Kyle Norton of Owner.com on How Great CROs Drive Enterprise Value

Hey, Kyle Norton here. We've got a special bonus episode for you this week. I had the pleasure of joining Asad Zaman and AJ Bruno on the Top Line podcast, and we dove into a bunch of really interesting topics that are relevant to the sales leadership audience. We talked about the evolving role of CROs and specifically what separates good to great, which is something I ask every guest on the podcast. We talked about the rise of AI and how, especially reasoning models of late, and how it's going to impact revenue leadership and sales and revenue productivity and strategies for scaling businesses effectively while trying to stay ahead in these markets. You know, it's really difficult to keep up with all of the changes in, in our industry while also trying to drive growth. And it was a really fun conversation. Tons of cool insights from AJ and Asad. Always fun to hop on with those guys. So hope you enjoy the episode. 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. This episode of the Revenue Leadership Podcast is brought to you by Superhuman. Superhuman is an AI-powered email app that helps sellers respond, collaborate, and close faster with features like inbox triage, automatic reminders, and collaborative email drafts. Reps can filter out distractions to focus on what they do best: selling. Get the email experience that keeps deals moving. Try Superhuman free for 1 month at superhuman.com/pavilion.

Welcome, welcome all Topline listeners. We have a special podcast episode for you all today. The, the special podcast episode is that, uh, Sam Jacobs is not joining us today. So if you, if you're out there and you're a listener and you're like, oh, I just need a reprieve from that Sam Jacobs, you, you get your treat today, but Actually, the special guest we have is Kyle Norton. You all know Kyle. Kyle's the CRO of Owner.co. He also runs the Revenue Leadership Podcast, part of Topline as well. He was on our— I wasn't on there actually, but you took my place a few months ago, Kyle, where you told Asad why he was completely wrong about revenue operations. He should rethink his whole life. But Kyle, welcome back. Welcome back to the podcast.

Yeah, appreciate the invite. I'm also part of the audience that's excited to listen to an episode without Sam.

So, oh man. All right, we should have a counter. Well, this is episode 92 for you all listening. We have a good one. Obviously with 2025 kicking off, we're starting to see signals and seeing a whole bunch of things happening in the market, happening in our businesses, happening with AI. Austin, what are we talking about today?

I thought where we start today is actually not the market, but with Kyle's experience in doing the podcast over the last couple of months. So Kyle, you've now done a bunch of episodes. They've been fantastic. I really enjoy listening to them. And I'm curious, now that you've spoken to all of these CROs and spent all this time with them, What are some of the interesting themes, threads, lessons, takeaways that you've had from these conversations? Anything interesting that you think about often based on these conversations?

So tons for sure. And it's funny because by habit I take notes, interviews, meetings, whatever. And so my first couple episodes I found myself just writing notes into the docket. I was like, oh, I shouldn't do that. I should focus on the guests. And so I stopped taking notes for 2 episodes and then I kept being like, what did that person say about this thing again? Because I wanted to reference it with my team or in my job. So I'm back to taking copious amounts of notes every time because every episode I'm getting some really cool nugget that I'm actually finding myself referencing quite frequently. But more generally, I think one of the things I'm interested in doing in doing with the pod is figuring out like what makes a great CRO. What are the things that the, the best people out there do? And one of my realizations is actually there's so much diversity in, in this population. Like I've interviewed CROs from Databricks and Xero and, uh, you know, smaller companies like Stevie Case from Vanta, is more emerging. And so, there's actually such a diversity of skills and superpowers of this group that I had a hard time finding common threads. And I think the thing that ties them together is they're uniquely good at leaning into that individual superpower. Some people are incredible systems thinkers and they think very systematically and very structured about their business and they're very analytical. And they lean all the way into that. And you can see that fingerprint across their business. And other people have incredible leadership craft or are great at manufacturing leaders like Sam Blond, who was the CRO at Brex. You could clearly tell he could go interview and get any talent he wanted. And the topic we talked about is manufacturing leaders, and that was clearly something he did incredibly well and was less of a systems engineer type thinker, but he leaned all the way into that talent and he leveraged that superpower and that became the thing that he built around. So I think this is my biggest takeaway is really great leaders have a pretty honest interpretation of themselves. They lean all the way into that superpower and then they find ways to build around them. Build the other skill sets into the team around them that maybe they need as complementary to themselves.

Kyle Norton, one of the things that kind of came out of your, one of your early episodes, you interviewed the CRO of Salesloft, Mark Niemack. And I found myself listening and it was like kind of when I was running, I was going on a run. I remember where I was, I was in Raleigh and I stopped and paused and had to like write something down. But here, one, a plug, because you mentioned an app before this episode called Snippet. That like helps you snipped, that helps you take like little, like sound bites of it from an AI standpoint. So we always like to plug new technology here, but that's one that sounds like that's what we do.

Yeah.

I'll put my referral code in the show link.

Yeah, there we go. That's why I assumed you were getting a referral code from this.

I need a proper affiliate relationship now that I'm talking about them so much. I just, I let, I've, It's super valuable because I double-click, I've set it up so I double-click my headphone and then it creates an AI mark. It pulls out the quote and a little summary.

You're taking the Tomas Tong shortcut keys that he was talking about in last week's episode to the next level. And so next you're going to tell us, yeah, I just have this thing wired into my brain that I just like blink twice and then it takes a snippet of it.

I think about this concept a lot of stage appropriateness. So when it comes to search at the executive level, there are these heuristics companies you use to try to reduce the risk when hiring for these roles. And when it comes to a CRO, the rules of thumb usually are that you want to align the person, their background should align with the go-to-market dynamics of your business. So sales cycles, deal sizes, who you sell into, that type of stuff. And the second is stage appropriateness. They should have experienced and enjoyed and been successful at taking a company from one stage to the other that matches the journey this company is trying to go on. And there are a few others like CEO fit and culture, et cetera, but these two are really big ones. And I think about stage appropriateness a lot because on one side, it's not fair to say that anyone from a very large company to not be successful in a very small company. We've seen tons of examples of that. You spoke about the Databricks CRO. He joined the company when it was, I think, $2 million in revenue.

It's sub-a-million ARR and they're doing a $3 billion run rate this month.

Like, think about it. What's the stage appropriateness there, right? Like, he scaled across a bunch of stages over there. You have the example of Chris from Snowflake who joined pre-revenue and he's still CRO. And so there are a lot of these examples. And so stage appropriateness can't be It doesn't hold true all the time, but it does hold true many times. And I try to think of like, what does it really mean? What are we trying to get out of it? And I think it might be what you just spoke about, which is that the needs at a particular stage are such, and the person's superpower should match those needs. And so if the need of the business is for somebody who's a really proficient systems thinker. If that's the need of the business, then a person who spikes in that area will be best suited for that. And one way of thinking of trying to find that match is other companies at a similar stage might need the same thing. So if the person's done that there, they might have that and could do it here. Same thing with when a company is scaling aggressively and it's about building first, second line leadership. Somebody who spikes in that area would be great. And maybe the stage experience they've had tells us that story. What do you think about that thesis, let's say?

