AI Companies Are Taking a Lot of The Good Marketers

You have one here around how AI companies are taking a lot of the good marketers.

Dude, I've been getting a lot of requests from venture-funded startups that raise between $10 and $50 million. Like, hey, we're in growth mode right now. Do you know any amazing marketers we can hire? And they're usually asking me for people who will work in office, typically in San Francisco. That's the most common city request that I get. I do get every once in a while LA, but it's mainly San Francisco. Every once in a while also, get Seattle, Washington because I used to live there, but it really is mainly SF. And I know a lot of great growth marketers, but almost all of them work for the AI companies. And I've asked a few of them if they're interested in jumping ship and they're like, dude, they're like, my comp is so high.

The comp is so good.

Yeah. And then I'm like, oh, is it because shares? I'm like, oh, there's probably liquidation preferences when some of these companies raise like $10 billion, $2 billion, whatever it may be. And they're like, yes, it's shares, but they're— and once they told me their salary, I'm like, oh, okay. But they're like, yeah, they're paying extremely competitive salaries, if not more than market rate. And I'm getting shares. So they're like, it's hard to find a job that pays as much cash, plus the shares could be worth a crapload of money when this company goes public. And a lot of them work for AI-related companies that are worth well over a billion bucks.

Yeah. What can you do?

Yeah, they're just, they can pay more.

I would say if I was starting from scratch today in our mid-20s, I'd probably just go work for one of them, so.

Dude, me too. If I was starting from scratch again, I would not be an entrepreneur. I would just go work for a company and make it grow.

In this very moment, 'cause AI's so hot right now and they've raised so much money and I know like it's, yeah, it's a good deal, so.

No, but even, yeah, in this moment, but even at my age, if I was starting from scratch again, assuming I had my knowledge, And pedigree, I would just go be a CMO at a corporation.

Yeah, and just keep in mind at these AI companies, just like the one AI company I mentioned, Lindy, they're working 996, so just expect to work a lot.

Did Lindy raise a lot of money?

I don't know, you can look it up. I suspect—

How do you spell Lindy?

L-I-N-D-Y. He did say on the podcast that their investors are like, you guys are one of the most efficient companies because they just keep building more and more agents.

Uh, $50 million was their last round.

Okay. From who?

Uh, funding raised about $50 million with Series B in January 3rd. Uh, it doesn't show me.

Yeah, dude. Speaking of people real quick.

Oh, notable investors, Menlo Ventures, Coatue, and Battery. Okay.

Those, those are serious, serious companies.

Yeah.

Yeah. Um, serious firms. Um, dude, speaking of people real quick, so, um, I was, I was reading on, on X, but What do you think about the concept of hiring fast and firing fast? So this comes from a private equity owner.

Hiring fast and firing fast?

Yeah. So here's what he said. Let me give you the background and we can react to this. So he said private equity, obviously you're hiring a lot of CEOs, right? So his biggest insight was hiring a long-term CEO is a crapshoot. Year 1 and year 10 data was exactly the same. After testing everything, there was no difference. This is why he says hire fast, fire fast because even with 10 years of data, you can't predict if someone will scale with the company. Humans are too wild. And I was thinking about yesterday when I, you think about the NFL draft, like how often do they get it right? They get it wrong pretty like—

A lot.

Yeah, and you have all these scouts, you have all these analytics, all these things, like humans are too unpredictable.

I was reading an article from yesterday, I just pulled it up from the AI Overviews. It was an article on Sequoia Capital and I don't want to go through it 'cause it was long, but Google summarizes it. And Brian, so Brian Halligan, the HubSpot guy, he joined Sequoia.

I think he's like a coach there or something for executives, helping them scale. Yeah.

And I'm pretty sure Brian doesn't need any more money, so I think he's just doing this for fun or to keep him busy or something, or this may be his passion. But he had a really good article on Sequoia Capital from a lot of the stuff that he's learned at HubSpot. And we've hired a lot of executives. You know my hiring process, it's pretty thorough and we hire slow, we fire fast. If we know the person or people in our network know them, we hire pretty quickly. But we generally are pretty careful and our executive rate is not that high. Like you would think that we're hoping for like a 90% success rate.

You mean your executive success rate, right? Yes.

