E26: Signals That Separate Great Companies from Risky Bets with Neal Patel, CRO of Crunchbase

And today's guest is Neil Patel, who is the CRO at Crunchbase, who comes in with 25 years of experience in the tech industry. He leads Crunchbase's go-to-market functions, including sales, partnerships, BD, marketing, CS, RevOps, and maybe some others I missed, and also serves as the de facto GM for its data licensing business. And I Under his leadership, Crunchbase has grown rapidly, somewhere in the neighborhood of 75x growth, and they've secured partnerships with companies like SMP, LinkedIn, NVIDIA, Amazon, and he's had an awesome run. So really excited for this one, Neil. Thanks for joining us.

Yeah. Hey, Kyle, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Hello and welcome to the Revenue Leadership Podcast by Topline. I'm your host, Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner.com. And every Wednesday we dive deep into the strategies and tactics being used to drive success by the best revenue leaders in the world. So join me as I sit down with revenue operators to discuss actionable frameworks that you can implement in your business today with no fluff, no sales pitches, and no platitudes.

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So we're going to talk about two topics today. We're going to talk about sort of state of the market, considering Crunchbase sits on some of the most interesting data about venture. You're at a cross-section as a CRO in that company and just having a really interesting perspective into the world of go-to-market. And we'll talk about the venture market, how GTM is being impacted by AI and what that means for folks, and then share some advice on how CROs should think about the right company to join for folks who are thinking about something new or that's on the back of their mind, really a framework to understand if their company's got legs or if the next thing has legs. So looking forward to this. What did I miss in your background? You spent a bunch of time at Google, but maybe give people the 60-second background.

Yeah, you pretty much nailed my time at Crunchbase. I spent a long time at Google. I helped early days build out Google Maps, and then I helped, I ran global partnerships for our search engine, and then helped early days build out the GTM for Google Fiber.

Very cool.

Prior to that, in an earlier life, I was a corporate attorney, do an MA in international finance, and on the weekends, I'm a mechanical engineer.

That's nice. So how big was Google in 2007 when you started?

Oh man. I mean, it was, it was, it was a large company, not anywhere near as large as today. It was post-IPO. I want to say maybe, maybe 4,000, 5,000 people. I think I remember being there when we hit 5,000. So I think there was a little celebration or some little, you know, a message sent out, but yeah, it was, it was, it was cool. And the Google Maps, the product that I worked on, we were our own little thing. And that was a much smaller team. So really, it really did feel like a startup inside of a big company.

Yes.

And super grateful for my time there because it really helped me, like, build one of the skill sets that at least I've been told I have, which is you can work at small companies and big companies and interact with them all the same way, do deals with them both. And they're very different beasts. But that gave me the, the early kind of training and insight to like, you know, it became kind of second nature to me because that's just how I learned. Nice.

And Google's like almost 200,000 employees now. So what a— that's crazy.

Yeah.

Crunchbase is like well known for having some of the most interesting data on tech and VC. And so I want to just level set quickly before we dig into the impact of AI. The market is at a funny place right now. You can talk to somebody who is super bullish, like tons of optimism because of everything we're seeing in terms of the AI platform shift and venture dollars seem to be there. The IPO market and M&A markets are unlocking a little bit. And then you can also talk to people who are certain that a recession is coming and everything's going to be bad again. And so from your vantage point, where do we sit? Right now?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think like, so as you like going in reverse order from what you talked about, like when you look at sort of the state of the world, geopolitical stuff and whatnot, like there's a lot of uncertainty there. And I think that, you know, I'm not, I'm probably the last person you want to comment on that stuff. There are people that are smarter out there that understand what's happening in the macro, macro level of all the world, but within within our part of the world, our part of the economy, I should say, you know, the, we are through Crunchbase, through the lens we have at Crunchbase, you know, we are seeing like things, some more optimism, right? And we are seeing, you know, we're seeing the public markets open up a little bit more. We're seeing M&A happen more, larger deals. Now, like, as you said, like a lot of that's driven by AI and the ripple effects of AI and optimism about it. But, you know, that's, as I tell folks on my team sometimes, you know, like a little bit of something is better than nothing. And that's kind of what we have right now. And, but I think like bigger, like if you take that one step further with like what's why that's occurring, it's because, you know, AI is just, it is obviously on, this isn't, this sounds silly saying it, but AI is one of these big tectonic shifts. That's happened, that's happening. Well recognized to be so, like back in, I'm old enough to remember, you know, the year 2000 when, you know, the internet bubble burst, but like the internet was a big thing, right? And you had, and there's lots of things that came out, but the biggest ones were you had cloud, you had mobility and mobile, right? You had like business model types with SaaS and things like that, that, that affect that, there were big, just big tectonic shifts in how people do business and what, what, what you're capable of achieving with technology. And AI is doing the same thing. And so there's lots of optimism. There's lots of, you know, it's energizing for us to see and even live it in Crunchbase, like how that changes the way you have to do business, how it changes business models and how it changes, you know, outcomes really. Like, and that's what we're, at least most of us are all, we're here for, like, you know, changing the world and hopefully making some money along the way.

Yeah. And so specifically as a CRO who sells into a bunch of these companies today, like what do you personally watch most closely to navigate Crunchbase?

Yeah. So I think with one of the interesting things about AI is this like the opportunity is amazing as I just alluded to. But it also like really changes the game for companies and every company I think risks being disrupted. Right. Um, you know, in like an example, like you think, you think about AI agents, like, right. And, uh, there's lots of talk, uh, mostly focused on consumer apps and websites of agents disintermediating, uh, some of these like large, you know, large consumer apps. Right. So if you can tell an agent to go book a flight for you, Why do you ever need to go to any travel website again? And if I'm an owner of one of those travel websites, I'm a little worried that I'm not going to be getting that user traffic and I'm not going to be, I'm not going to have the relationship with the end customer. And if I think about how I monetize, yes, through, you know, the referrals and fees, but I also monetize through advertising. And if an agent is doing all the work that I'm not getting those users, that's, that's a problem, right? Well, that extends out to the enterprise world too. Right. Um, where agents can now, you know, can, can, can effectively be an intermediary between enterprise apps and the user. Uh, and, and, and like, so that's like one layer to think about it. If I was, if I owned one of those companies and companies are making moves on it, but I just think it's very interesting because it's going to change a lot of things. You mentioned like my time at Google. In the same way that Google disintermediated web browsers, remember the web browser, right? You don't need a web browser and a web browser could, you could, I'm making this, I'll show you that a web browser is analogous to an application right now, whether it be consumer or web app or enterprise app. You don't need that if the outcome can be, if you can, as Google would just say, you can type in a query in Google and Google will give you the answer. You don't need a browser and you arguably may not even need the website, right? There's a lot of talk about that. This, a similar dynamic could be happening with agents and enterprise apps. So I think that's really interesting when you think about businesses. And another facet of it is even just like, just think about how the OpenAIs and and Anthropic and other large LLMs of the world are getting data, right? Uh, so if you are a data— if you are a company that, that, that, that has data and relies on data like Crunchbase to, to make money, you got to think about your business differently, which is one of the things we thought long and hard about doing. Um, and I can share more about that. Uh, but, but, you know, those are just two examples really of, of, of ways like it AI is changing everything. Okay.