Yeah, I think it's quite a strong one. This is a conversation I have with founders a lot. When you're hiring a head of sales, head of revenue, you're making two bets. One is the need to have, and one is more of the nice to have. The first bet is you need to have somebody who can navigate you through the next 24 months. So if you're going 5 to 15, 5 to 20, you, you want, hopefully, a leader that's seen that stage before, sometimes as the number 2 would be totally fine there and has those stage-appropriate skills. But then I'm also in that search trying to find people that have the potential to break through and not just be a stage-appropriate leader that then you layer or graduate, and you're trying to find somebody who can dynamically grow stage to stage to stage. And the things you're trying to untangle are actually a little bit different there. One, the first is the stage-appropriate leader. It's more of like a checklist competencies framework. Like, have you done this? Have you done these types of deals? And it can be a little bit more straightforward. For trying to find a revenue leader that might be able to be your 10-year person that takes you all the way through to an IPO, you're looking for different things. And those people are just much more rare. Like, they are in such tiny supply. But you're looking for super learners, people with, like, an insane outsized drive, have, like, a deep curiosity and interest in business building and leadership so that they're going to be sort of fanatical about learning these things and growing. And so I think you can untangle those two things where I'm really trying to find stage appropriateness and I'm going through my rubric while I'm also trying to find maybe it's the first hire or the second hire or the third hire because you might have three different heads of sales through your first six years as a company and you're hoping that one of those bets could be that sort of—

and it's really hard to qualify those things, right? Like, how do you qualify if a person's a super learner, right? Like, that's the thing you need to qualify. It was such a tough thing to qualify.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's tough.

Well, I mean, I think the, the other part of this is that not only are they someone that can go— like the Snowflake, Chris from Snowflake that you mentioned— go all the way, and they're in short supply, but you don't know if that's the right person. And then when you find out that they are, they're not going to do that again. They've done significantly well. So financially they're in a different position and they're most likely taking on CEO roles at that point anyway. So it's—

I don't know if they're taking on CEO roles. Like, I don't see Chris from Snowflake being like, I want to go be—

But do you see them taking on another zero to one?

He's probably made $100 mil. He's out.

Like, he's going to do this.

Like, chill out.

Like, more than $100 million. Yeah.

Um, he probably has the record for the most money a CRO has ever made intact at this point in time. Probably. I can't think of another person over—

there was the CRO of Figma who was set to make, uh, quite a bit.

Uh, he just quit the other day, and I don't think they sold, so he didn't have the upside.

Yeah, but Figma's only— the offer was $40 billion. Maybe they get $20 billion today, and Snowflake's market cap's way above that.

Sure, the market cap today is, but I assume that a CRO sells along the way at a market cap that was under that $26 billion.

I'll get him on the pod and I'll ask him.

Yeah, it's a real tough problem. I think the other thing that I was going to ask you on this, Kyle, is like, do you see archetypes changing? We talk about systems thinkers, or we talk in, in simple terms, there's like the, the dashboard, or there's the, the, the coach that's coming in and closing deals, the CROs that are doing that. Are we seeing with the rise of AI and how teams are interacting with each other in more of a remote culture, archetypes of those traditional VP of sales changing over time?

I don't have the data, so it's tough to say. It would be so anecdotal, and I don't think it's because of AI, because it's just so— it's still so early. But I think even the post-sales acceleration era, so post-2015 onwards, you've definitely seen an emergence of like more structured revenue operators, you know, especially the folks that I talk to that are under 40 years old who have like really grown up in this, in this era. Most of their leadership career has been in this, in this era. You definitely see it like Stevie Case was a great example, like very highly structured thinker, understands how things roll up from the frontline to her. She's doing a cool experiment with AI. She's got an AI ops team that's doing nothing but this stuff. Like, you have to have a keen interest in technology and systems, I think, to be super successful today. But I also see revenue leaders where that's not their forte, and they're still incredibly impactful at their job. And a lot of the time they've got a partner there. They've got a RevOps partner or a BizOps partner, somebody that's come along with them in a few different places. And there's a company I'm thinking of that I can't really mention publicly, but that leader is more of a traditional, like, business strategy, leadership development individual. And he has, like, an insane head of RevOps and strategy who's been with him, I think, for 15 years. And they're a very dynamic pair. And he's not necessarily known as, like, in this, like, understanding technology, understanding the sales tech stack, that's not what he's endeavored to be great at. And it's still, they're producing incredible results. So again, it's like, where do you spike? How do you flex into that? And then how do you build a team around you How do you build a team around you that can mitigate some of those weaknesses? I think about this a lot.

I think that self-awareness part is so critical because if you don't know where you spike and you don't know where you don't spike, then you can't hedge against it. If you are self-aware, you also need to have a level of confidence that allows you to lean into your weaknesses and bridge those gaps. And also, I think CROs naturally have to tilt towards being confident, right? Like, it's a tough job. There's a lot of hardship. There's a lot of failure that will happen along the way. There'll be a lot of tough days. There's a level of— we talk about resilience, but I think there's also natural confidence. Like, they're confident people. They can see the light at the end of the tunnel. They feel like they can take the charge and move the team towards that. And so, if they have this combination of they have areas they spike that are necessary for that business. They're aware of where they need to bridge the gaps. And they have this confidence that is magnetic where you can attract great talent and you can get the team to push because it takes pushes. Like, no company just like dances their way to the finish line, right? Like, these are— you're scratching your way to it and you need to get that energy and juice out of your team. Finding people that have all of those things are really tough. And I think, AJ, you're right that you probably, for that person who takes off, it's probably you're the first big bet on their career. Like you're the one that gave them that big role and now they'll break through with you. And then after that, they might not want to do that all over again. They might go and be a venture capitalist or do something different. But it usually is the first bet because why would they come back and do another 10 years again?

Well, it's also kind of lucky on the, uh, for the CRO as well and finding the right product. I mean, I can say this for myself that I did 0 to 25 million as a CRO of the company I founded previously. And that was a very transactional business. Our average contract values were, I think, by the time I left, uh, we got, we were sold, they were around $20,000. So it was just fairly fast inside sales team, and we never built an enterprise, a bigger enterprise product off of that. And our business model was straight inside sales team. We never had a distribution or partner distribution as well. And frankly, we didn't even have marketing until we were $10 million in revenue.

And so do you ever look back on that experience and think of things you would have done differently? Like you guys had a really successful outcome, But is there part of you that's like, maybe we shouldn't have sold, maybe we should have taken it to $100 mil? As a founder, once you've had an exit of that sort and you're in a new seat with a new company, do you reminisce about that, or are you just like tunnel vision on what you're doing right now?

