The Change Economy

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Julia Nimchinski: Welcome to Maduras and breath cleaner.

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Julia Nimchinski: I believe you’re no strangers.

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Brett Queener: Hey, Julia, how are you?

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Tooba Durraze: Hey!

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Julia Nimchinski: Nice tua, take it away.

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Tooba Durraze: Yeah, thanks, Julia. Well, thanks everyone for being here today. My name is Tuba. I’m the CEO and founder of me by AI. Also a geek by nature, by training super excited to be here talking to Brett, let me pass it over to Brett to give a quick introduction to himself. So, Brett, over to you.

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Brett Queener: Sure. Hi, I’m Brett Queener. I’m a partner at bonfire ventures. We’ve got about a billion under management. We invest in seed stage software companies B, 2 B primarily at the application layer. But part of this conversation might be, what is the application layer anymore?

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Brett Queener: Been here about 6 years prior to bonfire.

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Brett Queener: I’m old as dirt 25 years at software companies.

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Brett Queener: work the 2 fastest growing software companies of their era, a company called Sibo systems, and then spent 11 and a half years at Salesforce, where I built go to market, ran operations and ran all of product

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Brett Queener: and then I was a co-founder and coo of a

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Brett Queener: a company called Smart Recruiters. Probably the hardest space any founder could go into selling recruiting technology, but that company is north of 100 million dollars in revenue, and on its way.

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Tooba Durraze: Awesome thanks. So much for that.

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Tooba Durraze: I kind of want to dive into your thesis today. The change economy, thesis.

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Tooba Durraze: So 1st and foremost for everyone who hasn’t read that

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Tooba Durraze: find a link subscribe to breadth substract. It’s great writing. I would definitely read that. But let’s think about how you’ve written about how we’re no longer in a knowledge economy, but a change economy. And you talk about basically where the pace of innovation isn’t fast. But it’s sort of compounding on top of each other.

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Tooba Durraze: So for everyone else who hasn’t read it, can you just quickly walk us through your thesis? And then I think one question I have is specifically around, what do you think fundamentally shifts when change becomes the default operating condition of the company?

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Brett Queener: And thank you, Tuba, for doing this.

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Brett Queener: I write. It’s a little bit long form. It’s primarily for founders. It’s on my sub stack. It’s not for Pr. I primarily write to name my anxiety

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Brett Queener: when I’m meeting with companies, and I’m observing what’s going on. And I can’t name it. I write to name the anxiety. It’s my therapy

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Brett Queener: and we’ve always said in technology, Hey, go fast, ship fast, go hard. Okay, that’s great. We all should go hard and fast. But I’ve been in software for

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Brett Queener: 25 years, and for time immemorial. The way in which we’ve run those companies

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Brett Queener: is with the assumption that market impacting substantive product innovation happens probably once a year.

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Brett Queener: You know, if you think about it, there’s a dreamforce, whatever. There’s a Hubspot force. There’s an outreach world like once a year, the big announcement.

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Brett Queener: And sometimes twice a year.

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Brett Queener: but AI, and specifically in 2 situations, one, the pace at which you can build

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Brett Queener: 2. How many less screens you have to build that no users we’re going to use anyways have to be built changes all.

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Brett Queener: So your products can and likely have to be significantly more impactful.

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Brett Queener: I would say, at least each month.

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Brett Queener: And so in my mind, the change economy is really like when I think about the next. Era’s winners

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Brett Queener: are the ones rethink sort of the tried and true traditional Saas playbook into one that works for this new reality. And it’s kind of exciting, because, like, when we worked work at salesforce, no one sold software as a service, you would never sell software direct to every segment of the market, and there was a playbook. There were no blogs to read, no conferences to attend, so we had to kind of make this shit up. And I’m watching this happen right now. And that’s really what the change economy is about.

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Tooba Durraze: No, that’s great. And I think one of the questions I have is from the outside. It appears, okay. There’s a lot of iteration and change happening. But sometimes we know the actual product and engineering teams fall a little bit behind the marketing schedule per se. How do you think the product and engineering teams now need to rethink

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Tooba Durraze: their development in order to keep pace, especially when feedback loops are like so much shorter now. But the stakes are higher in terms of. If you’re not delivering a lot of product fast, you’re no longer relevant.

