The Future of Sales Post-Covid with Brex's CRO, Sam Blond

Go. Hey, everybody at Saastr. I am here with one of our good friends and my good friends. For me, since almost inception in SaaS, and for you guys, since the earliest days of Saastr, Sam Blond, now Chief Sales Officer at Brex, one of the great innovators in finance. And before that, head of revenue stints at Flexport, Rainforest, Zenefits, and others, and going dating ourselves or going back in time, um, the rock star pretty much everything at Adobe Sign and EchoSign. And I really wanted to bring someone back, a good friend, to talk about what's happening in sales post-COVID, right? I mean, we're coming out of this, we're coming out of this. The vaccines are going out, um, Texas is for better or worse at 100% capacity. And we've been selling, we've been selling from home for a year, haven't we, Sam?

It's crazy to think about it. It was sort of like January, February, 2020 is over, but it is. It's now been a year since all of this started. And crazy to think about that. And thank you for having me, Jason. Awesome to see you and excited to be here.

So, so much I want to learn, but let's, let's start off with some framing, like how much of your sales team today have you hired since COVID and how many of them have you met?

Uh, so we've hired— we're accelerating hiring. Um, we, uh, slowed down in a lot of 2020 when we were just figuring out, especially on the go-to-market side, just figuring out like what, what is the impact of, uh, COVID and all this stuff. And we, we make a lot of money on credit card spend, and so it's reasonable to think credit card spend would come down given things that you think about when people spend on credit cards. It's travel and it's restaurants and it's all these things that sort of disappeared. That said, our revenue did the opposite of what we were a little bit concerned about, which was accelerate, because the spaces that we're selling into are tech and e-commerce and these companies that spend a lot on things like software and servers and ads and things that a bunch more money is coming into today.

Yep.

Hiring, so it's accelerated in 2021. The folks that we have hired since COVID began in the sales organization, I don't think I've met a single one one of them in person, of course, met over the phone.

Not even a manager, not even a manager for a walk and talk or anything like that?

You know, so we've made, we do a lot of internal manager promotions. We do an external manager hire. It's actually somebody that we brought back, former Brex employee that we rehired her. She's great. Her name's Maddie. So I have met her in person despite the fact that she was sort of a post-COVID leadership hire. And so, you know, let's say we maybe made 20 hires, met all of them over Zoom and none in person. And it seems to be going well, but I know we'll go deep into a bunch of these sort of subtopics.

Got it. And so, and I want to go to the topic, okay, but so you've, you, there was a brief slowdown, it seemed crazy, but then Brex is on fire because your customers are in tech and e-commerce, right? The two biggest beneficiaries of COVID Enrique moved out of San Francisco too, right? The founders of Brex are gone. Are you going back to the office? Are you going to go back to floors of endless AEs and SDRs like in the Zenefits and others' days? Are we ever going back to floors of AEs in San Francisco?

Lots to unpack, I think. So Brex sort of specific, we made the decision very early on. I think it's really paid off for us. We made the decision very early on that we are going to to go fully remote even after COVID ends. So that allowed us very early, let's say back in the sort of like June or July timeframe of last year, to begin hiring anywhere, at least in the United States is primarily where we're focused. And had we, you know, sort of hemmed and hawed about the decision and not really made our mind up, it would have forced us to continue hiring where we have office locations. So we are fully remote. You alluded to Pedro and Enrique, they're taking advantage of it. So they now live in Los Angeles. Our head of product moved to Austin. I have my head of sales development, she moved to Dallas. And people in the company are moving all around. And one of the things that you and I just caught up on, there seems to be one theme And that is lots of good weather. So, you know, sort of like Florida, Southern California, Texas, mostly warm weather states. I'm not seeing a lot of new addresses in Minnesota.

Got it. And do you even care where hires live now? Is it relevant at all to the hiring process?

Interestingly, yes, we have a bias towards new hires that actually aren't in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, what we categorize as tier 1 cities, because there's cost savings associated with hiring people in, uh, lower cost locations. So, um, of these new hires that we've made, lots of them do come from, uh, non-San Francisco, New York type places. And, and you mentioned one thing that I forgot to touch on It was this sort of like, are the days of sort of like endless rows of SDRs and sales reps within San Francisco, are those over? I think probably.

Probably. Yeah.