I think the biggest challenge we had was part of it was just the founder vision just changed because we brought in a professional CEO at the Series B. My co-founder and I've talked about this multiple times. The co-founder was the CEO of the company. And so that changed it. But I look at like Muck Rack, which is a company that was an equivalent. We were much, much bigger than them and they're probably doing $100 million in revenue right now. That would have very easily been us and should have been us. But at the same time, given the board, the board dynamics, the investors, the time into it, it was a massively successful outcome, frankly, around it. But I would also just add there, like, I think the last year we had this trendy at the beginning of the year, oh, CMOs are— could be great CROs, and you had a bunch of CMOs go be CROs.

And I would say no to that. I just want to be clear, we were—

said no at that time. Remember, we had this conversation, this debate came on the, the podcast, and we talked a little bit about this in the summer. And then we— at the end of the year, we've had like more revenue operations leaders. And I have a current revenue operations leader that Kyle Norton knows really well, um, and Ryan Milligan. And that's been a really interesting and very pleasant— where I see the opportunity and the spiking is like Actually, as the company scales, maybe there's an opportunity above CRO at some point in time. And I don't—

I mean, you—

yeah, well, if you think about where— where— okay, so not currently—

oh, we're getting into the debate zone. This is fun.

Not currently, not $10 million in ARR. But you think about what a COO is really well suited to do and handling the entire growth side of the house, um, and potentially even finance. I think a revenue operations leader that can spike in the CRO with urgency and structure systems thinking could be well suited for that because they're, they usually have an objective point of view around the company versus the sales-led motion where I see a lot of CROs that are CROs first are really fighting for it on a new business or whatever their number is and potentially working against the organization, unknowingly working against their organization. So it's just an observation. Does it?

This comes up a lot in my discussions, actually. You can clearly tell the people that have like really, really made it and are leading, you know, billion-dollar ARR companies, they have the capability to think well beyond just the sales number and have a holistic understanding of how do I contribute to NRR and high-quality revenue, that, that certainly, that certainly does come up a lot.

And revenue operations, when you think about OKRs or just your North Star metric, at least I've noticed this with Ryan, I've worked with lots and lots of different revenue operations leaders. The best ones are able to put the company first in that regard. And so like that CRO, I mean, maybe that's a better way to put it, Kyle, is that The CROs, like, what are some of these CROs that have in common? We call them system thinkers. They're— they have been able to align and attach themselves to the vision and the mission of the company above and beyond, uh, sales commissions and their team's, like, own leads and giving me more leads from marketing and marketing funds.

That's just a bad CRO who doesn't have business acumen.

There's lots of those though.

There are, but like, what I'm saying is a good CRO has tons of business acumen. You can see it on the podcast. So when I listen—

How many CROs understand P&L? Seriously.

Quite a few, actually. Like, if you think about the very best, like, if you're trying to say what the best of the best—

Of all of them. But he's talking about in general.

In general, I think it's fair to say that there's less than 5% of CROs out there that would be world-class, right? Maybe it's 1%. So then the number is not high, but of the 1%, everybody has some commonalities. And one of those commonalities is business acumen. I think it's rare. I have yet to find a CRO who falls in that 1%, who can't think of the overall business, the overall market, who can't think out many years down the line and has the ability to also then come back down into the weeds and be highly operational in terms of, okay, fine, here's the big picture, but here's what we need to do today, tomorrow, day after. So I think they have it. I do agree that RevOps, the good ones, have this— it's a little bit more ingrained in them than maybe the path that a natural CRO takes, which starts in a sales role and then a sales management. So maybe it's naturally baked in over there, but their deficiency is a very serious deficiency, which is if they have never sold, I would not bet on that person to figure out how to sell what I've built. You know, Kyle has a RevOps leader who was a salesperson before. That's a person I can bet on. Now, sometimes you get lucky like you did, AJ, where you have Ryan and you're working with him on a day-to-day basis and you're a sales-minded CEO and you think that, okay, I see something and I can support, right? That's— your data set is of one. It's a very unique individual experience. In most cases, If it's a technical CEO with a great RevOps person and they transition to a CRO, I think it'll be really hard for that person. I wouldn't bet on that.

I agree with you there because oftentimes that individual doesn't have the risk appetite I think that sometimes is required to be a CRO. And I wrote, so I wrote an article on my Substack that talks about the difference between a senior leader and like a real revenue executive. And so a couple of those things, like, can you put the company first in your decision-making? So can you think beyond just your sales number? Do you understand enterprise value and your part in creating enterprise value over time? Are you focused on long-term revenue quality as opposed to short-term, just like hitting of numbers?

Do you—

can you read a P&L? Are you a multiplier? Do you have a way? Do you as a revenue leader make your head of product marketing better, your chief product officer better? Can you contribute outside of your role? Then can you be a systems thinker? Can you create followership? Can you attract and retain good talent? Like, yeah, if we go through the scorecard, those things need to be there. But I'm really trying to think about like what makes the great ones great? Because to be just like really good, you have to know that stuff. Followership, coaching and development. You have to be able to establish a vision, but like what makes these like multi-billion-dollar ARR CROs different? And I'm still searching for the answer, but it's something around they understand their spike, they can build around that, which takes a lot of authenticity and ownership And humility, intellectual humility. I find that—

well, it takes planning. I mean, I think the big part of it is like, I'll ask you, Kyle, this, and this was something I was curious about of like your, you know, owner, fast-growing company. And you've talked publicly about some of the numbers previously, but I won't state them. I don't know what's public or not, but let's say you've gone from that, you started very close to the zero. I don't know, but let's say it was that zero. What's that?

Started around $2.5 million, 2.5 years ago, and we're like considerably more than 10x that. Yeah.

Okay, great. So at some point in there, your thinking and your shift had to change and your day-to-day has changed, I'm guessing. So like, does that happen in a year to year? Do you, you like reflect on your 2024 and say, okay, we were at this scale, we were at the $10 to $25, $30 million. And now we're going 30 to 50 or whatever it is, and this is what my day needs to look like, and you just stick to that? Or do you allow more flexibility in your week to week on what your goals are and what you're trying to achieve?

So I definitely give a lot of thought to— this is part of the annual planning process. What needs to happen in this year to hit this year and set me up for next year? And so how do I deliver more than 2x revenue growth in 2025 and do the things in '25 that I know need to happen to hit '26. Because one of the other things that separates leaders from real revenue executives is the time horizon by which—

that's the planning part of it. That's exactly what I'm talking about.