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Brett Queener: I think what’s interesting. You made a comment there like falling behind market.

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Brett Queener: and it’s always been kind of the case. Marketing wants this sales wants this. What’s going on? Product team? I think we have to think about it. It kind of starts with product and engineering. First.st

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Tooba Durraze: The really interesting thing about this agentic world, and a lot of.

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Brett Queener: Writings on that over the last year, which is really exciting because you actually have product, that’s useful.

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Brett Queener: actually help somebody do their job. I think it starts 1st and foremost

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Brett Queener: with product and engineering. Now, I think what is interesting is what I’m seeing in

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Brett Queener: product and engineering organizations for those that are kind of at the AI native pace. And look, if you’re a larger corporation with a large monolithic code base, we understand you can’t go on lovable dot dev, and just roll out code right? And you sell the enterprise. There’s a transition

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Brett Queener: And so for me, it all starts with product.

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Brett Queener: Because in my mind you either have an agentic product that

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Brett Queener: that sort of immediately wows a prospect about a better way for their jobs to be done, or you don’t.

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Brett Queener: That’s sort of the baseline.

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Brett Queener: And so within that, what’s really interesting is, I think.

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Brett Queener: what I’m seeing is product in Dev and success orgs.

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Brett Queener: Even early out of the gate, we’d be like, Okay, here’s your product org. Here’s your dev org. Okay, how does dev do? Qa, okay? And then there’s A, so there’s a support org that kind of lives in dev, and then you move it out to success. They’re all kind of becoming munched

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Brett Queener: into sort of one

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Brett Queener: collaborative, collective being. What is really interesting and exciting was the hardest thing in running startups in my past was. As you got larger the Devs got farther abstracted away from the customer problem.

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Tooba Durraze: Yeah.

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Brett Queener: And it was very hard to keep them motivated and around the impact. Where that is.

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Brett Queener: that is not the case of what I’m seeing these orgs? And so

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Brett Queener: I think within this, there’s a couple of things we have to think about one.

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Brett Queener: the biggest changes we have to take, the definition of done.

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Brett Queener: You know, when I started in software, there was waterfall. And then we got to Agile.

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Brett Queener: Yeah, we can talk about Mvp. Or Amazon talked about. Minimum, lovable product

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Brett Queener: done? Is not I delivered a feature as scoped and designed, that met some quality test

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Brett Queener: done? Is, does your product deliver on the promise of the job to be done

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Brett Queener: that your customer expects for you to do for them, either in an assistant

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Brett Queener: co-pilot assistant manner. It’s helping a human being, or independently like something replaces workflow.

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Brett Queener: I also think that we have to define where scarcity lives. Now.

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Tooba Durraze: Yep.

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Brett Queener: Historically. The way we’ve run teams is that scarcity was tech talent, dev talent.

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Brett Queener: So we wanted to make sure that products spent all their time getting the stuff right.

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Tooba Durraze: We use Jira to do T-shirt, Sizing and allocations and the rest of it that’s not the scarcity now

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Brett Queener: The scarcity is the ability of the combined organization to quickly out iterate the competition in delivering these jobs to be done

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Brett Queener: or delivering more jobs. That’s that’s it. That’s your scarcity. Can these, as a collective unit out, deliver in an iterative way?

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Brett Queener: The competition? So that’s kind of how I

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Brett Queener: I think about it, I mean, do you wanna maybe some follow up questions there because you know me. I can.

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Tooba Durraze: Yeah.

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Brett Queener: Where do you.

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Tooba Durraze: Have one that’s sticky.

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Brett Queener: I can go on for hours.

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Tooba Durraze: I have one that’s based on what you said. There’s something that stuck out to me, which is the definition of done has changed.

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Tooba Durraze: I’m wondering in your experience. Has the expectation of what the definition of done is, has that changed for the other side? For the customers, especially enterprise customers. Do you find more enterprise customers and companies now being okay with less refined, less fully baked products.

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Brett Queener: I have seen that. I think this is a phase.