Of course, like, never say never. And the reason that I think probably, I think this just accelerated something that was already starting to happen, which was oftentimes companies would start in San Francisco, founding team would be there, you start growing, and then when you really reach a point where you're scaling and you have you then sort of outsource and open up a second location in a lower-cost city. So Zenefits did it in Phoenix, Brex had done it in Salt Lake City. And so what you've got in San Francisco are like the Salesforces of the world and maybe these companies that grew to be really big a long time ago. But I don't know that there are examples of more recent companies that are hiring that way in San Francisco anymore.

So let me, let me go back to a point you made about tier 2 cities being more cost effective. And I'd like to understand what you've learned. On the one hand, that makes intuitive sense, right? You have to pay people more in San Francisco, both, both because of cost of living and competition. On the other hand, a traditional, at least, AE comp plan with an OTE tied to a quota, how does this tie into salaries being normalized across the country? Because let's say you have a $250K OTE for a million $1 million quota, just to keep it simple, right? Does it really matter whether you're in Antarctica or San Francisco or Pensacola, Florida? How does that make it more cost-effective in a traditional AE comp structure?

Well, I think there's— I'll say two things, and I may not be answering the question directly.

That's okay.

So two things that do come to mind. One is like, how do we do this?

Yeah.

And then the second is some things that it unlocks for us that we didn't necessarily have previously. So the first is, how do we do this? We work with our people team and they have different cities and they peg them based off of a tier and it's all cost of living related. And so you mentioned if there is an AE in San Francisco with a $250,000 comp band, what we do is if we're hiring them in Denver, it's a tier 2 city. So we look at the Denver comp for $250,000 and sort of like peg that to the San Francisco rate and it may come down to, let's just say $200,000. These are real estate. And so then that's how you structure their comp, and it's a 50/50 split. And so they have the same target. They're just making money based off of where they live and not the exact percentage of what they're contributing to the company. So that's sort of how we structure the compensation. And then in terms of some doors that this opens for the business, We've found that having humans, and we can say it's sales or we can just say it's some form of support, but having humans focused on driving behavior and specifically customer acquisition or product adoption, that when we put humans there, it has a huge impact. And there becomes a point where the cost doesn't support putting humans on specific tasks. Yeah, because it's too expensive.

Picking up the phone is the one that drives me nuts. You got to pick up the phone, right?

You do. And if you're picking up the phone and paying somebody, you know, $10 to pick up that phone, um, they can only do so much to pick up that phone. There are certain activities that they can do with that. If you make— if you make it $5, they can actually do a lot of different activities. And so what we're finding as we expand outside into the United States, there's actually more things that we can put people on And then that even becomes more exaggerated. And one of the things that we're thinking about doing this year is something like an expansion into Brazil, where we have a lot of, you know, our founders from Brazil, lots of employees are from Brazil. And so if we can get an office in Brazil that allows us to pay people based off of cost of living there, the activities that those people can do to drive additional business, it just opens up a lot more to us. I love that. I love—

I want to just pick on or follow up on one thing and then push on one other, but I love that you're using the cost savings to invest more in support and customers, right? Because that's the biggest tragedy to tech companies. They pay so well, they make so much revenue, but they can't afford to pick up the phone. They can't afford to have humans. I think we've all learned we want more CS, don't we? We want onboarding to be better and easier, and humans make it better. Software alone can't do it. And the fact that you're doing, which I implore anyone listening to this to do, which is invest some of those savings in more people to make your customers happy, right? More people that do not have to make six-figure incomes, prima donnas that can actually make them. That's about the best investment you can make, even if your product's the easiest to use in the world, right? I'm a Brex customer. I rarely need any help, but I want help in 5 seconds. Like, if I have a problem and I don't want to have to always figure out the website, right? Well, I mean, maybe it's too specific an example, but this is magic for MPS, isn't it? And customer happiness is magic for retention, right?

You nailed it. I mean, like, everything you just said totally nailed it. We're doing right now an exercise of a bunch of people on our executive team. We're building what's called a flywheel.

Yes.

And, um, a big part of— I'm sure everybody's flywheel, we haven't gone over them yet— is, is sort of like inspiring customer love. And, um, rather than maybe, uh, taking the savings that you get by hiring in a lower-cost location and putting those you know, towards like the bottom line of the business. Instead, if you can reinvest that in, um, things that benefit customers, that's a big part of what we're thinking here with, with what, uh, going remote opens up for us.