Yeah. Because, you know, what often happens is, is, you know, things slow down, your inbound engine wanes, literally like, wow, we need an— we need outbound now. Like, okay, congratulations. It's going to take you 9 months to build like a real outbound function. So it's way too late. And so can you, so I'm constantly trying to think at first it's months ahead. Now that the business is a little bigger, quarters ahead and now going into next year, I'm really thinking in the increments of years because I know I can deliver 2x this year. I'm like quite confident in that. Not a lot in the business has to change fundamentally for me to deliver, you know, to get us through to 6, more than 60 million, but doing the same things in 2026 as we're doing in '24 probably doesn't scale. So I have a couple like really big bets, and if half of them paid off, I know I have the ammunition to, to hit '26.

How often are you communicating those big bets to the leadership team? Is that—

and what, like, what type of bets are you talking about? Because it's a big— like, to go from 60 to doubling that, let's say, that's a big one, right? And so what type of bets are you making and how are you sizing these bets?

So, um, the bets could be channel diversification, new products, new markets, uh, new pricing and packaging. Like, we all have a suite of, of strategies we can pull from. And for me, I, I— this is like a bit of a modified version of of what Annie Duke talks about in How to Decide and some of her stuff from Thinking in Bets. But first, I think of all the potentials, like what are all the things that we could do? And that's data informed. So like, what are, what is the business analysis telling me about where our big opportunities exist and what are all the potentials to address those things? And there's opportunity solution tree stuff in there. In the episode with Ashley Gretsch from Xero comes out in a couple of weeks when we talk about only this. Only like strategy and decision-making. So what are all my potentials? What is the payoff of these potential options? So if this thing works, is it a $10 million ARR win or is it a $500,000 ARR win? Then what's the probability? Like how likely is it to pay off? And then the fourth thing is the perspiration. How much effort is it? And so I'm taking that group of opportunities and weighing them against one another.

Is this just in sales or these company bets?

This was—

most of them are market bets, but some of them, like product, is a, is an overall company, uh, discussion, right?

Yeah. So, so I'm using this framework for the stuff I'm spending time on. So I, I play a big hand in the company strategy building, um, and then I'm writing my plan for the revenue teams. Um, and this is, this is sort of what I try to teach my teams about planning and decision-making. So it's like potentials, the payoff, the probability, and the perspiration. And I'm looking for really big payoff bets with high probability, low perspiration. That's your, that's the best, best one. But obviously, usually your high payoff bets have more perspiration and you're looking at bandwidth and who has to be involved. Okay. This one takes a bunch of enablement and I'm looking at the enablement roadmap and they're chalked, like they have to do all this other stuff. And so you're playing a little bit of this this, this puzzle game where you're trying to fit it all together and find alignment between revenue strategy and company strategy. You're trying to place the right bets that can deliver this year and next year. And you're playing this capital and resource allocation game at the end of the day. Like this is, this is all we do is we allocate, allocate resources, commonality in all our jobs, the effective allocation of capital.

It literally is wild that you can boil every exec job down to that. Like, can you do that well? Like, did you do it well? Which is interesting because you don't see that as an element on a lot of scorecards, how effectively did they allocate capital in their last role. You see it like in the— like if you read in between the lines, but you don't usually see it as like a core thing. Kyle, in the conversations you've had, you've met with people that are managing go-to-market orgs that might be mid-market or enterprise-focused, others that have an element of each. Um, how does some of this evolve based on if you're mid-market or enterprise? Like, is there a difference, like, in this process, in this way of thinking, based on sales cycles?

Changes a lot, for sure. Um, if we look at the extremes, so all the way down market in micro SMB, you have to be all systems all the time. You're really trying to eke out small incremental improvements in, in your funnel. And you're— because the ACVs are small, you need a very, very small, um, human capital footprint. Versus in true enterprise, that systems engineering is like much less important because how do you systems engineer a very creative process to win an enterprise deal. And like going back to Mark Niemczak, you know, you could tell there's a bit of art in that sales process.

Yeah.

And that guy is a deal junkie. Like you can just tell. It was our pre-conversation where we got into some of the biggest deals that he's closed, or either we had to cut it from the pod, but he was like just telling me about some of his whales and the creative thinking and how to get to this person and how to structure it. And he was telling me about some of the stuff he's building and his like value engineering team. With the storytelling and like that is so much more creativity and art than probably what I do day to day. Same thing with Ron Gabrysko from Databricks. Like that guy is probably involved in like multi $10 million deals. And so you're problem solving on a very like deal-specific basis. There's no framework to build, to have a Salesforce process.

And there's a lot of, you know, when we think about AI and one of the things I've been trying, I've kind of thought to myself recently is that the areas where AI is going to require some major breakthroughs to be really effective are the realms where intuition, taste, judgment, human empathy matter. And it's kind of interesting now if you use that framework to look at the different go-to-market motions and where the human in the loop is going to be super important. So when you think of something like enterprise sales where there's a lot of intuition, there's a lot of creativity that needs to be deployed, some of the things that companies have done to win their biggest deals are wild. Like you could write the best books—

Never been done before, completely out of nowhere.

I wanted to write a book on this. Like, I wanted to do a book which was just each chapter was a wild deal that was a very important deal in the company's journey. And it might be a great book to still do. I think now that I actually write, maybe I can actually do it. Yeah.

And one more, one thing I'll say is it's not that you don't need a systems thinking approach in enterprise. It's just a different type. So like in that episode with Mark Niemczyk, one of the things we spent a bunch of time on is how he thinks about forecasting and deal management. And he is surgical, like down to scripting. He scripted when my managers come to this call, I want you to adhere to this script to give me your forecast and had them run it like by this exact framework. And he was talking about how they assess the health and quality of deals and how they manage deals. And there's like a very surgical nature to that.

I even ask my team what they're going to wear to a meeting. I think these things really do matter because there's still this room where it's almost like jazz music where there's a boundary and there's going to be improvisation within that boundary. And so you're trying to control whatever you can control because still live, you're going to have to do a bunch of improvisation. And so you just want to reduce the space where you do it and wherever you can control, you try to control because there is going to be this space where now the magic is going to happen. It's really interesting when you take that systems thinking lens and now go into the O3 model for a second. You've spent a lot of time over the last bit, you and I have been going back and forth on some of these AI breakthroughs that came through towards the end of the year. And the implications, age just generally, but then also in our worlds. Talk to us a little bit about O3 to me was probably as significant, like it gave me that oh shit moment the way that ChatGPT initially gave it to me. And you had a similar point last night as well about GPT-3 versus this. What was your first reaction to what you saw? And now that it has been percolating in your head for a bit. What are your thoughts on the implementation of these reasoning models in a go-to-market team or in an organization as a whole or in the workflow or day-to-day workflow of a CRO? What are your thoughts there?