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Brett Queener: I think a lot of companies. And Mark just went on about how is he invest in some of the AI companies and figure out if this is vibe revenue or etc, I think in the period of the last year a lot of people have been exploring AI, and the models are changing so quickly that to some extent I have seen customers sort of engaging. Don’t fix it in the field, and and sort of giving feedback, etc. Now.

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Brett Queener: I think that will change. I here’s what I think about.

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Tooba Durraze: Yeah.

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Brett Queener: There is a new relationship between the customer

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Brett Queener: and a software provider which is

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Brett Queener: the promise in these agentic products are, I’m going to significantly. Help you do your job. I’m not delivering you a crud database with workflows and screens that you go in and enter, and then you go out and do your job elsewhere. I’m going to do your job

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Brett Queener: either as an assistant or I’m going to take parts of your work away.

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Brett Queener: Given that promise.

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Brett Queener: I think customers are much more willing to be aged in very specific feedback, and what is very interesting is

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Brett Queener: for years would be like, well, don’t build exactly what the customer asked for, because they’re shitty product managers. They’re bad at understanding screens and the rest of it. But if customer says this is my pain. Can you take this pain away? Then they’re actually much better product input managers than they were in the past. And I think it’s really interesting to understand now.

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Brett Queener: What I will say, though, is weird, is yes, you can ship very quick. You and I talked about this like, how do you not just produce a bunch of crap.

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Brett Queener: I actually think the Qa bar is higher.

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Brett Queener: I think the done bar is higher for 2 reasons.

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Brett Queener: One is you’re not releasing a bunch of stuff, and there’s some field or some object that works in some screen that somebody goes to, and they kind of go. Oh, that didn’t work, and then you you buy a session replay, and then you can track it and then prioritize it as p. 0, p. 1, p. 2. In. Like an agentic assistant. The way I think about it is.

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Brett Queener: I always tell my software companies when they think about AI is assume somebody was hiring the smartest person they could ever hire, who work the speed of 10 people who knew everything about your company, and never went on Glass Door and complained about your shitty management.

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Brett Queener: That’s what your product’s like. Now imagine you hired that person. And one day they came to work, and they just started glitching.

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Brett Queener: You would kind of notice that very, very quickly. And so I actually think, while you can ship faster.

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Brett Queener: It doesn’t mean you should just ship faster. It means you should ship impactful product much faster than you have in the past. And so

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Brett Queener: you and I had this conversation about cursor.

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Tooba Durraze: Yep.

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Brett Queener: Right?

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Brett Queener: Is it a technology breakthrough, or is it a taste? Ux breakthrough?

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Brett Queener: And you’ve pretty quickly said, it’s a taste ux breakthrough.

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Tooba Durraze: Yeah.

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Brett Queener: Right? And so I think just because you can ship faster.

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Brett Queener: The bar is actually higher.

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Tooba Durraze: Yeah, I would. I would agree with that. I feel like there are a lot of fundamentals that are shifting back to

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Mary Shea: you know, what kind of AI tools are you experimenting with right now? And I’d love to go through everyone and and get a bunch of tools out there.

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Tooba Durraze: like how things used to be in the sense that impact is more front and center versus like flashy features. There’s a concept that you talk about in your thesis, which I thought was really interesting around ever boarding, meaning the relationship between the software provider and the customer being a little bit more relational than even it used to be.

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Tooba Durraze: So I’m I’m curious about you. Kind of elaborating on that. And what does it look like? Describe it? And then what does it look like? How, if it’s done? Well, because I know we have this fear of like

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Tooba Durraze: having like account. Folks always be constantly attached to customers as well.

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Brett Queener: It’s interesting. These are 2 organizations and software companies that are often seen, as I guess I have to invest there.

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Brett Queener: And if for those people have tried to sell into these functions. They’re they’re doing God’s work, but they never have power to buy anything right. And

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Brett Queener: so there’s onboarding. There’s ever boarding. There’s waterboarding I’ll talk about onboarding versus ever boarding sales onboarding is a very interesting thing. I remember when I joined salesforce.com. I was getting sued by Tom Siebel because he liked to sue people

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Brett Queener: and we’d hired like 30 reps over the year, and they’d never been trained, and Mark was like, Hey, can you think you could train these people because we got to go kick people’s ass? And I was like, Have we ever done training here. No. So I put together like a 1 week boot camp with a certification and case study, and if you didn’t pass the certification you were fired like it was.

