20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong

Amit Bendov is Co-Founder & CEO of Gong, the leading AI-sales platform. The company has raised over $600 million from some of the best in the world including Sequoia, Thrive, Salesforce and more. Gong has surpassed $300M in ARR, serves thousands of customers (including multiple Fortune 10s), and is valued at over $7BN. AGENDA: 00:00 – Why CRM Was Always a Lie and Gong's Secret Insight 04:30 – Will AI Kill Salesforce? Mark Benioff's Nightmare 08:15 – Why 99% of VCs Said No to Gong's Seed Round 12:00 – The Shocking Trial Close That Changed Everything 18:00 – Can AI Make Every Seller Perform Like LeBron? 20:30 – Will Sales Software Shift from Software Budget to Human Labor Budget? 25:00 – Why AI SDRs Are "Stupid" and Bound to Fail 35:00 – Gong's Darkest Hour: Shrinking, Churn, and Losing Muscle 41:30 – The Re-Acceleration Playbook: How Gong Got Back to Hypergrowth 54:00 – Would Amit Ever Sell Gong—or Take It Public?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 Sales with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 20 Sales is the monthly show where we sit down with the best sales minds in the business to discuss how they start, scale and master sales teams. Today, we're joined by Amit Bendov, co-founder and CEO of Gong, the leading AI sales platform. Now, the company has raised over $600 million from some of the best, including Sequoia, Thrive, Salesforce and more, and Gong has surpassed $400 million in ARR and serves thousands of customers, including multiple Fortune 100s and is valued at over $7 billion. But before we dive into the show today, is your finance team a cost centre tied up in enforcing policies, bogged down by cumbersome processes and drowning in operational busy work?

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• 1:29Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:34Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:50Harry Stebbings?

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:52Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, listen, I've wanted to do this one for a long time. I interview the world's best CROs on 20 Sales. Everyone obviously uses Gong. So thank you so much for joining me today, dude.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

• 4:04Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, I think most companies are founded on insight developments, which is a way that you see the world that other people don't agree with. When you think back to starting Gong, how did you see the world and sales that other people didn't agree with?

• 4:18Speaker 02

  You know, if you take like Peter Thiel, say like Companies are built on secrets, right? Our secret was that everybody thought, still do, that CRM is a single source of truth. This is not true. CRM doesn't have truth. The only thing that's true out there is like who your customers are, what they bought, how much they're paying you, maybe their phone numbers. Everything else is not true. It's like information that sellers are bothering to put in. It's highly subjective. They put maybe like 1% of the information that's actually happening. I experienced it firsthand in 2015. I was like a CEO of a software company. We're growing really fast and then all of a sudden I had a shitty quarter and that sales or just not,

• 5:02Speaker 02

  just taking a nosedive and I have no idea what's going on. I started digging like in our CRM, like, uh, you know, do we have enough opportunities? Do we have enough people making enough calls, enough emails? Everything looked fine except for like we weren't selling. So it dawned on me that the secrets is not like how much work we're doing or how many people we have, but it's like the essence of the, uh, the conversations with customers. And I sent my product manager to sift through CRM notes and they spent a couple of weeks, load everything to Excel and then came back, said, there's nothing there. I mean, I realized the problem is that CRM was built for the leaders to give them the information so they can roll their forecasts and reporting based on sweat that people at the bottom in the trenches need to put in. They need to go in.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  So I met this customer. They're very excited with the demo. Well, we're gonna meet again next week and then nothing happens and never really know why. So CRM tells you like what you won and how much they paid and what you've lost, but you never really know why and it doesn't tell you how. This was 2015. For those who remember, this was the year where DeepMind was already beating the world champion in chess. And AI was starting to diagnose cancer better than the doctors. The question I asked, like, how hard would it be for AI to tell us what's going on better than sellers? That was the insight that ultimately led to Gong.

• 6:28Harry Stebbings?

  I go off in many tangents, but you said there about CRM is not really having a lot of data. It's a pain in the ass for sales, or else put a load of data in. Do you think in an agentic world, your CRM providers literally just become data storage holders? And actually, you just have agents crawling over them to retrieve information that users will never go back to those providers for?

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Like, I mean, who wants to fill in forms or flip the webpages? This is like people punching cars in the seventies. There's no doubt in a couple of years at most, and I used to say like in 10 years, right? Now I say like in one to two years, nobody's going to be filling in forms. Nobody's going to run those like reports and go and like update their managers and all of that. It's all going to be done by agents automatically with AI, better, faster, cheaper than people.

• 7:17Harry Stebbings?

  What would you do if you're Mark Bannion?

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Well, I think he's doing the right thing. He's building agents. I think they also recognize the opportunity with AI and they need to move fast, as fast as they can. So it's a formidable company, definitely capable, and it's impressive that the way that they have done.

• 7:32Harry Stebbings?

  We spoke about kind of insights when you started the company. I think some of the biggest lessons come from changing one's mind. When you think about what you believed that you now no longer believe, what did you believe that now you don't believe anymore?

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Our story is actually boring. Like, our presentation, like I still have the pitch deck from Series A.

• 7:52Harry Stebbings?

  How much did you raise?

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Uh, we raised six million. It was really hard. Like, nobody wanted to invest in us, sorry. Like, believe it or not, we struggled. Like, 99% of people said no, passed on the opportunity. Like, kid you not.

• 8:04Harry Stebbings?

  Six million at what price?

• 8:06Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't even remember.

• 8:07Harry Stebbings?

  Like 20?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  It was like, like, you know, 2016 valuations.

• 8:12Harry Stebbings?

  Why did they say no?

• 8:14Speaker 02

  They thought that sellers are going to hate Gong because they're going to see it as a big brother, that Google and Amazon are going to own the AI technology, they're going to own this market, whatever it is. Legal and compliance reason, they said you can't really record, like, it's illegal, which is not true. It is legal, like, as long as you have consent, everything is legit. One of the reasons, like, oh, there is no company made in a sales stack. At that time, there Companies that most of them like don't exist inside sales and ClearSlide. I know you might remember those like. So it was like, you know, is this like even worth an investment as a category, right? And these are, these are not stupid people. These are smart people that I know, right? Personally. And to hear those knows was gutting.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  So you raised six on twenty six. What happens then? Do we have product market fit then? It was insane. We raised the money. We started developing first year, twenty sixteen. We haven't been, weren't planning any revenue and we just coerced a few friends and family companies to try the product. So we can get data, so we can start training our models. We didn't plan on charging anything and people think, oh, free product, people would be, you know, happy to try it out. No, like people don't want to waste their time, but we use anything from emotional extortion to bending people's arms that you just favor. They tried it. So we started like the system started to work. I think it was January twenty sixteen. We launched like