So I had the same response. I actually had more of an, like, oh crap moment when I started to see a bunch of even the O1 stuff. But the '01 and the '03 model examples on X, it was a more profound sense of unease, I think, for me in really being like, okay, this changes a lot. Because in my mind, I had thought of like, okay, AI is pattern recognition and replication. If I give it a structured input with some examples, it can replicate that across similar things. And so I was applying it to our business very much in this way. Using it to fill in CRM fields for people using Momentum. And we've got this AI simulator with this company Avara, but it's more of like pattern match, rinse and repeat type application. And what O3 has shown us, which is the first version of like a reasoning model, and we know that 2025, you know, Sam Altman has said, hey, we're going to get the first first AGI that meets our current definition, it really changes a lot of—

Well, but by the way, we talked about what the current definition was for OpenAI. Kyle, do you know what that definition is?

Yeah, they can do like, they can like reasonably accomplish what most knowledge workers do today, something like that.

No, I mean, this is what Asad said, so I trust him. Asad, correct me if I'm wrong, is when OpenAI does $100 billion in revenue?

No, in profit. So there is a technical definition in the contract between Microsoft and OpenAI because OpenAI has been going around saying we're almost there, right? And there's this really interesting clause in the agreement between Microsoft and OpenAI, which right now basically means, says that any IP that OpenAI has, Microsoft has full access to that IP. That access ends at the point where AGI is there. So then Microsoft was like, one second, this can't be a loosey-goosey thing of like, you say we have AGI and we have AGI and now we have nothing. We just gave you $20 billion of $13 billion. So they basically defined it as once you can, with whatever fancy stuff you put together, once that thing can generate $100 billion in pure profit, we consider that AGI. And so there's less than 50 companies in history, I think, that have done $100 billion in profit. So that's like the technical definition. I think the definition that matters more is when they claim AGI, and they'll have to claim it at a point where it's impressive enough that society says, oof, that's wild.

So the, the Sam Altman quote is a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.

Work.

Yeah, most economically valuable. There's a lot of heavy lifting being done in that sentence. Yeah, economically valuable.

Most is the terrifying. Yeah, if Sam is saying the definition is it can do most economically valuable work, and that's coming in 2025, we're super not prepared for it.

And so when he was saying these things and we didn't have O3, I was like, eh, when I saw O3, I was like, one second, like, you know, another jump from here will be very close to that type of a thing.

I don't know how much you've played around with O1.

A lot.

I'm not on O1 Pro.

I'm on O1 Pro.

I've been doing a bunch of stuff where like I'll do my normal, hey, I'm gonna throw this into ChatGPT and I've been running it through both models to see sort of the difference. Sometimes 4.0 is actually better. It's interesting, like on certain tasks. But I got really sick over the break and I gave both models my symptoms. I was like, hey, and I've committed to ChatGPT's memory, like a bunch of normal health data about myself. So it knows like my habits and weight and exercise, all that stuff. I was like, using what you already know about me, here's what I'm feeling. Tell me what I should do and how I should prevent this in the future. And the O1 output was drastically better. And then I ended up, because I couldn't get into my doctor, I did a Health 811 appointment here and then a virtual doctor thing for through this other related hospital. And the information from O1 was drastically more valuable.

What do you mean drastically? Was it just more specific, accurate? Like what does drastically mean?

It was way more specificity. It told me about root cause, which was really interesting. And you know, when you think of it, What is O3? It's a chain of thought. So I'll explain maybe for everybody who's not seen it all, but the reasoning models, O1, O3, and some of what else you've seen in the market, those are basically just models that they're spending way more inference time compute on.

Yeah. Having a conversation basically before they give you an answer.

In the background. So we used to, I used to chain of, you can use a chain of thought prompt in any model to say, hey, first break this problem down into its component parts and then weigh the options and then do this and this. And so this is what O1 does basically out of the box. It takes any prompt, makes it chain of thought, and then it runs multiple attempts at solving that problem until it gets to the best possible solution. And so Asad, I don't know if you remember the token difference, between, um, 0.1 and 4.0 that Gerstner and Brad Gurley talked about on their pod, but it's like 10x or 100x, like the answer from a reasoning model versus, uh, like a 1.

And the cost is 10x, right? It's $20 versus $200.

The token.

Yeah.

The number of tokens. So the number of like basically characters would be—

it is so expensive that, so they have that $200 a month, um, pro account, which I got and it gives you O1 Pro, which is quite interesting as well. But they're losing money on that, which is insane. Like, no one would have thought that.

Yeah. And so if it's, for example, 100 times or call it 10 times, 10 times more expensive, well, think about how many, like, think about how many chats you put into that thing every single day. So anyways, so this is the difference between the two models. One is chain of thought, much more compute intensive, and it can solve much more complex questions and give you very high quality answers. It can break, especially for complex stuff like a health problem. It pulled together all this information. It told me about what the root cause was. It told me how to get better and what I should do in the future, the signals I should work for. And I got just way more information from both the nurse practitioner and doctor that I, that I talked to. And I did this for a bunch of stuff over the last few weeks. And you really start to understand, it's like, okay, I can do a lot more with this. I can give much more opaque and vague problems to this model without just being given hallucinating gobbledygook back. And it can resolve real problems in your business. Like it could take a deal, ingest it, give you like clear and actionable next steps with much more confidence than any of the previous models. So it has my brain spinning. I've been talking to my head of RevOps about this a bunch.

Have you operationalized it in any way yet? Or you're still kind of thinking through it?

No, it's still super early.

AJ, how would you think about this as a product guy? Or with your product hat on, because let's say you're implementing AI in CodeOps today and it can essentially help people do things a little bit faster than they could manually do them before. But with something like reasoning, you can now offer them a strategic analyst almost baked into your product. And so how do you think about it's there now, right? Like O1 Pro is really effective. O3 will be out soon. How do you think about roadmapping this in? Because obviously there's a cost element to this as well. But it's also interesting because you don't see any companies right now announce their integration with reasoning from an AI perspective. Really, most of the integration is pretty blah. But the first few to do it and do it really well, that's going to make a bit of a splash, right? Finally, it's a strategic partner baked into a product rather than an administrative assistant baked into a product. How are you thinking about all of this?

I mean, there's a few things. What's that, Jack? Kyle?

It's a good delineation.

It's a good delineation.

Like high-powered intern versus legit, you know, thought partner. Yeah.

I mean, there's a few things that like I was thinking about. So I was thinking about the product because we were launching an AI-powered Plan Builder in a few weeks. And I was thinking about the use cases. First off, the thing at the very beginning that Kyle said, which is that most economic value or something that by the end of 2025—

Valuable jobs.

