Sam Blond's Blueprint for Building Exceptional Leaders and Teams

Founders Fund is one of the most legendary venture firms out there. It's a path that I think is exciting for a lot of operators. Why leave venture and come back to operating?

Yeah, just reinforce what you said. Founders Fund is the best and my experience there was exceptional. The people that I was able to surround myself with were the best at their craft in the world and nothing but. Just incredibly positive things to say about my experience there.

Hello and welcome to the Revenue Leadership Podcast by Topline. I'm your host Kyle Norton CRO@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. But first, a word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Momentum IO. Momentum is a powerful tool for turning sales and customer conversations into go to market data. Using Genai, it extracts, analyzes and automates customer intelligence across your org. The best part? It's not a new platform for your team to adopt. It integrates seamlessly with your existing stack and writes data back to Salesforce directly. Some of the most innovative companies out there, like zscaler, demand based ramp1password and even my company owner.com use momentum every single day to capture, forecast and churn risk. Autofill Salesforce fields share product signals and track sentiment. So check it out with a free trial at Momentum IO. Mr. Sam Blonde, welcome to the podcast. Appreciate you joining me Kyle.

Thanks for having me. You're a legend and I'm looking forward to spending some time with you.

Awesome. So before we dive in and talk about building leaders, give everybody your 60 second backgrounder.

Perfect. I grew up in Kansas City, went to University of Missouri when I finished college. Didn't really know what I wanted to do. I was lucky that my brother was in the Bay Area doing tech sales. I joined a company called EchoSign as an SDR. This is back in 2008. Was again very lucky. That Echo Sign turned out to be a relatively successful SaaS business and timing was good also. You think about 2008 SaaS was sort of like just coming to market. Jason lemkin was our CEO and the success of EchoSign allowed me to grow my career from being an SDR to realizing several promotions over a pretty short period of time. I was with the business for five or six years. I was then VP of Sales at Zenefits for two and a half years. Joined very early left when we were about 70 million in ARR and a four and a half billion dollar valuation was CRO at Brex. Again joined very early left when we were about 400 million in interchange annualized interchange revenue and we were a 12 and a half billion dollar business. This is back in 2021, early 2022 and then most recently I was a partner at Founders Fund for almost two years and just started my own company. So that's the hopefully 60 second version.

Yeah, yeah. Very cool. I don't know if you've announced sort of what you're doing next so maybe give people the preview on what's. What's coming up.

Yeah, I'm going to be. I'm a co founder CEO of a startup that I'm going to build in the category of a sales system. So getting started on that. Not you know, sharing too many details at this point publicly but really excited. Have an incredible co founding team and we're starting to build.

Very cool. I love that I'll be following closely. So Founders Fund is one of the most legendary venture firms out there. It's a path that I think is exciting for a lot of operators. Why leave venture and come back to operating?

Yeah, it just reinforce what you said. Founders Fund is the best and my experience there was exceptional. The people that I.