

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