Yeah, that scares me because it's like, well, I could go ahead and implement this asset, but it doesn't— what is the point? Doesn't even matter. What are we doing anyway? And just have an existential crisis right there. And then But then I think about this and I'm like, well, the use case that we have, which is you think about compensation plan design and you have all these variables in different parts of the team that Kyle was talking about, the planning process that I'm sure he went through, and you have all these different inputs to it where, where this gets super interesting is if you're thinking about this in a workflow, the very beginning of this is the design, capacity planning, financial planning process of an organization. That Copilot can be with you reasoning all along the way. I wouldn't actually expect it to deliver the answer right up front. Rather, it has some level of back and forth from the get-go, takes that dataset, and then moves on to the next part of the, the workflow, uh, management that needs to be done. So for jobs to be done for QuotaPath, you have the planning process, which might be the rates and the commissions, but then you have the mapping and the data process. So like, where you have a reasoning model that takes that information and carries it on to the mapping and then carries it on to maybe some level of rules engine around invoicing data, then to payouts. And then it kind of loops back around in terms of dynamically saying benchmarking, like, based on all of the things that you've given me in the back and forth conversation, this is actually what the optimal outcome of your team should look like as it relates to compensation management. And like, that is in our world today, like, we don't even have that, a human in the loop that's doing that level. We have comp plan consults that a handful of the executives run. And I think that that's the difference in that you have like, I wouldn't say intern, but you have a CSM that's more tactical work on doing some of this. So AI can kind of really just pull that out and say like, this is—

I don't need a compensation expert at all anymore, right? Like that's actually baked into the product that is executing your commission.

When we, like, 2 years ago when I was thinking about, when we were like starting to think about this, and I remember the day, it was like November 10th, I think, when ChatGPT was unveiled to the world of 2023. Does that sound right? Or '22? '23. And I remember thinking then, okay, the first use cases on a productization are going to be fairly novelty-driven. Like, let's continue to wait and see what this really turns into. And I didn't feel that there was like the real, real product use cases coming online until the end of last year where I'm like, oh, okay, this is now really going to start to see this take off. If you're not an AI-first company, I think there's just lots of use cases obviously for AI-first companies, but for non-AI-first companies that were born in the world where they were just trying to take the chatbot or whatever off the shelf, it's like there has to be more of a reasoning and logic use case driven inside of the company, and then you can become an AI-first organization and develop it. And I think that's what has to happen. I still feel strongly that must happen with all SaaS products by the end of this year.

It'd be cool if you could have your team run some scenarios on what the cost of this would look like. Like, how far from sustainable is it, right? Because otherwise you would have two choices, which is I can integrate this thing, which will truly make our product quite magical and probably differentiated. For a certain amount of time, but we would either have to increase the price significantly for this additional value. And then what's the trash you have to deal with that? Or you have to wait it out. Like, it'd be interesting if your team actually looked into that.

Well, you go through the impact versus effort, which is that, like, one of those 4 key pillars that Kyle Norton was talking about in terms of the sweat. And, you know, Manny from previously Outreach, but he's launching his new new, um, product. He told the world yet what it is, so I don't think he has yet. But, uh, whatever it is, he made a comment, a post about the cost of AI and that, you know, founders, CEOs aren't taking into account and it's going to eat into 20% of margins. I just have like a strong, strong disagreement with, with that, both knowing the cost for where we're headed and what it looks like, but also just the leverage and opportunity you have with the the team that you have and how much more productive that team becomes. So I think it's that, that's just, I guess like he's assuming that you can't increase prices or that he's launching a product that has to do with margins of AI. I don't know.

But yeah, I think this is one of the most interesting points that is playing out right now and will play out between this year and next year is that the P&L is going to look very different. You can't like, actually at a macro level, if you took the P&Ls of a bunch of these tech companies, they look kind of similar, you know, certain 7% in R&D with a little margin, little margin here and there, 7% in sales and marketing, 7% in G&A, right? Those percentages are evolving. We were talking to Tomas about this last week as well. And he was like, yes, go-to-market will increase, R&D will go down, not because R&D productivity is going down, but because the productivity is increasing, you just need less heads over there. But on the go-to-market side, it's getting tougher and tougher. So you need You need to invest a bit more there. So these P&Ls are completely evolving.

The challenge though, Asid, because we had, uh, we have virtual kickoff tomorrow and on Monday, all hands, not all hearts, all hands meeting. Saw a tweet that, that was, uh, we won't go down this path, but that companies, startups had renamed their all hands meeting to all hearts, which I just don't believe that that was true.

But I don't think that, that's ridiculous.

That didn't happen.

All serious person. And you work in a company and they did that, you need to walk out like you need to walk out.

So we have this like this, this question they were asked like, hey, what did you do over break or what's one thing you're looking forward to, whatever. But the question was, what are you expecting to get out of virtual kickoff on, on Thursday? And the one of the larger bubbles was headcount planning or growth planning. And I, I'm like, you know, that's so interesting. One of the biggest challenges we have is these organizations that aren't AI first is having your team really just thinking about it in traditional growth levers. They're just like, I am not thinking about it that way. I am in a totally different headspace because I know the P&L and the cost piece of it and what this actually means to the organization. So, you know, Kyle, I don't know if this is something you've thought about, but teams expect when they join startups to join where the team that are hiring a lot of people. I want to be a leader. I want to learn all these skill sets and we're going to hire 1,000 people. People. But that is not where the world is. And I can see it's a struggle inside organizations, including ours, where that's still the expectation from 4 years ago, because our tenure— our average tenure at the organization is 3 and a half years. And, and people are getting, probably rightfully so, frustrated that they're not seeing that headcount growth.

Yeah, I think this is going to be an interesting thing for all companies to grapple with over the next few years, because you can just do so much more with so much less. And so there's less need for managers. And so one of the things that many companies have done, like Shopify, is elevate the role of a high-level individual contributor. And we've created principal roles in our, in our business for people who are just like awesome ICs, and we want them doing the highest leverage, most complex stuff and spending time with the product team, making an impact outside of their roles. That doesn't involve managing people. And that role actually is comped the same as a team lead, for example. So in terms of like comp and equity and their ability to like be in the room, I think that's when people want to be a manager or when they— people wouldn't want to get promoted. A lot of it is feeling like they're in the room and they're, they're making an impact in their strategic decisions. Yeah. And so, so how can you give people that opportunity without it being tied directly to like how many heads you, you manage. I think we're going into a place where a lot of people are going to be managing virtual heads, like agents. And, you know, the same way that we give instructions to people to do things for us today that could take hours of work at a time, you'll be doing that with agents, with reasoning, with these reasoning models. So it's going to be a big paradigm shift and people are, people are going to have to learn a very different set of skills over the next few years.

Is that something that owner talked about openly, this idea of principles of like why that was headed that way and what the shift, some of the future thinking in this shift?

Less so because we are just expanding headcount so aggressively, like, and we're promoting a bunch of people and there's just a bunch of roles we need to fill given our growth rate. But it's something that I talk a lot to my leaders about, especially Steve, who runs RevOps with me. It's like, how are we leveraging these tools to give us more scale? How do we get reps doing less low-value work? How do we, you know, one of the applications that this is interesting for is like your smallest deals. How do you build a self-serve journey out of these reasoning models and this type of experience? And there's really cool companies out there that are doing this for out of the box, like OneMind, it's the former founder of Sixth Sense.