• 9:40Speaker 02

  not even an alpha, kind of like, hey, kick the tires, tell us if things like even make sense. And then we started seeing that the sellers are actually logging in, like engagement was not zero. Cause oh, that's, that's pretty interesting. What are they doing over there? So we started looking at logs. We saw what they're, how they're using the product and we started tweaking the GUI a little bit. Move some buttons, relabeling, like, uh, we thought people were going to search for keywords like a competitor name. But that's not what they're looking for. They're looking like, okay, my customer name, right? Like where am I calling the customer or like a person's name, like a seller's name. So we tweaked, engagement improved. We started getting complaints, which is like a very good thing. People, oh, Gong missed that, uh, meeting, like, uh, why he did this? So which is a very good signal.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Why is complaints a good signal? You know what's worse than no complaints? Silence, crickets, right? Means people don't care. The ideal, the product just works amazing and nobody complains, right? The reality, most products aren't amazing, especially on, but when people complain, it means that they want it to work or that they care. So customer complains, most people panic. It's a phenomenal opportunity.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  If you react, so people complained, which was good. Oh, Gong was like five minutes late or like, uh, you know, I was talking behind my manager's backs, all those things, right? Uh, the Gong captured somehow. It was good. And then around April, I was telling Elon, Elon is my, uh, my co-founder. You know what? Let's do a little experiment. Like, let's do a trial close. The trial close in, in sales is like, you go and ask for the order. If you're working on a deal, you're gonna ask for money and it tells you where you are, right? To either get a yes or a no. Do they know it's a trial or they don't? No, you just say, hey, uh, are you ready to buy? And people say yes or no. If it's no, usually it's a no, right? But at least you know what you're missing. So we wanted to know.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  We didn't need the money or didn't have like any revenue goals, but do we have something that is valuable enough that people would be willing to pay? We saw that they're using it, they're engaged. Is it like valuable enough? Because there are plenty of product people use and love. When you go and ask for money, they're not willing to pay. So we didn't even have a price list, but we said, you know what? Let's start something like, you know, thirty to fifty K, which is a non-trivial amount. We wanted to be like somewhat painful, but not outrageous. We had a dozen customers and we reached out to all of them. And said, hey, sorry, boys, the, uh, beta is over. It's time to pay. And they hated us, but eleven out of twelve bought.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  So within six months, we had like, uh, paying customers and I said, okay, like, that's really good. And they were paying thirty to fifty grand? Something like that, yes. Wow. Uh, even less, doesn't matter. We ask, maybe they pay less. We didn't care like what it is, but we didn't want to be like a dollar because that wouldn't say anything and or a million. Uh, it was just an experiment. It works extremely well. Okay, so these are all like people that knew us, right? Friends and family, which is like stage one. Then the next step would be, can you sell like to all those strangers? People that don't know like a meat or a lawn or aren't my cousins, right? So I went to this first conference in Chicago in twenty sixteen, April. And I present like, I still have the deck, like how AI will transform sales and people's jaws dropped.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  You could see that, oh wow, that's new. And right there, I got our first, you know, random stranger, he saw, I showed him a demo. And he saw, I said, this is great, like, I need it. And a month later, he bought. So that's how it started. So it's clear that the product market fit, we nailed it. And it was a hole in one.

• 13:18Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think founders should be the one to build the sales playbook? You there are very provocative in terms of being the one on stage, getting your friends as customers. Should the founder be the one to create that playbook?

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, absolutely. It is very difficult to change things after that. Once you start bringing like, we still think of Gong that I say, I wish we've changed it now. Because once you have the momentum, it's never like important enough to change things. Now, if you're like an extreme introvert engineers, maybe not. I think a mediocre founder can do probably the best job early on because you understand the picture, you have the passion, you understand, you know, you're, you still don't have a playbook. So if you're an average like communication skilled founder, do it yourself. Just figure it out like, because you understand the vision, you're saying what people understand, what they don't understand, probably better than anyone else. You're not, you're not a better seller, but overall, I think it's a great, great experience.

• 14:12Harry Stebbings?

  What do you wish you had changed, but it was too late to change?

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Our sales are doing extremely well. So, but you know, I think our sales stages, right? For example, Gong, like, don't make like the most sense. They work, but they're created like in 2016 and.

• 14:29Harry Stebbings?

  Why don't they make sense?

• 14:30Speaker 02

  It's just technicalities. It's like, you know, the call a presentation one, presentation two. Some of them are kind of like more like customer milestone and activities. They're not the best practice, but they work well and it'll be like very difficult to change. It's not impossible. Maybe like one day, like if our sales team decide, they'll, they'll put the effort to put it in. So little things, nothing, nothing major, but you know, fortunately, after we started selling to a stranger, I brought like a really strong VP of Sales and he started crushing and brought like real professional salespeople and then the team took off.

• 15:01Harry Stebbings?

  Can you help me then? I'm a young founder who has done pretty well. I've got to a million in ARR. You're my angel investor. Well done. I hope I do well. And I'm hiring that VP of Sales like you were at that time. What advice would you have for me on hiring a VP of Sales for my company at a million in ARR? And I've never done it before.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  You know, I wouldn't hire that like high pedigree VP from Salesforce or Adobe or whatever. Not Salesforce is a great team. You need someone who's still hungry, scrappy and will figure out the playbook, right? That has like, I say enough experience that have been successful. I'd say I did like two or three other companies. One company is a little dangerous. Maybe it's not a good sample size, but have been successful. The number of companies I've seen, because every company is different. Your company is probably different than the two or three others that your VP of Sales have done before. So it's important to hire someone with a diverse experience.

• 16:00Harry Stebbings?

  If they've been successful at three companies, why are they going to join our shitty little startup?

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Well, first, your startup isn't shitty. Like you need to sell the dream, right?

• 16:09Harry Stebbings?

  Sure, but we're a million in ARR and there are sales leaders that's had three successful.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you say, yeah, let's do like a billion like in five years, right? I mean, that's like us first, you need to sell. Hire the best talent. It's hard now. It's not necessarily been like CRO at like three companies, but they've been like a seller at company one, crushed it. They've been like a, like a sales lead at company two, crushed it. And a director at like a company three, crushed it.

• 16:37Harry Stebbings?

  What matters more that they've sold your size of ACV? Or that they've sold in your customer base before in terms of the sector knowledge?

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Uh, the ACV.

• 16:47Harry Stebbings?

  Really?

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:47Harry Stebbings?

  Why is that?

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Industry knowledge can be acquired like fairly quickly and salesmanship is extremely hard and takes time. Now, ACV doesn't mean it's like, you know, between like 15 and 50K, there's no difference. But you're selling like, you know, seven figure deals. It's a very different ballgame than like 10K deals. One's like very high velocity and the other one is like traditional enterprise sales. So that's, these are the two categories, like enterprise or transactional selling.

• 17:12Harry Stebbings?

  How does the art of salesmanship change in a world of AI?

• 17:17Speaker 02

  I think the art stays the art, the drudgery goes away. AI does not generate art. Try it like with imagery, right? Or whatever with Sora or whatever. So art is created by our creativity and intuition that that people still outperform AI. But the numbers are sellers spend seventy five percent of their time on non-selling activities. This is insane. It's like updating forms, it's like the forecast calls, it's like one-on-one meetings, sifting through lists, running workflows, researching information, preparing for meetings. This is insane. You're paying three out of four dollars you're paying them is to do uninteresting work that can be decimated with AI.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  And the salespeople would be willing to pay out of their own pocket for this because they hate it. That's definitely going away. The bigger thing is the sales effectiveness, just to know how to sell. Like, obviously, there is a very big variance between the best sellers and the worst sellers. Just look at the graphs, right? Look at the taming graphs. Even the best sellers, right? Not like every deal to show up the best form. Just everybody, you know, LeBron has like a bad day, right? So the performance is very uneven across people, you know, within the same people. So AI can make sure that you show up in the best form, best shape every time, every game. And maybe some people shouldn't even be in a profession.