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Tooba Durraze: Yeah.

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Brett Queener: You know.

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Brett Queener: But the funny thing is, when you think about sales onboarding.

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Brett Queener: we focus in the 1st 60 to 90 days of a sales hire. We got to get on the ramp. We got to get Cop into running our playbook, know exactly what to say or do. At each stage of the sales process.

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Brett Queener: But what’s interesting is, if your product

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Brett Queener: by the end of that 1st year is 2 to 3 times more different or more valuable

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Brett Queener: then of their tenure than it was the knowledge you shared in the 1st 30 to 60 days. What then?

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Brett Queener: Right. And so when I talk to AI founders, you know.

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Brett Queener: I asked them, how much do you think your sales approach especially relates to your messaging. You’re discovering your value or capability, you know, in my messaging tree.

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Brett Queener: What does your product?

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Brett Queener: What job to be done? Does your product do for your buyer that they should about that they want to solve now better than somebody else. Right? If you can nail that. That’s the basics of product marketing and sales messaging. How much do you think that’s going to change over the next 12 months? And they look at me like well, a ton.

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Brett Queener: and then I’m like, well, then, what are you doing to make sure that your team is on board.

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Brett Queener: and then, similarly, customer onboarding another often seen as a junior function.

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Brett Queener: I always thought it was silly in a Saas world where products were always customizable, released a lot of features, etc, that we thought about onboarding like, let’s get them live. And then they were like, Oh, we’ll get some success person, the function that we’d never oh, we under invest in. And somehow they’re gonna magically make the customer take advantage of all the ongoing stuff. It was always it was always silly.

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Brett Queener: Now, if you deploy a product

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Brett Queener: and your product becomes 2 to 3 times more capable over a year than what?

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Brett Queener: How do you think about

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Brett Queener: that person or that using that product, discovering that capability, etc, because

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Brett Queener: you and I talked about this like

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Brett Queener: there’s an R and AR. Well, we’ll talk about annual in a second. But AR annual recurring revenue. We look at churn and Nrr. etc.

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Brett Queener: But, like, if you have an employee, you should have people evaluate. I’m using this agentic product, or I could hire an employee. And I’d be like, how much of this employee? How much growth has this employee shown over the year? How much potential do they have these V other people. And I think they’ll think that same way around products. And so

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Brett Queener: how do you think through this? The other thing which is really interesting is, I remember I’m a crazy 0 inbox guy, and I remember I was like the 7th customer, superhuman, and onboarded me.

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Brett Queener: the founder superhuman, and I was like, Oh, this is pretty interesting. This seems like a waste. I was like, how can this be efficient?

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Brett Queener: And what Rahul got?

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Brett Queener: And it wasn’t AI yet. Well.

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Brett Queener: this was a personal thing to me about how I like to manage my email, and if he could get me into that habit.

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Brett Queener: then I was hooked, and it’s the same thing with AI like I have organizations that are thinking

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Brett Queener: that have hired extremely expensive people from onboarding like somebody hired somebody from Apple who was responsible for designing that package or box that you get from Apple Products still really cool, even though you just get the same phone. It’s just like the last phone, but has a better battery. But with that box, and when you open that, you know, and the tape open, it’s that little magic moment. I think it’s the same way we have to rethink onboarding

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Brett Queener: for these agentic products, because while you might be selling to your organization. These are very personal products. I am helping you as an individual do this work, and either out of the gate they go.

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Brett Queener: Oh, hell, holy hell! Yeah.

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Brett Queener: right? I think you and I were talking about. I remember my wife think you know she went to the Kennedy school. She’s a preeminent expert on charter schools and and affordable housing, and the rest of it. Amazing writer!

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Brett Queener: And she spends a lot of time sort of the shadow Government here where I live, surfacing all state data and analysis, and then putting stuff together, presenting at city Council and to State representatives. And I remember the 1st time I showed her chat. Gpt! She was kind of like. Oh, this is pretty interesting! And then, when she on, I moved to Claude and she had a project where it remembered her voice and started writing, and then I showed her deep research. She’s

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Brett Queener: hook line and sinker, right, but like there are these moments of delight. And so I think onboarding is something we have to really think about and get right. So that’s how I think about ever boarding versus sort of this point in time whether it’s your salespeople, your customers.