Yeah, she's—

Yeah, who's awesome. We've spent a bunch of time talking. So I think there's just brand new opportunities that never existed for us, and I'm trying I'm spending a lot of time reading and thinking through how to do this without blowing up my existing roadmap.

I think what's really tough is that there's certain things that are baked into society as signals of safety, security, success, status, right? And so we were talking about managers a couple of weeks ago, and we discussed how in certain cultures, it's a signal that you've achieved a level of security and stability. It's not even about is that a good job, what it is. It's like, oh, you're a manager. Okay. Especially if you are, let's say, from— I'm from Pakistan. A lot of people over there might not understand business and business culture over here and technology companies and all of that, but they understand manager, right? They're like, okay, you're a manager. You're the boss, right? You're a boss. People report to you. You're good enough that they trust you to lead people. Not bad. I think employee headcount has been drilled into society as a signal of stability, security, and growth in a business for so long that it's going to be really hard to get out of that, right?

It won't take years because here's my take, it can't because it's going to change so fast that they will be forced to adapt on the fly. Like, I actually think being a middle manager is a fairly precarious place to be coming up over the next few years. Like, because if you—

I mean, the shift itself won't take years, but I think people's mindset, that's not a behavior change, doesn't happen.

I think it's generational. Like, you know, our parents who are retired, they won't understand this shift the same way that a person in the workforce will. So it'll require like generational shifts to happen. I think for it to become commonplace where no one cares how many people are working in an organization and using that as a signal of success in that company, actually then shifting towards understanding that the least amount of employees for the most amount of revenue is probably the best thing to look for, right? Like it's going to take a little bit of time over there because you still want to go away to Thanksgiving and you will have an uncle and you like, I'm doing this, this, and they're like, oh, what? I've never heard of that company. How many people work there? 5 people. Like, oh, Bobby is working at a 5-person company. Like, Bobby is totally insecure right now. Bobby is in a bad spot. So I think like it'll be interesting to see how all of that shifts.

Or Bob. Bob just sitting in the corner by himself eating Thanksgiving dinner.

Bobby's like, I'm a millionaire. No, you're not.

People might not get years to adjust because this might happen in the blink of an eye. And you might be right. My message to people listening is like, you better start learning now because this thing is, you know, AI is not, I can't remember whose quote this is. AI is not going to replace you. Somebody with AI is going to replace you. And so I would just get on your horse and learn and play and figure this out.

That's, but like, so from a CEO perspective, like I, you know, my sitting in my seat, a virtual kickoff. And we talk about part of it as being an AI-first company and what that means. Is that the message that I'm delivering?

I think the message you have to deliver, AJ, is you have to give them other signals, right? Like other signals that we are doing well and that they can also use as signals to the market. So I think it's a little bit unfair where companies can't talk about head— we used to talk about headcount because it was information we were willing to talk about. But they don't want to talk about revenue and you don't want to talk like, so you have to, I think, come up with a new set of signals that people can use in their personal lives to show status, to give them that comfort so that they're not pushing for employment.

Yeah. And I think that, but I also think the other part of this is just the learning and growing that's happening. Like that's, people join in startups because they're curious about their, their growth in their career and their growth. There is no better time in the world to learn truthfully. How many, like, think about this room right now, the 3 of us, how much content have we consumed in the last 12 months versus prior to that? I can tell you very confidently, I probably consumed 3 to 4x last year in 2024 than I ever have in any other year in my entire life.

I was measuring this recently. My research for the newsletter used to be 5+ hours of of just research and thinking. And now I can do that in about an hour.

Like, that's efficiency. But where are you spending that other hour? You're learning, you're like consuming other things.

But like, I can, with Perplexity, I can do my research component really effectively within an hour. And these are topics that I might not have a big foundation in.

You're putting out so much more because going back a couple years, you didn't have a podcast, you didn't have a newsletter, you didn't have bunch of LinkedIn content. So I think the ease of research has just allowed people to do—

well, the quality bar is still high, right? The quality of that, what you're putting out is quite high.

And the mediums with which you can consume the content have evolved to a point where somebody like me who likes to listen and learn now can do that and be very competitive with somebody who likes to read and learn.

Yeah. It's interesting. Almost everybody. I record a podcast with or I'm just talking to you, he goes, how do you do all this stuff? How do you have time for any of these things? And I just don't have a good answer. I always joke. I'm like, I just work a lot, basically.

I just hang with my kids and work out and I work.

But I think the more legitimate answer is I have little systems for almost everything. And these little systems are mostly AI-powered. My research and docket creation, writing the newsletter posts for that episode. The Pavilion team is doing a bunch of the creative stuff and generating like the headlines from AI. Like, I think just like subtly these things have all gotten baked in. And AJ, going back to your question, like, well, what's the message to my employees? One of the most interesting things I heard on this topic was Klarna CEO Sebastian, whatever his name is, And I can't remember the podcast, but he said that they had stopped hiring new employees over a year ago. And because of natural attrition, the number of total employees is actually down 10 or 20%. And his message to the team was, we're going to keep shrinking the number of employees and paying every employee more because we want to pay you for the impact. As the company grows, your unique value grows. As long as you're keeping, keeping pace. And so I've heard from another very large company that they're also trying to keep their total employee headcount under 10,000 people, and they want to keep just like replacing people with AI and making people more and more powerful. And I think that's a really empowering message. And then it gets people to be like, oh, maybe I should take a course. Maybe I should go, you know, get a ChatGPT license. And start figuring out how to bake this in. That has to be the message or else you will be left behind, in my opinion.

I find that there's this point of, well, if people become that much more productive and you have less employees and let's say your burn rate is not skyrocketing for some odd reason, then the revenue per employee jumps quite significantly. So let's say in a sales role, if an AE today gets paid $240,000 to drive $700,000 in new revenue. Well, what happens when that mid-market AE is doing 3 or 4 or 5? Like, do they make like $800,000? Like, does that roll? Like, are there going to be people who will have those type of incomes? It'll be very, really interesting to see at what type of increase in compensation is going to come out of this versus is it just going to fall in profit margins or Maybe the margins don't increase because the AI cost is so significant. That's a really interesting question over the next like 12 to 24 months, I think. As we come towards the end of this, we're going to trial a new segment. We're just doing new things at the end now. And so today's is something important that you have changed your mind about recently and why. And AJ, since you like to change your mind all the time, why don't you start?

Oh my gosh. I was— I supposed to come up with this and think about this on the fly. I have changed my mind about travel this year. Last year I spent a ton of time on the road and I felt like that was a really important thing for me to do, for it to be in front of customers, investors, board meetings. And events, inbound, the team in Austin. I had 14 out of 17 weeks in travel. And when I reflected on those, those weeks and my sleep and my health, I just realized it is like there was a cost, there's a hard, heavy trade-off in those 3 months. And so the beginning of this year, for the next 4 or 5 months, I'm only going to travel 3 times. One of those is the next week to the CEO Summit. And I'm going to hold myself accountable to that. And really, from a measuring of my health, I've got an Oura Ring like everyone else has out there. And there it is, Kyle. Thank you. Another name drop for another tech company. And I'm going to measure—

we're bad at this.