• 18:41Harry Stebbings?

  Some people shouldn't be in the profession. Interesting one. We just released a show today with Jason Lampkin and Rory O'Driscoll, who I love dearly. And we're talking about Microsoft laying off nine thousand.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, I've heard that. That's a really good episode.

• 18:51Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, thank you. But what we're seeing is like, you know, FDEs, four deployed engineers at Palantir, Microsoft laying off nine thousand people largely sales and replacing with kind of product-centric solutions engineers. Clay, a smaller company, but still a fast-growing company, doesn't have a sales team. It just has kind of product specialists itself. Are we moving away from a world of respectfully less technically minded salespeople?

• 19:14Speaker 02

  No, no. So, salespeople are required. There'll be fewer sellers, I'm pretty sure. And I'll give you some numbers to think about it, right? There are roughly nine million sellers like in the world. Let's say 10, just for even, let's say that they're all, on average, are making like $150,000 a year. So that's like one and a half trillion dollars in cost. Remember, three quarters of that, you pay them not to sell, but to do administrative work. So that's the opportunity. Now, that's the petty cash. So let's say, average quota or average revenue per seller, let's say 700K a year. I'm just throwing a number. So that's like 7 trillion.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  7 trillion dollars a year sold by the sales community. This is bigger. People talk about like, you know, Cursor for engineers or Harvey for lawyers. Gong or Revenue AI is for sellers. It's way bigger because it's not just the cost or the headcount. It's the revenue they're generating. It's like a magnitude of order bigger. So this is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity that AI can tap into.

• 20:21Harry Stebbings?

  If we make reps dramatically more efficient, we will need much fewer.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:26Harry Stebbings?

  Great.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:26Harry Stebbings?

  If we need much fewer, we cannot stay on a seat model.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Of course not.

• 20:31Harry Stebbings?

  So we move to a usage-based model?

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:34Harry Stebbings?

  How do we do a usage-based model when there's a lot of ambiguity in attribution?

• 20:38Speaker 02

  It needs to reflect the value. Usage is like one way to do it. Let's say that people pay like, if you have like one tenth of the seller, you increase the price per seat like 10X, right? So it's like 10,000 per seller, but they're 100 times more productive.

• 20:50Harry Stebbings?

  That's a core assumption that I think no one is spending enough time thinking about, just with AI in general, which is will we see the transition of these tools from software budget to human labor budget?

• 21:01Speaker 02

  I have it in my pitch deck from 2017. I said like Revenue AI will be bigger than CRM, not because like it has like a big ego, but just the economics like.

• 21:10Harry Stebbings?

  Because you needed to get your A done.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Well, people that I think people dismissed it at the time. Yeah, you're right. Whatever.

• 21:19Harry Stebbings?

  You do have to get around that. Hasn't to the right. Yeah.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  No, I don't think it landed, but it was obvious to me. If you think like it's not gone, but AI is bigger than cloud. Now people get it because cloud was an IT revolution. If I'm a seller, I don't care if I use Salesforce or Sebel. Yeah, one is a little easier than the other, but the IT is the beneficial. It's true that there is no software, but as a user, you know, I feel opportunity feels like here and there. Create opportunities here and there. Create quotes here and there. It's very similar, right? The benefit is the IT that there's no software, there's no upgrade, no infrastructure. But IT is 6% of a company's budget. The biggest item is payroll and AI taps into payroll. The 70% that people are spending on admin work goes away.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Now it has to reflect the value and that's why it's like it's a magnitude of order bigger.

• 22:09Harry Stebbings?

  Well, does it? Because if you look at, say, like a windsurf or a cursor. Actually, the commoditization of technology means that they don't have leverage and the switching is much easier. And so what you're seeing is actually they're not able to charge and move into the labor bucket. Because there is such little leverage in switching between the two.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  They might have little leverage if you're a thin wrapper and I'll open around offending. I'm not using cursor. It's a great things, but if if what you do is a thin layer over like L L M's. It's very hard because now there'll be others that are doing it and there'll be an efficient market. So the pricing will actually go down because someone to do the same thing better or as good, but cheaper. You'll not be competitive. So it's up to the company to develop the modes that allow it to capture the full value. If you're doing something trivial, then yeah, you're not be able to do the pricing.

• 22:59Harry Stebbings?

  Are you moving into the human labor budget now?

• 23:02Speaker 02

  We have not yet. So we're building the foundation, the key asset that companies have, especially like in our domain. And there even like in other domains is the data that you're sitting on. Because you could go to any of the Lam's, you could load a couple of cold transcripts and tell like, what do you make of these? Like, help me sell, but it will not. And it'll give you an answer, but it'll not be like a good answer and you wouldn't even know it. The real answer, have you captured like everything? What's in the emails, what's in the back channels, in Slack, what's like? And is it the right information? So the battle is now for two things. Data or in L L M words context and the second workflow. Is it like something that is weaved into the workflows of people?

• 23:46Speaker 02

  That's where we spend like most of our effort. But future products that are coming will transition to more value based pricing than per seat.

• 23:54Harry Stebbings?

  When will you move into the human labor budget? Cause that's the cool question for me as a V C.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  We already are. So sometimes, you know, I'll speak with a CFO and he says, oh, we don't have budget for Gong. Like it's a, it's a hundred thousand dollars. So it's like, okay, like how many starters do you have? A hundred. Now stack ranked them. Surely there are two at the bottom that aren't going to come even close to quota. You'd say, yes, okay, like two is ninety eight, but give them the technology to do it. So you're already like tapping into things, but if you're asking about usage, that's probably coming like next year. I think it's real and again, it'll be applicable to companies that create a unique offering with like strong modes that is not easily replicable by anybody else out there.

• 24:37Harry Stebbings?

  How do you think about the rise of A I S D Rs? We've seen a lot come with big brands and flashy sayings. How do you think about them?

• 24:47Speaker 02

  That was a pretty stupid thing, like we knew it, like in Elon and I, my, I said, like, what do you think? I said, this is not going to work.

• 24:53Harry Stebbings?

  Why did you think it was stupid?

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Uh, we have a framework for categorizing and stack ranking where the opportunities. So one is like, uh, the difficulty of the task for humans and the other is like the risk. Uh, what happens if it goes wrong? Outbound calling is probably the most difficult things for humans to do. It's like try to ride a bull at the rodeo, right? People just want to shake you off their back, right? And just very few people are capable of doing it. So that's one. It's very difficult for AI to do that, to keep someone on the phone. Second, the risk, right? Uh, what if it says something wrong? What if it's doing something unethical, like lying to people, right? I mean, you, you give it a goal, right? So the risk to the brand is massive.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  So you take on both dimensions, like it scores like pretty poor. Now, that said, I wouldn't write that direction off. I think certainly there are cases for inbound that can be handled pretty well with AI. But this was like well ahead of its time. The, the technology is non deterministic. It's not a hundred percent right. Now, there are tasks that's perfectly okay. If I want like an account summary, and if it's not always right, actually, it's not always right. But that's still okay. It's like a hundred times, but it's very difficult for a person to do that, right? It's very easy to do it with AI. The risk is not massive. So that's like a very, uh, great use case. But I wouldn't let it send a proposal for a million dollars. Who knows what it's going to put out there?