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Tooba Durraze: I think it appears that you need to stay more like top of mind for your customers in terms of like relevance, and like the minute they forget about a tool or forget about you. It’s a lot of folks that just tend to move on to the next fancy thing that’s coming up right.

694
01:49:20.200 –> 01:49:22.479
Brett Queener: People are really, busy.

695
01:49:22.830 –> 01:49:24.139
Tooba Durraze: Right. They don’t want to.

696
01:49:24.140 –> 01:49:39.909
Tooba Durraze: People are excited to try all sorts of tools right now. So it’s right. There’s a lot of enthusiasm around like I’m going to try everything. But the thing that sticks generally ends up being the thing that is like top of mind for them in terms of relation messaging all of that.

697
01:49:40.190 –> 01:49:41.390
Tooba Durraze: Yeah, would you agree.

698
01:49:41.390 –> 01:49:42.720
Brett Queener: I agree.

699
01:49:43.320 –> 01:49:45.100
Tooba Durraze: Yeah. So like that brings me to

700
01:49:45.450 –> 01:49:48.252
Tooba Durraze: say, like product marketing and messaging.

701
01:49:48.950 –> 01:50:05.600
Tooba Durraze: there’s something that you talked about, which is that messaging needs to be more context, moment and signal aware, like all 3 things versus what it used to be before. So give me, can you give me an example or not stuff like a company that you’ve seen. Do that well or with you?

702
01:50:05.960 –> 01:50:07.580
Tooba Durraze: Have you seen that play out.

703
01:50:07.580 –> 01:50:08.499
Brett Queener: I mean. Look.

704
01:50:08.600 –> 01:50:15.339
Brett Queener: I’ve always thought that the software companies at the application that I win the best have the best product marketing. Yeah.

705
01:50:15.760 –> 01:50:20.549
Brett Queener: What I mean by that is across the company. It is very clear if you pulled somebody up

706
01:50:20.730 –> 01:50:25.033
Brett Queener: in a hallway and I’ll get back because you’re chuckling, and you smile about this.

707
01:50:25.770 –> 01:50:27.630
Brett Queener: they know exactly who they’re selling to.

708
01:50:27.820 –> 01:50:41.270
Brett Queener: We sell to them. They have the elevator card. They have the longer pitch, but they understand very clearly why this? Why us? Why now, why should somebody look at the category solutions you represent? Why is it important? What pain does it solve?

709
01:50:41.680 –> 01:51:05.430
Brett Queener: Why us? Why do you solve that better than somebody else? And why now like, if you don’t do this now you know what costs. Are you going to occur? What risk are you going to occur, or what revenue will you lose? Not only at a business level, but at a personal risk? Level companies that nail that kick ass. You cannot scale a go to market organization without that, and a great example would be to go. Where did you last work

710
01:51:06.280 –> 01:51:07.025
Brett Queener: qualified.

711
01:51:08.110 –> 01:51:16.699
Brett Queener: So Sean and Craig, who worked with me and for me at Salesforce I mean Shawn Craig is probably one of the best product marketers. That I’ve come across in my career.

712
01:51:17.170 –> 01:51:22.670
Brett Queener: They went into an existing category that already existed drift and others, and they came

713
01:51:23.170 –> 01:51:34.460
Brett Queener: and they out product, I mean, Bing builds good product. Don’t disagree, but they out product market the crap out of the competition. And I was just sitting there watching it going. Oh, my lord, this isn’t a fair fight

714
01:51:35.182 –> 01:51:41.250
Brett Queener: and right to. But you would tell me, what would you do? What would what would they make? What would Craig and Team make you do every Friday at qualify.