Exactly right. And just see how the next several months go. So my mind is a little bit changed on travel in this moment. I do change all the time.

So check Interesting. I thought you were just a child. I thought you, I wouldn't have thought that was you.

Yeah, I'm done with it. I'm over it.

You got to buy these Huberman glasses. I've tracked my sleep for years. I've typically worn blue light glasses before bed.

The red one?

I bought the Huberman ones, which have the, or with Roka, and they've got the orange lenses. I now realize the other blue light glasses did nothing.

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Have you noticed a difference after switching to the red?

Big time. Oh, really?

Yeah. And I rarely notice this much of an impact from little changes. These Roka Huberman glasses, I was like, I'm such a sucker buying them.

Why are you wearing them right now?

Literally last night, I was like, oh, interesting because you can see footballers are using them a lot. And I was like, why are they using them? So, I went down this rabbit hole.

Just for 2 hours before bed so that you're getting rid of the blue light from watching TV or your phone or computer.

Fascinating.

Makes a difference.

Kyle, what is the thing you've changed your mind about?

I've changed my mind that I can sit on the sidelines with regards to politics. I think Asad and I text a lot about this and I just didn't want the distraction. I didn't want to get involved, but I'm in Canada and our country has been sort of run into the ground over the last bunch of years, you know, GDP per capita growth, innovation, housing, don't even get it. Don't even get me started. All of this stuff has gotten so much worse over the last few years with just like completely inept leadership. And, you know, I think it was a little bit of naivete and to just think it's like, oh, we're Canada. All the parties are sort of close to the middle. Doesn't really matter who's in charge. I can just like, I don't need to put my mental calories into that. But yeah, that's not possible because we're in a bad spot. And so I've like been getting engaged quietly in some stuff in the background because I feel like I, you know, this like we're just going to lose our innovation sector. We're going to lose all of our good startups. We're going to lose our best people to the US if we don't fix something like I know many people that are making moves to the US or thinking about it because of this. So I've changed my mind there big time.

Mine is also very similar. I grew up in a society where the conservatives were almost like little fundamentalists. And so that you were liberal and what you were fighting for were very basic liberal, right? Liberal causes like basic women's rights and like really basic stuff. And so I grew up in that society and I grew up on the side where it was a little bit punk rock. Like my family was punk rock about this. They stood up against what was the norm and they helped make change. And that was really ingrained in me. And then I came over here and I was tilting that way and I remained tilted there. But, and I haven't been very involved, even though I studied public policy, I haven't been very involved in that side of the world, kind of head down doing your thing. But two things happened over the last couple of years. A, the data that's coming out of our country is really worrying, right? Like productivity per person, standard of living, income, all of these things have fallen so dramatically through frivolous, wasteful spending. And so you see that data and after a while you just keep seeing it and it just beats you over the head, right? And at some point you're like, well, just looking at it and getting angry isn't enough. Like, you probably have to like be willing to then take some of your time that's going in other places and spend it, spend it there initially to create awareness and then maybe do something about it. The second was, and this is something I've spoken about on the pod a lot, as the economies were recovering across the Western world late 2024, I noticed that Canada's tech ecosystem was recovering much slower, really like much slower. And it just kept scratching at my head, like what's going on here? And I look at a tech ecosystem as having some core components. You need an education system that churns out STEM students. You need which we have the best. Like there's a story of how NVIDIA took the GPU to a bunch of universities a long time ago and they're like, hey, what can we use these GPUs for beyond video games? And the university where they figured out AI was U of T. Oh, not Waterloo?

Is Waterloo U of T?

No, it was U of T and there's Waterloo is fantastic as well. So we've got the university infrastructure and then you've got got regulation, taxation, you've got talent, and you've got investors, right? Those are like your building blocks. And I think the investors could be a lot better in this market, but I also think the regulation and the taxes do not facilitate growth. And I can see, you learn a lot about markets when they recover. And the difference in pace between the US and Canada in its recovery has been just quite startling for me. And so similar to Kyle, changed my mind about just my political leanings. I never thought I would lean ever in my life did I think I would even consider conservatives as a place where I would put my vote. Whereas right now, I can't, uh, I can't.

Listen, guys, this is easy. Just come live the American dream. We, we all know you want to, and we're, we're welcome you. We're welcome. We'll welcome you with open arms, and we're really excited to have you all.

Trudeau had a point. He's like, I— when Trump was telling him, uh, you guys should join Canada, he said, maybe we trade. You give us Vermont, we'll give you something.

It's one step closer to Greenland. We're good. I'm kidding. But I— look, we— this is a much longer topic, and we need to have Kyle Norton back to talk about it, because I think there's something real here that extends far beyond politics. It's more of on, like, from a global geo-capital world and where the North American continent sits and how it looks in the next 4 to 5 years is going to be really interesting to see. And like, Canada and US have always been aligned. And typically, we've always thought, I've always thought that Canadians live a quality of life that's similar, similar, or sometimes even on certain things peak above us and surpassed us.

That's not true anymore.

But it doesn't. But you all don't feel like that that's the case. And I loved the numbers.

It is not the case. It used to try. And now it's like the guy—

I will say, like, just from my call, like, there's so many changes that have happened, but my quality personally, my quality of life living has gone up over the last 10, 15 years by— I mean, there's lots of parts to that in my own career, but I just have seen lots of people around me, theirs have also— as that's all you like to complain, we like to complain about it, but it's actually much better than it ever has been.

Yeah, I'm not talking about my personal quality of life, like I'm definitely better off than I was a few years ago, but I think just being worried for the state of your community, the place that you want to call home, and it has to get better. It will get better or I will leave. There's only two options here. And I think a lot of people are in this place right now. I know a lot of folks that are evaluating moves out of the country, that have been reinvigorated by the fact that a change might be afoot. So, you know, we just have to get involved in trying to bring back—

come, come, Kyle, you have a place to stay. Come visit Philly. I, I'll introduce you.

I'll tell you this much, AJ, anyone moving from Canada isn't coming to Philly.

Well, this has been an awesome episode, episode 92.

Check it out.

This comes out out every Sunday. Next week is the CEO Summit. I will be there. Asad will be there. Sam will make an appearance. I guess he'll show up for that versus Topline. But yeah, we're excited to be in New Orleans and hang out in the city. But from all of us, Kyle Norton, CRO of Owner.com, Asad Zaman, CEO of STA, and myself, AJ Brunos, CEO of QuotaPath. Thanks, thanks for listening to this episode.

See y'all, everyone.

Thanks. 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.