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Even if it works like ninety eight percent of the time really well, that one percent is a massive risk. So you wouldn't let it sign a contract. You wouldn't let it like fire people. So there are things that- Does it work for low ACV quick sale cycle conversions? It's good. I think that the first thing that will be replaced will be the transactional AI. If I'm selling phones, right? Or cellphone plans, that's easy enough as long as there are guardrails. And there is like, you know, I spoke with a customer that, you know, we're looking to do like AI that's monitor, supervising the AI. So it'll be like an AI coach for AI agents, if you follow me. Yeah. You need to make sure, because even if it works well, you know, there's this famous case about the Canadian airline.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  It was offering like free travel for life or something, right? You know, AI, the agent offered it. They, they had to honor it. So it's, it's a liability for, for companies. Who do you sit on top of model wise? With a bunch. First, like we have a lot of our own models. Uh, we have probably forty or fifty gong models. And then we use like Claude, we use like, uh, or, or Sonnet, we use like, uh, OpenAI. Which do you use most prolifically? We dynamically switch between them. So sometimes they're good for one purpose or another. Costs are going down, quality is improvements, or we're also monitoring what's, uh, what's out there and what's the best that we could get. What do you not know about how AI changes your business that you would like to know?

• 27:53Speaker 02

  I wrote a post that is real observation that, you know, people think like AI destroying the world, which is a real risk. I don't know. I'm optimistic by nature, but I think it can drive mediocrity. The way that L L M's work, they're very consensus driven. So they aggregate like everything that they've heard and create something. It doesn't create great copy, for example. So I'm a pretty good writer, I think, maybe not the best, but pretty good. And I, whenever I try to say create something like witty or that it's not, it's okay. So the risk is I have someone at the company says, okay, come up with a strategy for this market. And they've actually used like one of the L L M's to generate the plan. That's a terrible idea. Because I could get like an average, it is sensible, it makes sense, but it's not the best

• 28:38Speaker 02

  plan, right? So how do I know that work, strategic work that done by people at my company is not like a product of L L M's?

• 28:46Harry Stebbings?

  I don't know, dude. I think 90% of the plans that they produce will be better than the plans that the people in your team produce.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  No, absolutely not. I review them all the time and I, they're okay. They're okay. But with okay, you do not create like an extraordinary business. You need the brilliance, the spark, the always like the angle that's unique. So yeah, if you want like an okay company, it's okay.

• 29:09Harry Stebbings?

  I don't know if that changes pretty quickly. I mean, like within a year, if you feed it the right data with the right prompts, I think you're gonna get there in a year. I mean, are you gonna get to like a C R O creating a full and end year long strategic plan? No. But if you're thinking of from a more simplistic sales plan?

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Well, super like, okay, this is the competitor over here. Create a competitive strategy for me. That's like a simple question. That's what most people do. What you're gonna get like is not great.

• 29:35Harry Stebbings?

  Wow.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:37Harry Stebbings?

  You must have really good people then, because I would.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  I have really good people.

• 29:40Harry Stebbings?

  I'm sorry, I didn't mean that rudely, but I, maybe I'm negative, but I meet loads of sellers. Most sellers are shit.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  First, most of our sellers are phenomenal at Gong, I kid you not. And it's not just sellers. Like, I mean, you know, someone in product marketing. I mean, it could be like anywhere in a company. It could be in I T, you know, what should we, so it's across the company and not necessarily Gong, by the way. It could be like any company. I call it the convergent to mediocrity, right? That's like a big risk that you should pay attention. I get some work, like sometimes I say, hey, was this written by an L L M? Because it looks like too sensible, right? Sometimes they're a little bit like.

• 30:16Harry Stebbings?

  Do you not want that? You know.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  I don't want that.

• 30:18Harry Stebbings?

  So Canva this week announced that they are doing the discovery week where they give everyone a week to try new AI products. Do you not want your team to be actively using AI in their?

• 30:28Speaker 02

  No, that's a, that's an amazing idea. But if you do the creative work, you do your, your messaging with AI, you do the strategic plan for the company with AI. I think that's a, that's not.

• 30:39Harry Stebbings?

  How do you think about how the structure of sales teams changes with AI? There's a lot of supporting roles in sales teams. How do you think about how the actual org structure changes with AI?

• 30:49Speaker 02

  Self prospecting by AEs, that's a trend regardless of AI. I think the whole unit economics for SDRs don't work for like hyper growth companies, not for companies that are, you know, growing 10, 20%.

• 31:02Harry Stebbings?

  So SDRs goes away.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it'll definitely not be a trend. And this is like independent of AI. A lot of companies like, yeah, is it even worth it, right? I see like how much revenue is generating versus like how many appointments. So a lot are moving, they still have SDRs. The, the value in SDR, they do generate some revenue, right? So if you're trying to scrape like every five, 10% of extra revenue, that's great, but they become the best sellers. So we had Gong see like SDRs as a sales school. And we get some of our most amazing sellers start like doing nine months as SDRs and then they move into sales. And then they go to commercial sales and go to mid-market, then some become like monster enterprise sellers.

• 31:39Harry Stebbings?

  Do you worry if we remove that SDR role, you'll lose that training?

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Oh, we will not remove it. Like, why would we?

• 31:45Harry Stebbings?

  We just said we'd lose SDRs.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  We, no, I think that first not necessarily us. Gong is growing at incredible pace. So for us, it does make sense. But if companies, SDRs did not exist like 25 years ago. The whole idea sellers used to do their own prospecting. Remember like, you know, Glen, Glen Ross, like, you know, here are your leads. That's how it started, but when companies started to scale, like in the, you know, early 2000 and incredible pace. People said, okay, you know what? We can't hire sellers fast enough and train them. Let's break the role and do two. We'll have people doing the upstream, the top of the funnel and people like monetizing, right? The sellers, that's a new invention that actually did not take off like.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  All industries, it's a tech industry thing for hypergrowth. Now, it does come with a lot of benefits. Uh, because you do get like very focused team that knows how to generate appointments and qualified leads and pipeline. But it creates a fragmented buyer experience. People wanna know like what does Gong do or what does the, you know, Figma do? And then they have to go through like a series of interviews.

• 32:49Harry Stebbings?

  What specifically do you learn as an SDR that makes you a weapon later on as a seller?

• 32:55Speaker 02

  Oh, first like to create your own pipeline. People don't like cold calling. It's an unnatural work for most of us, the fear of rejection. So they, they get really good.

• 33:03Harry Stebbings?

  Do you buy the future of cold calling?

• 33:06Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, I think, well, it could be like, I don't know what the communication means gonna be, but the idea is like reaching out to someone. Yeah, definitely like, you know, you reach to a stranger or create an introduction. Absolutely. I think that that'll stay like one way or another. So they know how to create their own pipeline. They get a lot of like, uh, I call like abuse, right? People and they develop their resilience. They know how to position the product. People say, oh, we already use this. But they build so much strength and resilience, it's unbelievable, right? And they go into sales, it's almost like they have the hard part behind them. Now it comes the easier part. I do believe that it's a great school, especially for people that did not come from tech. So, but now there are companies that aren't growing. Why do you need something that's optimized for hypergrowth?