And what about the market? Like how much as a CRO in your position do you pay attention to the macro conditions, or do you really think that CROs should spend much of their energy thinking and worrying about it?

I think, I think you, you have to balance the two, right? So you absolutely do need to understand what's happening in the market because you're out there talking to customers, you're talking to partners, and you, you have to understand how their how they're thinking, right? What's happening with their budgets? What's happening with their growth plans, right? Uh, you know, if, if you're, if you're in a situation where you're selling into an industry segment and that segment growth has slowed down, you might be talking to a company that's revenue is slowing down, right? And, and, and consequently, if they have a smart CFO, their, their budgets are shrinking, right? Uh, so you have to be aware of that and empathetic to that and design your, design your GTM to account for that. But at the same time, you have to balance that with like, you know, as a CRO, like real's real, you're living and dying by that quarterly number and you've got people working for you that are paying their rent by that monthly number, right? So you can't be, you can't just sit back and say, well, the market's really tough right now with the war and Like you've got to be able to operate in upmarket, obviously, but also in downmarkets. And that's the balance you have to strike. I don't think you can, you can't say you care about one more than the other, to be honest.

Yeah. And so what do you watch? Like, what are you paying attention to, to like answer some of these questions?

Yeah. So I think, you know, I watch probably the same macro numbers and trends that everybody else does. I look at, and particularly for us in Crunchbase, like a big, we sell, we also sell to a lot of growth companies. So I do look at funding, funding data. I look where the flow of funds is going. I see, I'm seeing who's, who has budget so we can tailor our approach, you know, like, and that doesn't mean we don't sell to companies. That maybe are in a down cycle. We absolutely do. We just do it a different way that makes sense for those companies. Um, but then the other thing I do that, that, that is like, is it sounds super simplistic, but it's literally like going out and talking to customers and listening to them, you know, uh, getting really, getting like going, like getting really simple into understanding the problems that they're having, trying to map that to what we're building, the problems we're trying to solve. And figuring out, like cracking that, cracking that nut for them. I'm like, how much value can we really add to you solving this problem? Right? And solve the entire thing for you. Can I solve it and maybe do something else you didn't even think was possible? Could I only solve half of it? Right? And then aligning with customers on that. And you get lots and lots of great insights on not only how to approach people, how to sell to people, how to price stuff, how to package stuff, that even what to build. I did a customer tour with my CPO or chief product officer starting about a year and a half ago when we, when we were thinking about what AI might be doing to Crunchbase, how it might disintermediate us and how we react to it and how we were going to change our business. And that, that I think was one of the most powerful, important things we've done as a company. It did change what we do at Crunchbase.

Can you share much about how it changed the company?

Absolutely. Sure. So, uh, so as you mentioned, when you first, when we first started talking, we talked like you mentioned Crunchbase and people know us for having funding data and firmographics and all things data about private companies. And we have that and we think we do a really good job of it at that. I mean, I think we do the best job of that, but I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm working at the company. Uh, but if you, it, when we started talking to customers, you know, we were like, well, you know, with this backdrop of AI and like, and we're a public website, you know, anybody can crawl us, right? So we had this fact, we were trying to solve two questions in the back of our minds, like, what are we going to do about this lingering AI thing? And, and both opportunistically, but also like, from this, you know, could we be disrupted? Uh, but also, but, but then also what could we You know, what could we be doing differently for customers? And the big thing, the big paradigm shift we had after talking to many of them was this is like, if you think about company data, what we have right now is historical. Every, every piece of data that anybody has about a company is historical. Us or any of our competitors, you have funding data, you have firmographic data. This is what a company does. It's what it did. Maybe what it does today, you don't know yet. A company got funded. That's in the past, right? Um, but what you, if you're really looking, if you're trying to do business with these companies, which is what everybody's doing in one way, shape, or form, whether your use case is investing, getting them involved here, whether it's selling to them, partnering with them, buying something from them, you're trying to do business with a company. Um, you will, you kind of care how they did in the past, right? But what you really care about is what's going to happen in the future because I care about what's going to happen once I start working with you, right? What you're really trying to do is predict things about those companies. And what we realized, uh, was that Crunchbase, we've been through the history of data that we have. We, uh, we've been around for a long, long time. We have 10 years of, over 10 years of data on companies and understanding how their profiles have changed as the world changes, as their trajectory changes. We also have 80 million users, all that viewership and how it changes and goes ups and up and down depending on what's happening with a particular company. And we realized that we could start predicting what's happening with, what's going to happen to a company. Uh, and we started talking to customers about that and they started getting more excited and then we started getting excited about the fact that we could actually do it. Then we started testing it, uh, and, and what do you want to call it, beta or design partnering with like with a handful of very large companies. And it turned out we were actually able to predict things like fundraising and M&A. Uh, you know, we, we predicted Coda being acquired by Grammarly. We predicted Hippocratic AI getting funded and, and like we're making 90,000 predictions, like I think we made 90,000 predictions last 30 days alone. Uh, and they're getting, they're getting, they're very accurate. Uh, if you're into statistics, like we've, our fundraising prediction, for example, is, uh, 95% accurate, uh, with, uh, 99% recall. So what that means is when we make a prediction, we're right 95% of the time. Uh, and we only miss 1% of fundraising rounds in terms of a prediction, making a prediction on one happening. Um, and that was all because we were talking to customers and with this backdrop of one, like, how can we solve bigger, better problems for you? Of course. And what can we learn from you? And how are you thinking about AI? But then drawing that back to what I was talking about earlier about like, How do we think about our own company differently to help ourselves from getting disrupted? Um, and with, uh, and, you know, luck has a little bit to play in this because like, you know, as luck would have it, those things converged and we were like, oh my God, we have this asset, our engagement data and the historical changes or the way understanding the history of how profiles of companies change as their trajectory changes and pattern matching. That enabled us to make predictions about what's going to happen to companies in the future. And that's something nobody has. And that's literally— we just launched that a few weeks back. And that's what we're—

is this the Heat Score, Growth Score chart in there now?

