Founders explain how to ask VCs for concrete help and build sales teams that work. They cover hiring inside sales and field reps, pushing aggressively into enterprise, and balancing coverage between Silicon Valley and major markets.
It easy, make it specific. Most people want to help. Your VC wants to help you for sure. And most of the people that are the VCs connected to, they want to help too. They want to meet entrepreneurs, they want to see cool tech. So make it specific, make the ask easy. I take lots of 20 minute meetings to meet new founders and CEOs and CROs because I, I'm an entrepreneur. I love that stuff. I think it's super interesting. So very cool.
Let's continue down the path. You said something like in the early days you were flying to New York, meeting with some of the biggest banks in the world. Which leads me to when you started building out the team. I think you're in Phoenix, I think databricks is in San Francisco. Were you building a field sales organization? Did you have an inside sales team? What was the calculus for how you determined where folks would sit?
Yeah, we did both actually. So like our headquarters were in San Francisco, so I would go up there every other week for the whole week and the other weeks I'd be on the road to New York and London and wherever. We built out an enterprise field team. When I got here it was mostly just startup folks, so we had call it a hub in San Francisco. It was mostly inside sellers. We were trying to sell to all the smartest Silicon Valley tech companies, which is actually pretty hard. A lot of those folks like to build their own stuff, right? They're early adopters of tech, but they're also like harder to get big dollars out of early in a company. So part of my assessment when I came here is like enterprises are the companies, they have big dollars but they need the most help with data and AI. So I built out the enterprise field team. I think probably in the first quarter I probably hired 40 sales folks because I saw the kind of demand that I thought and we, we had some big revenue aspirations, but we built both. I would say, I think you want to decide is your product a big ticket item where you need all custom stuff, or is it, you know, something you want to start in Silicon Valley? We decided to do both because we saw the opportunity in both. I did.