• 33:51Speaker 02

  And have like SDRs and move it. I think we'll have like fewer roles that are more able to do multiple jobs. You know, maybe sellers should be able to support customers as customer success. So I think we'll see like a band of these roles, like in a one person, almost like a one person band. That is doing like multiple roles at the same time because they have the tools to do it, right? They use agents.

• 34:14Harry Stebbings?

  How much more are those sales teams? Twenty percent, fifty percent, seventy-five percent?

• 34:18Speaker 02

  We said seventy-seven percent. Uh, I don't know, we can reach the full potential because always be some addition. Plus there, there's a limit like to how much people can actually absorb. It's just, I throw food at you, right? Like, I mean, you can't eat all that much, so. There is a limit to how many customers people can help. So most companies, they have a quota capacity, right? If you build a plan, let's say your plan for the year, you need to generate like eighty million dollars, right? So you wanna make sure your quotas add up to, let's say, a hundred million. Because you know, not everyone's gonna hit it, so you build some buffer, right? And then most companies hit like sixty-six percent or whatever, seventy percent, or seventy people hitting seventy percent. And Gong were like at a hundred and thirty off capacity.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  We perform like well over a hundred, I don't know if it's like exactly a hundred twenty, a hundred thirty, well above our capacity. So that shows the power of AI to make people more productive and more effective.

• 35:10Harry Stebbings?

  Can I be direct? You said beforehand that I could ask anything.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 35:14Harry Stebbings?

  There was a time when you guys were flat, or it was a tougher time.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:18Harry Stebbings?

  What happened there?

• 35:19Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, that was like early twenty twenty-three, absolutely. These are like dark times. We're like even like, we're not growing, even like slightly shrinking. So we had, it was a combination of things. First, like people like bought like crazy uh in twenty twenty-two in the post uh Covid world.

• 35:35Harry Stebbings?

  Did you know they were irrationally buying at the time?

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Uh, no, I, I have to say like I shared the excitement of like everybody, to be honest. We're excited, uh, we're drinking the Kool-Aid.

• 35:45Harry Stebbings?

  And you raised a pretty big fucking round then, didn't you?

• 35:48Speaker 02

  Uh, we raised, where's a lot of money? Most of it is still in the bank. Gong is not burning cash, like.

• 35:53Harry Stebbings?

  How much money have you raised?

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Five hundred and fifty, give or take. I mean, don't take the exact number, but yeah.

• 35:58Harry Stebbings?

  How much have you got left?

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Vast majority of it.

• 36:01Harry Stebbings?

  Great, well done.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  We're not, we're not burning, uh.

• 36:04Harry Stebbings?

  When you raised it, what was the price on that biggest last round?

• 36:08Speaker 02

  Seven and a quarter.

• 36:09Harry Stebbings?

  Seven, were you like, oof, that's a high price to raise that?

• 36:13Speaker 02

  It was a high, a high multiple. Uh, definitely the multiples are different today, but still, I don't think it's something like, you know, we're thinking like such a big company. If you take like a twenty-year view, then yeah, still think like the potential is like far greater. It was a number of things. First, time got tough. We had like a lot of concentration, a lot of like companies in technology business who were hurt by interest rates. So money wasn't cheap. So a lot of our customers would happen like in twenty twenty two, they would buy. Let's say that they bought, they had like a hundred people and the sales are going so okay, like, you know, how much are you growing? I said fifty percent. Okay, I'll throw in like fifty more licenses. So they bought like a hundred and fifty seats, right?

• 36:50Speaker 02

  Comes the renewal. Now not only they don't have the fifty, now they have like seventy. So really high like downgrade and churn. So we lost a lot of seat that were not real because company didn't have the growth. So that's number one, and it was painful. Second, I think we lost some of our muscle tissue, like when we were told about the hustle, like when we were like three people at the company, but all of a sudden people just bought. So our game, like, we just gave them licenses and moved on to the next thing. The way we supported customer was not as tight as you need to, but all of a sudden, you know, CFO shows, asks you like, show me the ROI, why should I spend on you, right? So we had to learn things. And the third thing, we had like one product. We had the conversation intelligence product.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Our customers were looking to consolidate on one platform and say, oh, like, we absolutely love Gong, but outreach is giving us both the engagement and the CI or sales loss. So we're like behind. We had the deepest AI technology, but not the breadth of the platform and company just couldn't care. I mean, we lost, you know, sometimes the CRO that bought Gong was out of a job. So there's not even like to, so we lost a lot of customers. What are your reflections on that on breadth versus depth of product? For us, we're just caught like in bad timing, where we're like hyper growth, like in a lot of like licensed people bought and didn't get to use because of what happened with the economy.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  We're planning to expand the platform, but we, this is like, okay, it's happening now and we're not ready. And I still remember like the old hands call the company was like really tough and people were not used to that. Gong is like a rocket ship. What? Like we slowed down like this is like inconceivable. When you say slow down, what is slow down? Like no growth. Yeah. Yeah, slow down. Yeah, yeah. Um, high churn.

• 38:42Harry Stebbings?

  Can I see you're you're a pretty chill dude. Maybe you're like, just sorry, ice cold Israeli. But like, are you stressing out at this point internally?

• 38:51Speaker 02

  No, no, uh, absolutely not. I, I, I think it's important. Like, it's not the first time. So I've, you know, I've experienced like 2000, 2008 COVID. It's the first time, you know, the cycles like are thing. Second, I know, listen, we have like plenty of cash. When you have enough experience, you know, like a crisis, in a crisis, there are like plenty of opportunity. Just look around, like keep your head up. And we knew, listen, we have cash, our competitors are gonna struggle, we're gonna step on a R and D gas pedal and develop like crazy. First, we need to, right, to expand the platform and they're not gonna be able to do it.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  So this is a great opinion. This is what we're seeing right now. I knew that we're gonna win. It's gonna take a while. I didn't know like how long or how fast, but I was very transparent with the team. No doubt, like this team is gonna win. I don't know how long it's gonna take. And we saw like, uh, first there was like no growth. There was like, you know, a little bit, you know, maybe like 3% and then like 5% and 10% and then, you know, 20% and, and, and 30% and higher. So the company is accelerating.

• 39:55Harry Stebbings?

  What did you do to re-accelerate? Cause that seemed like a very cyclical, in a nice way, it's nice, it's not you. But in a bad way, fuck, if it's not me, I can't change much. So what did you do to re-accelerate?

• 40:06Speaker 02

  No, part of it was us. First, we didn't have like the products. The people want it. So we, we, we had to develop them. Second, we really improved how we support customers, like that we, we measure our usage, engagement, do they see strategic value? So we, we moved to outcomes.

• 40:23Harry Stebbings?

  Did you build a team that's focused on data presentation of outcomes?

• 40:27Speaker 02

  Absolutely. We have value engineering. This is what they do. And their job is to prove to a CFO, we imagine the most like cold-hearted cynical person out there and prove to them why this is the best investment that they can't do without it. So.

• 40:41Harry Stebbings?

  Is it not, is it not just another cost that makes these businesses more and more margin light? And what I mean by that is when you have like the SDRs and the BDRs and then the AEs, and then you have the CS team, and now we need another fucking team doing value engineering, and this is just in the acquisition and retention before we get to product marketing edge. The margin on these businesses is getting crushed.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Well, we have great margins.