Yeah, funny story.

We're—

Sam and I are both investors in a company called Gorgeous, which is sort of like a Zendesk for e-commerce. It got a huge boost after COVID. And the last board meeting, I love the whole team, but one of the sales leaders kind of complained. Never complains. I mean, he's great, right? But he said How come now we have 3 times as many people in CS as sales? I said, well, look what happened. Your time to deployment went down from 30 days to 1 day. And all these CS folks, they're not in the Bay Area, right? They're in Europe, they're in low-cost centers of Europe and the rest of the US. I'm saying that's where you invest the money. That's magic. The fact that you have 3 times as much CS as sales should warm your heart as a sales leader, right? Because that's going to be your magic to getting your NRR up, isn't it?

You nailed it. So as you're saying, sitting here talking, thinking about this flywheel and the investment in CS that you just talked about to Gorgeous, it's going to make the customer experience so much better.

Yes.

That's helpful to the brand and that's helpful to the reputation and that makes selling easier. And so the fact that they are investing so much in CS and making the product, the customer experience better, it's actually benefiting the sales team.

Yeah, let's just finish that point. We could talk about forever, but people get this wrong. If you, if you have cost-effective, high-quality humans, that is the single best investment you can make in software. It's totally not obvious, right? But if you have folks that are cost-effective that can improve your— there's always gaps. There's always gaps from trial to deployment to onboarding to renewal to questions, and humans can fill those. You'll never solve all those gaps with software, right? Even Zoom doesn't do it, right? You'll never solve all of them with software, and you will have happier customers if you put people, right, at prop— Put people on problems, right? It always works, doesn't it? People on problems, right?

The right people.

The right— it has to be the right people. Yeah, there's nothing worse. There's nothing worse, right?

But, um, you'll almost never have a worse outcome if you put somebody good on a problem and say, improve, improve the numbers here. Yeah, very seldom do they come back and they're, it actually got worse. You put me on this and, and I made it worse. Yep.

All right, let's just go back to one last thing and then let's move forward. But I, because so many, so many founders in particular really try to work on their sales comp plans. So let's talk about this Denver versus SF thing. And SF is almost, doesn't even exist for Brex anymore. Okay. But we've had, we've had salary differentials since the dawn of time, right? It's since the federal government pays different salaries, no matter what anybody says, big companies are never going to pay everybody the same everywhere in the globe. At least the majority aren't. Some will and more power to them. But most, most of that's going to go away by 50 or 100 employees. Right. So it's nothing new. But where I get a little confused is around accelerators and incentives. Okay, so let's imagine you have a rep in Denver versus SF. The $200 versus $250 OT in theory makes sense, right? In theory makes sense because normalized they're the same, right? And let's say, let's be simple. Let's say the quote is 4x, or let's say it's $800K, right? But if you get into the bonus, if you get from, instead of doing $800K, you do $1 million, that's so valuable to the company. Does the Denver person not keep as much of the extra $200K? Or do the accelerators have to normalize even if the bases are lower?

So I'll tell you how we do it. Yeah, it, it, it doesn't mean that that's the right way of doing it, and maybe, maybe we could drive different behavior by doing it differently, or so certainly could be debated. The way that we do it though is we believe that $200,000 in Denver feels like $250,000. Again, these are illustrative. I don't know that these are the exact numbers, but $250,000 in San Francisco feels like $200,000 in Denver in terms of cost of living and the, you know, where the home that you're able to rent with that and, you know, food prices and whatever else. And so when people overperform, an extra 10% is 10% on each of those. So if somebody gets an accelerator, At the $250,000, they may make $275,000. And in Denver, they make $220,000. So it's 10% of what your salary is and not necessarily the hard dollar value. So the person in San Francisco that's overperforming, they do receive more hard dollars, but they receive the same percentage increase.

I guess that makes it after, you know, after costs and taxes, it's the same, right? Or sort of, right? It makes sense. I have to noodle on it because I like things simple. I don't like two folks making different amounts for the same activity. But on the other hand, it's logically consistent, right? You're— that way is the simpler way to do it, isn't it?