We're above 50, but we're definitely below like 80%. We're somewhere in between. And I don't know the exact percentage, but I know we're above 50 and I know we're definitely below 80%. And Brian talks about this at HubSpot because I know they have a crazy hiring process. And he talked about how 40% of executive hires did not work out for him. No matter how good you are, he's like, the problem with it, and he's spot on, when you're recruiting executives, especially like VP of marketing or CMOs, people interview really, really well.

Mm-hmm.

And they've been around the block. So they're much more polished. It's harder to sniff out bad executives. What we've done that's helped increase our odds of recruiting amazing executives, especially in marketing, we will tell them how we expect them to be player coaches. So they got to teach the team and help them improve, but they got to get their hands dirty.

Yep.

We also tell them how we expect tons of hours of work. I'll call them and other people will call them at random hours. We expect things to get done. And if this is not the environment that they want to end up working in, Yeah. Cool, this isn't for them.

And I think that's really important 'cause you're just setting expectations. It's not, there's no right or wrong, it's just that's how you guys do things. And a lot of people, by the way, the reason Neil's doing that too is a lot of executives, they've gotten used to having a lot of resource and being very cushy, right? It's like, hey, if you're gonna come here, you're not only gonna be managing, you're gonna be in the trenches as well, and you're gonna be working a lot. So don't expect to go into a situation where you're very comfortable. That's the expectation you're trying to set. And I think it's really important that what we do with our hiring process is at the very end I'll say, hey, I'm gonna anti-sell you. I'm gonna tell you why you shouldn't join us, right? And then I tell them, And they still say they want it, right? So, but I think your way of doing it is all your people in the hiring process anti-sell them at every single stage.

Yes. And we do it from day one because we don't want to waste the next person's time in the interview process if we already know they're not going to be interested, if they're not going to be down with our culture and the way we operate.

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One thing to give you an idea, you know Nick on my end, right?

Yeah.

Dude, when we were in San Francisco, I won't mention the company name. So I met up with a really large corporation. I told Nick that day when we were in San Francisco, I need you to create a deck in less than 24 hours to send to a potential customer, and here are their requirements. He ended up creating almost a 90-page deck. It was 80-something pages.

From scratch.

from scratch and he had to turn it into me and do it. And I remember him telling our CEO, because our CEO was in Cuba at the time and I was trying to not talk to him and have people not talk to him because he needed to spend time with his family. He was still working. He would just act like he wasn't working so I wouldn't know.

Yeah.

But Nick was telling me, he's like, oh, I'm glad that you're back, Mike. And I probably called Nick during that week 20-something times.

Wow.

It was that deal and 2 other deals, so 3 total. I made him scramble last minute and do stuff. I usually send it to Mike and then Mike rounds up who he wants in doing it. And Nick makes commission, so it's in his best interest. But like, he's a trooper. He doesn't complain. He knew what he was expecting from day one. He's one of our oldest employees. I think he's our 2nd longest standing employee. I think Chad is number one. But yeah, no, this is the— this is what executives in my organization had to deal with.

Nick reports to Mike, right?

I have no idea who he reports to, but probably.

Yeah. So he handled it for a week, but for a long period of time, he'd probably be like, this is hard.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But Mike wasn't here from the beginning. So years before that, he dealt with Mike Cammello or me. Yeah. Or technically both of us. And we would give him stuff.

Yeah.

But dude, he's like jam-packed and busy. A great example of this is I was talking to a firm yesterday that needed marketing help in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. Javi leads up LATAM and they had questions for our US team, but they're not interested in working with us in the United States. I sent it to Nick. to help him out for free and then deal with helping them in Latin America, including Portuguese and Spanish. So he would have to coordinate with Javi and Meringue and their teams internally to help him out in the US when he's not going to get any contracts or anything like that from the US and he's not going to make any money. It's a long game. It's a lot longer. But Nick doesn't complain and he's a team player and doesn't have any issues. Like, no problem, send whatever you want to me, I'll figure it out.

Dude, 90 pages, 24-hour turnaround is a lot. I'm sure he had other templates he could pull from.

He like He did, but my guess is the deck probably took him—

At least a couple hours.

No.

How long?

7 to 8 hours.