• 41:05Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think most SaaS businesses have good margins though? Like, because when you see the structure.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  The good ones, listen, there, there is a, there is a bell curve of, of companies and some are, you know, top deciles, some are bottom deciles. So not, not everybody. So you need to understand what makes sense for your own business. Gong is fairly efficient as a business and it's growing fast. So.

• 41:23Harry Stebbings?

  So the number one thing you did was expansion of product line.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  That's probably the most impactful thing. So it took us a year to get something out there that was not even like fully mature. And now it's like mature and, and we also, I think there's very important things for us. I think the, the biggest benefit that we learned how to scale from like one product to three. And now we're in like four and five and six products, right? So to become a big company, we need like a bigger solution, which is a skill that the company needs to learn. It's not just like developing a product, how we train the sales team to position it is something that they don't know all of a sudden.

• 41:59Harry Stebbings?

  Do you have different sales teams for different products?

• 42:01Speaker 02

  No, we, we don't, we don't because we have the benefit that we sell to the same buyer. It's all goes largely to the CRO and sales operations. If we had to had other products for, let's say, maybe like a C H R O or whatever.

• 42:15Harry Stebbings?

  Well, I, Rippling very much have verticalized sales teams for verticalized products.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. We have one sales team and we have subject matter experts. So people that are kind of product experts, because some of the products are very technical, like, you know, forecasting, for example, is like extremely nuanced and detailed and a lot of minutia.

• 42:32Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think we're totally into the world of the bundling of sales tools? You mentioned forecasting there, obviously Clary's like one of the leading forecasting tools. Does Clary just get eaten up by you?

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Listen, Gong, like within a year, added a thousand engagement customers. Most of them are had like either outreach or sales loft or groove, right? So think about the pace, like a thousand companies moved to Gong. And we have close to eight hundred customers on forecasting like within a year. And most of them probably using like nothing or Clary or like. There are a few other smaller companies. So yeah.

• 43:07Harry Stebbings?

  When you see a competitor like Salesloft bought by PE, are you guys all like high fiving?

• 43:12Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 43:13Harry Stebbings?

  There's a couple of reasons why, like 2.1 billion, it was an expansive buy, given where they are at. And two, innovation and product instantly is degraded when PE buys. I'd be doing a victory lap in the boardroom.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  First, I always liked the company. I liked the people. They're a good partner for us until we became like a competitor. And even after that, I've not lost my respect.

• 43:31Harry Stebbings?

  This was another reason I'd do a victory lap. Carl's fucking happy.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  It doesn't make me happy that my competitors are failing. And again, I never saw them as like our ultimate competitor. I'm extremely competitive type. Competition like fires me up, but I'm not obsessed with the competitors, right? Because remember the opportunity we're looking at. We're looking at $7 trillion being sold with human labor and sweat. That doesn't make sense. Why would I even like worry about like a little forecasting for some mid-market enterprise companies? This is not like the big prize and you should keep your eyes on the prize where you're going and not on the other companies. This is like what we're building.

• 44:13Harry Stebbings?

  When did you take your eyes off the prize and how do you reflect on that? Like, when did you get distracted by something that shouldn't have distracted you? A shiny object that you shouldn't have spent time on?

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Not shiny, but sometimes there's real. You know where you want to get and there are some things that are real that aren't, you know, a straight line to where you want to get and you take a little detour because you need to do it. Building an engagement product, kind of like took him from Salesloft and Outreach. We had like other plans that are like even like bigger potentials, but 2023 came. And I said, if we don't develop it now, I don't know that we'll get a chance because once a company gets like really bruised, like it's very difficult to get over it. So we said, okay, like forget the strategic plans. Let's develop this like right now, like really fast. So we crossed this hurdle. And then from a power position, a position of strength, we can continue with our more strategic plans.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  So this was like a little detour. Again, it's not, it's not a waste and it's, it's created a ton of revenue and strengthened the market leadership position, but it's always. Like a judgment call between a same kind of the long term vision of the company and some things that you need to do technically. You know, the customer has a problem, right? You need to take care of it now. You know, realize our customers need like more stability with the system. This is my mission critical right now. So he said, we halted like all engineering work for four weeks. No features, right? Just to improve the stability and performance of the system. I hate it, but you gotta do it. Security, I mean, you need to invest in security. Gong touches like very sensitive data. We have to be super secure. So you do a lot of things that aren't necessarily the most strategic thing for you, but you just have to do it.

• 45:50Harry Stebbings?

  Are the best CEOs the best resource allocators?

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you can't suck at resource allocation, right? I mean, it has to be reasonable. The most important thing for the company is the strategy. So I think if the execution is like eighty percent okay and a good strategy, you will still win. Yeah, you could do better or worse. There are two things that matter, right? The team, which is basically execution and the market. The market is the most important thing. And this is the strategy. The strategy, like what do you sell to whom and what's your unique positioning, unique value that you're creating? Nobody else. That's the most important thing for the company and you. I've seen companies that are doing extremely well and and I know the team, they're okay. I mean, they're not bad. They're not phenomenal and I've seen smarter people that fail. The most important thing is the strategy of the company.

• 46:38Harry Stebbings?

  In a hypothetical situation, okay, I'm your son and I've just got a job in a sales team and have a great company. And I say, Dad, knowing all that you know now, what do you advise me in terms of building my career, starting from the bottom? In a new sales team that I want to grow in?

• 46:55Speaker 02

  First, I wish that my sons would go into sales, but they probably will not.

• 46:59Harry Stebbings?

  Why do you wish they went in sales?

• 47:01Speaker 02

  That's a good question. I think it's a very useful skill. I mean, they're doing things that are like as interesting or not more like in in other ways. But sales is a very, very useful skill in life. And again, it's not like selling like a phone. You sell ideas. You ask me, how can a young founder bring like a hot shot CRO, right? You sell the dream. Why do I want to ditch their successful company? Because it's not exciting and come to your company that you said is like shitty right now. You want to sell to investors. You want to sell to your kids sometimes like an idea. You want to promote ideas. So it is like, it is a very useful skill and it takes a.

• 47:39Harry Stebbings?

  So what would you advise me as your hypothetical son in this situation?

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Join like one of the best teams out there. A company is doing really well and there's good culture and then you learn, doesn't matter what the role is. Just, just a learning experience is way more important than whatever you, you know, even if it's like at extreme, like for free. Even if it don't pay well, just, just what you learn is a hundred times more valuable than what they're paying you and, and have fun and pride. Then make sure, obviously it has to be like an ethical pro company.

• 48:08Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think that actually being in an OpenAI, a Cursa, sales team is actually useful as an experience base? Because it's so non-reflective. You're basically an order taker. They're gonna kill me for that, but it's true.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, I haven't worked there, so I know this is so unique. I think that eventually, every company has competition, right? People think, oh, you're just taking orders, but you wanna be at a company. It is not like, um, I hope that people don't think I'm picking up on Salesforce. Salesforce is a great company, but again, like there, it's like already like very structured and, and a known brand and all of that. So you wanna sell to an underdog on one hand, but not something that will not take off. I mean, you, you, that's the right trick, right? If some product are just hard to sell because it's not good, right? Or it's not competitive with the market, right? You don't wanna be there.