Those are two signals. Heat Score is an insight. It's telling you about the present, what's happening right now with the company. The Growth Score is telling you what's happening right now in terms of— I think you're looking at a profile page right now. But you'll see—

I'm looking at ours. Yeah.

Yeah. You'll see also, uh, on if we, if we think there's an imminent fundraising round or an M&A activity is why you're not going to see prediction at every company because not every company is about to fundraise or get bought, but you'll see a prediction, uh, uh, on, on, uh, for, on companies, if we think they'll, if we think one of those events going to happen.

And yeah, it says future growth, very likely. Yeah, I agree.

There you go.

Good for you. Yeah.

But, uh, but that's an example, like, right, of, of, of kind of the, the forces I was talking about earlier all coming together for us, uh, and how we apply that to our own business. Uh, so what's in that heat score?

Like, what, what, what makes up that heat score?

Intensity of it. So in plain English, it's intensity of interest in a company. And so what do we pull to generate that heat score? It's lots of things, but you can think about like, uh, how many people are hitting our page, intensity of traffic, how many people, how many search, how many searches does your company surface for? So if somebody searches for, give me companies that are predicted to grow a lot in the next 2 years, and your company shows up in one of our search results, that's intent. It's things like that.

Yeah. Okay. Very cool. And so you're not tuning into the Fed interest rate announcements and spending much time looking at CPI data. It's more about, hey, like focus on the customer, pay attention to their markets. Is that— I think it's a—

or yeah, it's a balance. Like, that's what you— I can act on the things that I just— on the latter half of that. Like, I can, I can change my day-to-day and my week-to-week, month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter on that. It's hard to change, you know, day-to-day based on the macro, but you absolutely do have to look at that. And that goes then again to like adjusting how you're thinking about talking to different customer segments, right? The CPI index impacts some some companies more than others, some consumers more than others, right? So if I'm running a company where that, that matters, then of course I'm going to do things. Interest rates, right? Interest rates, it matters. Like geopolitical stability or instability, it matters, right? So you do have to think about that. Like there's a balance that as a, as a leader, a CXO, it doesn't even matter if you're a CRO, uh, then you have to, you have, you have to be aware of those things.

Um, If you're selling into European defense contractors, there you go. You better be paying attention. Yeah.

Yeah. There you go. But the latter, the insights that you get on the latter half of those things, the non-high macro, those are also things you can influence. Like if I'm talking to a customer, right, I'm of course listening to them, but I'm not obeying them. Right? I have the ability by sitting and discussing with a customer, if I've done the pre-work to have a good relationship, have good rapport, to have them trust me and be a credible voice at the table. Then I can, I can, I can engage with them to come up with a mutual point of view, which I can't do with interest rates. I can't do that with interest rates. I certainly can't do that with, you know, the CPI or, or, or the other, the other issues we talked about. And so that's what I mean when I say like you have to balance because there's things I can influence. And then that's kind of what happened with this predictions thing. Like we didn't, You know, as you would expect, when we first started talking to customers, a lot of their feedback and like problems they thought they had were really— when you peeled the onion, they were just asking us to build a feature that somebody else had, you know. And the classic example is, hey, do you have better contact data? Could you get contact data in Crunchbase? I was like, we could. Like, it's not a hard problem for us to solve. We could. But like, let me ask you this. Would you buy more of our stuff or pay me more for what you have for that? And if you would, let me know, like, let's talk about that. Like, right. And, and, and after a little bit of back and forth, it was like, no, actually it wouldn't be worth it.

I got that here. I have that here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And then of course you do have to share what it takes to build it. Right. So when you have these to have like type of customer convos that like me and our CPO and I had, there's trust on both sides. Like, so I'm sharing. How we would build it. I'm sharing how long it would take and how much it would cost us and what the opportunity cost of that would be for us, what we couldn't work on. Right. And there were a few cases where I said something to the effect of like, hey, would you rather have us do— get you something like contact data or predict the future of companies? And what do you think they said?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very interesting. So let's shift to this. AI topic. So like, you know, we, we touched a little bit on the macro and what to pay attention to, but more than anything, I think what is touching all of us right now is, is AI. Obviously it's in our products, it's in our go-to-market. Uh, you, you mentioned, um, a couple impacts on, you know, the opportunity to be disrupted or disintermediated, and, and a lot of that's on the you know, how we think about product strategy. How do you see AI impacting go-to-market broadly? And then I'll get into some more details here.

Yeah, I think like, so imagine, you know, like there's, like I said, AI and agent, like even going to use agent as the, as my fulcrum upon which I talk about this. Cause it's, it's something I was talking about with a colleague, you're a, so it's certain. It's just proximate in my mind. Uh, but like, you, you could, you could loosen the grip of having to engage with any enterprise app's UI if it's connected to an agent or, or, or an agent's connected to their API, right? So if I wanted to, like, I could have an agent, like, pull customer data from Salesforce, uh, via like an API and and merge it with like financial data from an ERP, like NetSuite, your Snowflake, Mongo data.

Yeah.

Yeah. And then just generate like some sort of business intelligence report for me. And as a user, like, think about what I would have to do if I had to do it by myself and engage with each of those platforms, or I could just ask my agent to do it. Right. And then think about the level of the human, like, you know, like, like, and even the functional experience of that human that I would, I would need to like to do that. So it changes a lot, right? Like when you start thinking, I'm taking it to its lot, like almost to its logical end, right? But you know, you can, you could take it even a step further and be like, it could even reduce the need for lots and lots of GTM apps right now. Right?

Most of them, arguably.