715
01:51:41.250 –> 01:52:07.119
Tooba Durraze: They would repeat the same messaging to us over and over again. So everyone who worked in the organization had this like idea of like who we are, what we do and for whom was just ingrained in our heads. So you could have picked an engineer who was like a new hire from an engineering org and put them in front of a customer, but they would know exactly what these dimensions were to talk to a customer which I found really interesting because

716
01:52:07.560 –> 01:52:22.820
Tooba Durraze: I was like it was so repetitive to me right? But like now running my own company, I’m like that is such a good tactic to have, because you never know when folks from your company are again going to run into customers or potential customers.

717
01:52:22.880 –> 01:52:43.530
Tooba Durraze: and like the same thing with product marketing as well. And I don’t come from salesforce. I’ve obviously explored a lot at the World Economic Forum as well, but qualified was my 1st example of seeing like, how you can have the best product in the world. But if your messaging isn’t right, and if you’re not marketing it well, how flat it can fall.

718
01:52:44.201 –> 01:52:46.569
Tooba Durraze: These are lessons. Yeah.

719
01:52:46.570 –> 01:52:50.759
Brett Queener: And the big issue is, okay. Most companies suck at that once a year.

720
01:52:51.480 –> 01:52:52.230
Tooba Durraze: Yeah.

721
01:52:52.230 –> 01:52:56.080
Brett Queener: What happens when your product changes every 30 days, like

722
01:52:56.300 –> 01:53:03.040
Brett Queener: I literally in the slack arms of my, the ones that are the fastest growing, and they raise a lot of money and they’re on their way. Yeah.

723
01:53:03.190 –> 01:53:04.670
Brett Queener: freaking chaos

724
01:53:05.070 –> 01:53:13.490
Brett Queener: product doesn’t know what dev is shipping customer success doesn’t know that this thing is out. Marketing is trying to keep up to date. It is chaos

725
01:53:14.445 –> 01:53:16.719
Brett Queener: and so you need to nail this.

726
01:53:16.970 –> 01:53:18.619
Brett Queener: and you need to refresh it

727
01:53:19.920 –> 01:53:24.369
Brett Queener: every month, I and it it sounds crazy. But I almost was like date

728
01:53:24.570 –> 01:53:33.669
Brett Queener: day. One of the new month is a day off it. We spend one day each month, refreshing the team, refreshing our materials, and make sure understand that

729
01:53:33.790 –> 01:53:39.860
Brett Queener: vis-a-vis, the competition, and one really good exercise for any founder in the room when you get to like.

730
01:53:40.100 –> 01:53:51.340
Brett Queener: I don’t know 30, 40, 5,000 people. And you start to build your executive team, pull your executive team around and tell them, take out a card and write down. What is it we do for whom that they give a shit about.

731
01:53:51.670 –> 01:53:52.130
Tooba Durraze: Yeah.

732
01:53:52.130 –> 01:53:57.509
Brett Queener: Better than somebody else, and what you will find is those answers. Half of them will be bad.

733
01:53:58.260 –> 01:53:59.520
Brett Queener: but they’re not aligned.

734
01:53:59.740 –> 01:54:05.909
Brett Queener: and then just run that experiment, I promise you’d be like, Oh, okay, I get. I get what Brett and Tube are talking about.

735
01:54:06.700 –> 01:54:13.120
Tooba Durraze: Yeah, I think the worst thing you can have is sitting in a room with your C-suite, and, like everyone, has a different answer for what you do and what you’re.

736
01:54:13.120 –> 01:54:15.789
Brett Queener: If you do, then what do you think the employees have right.

737
01:54:15.790 –> 01:54:44.259
Tooba Durraze: Yeah, exactly. So sometimes, even exactly. Leadership isn’t even involved. So from the from the perspective of the customer. Now, who’s like looking at all this fun kind of product marketing stuff coming out, all this new messaging coming out? What is your thought on whether they get fatigued by how often there is a new release, I mean, for us. We amoeba. We had our biggest release yesterday we released pipeline intelligence powered by amoeba agents, and then my feed is actually riddled with.

738
01:54:44.620 –> 01:54:55.770
Tooba Durraze: I think another like 15 companies that’s just in my network had a release yesterday as well. So when you think about that from the perspective of the buyer. Do you feel like they get fatigued by everything.

739
01:54:55.770 –> 01:55:03.460
Brett Queener: Yeah, I mean, look, until all of our go to market teams and all our buyers are just agentic robots talking to each other and selling each other product.