Well, it's the same whether you're in sales or anywhere else, right? Like, um, people in support, they're, they're, they're likely measured on, uh, you know, how many, how many tasks they can complete, or, or whatever the, the metric is. And we, we should expect the person in Denver to complete the same number of tasks as the person in San Francisco, and the salary is going to be different. So It's universally applicable that you are getting paid less for producing the same, depending on where you're located.

All right, let's chat a little bit about training and onboarding, right? And I'll tell you where I get the— I want to hear what you've learned to improve training and onboarding in general, like with the distributed team. But first, let's talk about SDRs, right? I find that entry-level SDRs straight out of a 2-year program or whatever, I mean, We have trained them since the 18th century by osmosis, right? By folks that ask 7,000 questions a day, turning around rapid fire, asking questions, making mistakes. How do you train these folks over Zoom and Slack? How do you make that work? It's so different than the past, isn't it?

This is when you and I emailed about chatting on this topic. This is the group of customers that came to mind, or this is the group of employees, I'm sorry, that came to mind. This is for sales. It's going to be SDR. For other departments, I think it's just sort of like your most junior employees, entry-level stuff, right?

Mark Zuckerberg said those are the ones that have to go back to the office. He said everyone else can work from home, but at Facebook, the newbies have to come in, right?

Totally. And when— so when COVID first started, and then when we made the decision to go remote, this was what was on my mind. And it was on my mind because I remember I joined, uh, EchoSign in 2008. And I was shortly out of college, 22 years old. And just thinking back, like, if I didn't have the forcing function of needing to be in an office and sort of like appearing there and I had a manager that was sitting next to me, what would I have done with my days? If I woke up in the marina in San Francisco and, you know, maybe I'd gone out that Thursday night before, what would Friday look like for me? And I, so that was my big concern. And I think my thinking has evolved a little bit and then we can get more tactical in terms of what we should actually do. My thinking has evolved a little bit and accountability is less about sort of showing up and it's more about performance. And so that line of thinking is incorrect now, or I've come to the conclusion that that line of thinking that these people, they're not going to work, is not correct, because I think what's going to be motivating and what they'll be accountable to is hitting certain numbers and not necessarily being in an office for a certain period of time. We've actually found that to be true. We haven't lost productivity with this group of employees. I mean, the question would be best answered by Ashley Kelly, who's our director of SDR, and Maddie, who's one of our SDR managers. In terms of like tactically what they're doing. But I see a lot of, a lot of times on calendars where people are doing the same activity. And if everybody's on the same page, let's say there's a prospecting block for 2 hours in the morning and you get everybody and maybe you're even on a Zoom call in the background where people can sort of like unmute and chime in. Hey, has anybody ever seen this before? Do you know how this product, like this system works or anything like that? But if everybody's doing the exact same activity, you've got a Slack channel that people can type in, you know, successes, celebrate those sorts of things. If you keep everybody doing the same sort of thing for specific time blocks, that seems to be something that's really valuable.

Well, that is a big change from the classic throw a bunch of SDRs at a random list or, right? Have structured blocks where everyone's doing essentially the same thing at those times.

Structured days the same.

Structured days.

Yeah. Ideally, you know, there should be a period of time, and this may differ by time zone, but there should be a period of time that cold calling is the most effective. All right, let's have our cold calling block from, you know, 9 to 11 AM.

I see, get the whole team together. That's what we're doing from 9 to 11, we're doing our cold calling, right?

That's exactly right. Get everybody rowing in the same direction, doing the same activities. And then a lot of what used to be the sort of like tap your neighbor on the shoulder encourage just a ton of communication, whether it's over Zoom, over Slack, whatever the sort of medium is. It's just— and reinforce that at the leadership level. So lots of pings like, how's your day going? Anything I can help with? And just sort of like constant communication.

Yes.

It didn't necessarily have to take place when you're in the office.

And have you found— I've only seen this anecdotally, I don't have the data, but I found that that for sales folks in particular, true of anybody, but especially sales and some marketing folks, it's much harder for the mediocre to hide now. Right? In the old days, we're just driving from the marina and hanging out in the office got you 20% of your brownie points. No one cares anymore for someone that shows up to the Zoom and smiles, do they? Have you seen that impact sort of like maybe the, the, the, like the just below mid-pack group? Have you seen them stress out in this situation? Have you seen better performance from folks like that? Or is this, you're not seeing this behavior?