It's, it's, it's scary. It would be scary if I were some of these companies, I'd be scared. Uh, so it's like a, the apps could become like anything from like having the same fate as like these early, those early web browsers I was talking about with like this invisible infrastructure sitting behind the UI of an agent, right? So you no longer log into any of these apps. They're just invisible infrastructure in the background and you have agents that do everything for you and you're talking to that agent in plain English, literally removing a layer, right? And, and that layer is huge. There's a cognitive layer, but there's also a training layer and onboarding layer. Like think about training and how much time you spend on tools and stuff. And if you're a seller of those tools, think about, whoa, that's like, that's a big part of my business. Like, what's happening? And, you know, and then you could think about managers and wanting like reporting data and like, you could, you know, you could be like, you could say, pull up performance report by looking at Salesforce and Tableau data for me. And here's what I want. And I now tweak it here, wait, this way. Now tweak it this way. Now tweak it that way. If I do that in a meeting today, I have like 4 people on my team pulling their hair out or pulling the rest of my hair out. Uh, and instead you just have an agent just going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Right. And again, this is all not happening today. This is a little futuristic and there's details behind it. But to answer your question, if I'm a CRO, I'm thinking about those things on both like the how my teams should be operating and how they might operate in the future. And how I'd plan for that. But then also if I'm thinking about like, you know, like I'm, if I were another CRO and I was thinking about making a move somewhere, what kind of company would I go work at? If I were a founder and I'm trying to start a company, what kind of company would I start? You know, or God help you if you're a founder who started one of these companies that's, and been in it for a couple years and oh my God, like, this was— I'm completely disrupted now, right? Yeah. Yeah.

I think Chamath said it really well and he was like, you look at a bunch of these enterprise apps and they're just a workflow. It's just UX on top of a CRUD database. Like it's just some way for a user to more easily interact with a pretty basic database schema. And If you no longer really need that experience layer, it's really just about getting access to the data and having agents go do what you need with that, then, you know, it's a bunch of value is going to accrue to surprising companies. Like, and it's like, oh, could this disintermediate Salesforce? Well, or does Salesforce become the most important part of your stack? Like, does this make Snowflake like way more important than it's ever been? But trying to figure out where that is, is a tricky one. And just before I do want to get into this company selection question, but how are you thinking about AI's impact on go-to-market? So that's more about like company viability, like overall business strategy and positioning, but then down into the details of like where should should CROs be prioritizing their own use of AI and exploration? Do you have much of an opinion on that?

I work backwards from like a big, like a long-term vision thing. And I think kind of what I was saying, the long-term vision is you, I do think there's a strong chance that the GTM stack shrinks from 10, 15 tools that everybody uses now to 2 or 3 AI-driven platforms, you know, and maybe it's like a Snowflake or a Salesforce, or maybe it's just some other company we haven't heard yet, heard about yet. Garage, right? And I think you, and then in that world, GTM folks are going to be, it's going to be more about the things that AI can't do, which is relationship development, right? And thinking about like strategy and marrying those two things together, right? Like those are probably the biggest things, like creativity, even like you can argue there's not only anything is ever going to replace human creativity. That's just my opinion. When you have to, when you have to have creative strategy linked to human relationships, establishing relationships, like that's where the GTM portion is really going to come in. Right. And things like, you know, if you're, if you're selling a type of thing that requires, you know, negotiation and back and forth and customization of a product. Right. And like you think about like, you know, whatever you want to call it, like, you know, solution selling in terms of like selling an actual solution and then building something around it or customizing something around it. Like, that's not— that's— those are the types of things I think the GTM folks are going to like be more weighted into and not doing, like you mentioned, automation, workflow, rudimentary, rudimentary analysis, pulling data from multiple sources and doing that analysis. Like, that's not People aren't going to have to do that, and your team's not going to have to do that. Now, bringing it all the way back to today, like, that's not the world we live in today. I still have a number to hit. My team still has to pay their rent, right? So, so you use what I would say, like, today's action is like, look at what's out there in the market and start using what you can, which is not necessarily like this, the agent stuff I was talking about full bore, maybe some of it, but definitely the assistant stuff. Right. There's lots of great AI tools out there that are helping people assist and even doing portions of the automation. Like there's lots of tools out there that pull stuff from your email, Gong calls, you know, and so on. There's, there's, so I would start using that now if for no other reason, like I think there's going to be financial advantage and you can build leverage, but if for no other reason, like you got to get conditioned to change the way they work and they are going to have to work with AI one way or another. The same way you had to change, you had to start working on your phone when mobile happened. You had to start in the cloud when the cloud happened. You had to start using the internet when, you know, when that, when that happened. You didn't have much of a choice not to use the internet.

That would have been a poor, poor decision at the time.

I think, you know, like you, you you're not going to have a choice not to use AI either.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And I think one of the other really important things here is you have to start to get your organization used to engaging with these tools and exploring and learning. I find this is something I'm pushing a lot. Unfortunately, I am probably the most deeply entrenched in AI right now of anybody in my go-to-market team. I would prefer that not to be the case, but I just have such a strong conviction that this will touch every single part of our business. I'm in San Francisco and my wife and kids went home on Saturday, so I did a bunch of work and I was working with one of our engineers. and we were like building an app to try to pull out data from everybody's Google Calendar and synthesize that with what's in Notion and then like pre-build their weekly update for them. Because every week my managers, all my sales leaders or revenue leaders do a weekly update. And I was just like, is that really going to move the needle a whole ton for the business? No, but it's just like a it's an interesting project for me to get exposure to vibe coding and understanding how these things stitch together and just getting a mental model of how to think about this stack. Because I think if you're a CRO and that is completely a black box and you don't understand anything about sort of the ecosystem of these apps and how APIs could work, and I was trying to figure out this like OAuth stuff. And so I learned a bunch there. And then you start to understand the component parts. Like, I think one of the important things about being a great CRO or revenue leader is you have to live at two levels of abstraction. You have to live like really strategic thinking years ahead about this world of agents and what that means, but then also learn the very like discrete inputs of like, well, what does that mean? Like, what is an agent? How is an agent different than just an AI workflow? Okay, so it makes decisions and engages other AI solutions. Okay, so then now you start to develop this map of what the world may look like. And I think I'm biased because I'm always very technology first, but I'm really pushing my organization to just get exposure and wrap their heads around the foundations of these tools because it's It's going to re-rate and remake everything and it's going to creep up on us fast.