7 to 8 hours?

Yeah.

That's a lot.

It was all custom based on what the customer wanted.

That's a lot. Yeah. And he's doing all the analysis on his own?

Uh, no, the team helps.

Okay.

But Nick's time that he spent, 7 to 8 hours.

Yeah. Well, hey, show me—

And he didn't turn it around in 24 hours. He turned around a draft to me in 24 hours and it needed a lot of changes. We turned it over to the potential customer within 48 hours.

This is when we were on the way to go record, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Dude, speaking of sales real quick, because we're talking about Nick on the sales side. So this is interesting to me. You and I kind of know this already, but obviously the fortune is in the follow-up, right? So 2% of all sales are made on the first contact. 3% of sales are made on the second contact. 5% of sales are made on the third contact. 10% of sales are made on the fourth contact. 80% of sales are made on the 5th to 12th contact.

Can you repeat it all for me a little bit slower?

Yeah. Here, let's start from the 2% of all sales are made on the first contact, then 3% on the second contact, then 5% on the third contact.

Wait, uh, is this total like 2%? So on the second contact when it's 3%, that means you're adding one more percent? Mm-hmm. Or is it 3 more percent?

No. I think you're adding 1%.

Okay, so 2% of your total sales on your first contact.

Yep.

Your second sale is 3%, but that means you're only getting 1% extra in sales. Your third contact is 5%, which means you're getting 2 more percent from the second contact.

Yep.

10% on the fourth.

Yep. And then 80%, sorry, this is of all sales. 80% of all sales are made on the 5th to 12th contact. But the key thing here is no matter what you're selling, obviously this will vary a little bit if you're selling B2B or consumer or whatever, the fortune is in the follow-up.

Yeah, so it doesn't actually add up. So it is 2% on the first.

Of all sales.

Yes, but no, second on the 3% of all sales made on the second. So now you got 5. The third is 5% goes on the third contact. So now you're at 10. You're following me? The fourth contact is another 10. You're at 20. Fifth to 12 is the other 80. So that's 100%.

Yeah, this is all in.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So, but this is not necessarily new to you or me. It just the— and John Maxwell says this, the fortune is in the follow-up, right? And people tend to think, When you're early in sales, like you're worried about getting rejected. Nobody likes getting rejected, right? But getting rejected is also the key to winning. And if you look at the most successful people in the world, they've been the most rejected people in the world.

Yes. And this is why I tell people when they're doing email campaigns, you got to send more emails. And people are like, no, I only want to send one every few weeks or one a week. And I'm like, but if you don't send emails, you're not going to make as many sales. And they're like, Yeah, but people are going to unsubscribe. They're going to hate us. I'm like, well, figure out how to make your emails more valuable so you're willing to send more. Because if you're not, that means there's probably something wrong with the type of emails you're sending.

Dude, for our outbound, so we hit our entire TAM and then the outbound agency was like, you know, let's, you know, cool it down. Let's try like another group. I'm like, no, let's hit the same group, different offer.

We've been doing something that's unique or looking into it. I had to actually check if our sales team's doing it or not. But I know it's set up. I don't know what we're doing it for or not doing it for, just to clarify on that. But I know we have something set up where it scrapes all the home service businesses from Yellow Pages and you can do it for different categories.

Interesting.

Then you get the phone numbers and then it has it go to their website. Then you're having them verify the information because sometimes the information is a little bit off in the Yellow Pages. And then you're figuring out what's working out for them, what the business is doing on the marketing, it's analyzing stuff. It's all done through AI. Then what we'll do is we'll look at their social media, come up with a content calendar for them, send them actual, the content calendar and images and text and stuff that they could be posting. And we do it for free to try to get calls scheduled and then be like, look what we did for free. Now imagine if you were actually working with us, how much more we can do and how much more revenue we can end up generating.

Oftentimes, by the way, this reminds me of when people are like, hey, can we create content? When you just go the extra mile and you've actually done the work ahead of time, that gets much more response rate. Why? Because it's like, oh, this person's a hustler. This person stands out from the rest because they're willing to do the work. And most people, the reason they don't get what they want is they're not willing to go the extra mile. Yes.