• 48:58Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree with you in terms of not wanting to be there. One of the reasons you don't wanna be there is because of comp plans. And a lot of comp plans are based on obviously selling a lot of products. How do you think we'll see sales comp plans change in the future?

• 49:10Speaker 02

  You know, I haven't spent a ton of time thinking about it, but I think there'll be a few sellers, uh, they could make like a lot more money because they're, they're generating a lot more, so.

• 49:19Harry Stebbings?

  Has the way that you sell changed over time?

• 49:22Speaker 02

  Well, we're, we're better, like in, uh.

• 49:24Harry Stebbings?

  I'm saying you personally.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Me personally?

• 49:26Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Well, they don't allow me to sell anymore.

• 49:28Harry Stebbings?

  But, but selling is fundraising. Selling is hiring.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  We're not raising funds. Uh, I am always like speaking, I'm speaking with customers like a lot of time and, and I.

• 49:38Harry Stebbings?

  Will you still go and close customers?

• 49:40Speaker 02

  I don't close. Uh, the, the team is doing a phenomenal job.

• 49:43Harry Stebbings?

  You wouldn't go and close a customer?

• 49:45Speaker 02

  I would, but they don't need me. But I, I usually go.

• 49:48Harry Stebbings?

  I'm sorry, I'm so naive here. Why does banning off still in needed in customers?

• 49:53Speaker 02

  With customer want, they want the vision of the company and they want access to the person that can decide, so. If we're doing like, you know, a large, like seven or eight figure deals, the customer wanna know, listen, I'm making investment. I wanna know when something goes wrong, I can call me at like in the middle of the night. That's the role that leaders are usually doing in those deals. Plus, sometimes I can make things outside of the ordinary.

• 50:15Harry Stebbings?

  Customers, do you think you have who have that can call you in the middle of the night relationship?

• 50:20Speaker 02

  Any customer can call me, like even if it's a $10,000 account, like, uh, people reach out to me, I respond. Uh, uh, literally, I had like someone reach out to me on LinkedIn, hey, like, I'm a startup from, uh, Y C, I just need two seats. Uh, Gong is like, uh, I can't afford it. Like, can you talk to, I respond to them.

• 50:37Harry Stebbings?

  No.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Absolutely, absolutely, yes.

• 50:40Harry Stebbings?

  No, you can't have two seats. Pay your fucking seat price.

• 50:43Speaker 02

  No, I didn't say that, but I said like, uh, listen, it is what it is. I hope, uh, let me, uh, connect you with the sales team and see, I, I take a look, right? So I respond to any customers and I'll get, if a seller asks me, again, there, there's gotta be a reason, like not bring me that, you know, we failed to articulate value. Now, meetings will save the day by, it was his charm or whatever. You gotta do your work, right? But I, I get on calls with customers like, uh, almost any size.

• 51:09Harry Stebbings?

  When you think about deal wins, what deal win is most memorable to you and why?

• 51:15Speaker 02

  You know, I told you about the event that we went to in April 2016 and, and, uh, one of the customers that I met was, uh, the senior buyer from A D P. So it's a big, uh, payroll in H R company in, in globally, but mostly in the U S. And he asked, he was impressed with the A I technology, but I told him like, you know, I don't think we're ready for you, which he actually like was pretty, uh, pretty impressed because not a lot of people would say that. But we met the following year and then they bought, which is, uh, incredible. Uh, they're using some other things that didn't work well, so they already had a budget and they bought Gong. LinkedIn was our first customer, first large customer, like early on, before we even like thought that, uh, we will sell. We said one day we're gonna sell to bigger companies, but there was never like an idea.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  They evaluated us and they evaluated like, uh, Chorus at the time and, uh, for those who remember. And they said, okay, we decided to go with Gong and now they're, you know, they're growing and expanding and that's very exciting. So there, there are plenty.

• 52:13Harry Stebbings?

  Not naming names, but what's your single largest contract today?

• 52:17Speaker 02

  Well, we're definitely now in the, uh, seven and, and eight figure.

• 52:20Harry Stebbings?

  An eight figure customer?

• 52:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:23Harry Stebbings?

  Wow, that's a lot of dough.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  Well, big companies. Half of the Fortune 10 companies use Gong today. Wow. Yeah. Which churn hurt the most and what did you learn? Well, I think 2023 was like a very painful moment because I was able to actually use the technology to understand what is going on. It was like a breakup conversation, right? Said, listen, we absolutely love Gong. We have no choice. It's like we choose you or the other guys because they provide like three products and our CFO just wouldn't listen. Companies didn't have a choice. It was like you know, customer like super happy and you're still losing them. And so that was like a very painful, but the good news, a lot of them are coming back now. So we have a lot of like boomerang employees and boomerang customers.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  What happens to outreach? I don't know. I wish them the best. Like, you know, I don't want people to fail. Another P sale? I don't want to like comment on them specifically. I think if a company like isn't growing or isn't growing fast and doesn't have like plenty of cash that could go like 20 years. I don't know what their cash position. They can't IPO and somehow people need to get paid, right? Whatever the investor. So a P might make sense for, there are quite a few companies like that. The hard thing is you need to be 20% grower and profitable to be attractive for P. That's the hard thing. That's the hard part. Yeah. So, and I don't know like which strategics would want them. Did you ever have an offer to sell to Salesforce? No, no, no. Were you ever tempted by an offer? Listen, someone comes like, oh, like here's like a trillion dollars. Like, you know, everything is something we consider.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  I'm not naive, but you can't have it like even as a plan, right? I believe in controlling your own destiny. We have like a great company. We're really in the early innings and we're growing, we're generating cash, like we don't need anything like. Do you want to be a public company CEO? This is not something that is like a personal desire. I mean, it makes sense for Gong to become public like one day. Some, you know, people invest in the company and need to see a return. But I don't think it's like, you know, some people see it as like their mission in life. Certainly it comes with a lot of like. Sure, the IPO is kind of cool and some people get paid, but there's also comes with a lot of like restrictions on what the company can do and the flexibility and where your attention goes.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  Do I need the next generation of AI or like focus on, you know, three percent EPS like on this quarter?

• 54:44Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, listen, you have expanding secondary markets which provide liquidity more and more. On secondaries, different founders have different takes on them. If you're advising a founder friend on yours on what do you know now about secondaries that you would advise them? What advice would you give them?

• 54:59Speaker 02

  Well, it's actually like a pretty good, pretty good option. There are companies, not a lot, but that are growing fast. So you go public for either you need cash, you want the brand recognition to come. And it does come with more brand recognition and some liquidity. Many companies don't need the cash, they have enough and they're generating cash. So that's like one. Second, liquidity is a good option with secondary. Now the market is actually evolving and the brand, okay, like it's real. But let's say, you know, if you think about the cost of being a public company, take the money and buy Super Bowl ads. So there's an alternative ways to get the publicity that aren't, don't come with the restrictions. But secondary, yeah, don't go crazy with valuation.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  Sometimes a little bit of like an ego thing, right? And you want to think about the next round or you don't, because otherwise it can create like problems for employees like down the road.

• 55:51Harry Stebbings?

  What are you at ARR wise now, three hundred or?