It will. It will. And I think you're doing the right things, man. Like, for what it's worth, like, you didn't ask me, but I told you, like, it's, you know, I've, I ask a lot of, I have, you know, like, like you, I'm in, I'm in, I'm in these circles with other CROs and I ask the question a lot and I'm like, what are you guys doing? What do you know about what are you doing? And my answer is usually like my answer on personal is what I've been talking to you about. Um, you know, every time I hear someone say, well, I've heard of anybody really say that, like, they're making money off this, so I'm not gonna— I'm really just gonna, like, do my thing until I hear someone tell me, yeah, money off this. And I'm always like, okay, like, that's— that, that, that only works if you plan on retiring in 2 years. Yeah, like, if you're done, if you're done and dusted in 2 years and that's your plan, then good, you're great, you know? Yeah. So that, like, if you're at the right company and all that kind of stuff, like, God bless you, you know, like, great. But if you plan on doing this job for another 5, 10 years, uh, or doing it really well for the next 2 years, like, yeah, you should maybe take 10% of your time at least and start learning about this and start doing exactly what you said, like, start getting You know, you have to lead from the front here, like, right? Uh, we're like, if your team doesn't see you doing it, or at least celebrating people on your team that are doing it and learning with them alongside them with them, then they're not going to do it. And then they're not innovating. And you do have to innovate. Like innovation isn't just coming from your tech team and your build, your product team. Innovation should come from your GM, GTM team too. And that's one of the great things about doing what we do, Kyle. Like we get, we have license to do that, which is awesome. Not everybody else does.

I think the other version of this is I'm waiting to see how it plays out to see who wins. And I get it because what they're saying is like, well, there might be a second mover advantage. Like you're going to partner with an early stage startup. They're not going to build in the right direction. It's not really going to work. And you've done all of this work to implement it and train your team and you might be wrong. And that is guaranteed to happen. We have tried a bunch of things. So maybe we've got like 6 major AI use cases. We've tried 6 major AI use cases. One of them didn't really work and we spent a bunch of time on it and it was definitely like an inconvenience. But the cost of not pursuing it and not having these other 5, or even if it was like 2 failures and 3 successes, that cost is much too great in my opinion. And again, like, okay, you're going to wait it out and jump on to the winning vendors. That's great. But then your whole organization is 12, 18, 24 months behind in terms of their understanding and adoption. And you just better hope that your direct competitor isn't doing it. Like you just better hope that your direct competitor is not farther along because like for us, the advantage in rep productivity and like revenue growth and the LTV CAC profile is like pretty profound. Like it is a very, durable business advantage for us. And it will be like probably for a while because we're going to potentially expand our lead versus competitors. I think that's the danger for CROs.

Yeah. I think you're always going to have the, what happens if I pick the wrong horse in these early markets, growing, like, you know, early stage parts of these changes, these industry changes. Uh, but I'd rather pick the wrong horse than not be in the race at all. Uh, and then there's, there's things you can do to mitigate. Like, you don't need to create existential risk for your company by choosing to use AI in your GTM. Like, right? Like, that's silly. Uh, nobody should do that right now. Um, but yeah, do you have— sometimes you, you know, you do take two steps forward and then you have to take one step back. Sorry, but that's actually how the real world works. It's messy and it's not always up and to the right.

Yeah.

And then that's actually how you change. And then I think it's actually healthy. Like, you know, I think your team is going to see you doing that stuff and, you know, your team will see, you know, failures. Right. And then they'll see you recover from those failures and they'll see you rise up even higher than you were before that failure. And partially due to what you learned through that failure. And those are great lessons to learn because you got it, you got it. You have to take, especially in this context, like these aren't just blind chances you're taking. Like you're doing research, you're talking to these companies, you're doing your due diligence, right? And you're definitely betting on an ROI that is outsized, right? So if it works, it works big, right? And if it doesn't work, okay, cool. I think that's spot on.

Yeah. Going back to your horse analogy, you'd rather bet on the wrong horse than not be in the race because at least you're learning to ride a horse.

Yeah. You know? Yeah. And if you're not invited to the race, if you're not in the race, pretty soon you'll stop getting invited to races and pretty soon you'll stop getting invited to anything anybody's doing. And then you wanted to retire or not, you are retired. Yeah.

Hopefully you have a different retirement fate than the horses that retire. But let's see.

Yeah.

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Anything else that you want to say on the impact of AI and go-to-market before we get into this company selection question?

No, let's jump into the company selection stuff. Okay. Okay.

So we've talked about the macro environment. We've talked about how AI is basically touching anything and everything. And so you see these companies, you've made this transition yourself, selecting an awesome company like Crunchbase that you've now been with for a bunch of years. And I would imagine you were pretty measured in that decision-making process. So share how you think CROs should be thinking about a next step today if they're thinking about maybe something new or they're on the market. Like what's the landscape and how should they be thinking about this problem set?

Yeah. So I think like it obviously depends on what stage company you're looking at. If you're a CRO, right? If you're a CRO, like if you want to go, you know, sub $10 million, over $10 million, like $10 to $50 million, over $50 million, over $100 million, they're all different things you need to consider. I'm not going to go like everybody knows sort of the PMF and look at like, and talk to customers and all of this.

But don't assume it just like, you know, actually give me your thought there.

Okay. So, so first thing, like you, you absolutely like everyone's going to tell you the things, but how do you verify that? So you're going to ask questions about, about revenue. You're going to ask questions about retention rate. You're going to ask questions about whatever questions you need to ask to ascertain product market fit. You're going to, you're going to ask questions about, you know, how are you different than competitors and so on and so forth. And, and every, whether you're getting the answers out through research, you're getting the answers directly from the company that you're thinking about working for. I would go one step further and ask if you could talk to customers or just go out and backchannel and talk to some customers. And see if you, what you can validate, what you can't validate, right? Uh, or what you can contextualize, right? So, you know, retention, their retention rate, it may not be awesome, right? Uh, but you go talk to some customers and it turns out like there's a relatively easy fix to that and the company's already working. And so what you learned, What you looked at was historical data. Like I was just talking about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you go talk to investors and you can now predict the future of that company a little bit. Oh, they're going to fix this thing. And it was a hard thing to fix. They've been working on it. Probably not something they were going to share with me in the first or second interview, but turns out I got, I was, I was able to get that information. Now I can lean in where maybe others, other CROs that we're interviewing are pulling back. And you just found yourself a great little company or a big, great little company to work for. Because you could help, you gain one additional signal to help you predict something positive for them. Um, I would also, uh, so I think like that's, that's big, like talk to, talk to whoever it is and like customers. And when I say customers, I don't, I don't just mean buyers. I mean end users. Um, and figure out what problem they're actually solving. And if they're, if they're, if they're actually solving the problem they think they're solving.