And then on our end, I know we've built it. I've seen it. I don't know if we're actually sending out emails because we got to get approval from legal. That's the shitty part. Yep.

Dude, speaking— okay, I'm assuming, are you— this is all manual? You guys aren't using AI for any of this?

What? No, this is all automatic through AI.

Oh, so you are using— okay, good, good, good. Because this leads it in over into these 2 AI topics we have here to close out. But did you see that AI artist that signed a $3 million record deal?

No. Are you talking about like a music artist?

Check this out. So an AI artist just signed a $3 million record deal and her songs are charting on Billboard. Zania Monet is an R&B singer and the AI persona of a poet named Talisha Jones. So this is all AI over here. So this person will write all the lyrics and stuff. So she writes lyrics herself and uses Suno, which is the AI music generator, To turn them into songs and also uses AI for videos and her socials. So her socials, this is all AI over here.

That's not her image.

No.

She looks totally different.

Yeah, I don't— I think this person's anonymous. This person just writes the lyrics. That's it.

Good for them.

Yeah, but $3 million record deal. And I don't think this is going to stop anytime soon. This is just the very beginning. And so when this is like, this is kind of like, you know, done with you, AI working with the human. But I think same deal, AI influencers. If you remember that guy we met in Germany that managed like, you know, A little different, like OnlyFans people, right? But in my mind, this person can now just manage AI influencers and it's going to be a similar type of outcome. And then on the other side of this, did you see the podcast farm that spawns 3,000 episodes per week?

No.

Check this out. So there's an AI startup called Inception Point AI and it's flooding podcast apps. It launched 5,000 podcasts. It makes 3,000 episodes a week and it spends $1 to create an episode and monetize it by getting programmatic ads and basically breaks even on most episodes if only 20 people listen. So if you do the math, if they just start to hit some, they clear above 20, they're going to make money, right? So types of podcasts go from low effort like weather reports, simple biographies to higher effort like 50 AI personalities, including food experts, right? So this company has 184 custom AI agents using various LLM models, and the CEO is a former exec at podcast studio Wondery and says she wants to make thousands more AI personalities, including AI Oprah. I think there's going to be a lot of trash added to the podcasts. You know, I guess networks. This just goes to show, I think in my mind, that human like this is going to become even more valuable.

Yes, it is. But it's also tough. How do you know when you're listening to a podcast that it's AI generated or not if the audio is really good?

I don't know. I don't know right now.

I don't really listen to AI podcasts at the moment, but I think what makes the human touch really good is people can meet you and they can relate more. I'm not saying they can't do that with AI. I just don't know how they can do that with AI right now. Time will tell. But from our experiences, when we go in person and go to events, people like the fact that we're humans. They can interact with us, take pictures. I'm not saying I'm popular or anything like that, but, or Eric's popular or anything like that. It's more so people like how they can interact and share stories and we can relate to them.

I think events are going to become even more valuable and communities are. I mean, even you look at the last 12 months or so. So this year I didn't do my— the annual event that I do, right? And everyone's like, when's the event happening? When's the event happening?

What annual event?

Remember, I would do it at the Beverly Wilshire or like, you know, we do like the little mastermind thing.

Oh yeah.

Yeah. And like this year a lot of people were texting me saying, hey, when's it happening? I was like, oh no, I'm doing— I had to handle the YPO Global Marketing Summit this year. And so I think these types of communities are going to become more and more valuable because it's just all this stuff that you're seeing right now. There's going to be a proliferation of all this AI content, which is fine, but the unique part To your point, is the human connection, whether you are introvert or not.

Yeah. You're actually better off doing more of the YPO marketing summits each year if they let you.

They won't let me.

Than doing your own thing.

Yeah. They won't let me because there's a board that they have and they like to cycle through different people every— the problem is every person they cycle through a lot, it's the event experience varies. Whereas like I've done a lot of these and so I know how I want it to go, right? And so the quality changes every year. Yeah.

And he, you picked a legit hotel, right? Noah?

Yeah.

What do they have that we love? The tree ice cream.

Yeah. Yeah. St. Regis Belle Harbor. Shout out to St. Regis Belle Harbor, which, um, I was going to say is owned by Waipio, but it's not. So yeah.

Cool.

Yeah. Anyway, that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we will see you tomorrow.