I think what I'm seeing, which is maybe related, is in the office there are a lot of personal relationships that existed. And I think also a lot of the shift to remote has, I think, more than ever made the sort of perception of performance very data-driven. It's less about—

Exactly, right? Yeah.

You're so— I'm in data so much more and so much less going to lunch with people and developing these sort of like personal relationships that can make performance evaluation far more subjective. When you know somebody, they're a great person and like, you know, you really like them and all of these. Instead, it's much more seeing how people are stack ranking and you don't get as much of that sort of like one-on-one going to lunch. Now, there are advantages and disadvantages of that. But I think it does shine a much brighter light on the sort of like performance of people because that's all you're seeing and less the sort of personal relationships that often exist in the office.

So even at your level at the top, you're finding that you're judging folks even more quantitatively than you did before, right? Definitely. Yeah, I think that's the thing. There's always this persona of Bob, who everyone likes in the office, that's not that great, but he skates by, right, because of his persona. I find Bob's are not only not skating by, I'm finding they're deeply struggling now. They're deep because their toolkit doesn't work anymore. Right?

That's true. And I think before, oftentimes we would bake in excuses for Bob. Like Bob is—

Endless excuses for Bob.

Endless.

Everyone has an excuse for Bob.

Right?

He always makes it 2 more quarters than he should have, doesn't he? He always lasts 2 more quarters than he should.

He's trying so hard. He's such an idiot.

Trying so hard. Yeah.

He's in the office at 8:00 AM every day. Do you see that? He's sitting and so—

Every day.

That, that, that—

Give Bob more time.

That goes away. And so, the other thing, and it's sort of related, is there are people who, and this is maybe less true in sales, but it does exist, that are less comfortable sort of like asking for help. They're just not, they feel like they're intruding or they're taking somebody's time. Those types of people will struggle more.

And what— but we all have— even I have some of that, right? What's your top learning? How do you encourage people to ask for more help than they're used to before distributed days?

Well, I think it's a two-way street. Yeah. And what I mean by that is we have to encourage people to ask and say, like, you're not going to be successful if you don't. And if you put it in terms of success and failure, there aren't asterisks. You know, we talked about this data that we're looking at. It's people's performance. There's not an asterisk next to Bob's name that said Bob reached out to his manager a bunch this month to get help to get to his number. Yeah. So the numbers are the numbers and you put yourself in a better, in a better position to be successful if you do seek help. So like we encourage that. That said, it's a two-way street where We need to tell Bob to seek help, but we also have to set Bob up for success and create an environment where help finds its way to Bob. And it's, it's more constant communication. It is more of the proactive, what can I help with? Anything that you need? Let's get on a quick— even if it's just like a 5-minute call, I want to check in and see how your day is going. Yeah, those sorts of things really make a difference.

There's, there's two more things I want to make sure we get to before I run out of time. But curious your feedback. The one thing I've tried to do with folks to improve some of this, the questions and the onboarding is, and just curious your thoughts as a leader, is much more shadowing. So the new idea I like is for the first 30 days, no employee has to do anything but shadow. There is no quota. There are no sales. You should not even do your own call. You will not get a lead. You are paired with Sam or Abigail. Or Jody in any role, but, but especially sales and marketing. And you're not— we're not expecting anything out of you the first 30 days. And all I want you to do is find— and then if you're lucky, you end up with an inadvertent mentor, right? And all you do for 30 days is you join them. And we're not— and then on day 31, we'll be— well, then, then let's talk about new stuff.

I really like that. Um, and that's actually a takeaway I'll probably, you know, On my next sales leadership team meeting, there will be a line item for discussion topic Jason M. Lemkin idea on shadowing for the first 30 days. We do a variation of that, but I think I might like yours better. Yeah, everybody, everybody, and this was actually true in office too, everybody's assigned an onboarding partner, and that's somebody on their team, likely somebody that has been successful in the role, that they're, in addition to their manager, encouraged to sort of go-to, and that gives the person currently in the role— also, it's helpful to teach people. You can learn a lot yourself, and it's a positive experience from a learning in terms of like, you know, leadership-type roles. You sort of pair the success together. I think there's lots of like positive benefits. We don't do that though, where we could say your job is just shadow this person for 30 days.