Mm.

Right.

That's good ones.

And, and, and, and that can be a, that's not a gotcha kind of inquiry. That, that could mean, aha, there's even more to this company than I thought. Holy cow. Uh, if you're interviewing, how great would it be if you're like, if I'm a CEO and I'm interviewing my next CRO and the CRO comes in and says, yeah, so I talked to some customers, turns out like Did you know, like, you think you're solving this problem, but like, you're actually solving something this big. And I talked to 3 or 4 of your customers, and if you just, if you thought of, if you did this and this, maybe the problem gets much bigger that you're solving for them. I mean, you interview people, like, how great would it be if someone you were interviewing came in and said that to you? Uh, for sure. Right. Um, so, so, so those are a couple, like, like the other thing I would do, like, so there's other external things I would do, but like internally then, and this is all tactical stuff. Internally, you really do have to make sure you have fit with your peers, whatever you want to call it, like ELT or the exec team, management team, whatever they're called, right? Can you, you know, can you get past the bullshit with the CPO, CMO, right? And I'm lucky enough where like I've had CPOs, including our current one, and, and, uh, and CMOs where like, they're my legit friends. It didn't start out that way, right? Like we were strangers when we started working together, but, but we, we became like, we looked for, like, we, we manufactured our relationships as such where like, like the quote was like, my job is to make you look like a hero. Your job is to make me look like a hero. In the end, in the end, like the bigger hero loses. And you think about that, actually, my job is to make you a hero and your job is to make me a hero. If I become the bigger hero, then I actually lost. I didn't do my job.

Yeah, I like that.

That's good. Um, and it's just a great, cool little dynamic to have with a, with a peer that you work really closely with because I know everyone's, you know, they've got your back and you've got their back. And it's as simple of a thing that is to say it, it actually means a lot at the exec level when you're working with people. So you have that.

And how do you assess that? Yeah, how do you assess that in an interview process?

So that's hard to do in just an interview, you know, you got 60 minutes on a Zoom. How are you going to test for that? Like you, I, it's, it was harder to do in the past. I think you now, like you insist on meeting people in person, insist on having a meal, going to coffee. Talk about your lives. Don't talk about just business, right? Like, talk about, talk about your lives. Talk about their, like, like, what do you do for fun? What's your family like? Um, start getting a sense, right? And you'll see how they talk, right? Uh, you know, if people open up to you right away and are trusting, then they can probably be trusted, right? Um, and if they're, are they being vulnerable with you right away? Are they not? right? Can you tell that they're positioning already, right? And are they not positioning? Are they, you know, there's all kinds of things you can, and then at some point, if you have that sort of, you break the barrier of like the professional interview context and are just talking to somebody, you know, you can, it's a lot easier to do, I think, at the exec level because in reality you're both interviewing each other, right? So, so I don't think this is applicable to every, every, every, every level, I guess. But at the, at the exec level, it certainly is. And you can try to do that. The other is, is, is like backchanneling, you know, and talking to, and, you know, like, we all have big networks now. So if I knew somebody that knows somebody, just ask them about them, what they like to work with, the good and the bad. You're going to hear bad. Hopefully you do hear bad, right? Because then, you know, it's garbage if it's only, you're only hearing good stuff. Everyone's got No one's perfect. Everyone's got their good and bad.

Yeah. And you don't even need a network to backchannel. You can just cold reach out to people on LinkedIn. I tell this to people that are interviewing for roles on my team. I'm like, hey, like, candidates will ask for references and I don't give references. I just tell you to go find your own because I'm going to give you only people that are happy. Obviously, I'm trying to get you on the team. Go look at LinkedIn, find people who have been here more than 6 months, so they're out of the honeymoon period. And I tell all of my teams, I'm like, if somebody reaches out, the candidate reaches out to you on LinkedIn, you're more than welcome to talk to them. I know sometimes people are shy about it. You can get a pulse really fast through that, or reaching out to people who have left the company after a while. It's like another great back channel. I'm like, a big proponent of this. And I think you're very right on the just time. Like, you just have to spend the time. There's no real alternative than sitting down with somebody for 3 hours over a meal. There's something weird about food. Like, it's such a communal thing. Like, you actually can get a feel for people and learn about them in like a really material way.

And your own comfort level, right? Like, fit works both ways. There could just be like, I still do even like, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm a very analytical person as I get told very often, but I still go with my gut so many times. This is one of those times you'll get a feel when you're hanging out on a personal level with someone, you'll just kind of feel like, is this someone I can hang with and work with and have hard conversations with?

Right?

Uh, is it also someone that I actually want to have another meal with? You know, have them like you're going to, you're going to have to do it again and again and again if you're working with them. Right. So, yeah. And there's, there's something to that part too, where you have to be able to have fun with people because no business, no company is going to be sunshine and roses the whole way. And you got to, you still got to enjoy the shitty times, right? Like, yeah, you may not, you know, it sounds like a weird thing to say, but it's a, you know, if you're with the right people, even when you're eating shit, it don't taste so bad.

Yeah. Like even Crunchbase's growth score went from 75 to like in the middle of the downturn, 15 or whatever it is. I was looking at it before we talked. I was like, you know, that's everybody's going to go through those troughs. Yeah. And how do you think, do you think much about like Typically in venture, people want to invest in big markets. You got to have a big market to build like a really venture-scale business. Are you a believer in that? Do you think people need to be focused there? Like what are, and on top of market, like what are the other big inputs that you would tell people to look at to understand company quality?