• 55:55Speaker 02

  Oh, we crossed like three hundred last year. Uh, we're not sharing what it is, but we're well over.

• 56:01Harry Stebbings?

  Cause if you apply like the 10x multiple, Bill Gurley is a genius, I think, I love the man. And he always has like the 10x multiple, which is kind of the heuristic in finance that holds true. Do you worry about what it takes to get back to the seven point two price or not?

• 56:15Speaker 02

  No, not at all. Cause like the difference is like how much time? If you believe that the company has like trillions of dollars of potential market value, then you know, it could take like a year, two year, five years or 10 years. But at some point, the question, do you think it's becoming like one day, does it have potential to become like a hundred billion dollar company? Then all of a sudden, it doesn't matter. Just take a high enough altitude and. We're not pricing the company right now. We're not doing it. So. Are you ready to do a quick fire with me, Amit? Oh, um, should I be nervous? Absolutely. Bring it on, like. Okay, what do people most get wrong about Gong today? It is a call recording. You know what the funny story? Before I started, I had call recording. We were like recording.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  And I hate listening to recordings. I wanted to a solution that will use AI. So I don't need to listen to conversations, right? So it's the insights that's generated from the data that is the real value and now the the action automation. Which competitor do you most respect and why them? I think both Salesforce and Microsoft are incredible companies, you know, and. You would put Microsoft as a competitor? They're also, Microsoft is always a great partner. They have some revenue intelligence capabilities with their own. So they're they're a good partner. They're integrating Gong as part of a co-pilot, but they have in in a CRM. So everybody in CRM is both a partner.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  Salesforce is a partner, Microsoft is a partner, HubSpot is a partner, but they also have their features that are competitive with Gong. What $500 purchase most changed your life? Oh, I love the question. All right. You know, I was like 250. Sure. My Bose QuietComfort headphones. Why? I spend like half of my life on airplanes and it makes such a huge difference. I come out of the airplane like so fresh that just noise cancelling is is unbelievable. It makes like huge. I don't go anywhere without them. What is the most non-obvious but hugely important skill for CRO to have? The ability to look at things sometimes from the sidelines. Like sometimes there there are problems or something great going on.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  And I think for leaders in general, the ability to almost like have like an outer body experience, like just detach yourself emotionally. It's like, what is going on here? Understand kind of what's the deeper issue and then like fix it and improve. What do you know is bad but continue to do anyway? Check my email first thing in the morning when I get out of bed. I I try to be disciplined not to do it all the time, but sometimes I just can't resist.

• 58:44Harry Stebbings?

  Do you get up early?

• 58:45Speaker 02

  Really early, yeah. I don't sleep a lot.

• 58:47Harry Stebbings?

  How early?

• 58:48Speaker 02

  Uh, usually between five and six.

• 58:50Harry Stebbings?

  When do you go to bed?

• 58:52Speaker 02

  Midnight, one A M like.

• 58:54Harry Stebbings?

  And you just never needed much sleep?

• 58:56Speaker 02

  I don't know if I need or not. I just don't sleep a lot. Like I I come with a I wake up with a lot of energy and I guess my body needs like very little sleep.

• 59:04Harry Stebbings?

  What's the biggest challenge or worry that you have today?

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Well, right now, hiring, like we have like two hundred open positions and and we're we're behind.

• 59:13Harry Stebbings?

  So Jason, Jason on our show today said that B two B A I hiring will be the single biggest problem in twenty twenty five and twenty twenty six.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  He did. Okay, you know what? I'm feeling it firsthand.

• 59:22Harry Stebbings?

  But he also was blunt. He was like, listen, if you are not OpenAI, Cursa, Anthropic, you name it, or Meta, good fucking luck. Even if you've got a super exciting vision, you don't have budget. Matt is paying ten million in A I.

• 59:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:36Harry Stebbings?

  Engineer.

• 59:36Speaker 02

  We're not too far behind, but definitely I I need to like step in and make sure that.

• 59:41Harry Stebbings?

  Would you pay five million for A I engineers?

• 59:43Speaker 02

  No, I mean, we're not a foundation A I company. We're an A I application. Gong uses A I. I want like every engineer at Gong to become excellent in A I.

• 59:54Harry Stebbings?

  Totally get it, but like Cursa does too, and they're paying through the nose.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  I have no idea what they're doing, but we're no, we're not even in the same market.

• 1:00:00Harry Stebbings?

  Does that worry you though, the hiring pipeline?

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  No, I I'm not feeling it.

• 1:00:03Harry Stebbings?

  But you have two hundred open applications.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they're progressing. Like, I mean, we're hiring people. We just crossed like four hundred like engineers like today.

• 1:00:12Harry Stebbings?

  Will Gong have more engineers or less engineers in ten years' time?

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

  More.

• 1:00:17Harry Stebbings?

  Why do you say that?

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  Well, because the the business would outgrow, right? So, yeah, they're they're using A I like everybody like vibe coding. Okay, that says like, you know, today, like maybe like ten fifteen percent productivity improvement. But the business is growing at a much faster pace, so I would need more if I can seize the opportunity.

• 1:00:35Harry Stebbings?

  Being a C E O is a very demanding job. Being a husband is also a very demanding job. What's your biggest advice on marriage?

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  The most important decision in your life, like who do you choose as a partner, right? This is like more important than VCs or employees.

• 1:00:49Harry Stebbings?

  Oh my god, yeah.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  By far. So uh choose well. Think of it really as a partnership, right? That's like, there's a bit like uh helping each other, give and take, compromises. But choosing well is like super important.

• 1:01:02Harry Stebbings?

  What compromise did you make that was the most challenging to make?

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  Oh, now I'm gonna get in trouble. I don't know. It's like, you know, sometimes it's like little things and and if you have like enough of them over time, things can then to pick up volume because it's a little like irritation. So there's nothing major right now to feel I'm uh I'm uh compromising. We've been together, together, like not necessarily married, like almost thirty years now. So it's working really well.

• 1:01:28Harry Stebbings?

  Twenty thirty, where's Gong then? ARR wise, company headcount wise, hit me.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  We are now working on a plan, uh how quickly can we cross the billion in ARR? And there are like different bets, but they're not, uh we think within a few years, uh we can get there. But the most important thing is that our vision is to become the Revenue AI Operating System for companies, right? That's the the central system that we move from like a data entry world to a system of intelligence that runs the entire organization. And we want it to be used by a more diverse set of companies. So we're expanding the industries that we're in and want like every company to be benefit from AI. So selling becomes easy. You just need to compete on having the best products.

• 1:02:19Harry Stebbings?

  Incredibly direct and aggressive question of me, which is a yes or no. When you sat down with your team for the billion ARR bet, is your bet before or after twenty thirty?

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  Before, yeah, absolutely before.

• 1:02:31Harry Stebbings?

  Where did your bet land?

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  Now the question is like, uh I I'm not getting to the internal discussions, but how how fast? There is like things that are like extremely aggressive and and and still aggressive, but a little less.

• 1:02:42Harry Stebbings?

  Amit, listen, at the beginning, you said that I could ask any question. I took that very literally. So I appreciate you answering very directly.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:49Harry Stebbings?

  Uh you've been fantastic, dude. I really appreciate the time. So thank you for joining me.

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  My pleasure. It was fun.

• 1:02:56Harry Stebbings?

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