740
01:55:04.040 –> 01:55:08.639
Brett Queener: We have to understand there’s just a normal rate of human absorption.

741
01:55:09.110 –> 01:55:09.770
Tooba Durraze: Yeah.

742
01:55:09.910 –> 01:55:16.020
Brett Queener: Especially if I’m doing something the way I do it today I have to absorb it. And now I should adjust what I’m doing.

743
01:55:16.520 –> 01:55:25.409
Brett Queener: and yes, and so, you know, I think anything more than a month

744
01:55:26.260 –> 01:55:28.030
Brett Queener: faster than a month is ridiculous.

745
01:55:28.650 –> 01:55:31.099
Brett Queener: At some point you might move to Quarterly

746
01:55:31.760 –> 01:55:33.199
Brett Queener: but I think it’s a month

747
01:55:34.557 –> 01:55:37.580
Brett Queener: and I think there’s another really interesting thing

748
01:55:38.110 –> 01:55:40.890
Brett Queener: which is back to the messaging tree.

749
01:55:42.000 –> 01:55:44.119
Brett Queener: If you’re not changing what you’re saying.

750
01:55:45.140 –> 01:55:49.259
Brett Queener: if you haven’t improved the job to be done or doing a new job to be done.

751
01:55:50.780 –> 01:55:51.970
Brett Queener: what are you announcing.

752
01:55:54.800 –> 01:55:55.140
Tooba Durraze: Yeah.

753
01:55:55.140 –> 01:56:00.140
Brett Queener: Right? So you know, I think some filtering probably helps around the edge.

754
01:56:01.020 –> 01:56:14.100
Tooba Durraze: No, I would agree. There is a lot. There’s a lot around like Brand refreshes these days as well. But to your point, if you’re not fundamentally changing something. What are you essentially launching?

755
01:56:14.990 –> 01:56:24.069
Tooba Durraze: Let’s talk about something that’s been kind of front of mind for me. It’s it’s more future driven. But I have this theory in my head that we’ll move from

756
01:56:24.470 –> 01:56:39.449
Tooba Durraze: b 2 b selling to like agent to agent selling like humans just completely, you know, are like sitting on a beach like drinking their Mai Tai’s get removed out of the equation at some point they do the math. The mathematician in me is like. At some point humans will get out of the way of the math.

757
01:56:39.620 –> 01:56:49.350
Tooba Durraze: So do you see that happening at some point where most of the let’s say not all. But most of the buying journey is handled from an agent to an agent.

758
01:56:56.510 –> 01:56:57.520
Tooba Durraze: I feel like I’ve stumped.

759
01:56:57.520 –> 01:56:59.729
Brett Queener: I think I think it’s a long way off.

760
01:57:00.730 –> 01:57:02.379
Tooba Durraze: Long way, meaning the decades.

761
01:57:05.600 –> 01:57:06.659
Brett Queener: 5 to 10 years.

762
01:57:06.850 –> 01:57:07.789
Tooba Durraze: 5 to 10. Okay.

763
01:57:07.790 –> 01:57:20.959
Brett Queener: At a minimum. I I just, I’m flashing into ready ready player one. I’m just sitting in some like Pod somewhere connected up to like some video game and etc, I’m not gonna expect I it’s hard for me to look. I think the challenge is.

764
01:57:21.900 –> 01:57:23.880
Brett Queener: I guess if there’s full Agi short.

765
01:57:24.300 –> 01:57:27.650
Brett Queener: but at the end of the day people make purchase decisions

766
01:57:27.950 –> 01:57:31.880
Brett Queener: based on solving, make purchase. For 2 reasons, fear agreed.

767
01:57:32.160 –> 01:57:32.730
Tooba Durraze: Yeah.

768
01:57:32.730 –> 01:57:36.730
Brett Queener: Here. Somebody else is going to do better than me greed I can do better than somebody else.

769
01:57:37.420 –> 01:57:44.309
Brett Queener: So till we get there, I think the human to human connection is still very interesting.

770
01:57:44.940 –> 01:57:46.050
Brett Queener: that’s how I think about it.