Yeah, I believe that for like certain segments of the venture market, right? Like you're a firm that's dropping, that has to, like it all comes down to like how much money you have to manage and how much capital you have. Employee, right? Um, I think there's certain VCs you'll talk to, and if there's a clear exit path, they're just looking for the right multiple and then looking for the probability that you're going to hit that exit path, right? It doesn't necessarily have to be in a big market. You could just be the only player or best player in a smaller one and someone's going to buy you. I mean, they're going to make a bet on an M&A play. You don't hear a lot about those VCs, but they're out there, uh, and they do quite well. Right. I think the same goes for CROs, right? Like you, you, you're, you, I focus like you, you obviously, yes, you do need it. You need to have that context on like, what is, what is the market currently and how big could it get? Right. I'm not saying ignore that. You do have to have that understanding, but I would, but I think you, that's not all. Like it's simplistic to just say that, right? Like, big market, great. There's lots of big markets, you know, like peel the onion on that. What does that mean? Right? So like, okay, within that big market, like what problems in that market are the thing you're building solving? Right. And then, okay, like is the market to solve that problem, which is tied to propensity to pay to solve for that problem, like How big is that, right? So is the, is the market what you thought it was, or is it something different, right? Because people use nouns to talk about markets, like they, they used these labels, right? They don't use problems, right? Uh, so you have to do more work to understand the actual problem in the market that you think that you're solving, right? Uh, and, and then, and then there's the, the time-based stuff, which is you know, like, okay, what's your total addressable, which is which versus like your SAM and your SOM and so on. So I think like, I think, I think those are, that definitely goes into it. The other, like, the other thing I would look at, hearkening back to our conversation about disruption and so on, is when you talk to your product folks, when you talk to your CEO, when you talk to the board, uh, are they, you know, like, are they clear and aligned on what the, what the end state of this company is going to be?

Like, what's the goal?

And it doesn't need to be the publicly stated goal, but inside that, you know, you got, you got to, you have to get to like, hey, like, and they may not know. And to be fair, that's true. Like lots of companies are like, well, we're going to try to go public. We think we can do it. There's there, and that's what we're going to shoot for. If we don't go public, someone's going to come along and buy us. And that's a perfectly valid strategy. But again, doing the work and having the conversation underneath, you have to still answer the question, what happens if we're on our way to doing that? And in 2 years, someone offers to buy this company for $1 billion. Right. Uh, and there's not going to, you're, I don't think the right answer is to expect, I don't think the, on the expectation is that you should expect a yes or a no answer to that. The insight is in how they did, how they answer the question for you. Right. So, and then that says, does that align with the way you think and the way, the kind of thinking that you want to be tying your career progression to? Um, just so like by way of example, like somebody could be like, well, yeah, like, I don't know, I think we can go public if a lot of things go in our favor. Uh, so that's what we're doing. And along the way, if somebody comes and buys us, we have, or makes an offer to buy us, we have a fiduciary duty to surface that to the board and have the right conversations. Okay, cool. So what if like, you know, you're not going to go public unless you like have probably like a over a $5 billion or a $10 billion valuation. Uh, you might even stay private then. I don't know, but that's like a threshold. So what if someone comes in a couple of years and wants to buy you for a billion dollars and today, let's say you're worth $100 million. That's a 10x. Valuation increase in 2 years, would you take it? Okay, well, here's what I would look at in evaluating that. That's a great answer, right? Look at, right, and see what they see, what kinds of things they talk about, and see how— and see if they say things like, I would want to talk to you about it. I would actually ask you your opinion based on the state. And like, like, you know, turn the question back on you. Look, well, what would you say if I asked you that question back? Because you're going to be on the exec team. Right. That's a great conversation to have. Right.

Yeah, I love this question and this framework and thinking about how they answer it. And how does this change in a post-AI world? So like we talked a little bit about the number of companies that could be disintermediated or obsoleted or obfuscated. How do you, how would you guide a CRO to think about either where value's going to accrue in that stack between foundation model and app layer and where they might want to consider versus what might be dangerous?

Yeah, it's kind of going to this cycle, like on the Meta thing, like what I was talking about, look at like picking companies and like you have to have these kind of conversations for fit. Uh, but also like, look to your leadership and, and CPO, CEO, board on like vision and add like, are they skating to where the puck's going or where it is today? Right. Uh, and it's kind of like you have to balance both. You have to build, do things today to capitalize and draw revenue from what's available today. But you also have to be in parallel building for the future so that you're always able to like, like one follows the other. and then assess that. And I think coming back to your question, you know, with AI, like you, like, I don't, I wouldn't, like, I would think hard about being in companies that are just, that are like, have like, are built upon, uh, are solely reliant on scrapable data, right? I would think hard about working for companies that solely rely on scraping that data. Cause as you said, both, like both are going to be commoditized, right? But people who have proprietary data that like isn't scrapable, uh, or that is so dynamic that it's just too late by the time you scrape it, it's not relevant anymore. Like, think about like, like, so, uh, so for us, like, it's like, uh, just to make it real, us, that's our engagement data. No one, no one has that and it changes all the time, right? Our usage, people, 80 million people, what they're doing on Crunchbase. No one will ever have that except us. Right. Um, the historical change of company profiles, the edit data over time and how to, how to tie that with what's happening to companies in the market. Really hard to like take that and do something wild with it with AI unless we control it or unless we're part of the solution. Right. Um, Workflow, like you said, simple workflow. Uh, like if that world that I was talking about where agents are, are, are being, are, are taking the place of the UI, you know, you're, are you going to be investing in creating all new workflow features when an agent could just do it behind the scenes by connecting to your API? Like, right. So there's a, so, you know, and then again, talking about like, like the kind of company and the kind of sale you're having. You know, are you, are you, is this about like human-human relationships? Is it about creativity and creative strategy to get us there? Those are things that are going to be hard to disrupt. And I think like when you think about whatever it is your company's building and or whatever, however it's going to market, those two intersect with how you're thinking about How I'm thinking about, you know, making an impact at that company, both from like what we can do out there in the world and solving problems and making money together, but also like how I'm going to operate inside that company.

Yeah. Last question on this topic. What are your biggest red flags? What are the things that you think people overlook that are the most dangerous?

In the, in what? In the hiring company selection.

In company selection.