Yeah.

What we do is, this is your buddy or whatever we want to call it, and you two need to, you know, meet twice a week, and there's like, you know, a document that sort of outlines that stuff. But it's less sophisticated than what you just described, which I kind of like. There is one thing that we do in addition that we haven't done before. So we just added, in addition to managers and in addition to these buddies, We now have a team lead or a coach that is the top performing individual contributor on our team. 25% of his number is now tied to the performance of the team. And because of that, it's now part of his job to join the calls of other reps on the team. So we are adding just more support than we ever really needed to in the office environment.

It's a different point than the shadow, but I like this. That's a good— I like that simple heuristic for— we all end up with a team lead, right? They naturally gravitate around these leaders that may not be ready to be the manager or the director, right? And tying 25% of their comp, if they want it, to the team, it's just about the right ratio, isn't it? It's just about the right— to be their number 2, because then it's your number 2 job, isn't it?

Yes. And I think totally. And one thing that was happening before is this person was already recognized as the top rep because people see the leaderboard, right? And so periodically, especially newer AEs, but periodically newer AEs, and then maybe sometimes in big deals, people would sort of like slack him and be like, hey, you know, quick question on this account. And I think there was this— we talked about it with potentially people not seeking help, but I think that there was this like, am I taking too much of it? His name's Bobby. Am I taking too much of Bobby's time?

Yep.

Bobby doesn't want to like— Bobby's got his own stuff to worry about. He wants to be number 1 on the leaderboard. Am I pinging him too much for help? And by delineating Bobby as team lead and tying 25% of his comp to the performance of the team, that's now Bobby's job. So like you're actually helping Bobby do his job by pinging him. It's his job to join these meetings.

That's a good point.

Yeah, so, uh, that, that was an important distinction. And by the way, we're, we're— what's today, the, the 4th? We're 4 days into this.

So this experiment, I like it, I like it.

I can't report on, uh, results just yet.

We'll do this again and we'll talk about the shadow a bit more too. Um, all right, 2 last ones because this is great. There's a lot I'd like to ask you, but 2 last ones. Um, one might be a big topic, but let's simplify, which is, have you found now that you can recruit anywhere and over Zoom, have you been able to build build a more diverse sales team out of this?

We have been able to— I can say definitively we are building a more geographically diverse sales team.

But have you been able to take bias out of this by, by having a more technologically focused recruiting process? Has it benefited you in terms of overall diversity? Have you found ways to leverage that?

Yeah. So, so I think where we are continuing to have done well and continue to do well. And then I'll talk a little bit about maybe a downside of what— the way that we do this also. So, um, we are becoming far more diverse geographically. I think as you become more diverse geographically, you inherently become more diverse with sort of like thought. You know, people in different parts of the country, they're different. They are different from one another. So, so I think that adds— certainly We've always been, I would say, good, not great, on gender diversity. We have several really amazing women leaders in the sales organization. We can probably do a little bit better with our individual contributor hiring. This does open up the candidate pool so much wider, such that we now can be more thoughtful about like, you know, making sure we've got a ratio that we're comfortable with. Where I think, and this is something that I've talked with you about, I think, and certainly talked about in some of my recruiting conversations, we do a lot of referral-based hiring and that remains—

Has pros and cons here, right? It has pros and cons here, right? You get people that look a lot like who you already have is the downside, right? It's a big downside. We do.

And the upside very much mitigates risk.

Way lower risk, like order of magnitude lower risk with referrals, right?

I mean, and there's all sorts of second order things. The person that makes the referral really takes that person under their wing and makes sure that they're successful because it's a reflection on them. And like all of these positive— I think, um, or not I think, I'm pretty certain that it doesn't help diversity.

It, it is classic anti-diversity, right? The first time you go to manager school, you learn you have to stop hiring your friends or no one else will. They'll only be like you, right? That's the problem. Non-managers only hire their friends. That's who they bring in, right, that look, act, talk like them, went to the same school, went to the last company, right?

That's true. And so we can do better there.

But tough trade-off, right? I think it's like promotions. In a perfect world, you'd have 50/50. You have 50% of your managers from within and without, right, to get the best of both worlds. In a perfect world, half would be referrals, and then you would balance that out with going even further to make your team more diverse, right? Rough idea, 50/50s are nice in these things.