771
01:57:46.620 –> 01:57:50.210
Tooba Durraze: Do you see humans moving more sort of like up the chain.

772
01:57:50.210 –> 01:57:54.850
Brett Queener: Yes, absolutely. I mean, absolutely. There’s a thing about, how do we think about

773
01:57:55.180 –> 01:58:16.550
Brett Queener: what does the new software company look like? What’s the size of the software company when it comes to junior employees and the rest of it thing on Junior versus Senior, we have to think differently. Junior was some people that would come in and they would go do the grunt work, because that’s how you keep. And then by doing the grunt work reputation. I think the reality is a lot of the grunt work gets automated and goes away. Yeah. And I think

774
01:58:16.670 –> 01:58:24.233
Brett Queener: the reality is that the work that you will be doing is far less

775
01:58:25.000 –> 01:58:29.300
Brett Queener: automaton work and far more sort of thoughtful work.

776
01:58:30.608 –> 01:58:34.620
Tooba Durraze: I see Julie’s come out. We probably got 1 1 min left Julia.

777
01:58:34.620 –> 01:58:37.089
Tooba Durraze: One last question, Julia. One quick question.

778
01:58:37.220 –> 01:58:40.819
Tooba Durraze: Now that you talked about kind of teams getting more and more senior.

779
01:58:40.920 –> 01:58:50.780
Tooba Durraze: and then the juniors are kind of the grunt. Work is getting replaced. So what happens to like the teams of the future, where the juniors haven’t made their way up the ranks in a company.

780
01:58:57.940 –> 01:58:59.529
Brett Queener: In my mind.

781
01:59:00.450 –> 01:59:01.739
Brett Queener: We’re in a New Age.

782
01:59:02.170 –> 01:59:02.800
Tooba Durraze: Yeah.

783
01:59:03.170 –> 01:59:13.629
Brett Queener: And what I look for in a lot of companies is 1st principles, thinkers. We think of senior as somebody who has 10 to 20 years experience, but they have 10 to 20 years of experience in the old way of operating within Saas.

784
01:59:13.630 –> 01:59:14.300
Tooba Durraze: Yep.

785
01:59:14.300 –> 01:59:28.539
Brett Queener: And we’re creating a new playbook. And so in my mind, I think less as senior versus Junior I think of, are they 1st principles. Thinkers? Are they super smart? Are they super collaborative? Right? Like the best use of AI is, how clever are you with a prompt

786
01:59:29.180 –> 01:59:46.280
Brett Queener: right, not understanding, you know, the transformer model. So I get less worried about that. I do think in aggregate, though we will need less people. So I do believe that there is the number of people that are working in software companies today.

787
01:59:46.991 –> 01:59:49.149
Brett Queener: will be less going forward.

788
01:59:49.320 –> 01:59:51.720
Brett Queener: So I do believe, interestingly.

789
01:59:52.030 –> 01:59:52.920
Tooba Durraze: You know.

790
01:59:53.660 –> 02:00:05.299
Brett Queener: There is gonna probably be some level of retraining and rethinking of the white collar workforce that we didn’t do with the blue Collar workforce. We. We went down the Nafta and globalization route.

791
02:00:07.050 –> 02:00:13.369
Tooba Durraze: Awesome. Well, thank thank you so much, Brett. This was an interesting chat, as always. And thanks Julia for having us.

792
02:00:13.620 –> 02:00:16.090
Brett Queener: Alright, Tuba, send me all the information on the new release.

793
02:00:16.090 –> 02:00:19.220
Tooba Durraze: I will thank you. Thanks everyone.

794
02:00:19.630 –> 02:00:26.630
Julia Nimchinski: Such a pleasure hosting you. Thank you again, Fred and Tuba, and we are transitioning to our next session. Welcome.

795
02:00:26.800 –> 02:00:27.520
Brett Queener: Hi, Nick.

796
02:00:28.330 –> 02:00:32.357
Nick “Mehtaphysical” Mehta: Hey, Brad, I agree with everything you just said so.

797
02:00:32.760 –> 02:00:33.359
Brett Queener: See you.

798
02:00:33.360 –> 02:00:33.950
Tooba Durraze: Bye.