Yeah, company selection. I think people— I think it's— I think I don't have like crazy, crazy red flags that are like new and interesting, like the same red flag. You're right. But like one thing I think maybe like might be different is a lot of people say, I want the person like, take what you did there and I want you to do it here. And I don't know that like that would be a great job for me. Right. Which is kind of counterintuitive because anyone who's looking at, they're looking at like the whole reason they called you in to interview you and talk to you is knock around there like, oh my God, you can do what we want done here. But hidden in there is a presumption that like things haven't changed since you did it and you haven't changed since you did it and you're not going to change once you're here. And like you raised this, you said this earlier, Kyle, like you, when you're talking about getting your team to understand AI and start using it and changing, like you have to change, you constantly have to be adapting. Right. And so companies selecting, like, I want, I would, I would advise, like, I mentor, coach other folks and like, I tell every single one of them, go someplace that wants you to adapt, go someplace that will need you to change. Right. You know, you can still be the smartest person in the room in the domain that you operated in and doing the, having the playbooks you had. But they don't need you to just do the same thing here. First of all, that's super boring too. Like, why would you do that? Like, you know, like, like go grow somewhere, right? Like go do something that like pushes your own envelope, right? Stretches, makes your bubble a little bit bigger, right? So I think that that's a different— that's one for me where I would say advice I give other my friends and mentees on when they're looking for things like that, like Go for the place that like wants you to stretch and adapt a bit rather than do what you did somewhere else and do it over here. Nice.

And it's just not a smart approach. Like if somebody's saying, oh, just drag and drop it, they don't, you know, it's a poor mental model.

Yeah, you hear it on the other side of the fence. Like when you're hiring, it's very like lots of people tell you, I'm going to run my playbook. Yeah, don't hire people who's just saying I'm going to run my playbook here. But also that what's weird is the other side of it. When you hear that from someone who's who is interviewing you to hire you and they tell you that, uh, and don't acknowledge that or don't show you how you're going to have to change and adapt or make or leave an opening for you to understand that, that, that's, there's something, there's something a little bit off about that. Yeah.

Nice. Okay. Let's, uh, get into quick fire and then we'll wrap it up. So, uh, what do you think separates a good CRO from a great one?

Uh, what you do with what you have. Uh, lots of good CROs can, can do lots of great things if they have a lot. You've got a great product, you've got, you've got a lot of really strong product market fit, you've got industry tailwinds and macroeconomic tailwinds at your back. Uh, your product's super differentiated. You do lots of good stuff. You have, you already have a team in place that's like pretty good. Not a lot of changes happen. Like you can do a lot of great stuff. Um, flip side, like you could be, you cannot have a lot of success. Like you don't have a lot of stuff going for you. Like, right? Like there's lots of headwinds and, and, and your product isn't going to focus on what you're doing. Uh, there's other priorities. There's, industry headwinds and so on. And you, like, by the numbers, you're not doing great, right? But you could be a really good CRO. So I think you have to— it's like what you do with what you have separates a good from a great.

Nice. What's the most common advice you find yourself giving to mentees and younger leaders?

I say this way too often. I create the context for your success. It means there's lots of ways to unpack that, but it's like another kitchy thing I say is like, if you've objection handling, you're already lost. You should have preempted those objections. You shouldn't even just preempt those objections. You should be thinking ahead and planting seeds, continue on how you're having discussions with people, contingency planning for things that might happen that go right or wrong, and creating an environment for yourself and your team and whomever where in a particular deal or in a particular project or whatever, where it's like heads we win, tails we still kind of win. And that's not impossible. Like it takes, I guess, you got to do the extra thinking. And you have to have the extra conversations and you have to have like sometimes the painful work of like bringing people on board with that and aligning because people want to do A or B. And if we're not doing B, fuck it. Like we're just doing A. But you're like, no, you kind of have to do a little bit of B too, because that's how heads we win, tails we still kind of win because we don't know which way it's going to go.

I like that a lot. The, uh, I just did a course with Chris Orlob's P Club and like one of the biggest things I tried to emphasize is like we want objections. You want to pull out objections so that you can address them head on and like know what the problems are and like pull them out, like pull them out of your buyer to address them. So I love that.

Yeah. And that's exactly right. Because it's like you're not trying to preempt objections. You're saying, I'm creating the context where I know exactly what you're going to say. You're going to make your objection and I've already planned for it this way. I'm not going to handle it. I'm not going to push back on you. I'm going to say, great, like, now we're going to go this way based on what the objection you had.

Yeah.

What's the hardest lesson you've had to learn? I can't solve every problem and I shouldn't.

Say more about that.

Well, I think like you sometimes the things that get you to places in your career and in life sometimes end up getting like, you can't, you like, I'm a problem solver, right? There's a lot, like I mentioned my background, like you could probably tell, like, you know, I believe I'm resourceful, I'm creative, and you give me a problem and I'm going to try to figure out how to solve it. But there are some problems that at some point, then once you get to some level, like you can't solve everyone, you have to bring people in. And then even when you bring people in, you just might not be able to solve it. And so then what do you do? Just keep banging your head against the wall until you solve it? Or do you get help? Or even like after you get help, do you say, okay, you know what, that's not the right problem for us. Let's find me, let's go figure out another problem.

The best poker players know when to fold.

Yeah.

Yeah. Annie Duke just wrote a whole book about it. It's great. Okay. Last question. Speaking of books, what's the best thing that you've read in the last 12 months?

So this is awful. I don't think I've read a whole book this past year. There's been a lot going on, but I do read, I think one of the things, one of the best things I've read is there's a person named Azeem Asrar and he writes a thing called Exponential View. And it's a little newsletter and I love it.

Another newsletter. I did not need another newsletter in my life. I'm addicted to them.

I know, I know, but it's the honest answer.

Yeah, that's awesome. No, I say that jokingly. I love newsletters. I just like find I'm like constantly subscribing to new ones and I have this just so much. I often joke I have like knowledge FOMO. Like I just like always want to know it all. This is a good one. I like, like just looked at a couple of the titles. This is right in my lane. Yeah, I'll let you know. Well, this was awesome, Neal. I really appreciate the time. I think this is going to be really valuable for people, especially there's a lot of people on the market thinking about being on the market. So it's going to be really useful for those folks and for CROs to think about how they're navigating their way through pretty crazy times. Where should people find you?

You can ping me at Neil Esh at Crunchbase. I'm not on social media. I'm on LinkedIn. I don't post much except to talk about Crunchbase and/or some of the companies I advise, but that's where you could find me on LinkedIn or just ping me at Crunchbase. Awesome.

Neelaship Crunchbase?

Both work. Full name.

Okay. Very cool. Well, thank you for the time. And this was a blast.

Thanks, Kyle. Appreciate it.

Thank you for listening to the Revenue Leadership Podcast. If you enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe and you can find a link in the show notes and be sure to leave a 5-star review, share it with your network, and please join me next Wednesday for another great conversation.