I think you're right. And again, we have solved for the risk mitigation historically. And so this will give us an opportunity, I think, more than ever, because again, like the candidate population that we can hire from today just grew exponentially. We had offices in San Francisco, New York, and Utah. That's a small percentage of the United States. We can hire anywhere in the United States today. And so that just means that the candidates that we can hire from, it just grew exponentially and we can then filter in for the highest quality and do a combination, I think, of mitigating risk, but also not just taking from referrals.

All right. Last question, and this may be more for your ecosystem and friends and peers, right? But catch me up on where the top— will the top executives work for a CEO-based anywhere today? I was skeptical for about 6 months after COVID. I was skeptical that a top CRO, CMO wouldn't wait, wouldn't like, look, I'll work from home, but after all this, I want to be in the office with her, with my boss, right? And then about 3 or 4 months ago, I saw this fall apart and I saw top folks that we knew start to take jobs with companies in Europe in particular, because I've worked with a lot of Europeans. I'm like, what? What? You're joining as CMO for a company based in Norway or London. Is this temporary? If I'm a CEO based in wherever in the world, can I hire a Samblon today?

I'll give my sort of like biased and personal experience perspective on this one. So I suppose it's a strong opinion that's loosely held. Yeah. So I think I think it depends on the stage of the company. And what I mean by that is there is so much value to having the early team be in an office together. I think not just developing relationships, but also the like, you know, 8 o'clock at night, everybody's still in the office. Oh, this thing came up. Let's all jump in the room and whiteboard out like how we can accelerate, you know, next month's revenue twice as much as we think we could before? Like, what would we do differently? And I don't think those types of conversations happen in a remote world where the executive team or whatever is fully distributed at an early stage. I think as companies get larger, that becomes less relevant. Those types of things don't happen as much anymore. And so to answer your question directly, I do work for CEOs that are in different locations and may or may not be in different locations, uh, once, once we're done with COVID And, uh, I would, depending on the company, of, uh, a company size, um, sort of like removing myself from the, the situation. I, uh, I think people, the expectation is they will. I, I think, um, we're in sort of a new world here. Yeah. And for larger companies, they're going to have distributed executive teams. But again, I, I, I— if I were starting a company today, um, I would want that, that first core group of people to be in an office together. And, and, you know, maybe it's just the first 12 to 18 months or something like that, but I just— it felt like there was so much value that we gained, whether it was at Brex or at Zenefits, or I'm sure you remember at EchoSign, just by being able to pull people into to rooms and have those ad hoc.

For sure. Well, let me, let me just summarize it at the end and then we'll break. Let me ask a specific scenario, right? Just for cross execs, you know, right? And folks, you know, a $5 to $6 million ARR SaaS company doing really well. Okay. Growing triple digits, great product, good customers based in Sweden, based in Italy. Okay. Based in, I don't know, not Paris in France, some other city based in maybe even Brazil. Can they hire Bay Area SaaS VPs today? Like, and should they almost— should they not have any worries and should they go for it? Should they not be worried they can't hire the best folks that have spun out of SF tech companies? What's your thinking on that? Will folks, you know, go work for those companies?

So I'll give a very Switzerland answer. I think it depends. But I think generally speaking, yes. Yes. Generally speaking, yes. If there is a really hot, fast-growing company that is located outside the United States, I think that's fine. And yes, I think what matters more is the quality of the team, the growth of the business, and less where is the founder or founders located. I don't think that that is, you know, sort of like at the top of the priority list. All of that said, there's some nuance in terms of like if they're in Italy and all the customers in Italy, does it make sense to hire somebody leading sales in the United States?

No, no, I'm assuming it's a global— it has a global customer footprint, right?

Assuming, you know, that yes, I think like if customers and go-to-market is primarily concentrated in the United States, I think it makes sense for both the company and the individual. To have somebody out of the US. Yeah.

Well, thank you, Sam. This was incredible. I'm sure we'll touch base on all this again in the coming months. We'll have you at another SaaStr event and we'll dig in a bit more, but thanks again and congratulations on everything.

I can't wait. And congratulations right back to you. It's been awesome to see SaaStr evolve over the course of the last, you know, 12 months now into something bigger and better than it's ever been. So awesome to see you, Jason, and congratulations as well.